Before history must repeat itself..
Posted by mansoor on 15 Oct 2008 | Tagged as: general riff raff
the people must prepare by forgetting, wrote cyril in his op-ed column.
very well put cyril! very well put!
in the last couple of years, while blogging on metblogs and other places, i was an avid supporter of the musharraf government. while i’ve been put down again and again for my support of a ‘dictator’ and that since i’m a direct beneficiary of the military (son of a military officer) my thoughts and convictionsare somehow useless. i’ve weathered through all of them, choosing my battles and answering with facts.
till the day musharraf stepped down.
since then, i’ve been quiet about mostly everything. and why is that? i’ll tell you.
the first thing was that however much i believed in the person musharraf, i believed more in the institution he represented. much has been written against him, from calling him a spineless order taker to a evil mastermind hell bent on ruining pakistan, yet my belief in what him and his team was unshaken.
musharraf was an institution, with think tanks and council’s guiding every move within the country. and these thinktanks were filled with bright and skilled people. that is what i believed in.
i kept hearing from many sources, that musharraf can’t make a decision on his own and relies on his thinktanks for everything and kept thinking, isn’t that the best form of government? isn’t that what leadership is about? we had a democratic rule guised under dictatorship.
when i did voice these opinions, the first argument i got was, the thinktanks were not ‘elected’. is it really that bad when elected people come to office more on their personalities or their heritage than their capabilites or will of the people? atleast the people in the thinktanks and other council’s are there because they have something to offer!
alas, those who could not get their share of the loot would not settle for it. it took 8 years, but they finally got their hands on the loot again. only this time, it was many times that of 1998.
musharraf’s institution got a couple of things right. they kept the dollar exchange rate at around 60 for over five years! they largely illiminated low level corruption from quite a few places in the country and kept bringing in huge dollops of international money into the country (from oversea’s pakistanis, investors and aid) all of which fuelled an economy shattered by a certain duo in the 70’s. under them, karachi was growing as was lahore and even islamabad came a long way! other cities were slow but getting there. multi-million dollar projects were being signed everywhere and the infrastructure (roads, telecom etc) which was not available to the masses to build their lives on slowly came into shape. what’s more, they contained a war within a relatively small geographical area of the country which really didn’t affect much of the rest.
they also got things wrong, like privitization at ridiculously low returns, the mqm & the CJ fiasco and alleged corruption at high levels.
no, they weren’t “clean and pristine” but they were a hell of a lot better than where we are today…
maybe it’s just me, but i just want to live a safe and prosperous life! is that too much to ask?
