Out with a dictator, in with an emperor

Pakistan has laughably simple politics. While there is a lot of skulduggery going on in the background, the governing rule is that the flavor of the day, whether an army dictator or elected emperor, is going to do whatever it takes to maintain his iron clad grip on the peacock throne.

In a democracy, you need a functioning independent judicial system. A functioning judiciary will take action to right wrongs as per the law, and that's where the problem lies in Pakistan. Whether elected or brought up through the army ranks, the leader of the country is always on the wrong side of the law, and thus a functioning judiciary is impossible.

The judiciary in Pakistan was hanged by Musharraf back in March 2007, and Zardari is exhuming the corpse and sending it before a firing squad to ensure it doesn't come back to haunt him. In a slight change from the Moguls of old, instead of only killing their entire family to ensure there is no challenger to the throne, these days all and sundry are targeted.

Zardari has made numerous promises over the last year to restore the judges, and recently he was asked on TV why he was not honoring his word to do so. His famous reply: "That was a political promise. It has nothing to do with reality".

Time will tell how naked the emperor really is, in this case just a measly 4 days till May 12th, when yet another deadline is due to restore the judges illegally deposed by the old dictator.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb: The Black Swan

A wonderfully insightful book, strolls though history, academia, psychology, cognitive science, probability theory, philosophy, statistics and more. The back of the book claims that the book "will change the way you look at the world", and it does.

A Black Swan is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was.

Taleb argues that events and life itself are far more random than we perceive them to be - the human brain just isn't able to cope up with the complexities of the modern world, most of which have sprung up in the last couple of hundred years, while our brains still haven't evolved much further than the hunter-gatherer stage. This is the most interesting part of the book, where Taleb discusses various studies on how the human brain processes and perceives information, probability and data. We fit explanations to events post-facto - but the world is not so easily squeezable into the theories we built to describe the past and than extrapolate to predict the future.

Our brains are wired in a such a way that we construct linear narratives, or theories about events, in an attempt to simplify and understand - but real life is not linear, and these stories about how events happen are too simplified to be of much use when the next Black Swan comes about.

Reading in Karachi

Adil Najam wonders if Pakistani's read? and links to a fascinating article in the newspaper on the number of libraries in Pakistan.

Lahore, an ancient city of culture, now has more polo grounds than libraries. Lahore even has more offices for the chief minister (four in all) than libraries. Of course, the Chief Minister needs office space more than our children need libraries.

He hasn't visited Karachi, where far as I know there are no public libraries at all. There is this interesting library run by the Army where you need to be a millionaire in order to join - they require you to first buy a plot of land in a army run housing scheme before borrowing books!

Lack of cities aside, Karachi is a tough city to read books. The average new book price is a 1000Rs, and while used books are much cheaper the selection is really limited. Ordering from Amazon is a hit and miss process - if you order by DHL or UPS the books always arrive, but the shipping costs are so high that it's not worth while, and sometimes they charge duties on books. If you order by regular post, than the books get stolen sometimes, and it takes anywhere from 1 month to a year for the carton to arrive. The locally published books are also very expensive, and there just isn't enough variety.

Parliament Watch - What do MNA's and Senators do?

My MNA has a name, but I have no idea what she stands for, what she does, and how is it that she came to be standing for elections. Now, I can find out what his/her name is, but beyond that there is absolutely no information at all. Come election time, just a month or two before voting takes place candidates suddenly appear from nowhere running for election, and provide zero information about themselves in their entire campaign. What did the MNA accomplish in his/her last stint in office? What about their tax returns, their life, their positions on important issues (besides the rhetoric)?

Pakistan, Egalitarian

Pakistan is turning out to be a very egalitarian society. Some of the new crop of politicians come from very humble beginnings, indeed. Sure, not all of them started out humble, but all of them have improved in leaps and bounds from their starting point. Not too many countries can boast of that, so here is a listing of our extremely egalitarian politicians:

A tale of two Chief Justices

...the new PPP government would feel more comfortable with the present Chief Justice Abdul Hameed Dogar instead of Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry.

Translation: Dogar is a priceable commodity, bought and sold as needed by the powers that be. Earlier, he worked for Benazir, than switched to Musharraf, and now that Zardari is the new king of Pakistan, Dogar is busy licking his boots. From his track record, Dogar is not so much a judge, but a trader, better suited to a pan shop than the Supreme Court.

The actual Chief Justice, who was just freed from an illegal arrest, is a bonafide judge. Despite every single intelligence agency in Pakistan desperately trying to dig up dirt on him, they have failed to find anything wrong with his tenure as Chief Justice. That in itself is an amazing thing, in a country where all hands are dirty.

Tim Harford: The Logic of Life

Another great economics book from Tim Harford, exploring the hidden rationalizations we make during everyday life. "In this deftly reasoned book, Harford argues that life is logical after all. Under the surface of everyday insanity, hidden incentives are at work, and Harford shows these incentives emerging in the most unlikely places."

A great followup to The Undercover Economist. Thomas Schelling, a Nobel prize winning economist on the book: "This is a terrific read. It's one those books that forever changes the way you look at things. It proves economics is not a subject for dull textbooks; but is really a way of thinking that can shed light on all aspects of life."

A lot of newspaper editorials, opinion pieces and even the reporting consists of the proverbial blind man groping a herd of elephants, trying to figure out why things happen the way they do in Pakistan - Tim Harford lucidly explains that often even the most seemingly irrational acts have a logical explanation.

Deception: Pakistan, the United States, and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons

The book traces Pakistan's nuclear history, wherein Pakistan with Chinese, Saudi, American and North Korean help (and a whole lot of private contractors) developed numerous types of nuclear weapons and delivery systems.

The book is really interesting, not because of the exact details of how Pakistan developed the bomb, but the insight it gives on how Pakistan really operates. It was Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto who kicked of Pakistan's nuclear programme, famously declaring "we will eat grass if we have to, but we will make the bomb". For the next 20 years this statement was literally and figuratively true - everything took a backseat was tens of billions of dollars were poured into two competing nuclear labs.

This is the most depressing account of Pakistani/American political history I've read. The old maxim "the end justifies the means" was the one and only motto of the Pakistan Army & the Republican Party, which ran the country for the next 30 years, sucking in practically every dollar of foreign aid and diverting it to nuclear weapons development and regular arms procurement. They had to let parts of the billions of dollars pouring in for the Afghan war though, under American pressure, but development aid money was mostly fully diverted to the bomb.

Of Judges and Hope

The current fight for the restoration of the judiciary is the single most important issue for Pakistan in my lifetime, perhaps in Pakistan's entire existence.

Pakistan has always had only two pillars of state - the army and the politicians. In a functioning democracy, you have three pillars - the executive, legislative and the judiciary. While we will not be heading towards the regular mode of democracy any time soon, it looks like the restoration of the judges fired by the outgoing dictator will empower them all the way to the third pillar of state.

Everyone was right, the elections were rigged

Everyone I've spoken to, most newspaper reports, international observers, everything points to the fact that rigging did took place.

The outgoing government tried every dirty trick in the proverbial book to hang onto power - but the wonderfully heartening news is that the rigging wasn't enough - the government still got kicked out.

The story which is emerging is the age old one, that of the naked Emperor who fools himself into thinking he's clothed, while the whole world laughs. The dictator was naked, and like the emperor of old, surrounded by tailors and yes man who wouldn't tell the truth.

In other news, the government is busy trying to censor videos of rigging uploaded to Youtube, which show the the government parties busy rigging away. I wrote up my own personal brush with censorship here, and now it seems the govt. has moved on from targeting individual websites to the Moby Dick of the internet, Youtube.

The King's party loses, we were all wrong about the rigging

It seems like every single political commentator (which these days is most of Pakistan) was wrong about the elections being heavily rigged.

To be fair, there was a massive and transparent attempt at rigging by the outgoing government, and it would have been enough if the results had been closer - but the difference is so vast in the actual polling results that the rigging was just not enough! Now, if this was Florida where the state was evenly divided, a little bit of rigging would have done the job, as we saw in the US - but Musharraf's party underestimated the extent to which they are disliked.

Elections are messy in Pakistan - all the parties try to rig the elections in their favour, it's just that they employ cruder methods than in more developed countries. It seems like everyone was rigging, but it seems to have canceled itself out.

One really big change, which no had predicted, let along even thought of, is the level of interest people took in the elections this time. Sure, turnout was low, but many 'regular' people volunteered for election watch duty, and besides that, I've heard from many polling stations that people just randomly turned up to keep an eye on things, armed with cellphone cameras and the numbers of the local media. Yes, there were a few hundred foreign observers, but there are just too many polling stations - it was the observing of the many thousands of Pakistani's who just turned up to observe which was key.

I didn't volunteer for elections watch, but the three hours I spent trying to vote I kept snapping pictures of the process - and no one said anything. This in itself is a sea change in Pakistan - just the last elections if you tried to do that you would be beaten up, the camera smashed, and worse.

Older Entries

• My voting experience in the 2008 elections - Posted 18 Feb 08 in Pakistan
• The Undercover Economist - Posted 12 Feb 08 in Books, Pakistan
• Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. - Posted 11 Feb 08 in Books, Misc
• This website censored and blocked by the Pakistan Govt - Posted 04 Feb 08 in Censorship, Pakistan
• Only 3pc businesses, industry paid taxes in 2007 - Posted 04 Feb 08 in Pakistan
• Nassim Nicholas Taleb: Fooled By Randomness - Posted 28 Jan 08 in Books
• The Pakistani boomerang on the backward swing - Posted 22 Jan 08 in Pakistan
• Next Gen Taliban - Posted 12 Jan 08 in Pakistan
• The most important man in Pakistan, circa 2008 - Posted 09 Jan 08 in Pakistan
• Dating service provider to match voters to politicians - Posted 05 Jan 08 in
• Pakistan electoral rigging outsourced to Montreal - Posted 05 Jan 08 in Pakistan

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