Interned among the Insane

There may be nothing worse than being a sane person, locked up with all the insane, and categorized as such. So, I must acknowledge some voices of sanity in the lunatic asylum called Pakistan. Here they are:

Munir Attaullah in the Daily Times.

That phenomenon known as “a policy failure” has never been admitted as part of our official history, for our leadership has always been blessed with “success”. As for placing by far the largest share of the blame for our many woes squarely where it belongs, who dares criticise an institution that promotes itself as the embodiment of the Pakistani ideal of manhood, believes itself to be the ultimate guarantor of our federation’s integrity and, as a clincher to silence any critic, can claim to have paid in blood while unflinchingly defending us from our enemies?

Kamran Shafi in the Daily Times:

While we should have been inured to the shenanigans of the military government by now, it having lorded it over us for far too long, it never ceases to amaze by going one better every succeeding time. If there were a prize for most U-turns on a matter of the greatest import in the shortest possible time, high in shamelessness to wit, it would go hands down to the unthinking, unfeeling, devil-may-care, military-led government of the Citadel of Islam.

Irfan Husain ("Mazdak") in Dawn:

Had it not been for 9/11 and the ongoing western operations in Afghanistan, Pakistan would have been relegated to the backwaters of the world, together with Myanmar, Somalia and Rwanda.

We dug ourselves into this hole, and we can climb out of it, provided we accept the fact that we are in a hole. The first obvious step is to understand that there is no place in today’s world for state-sponsored or even state-tolerated terrorism. The presence of thousands of armed men loosely organised under various fundamentalist and ethnic banners is unacceptable to the rest of the world, and should be unacceptable to us.

Musharraf must realise that words are not enough to combat this plague of mindless violence. His litany of ‘enlightened moderation’ must be matched with action, something that has long been missing from his agenda. .....

Far from providing a solution, he has now become a part of the problem.