Within days of celebrating the 60th anniversary of Pakistan’s emergence as an independent country, Pakistanis have been repeatedly reminded of the limitations of their independence.

The pursuit of grandiose strategy by politicised generals at the expense of internal strength has so compromised Pakistan that many key decisions are taken only after the intervention of foreign actors.

And under General Musharraf’s rule, the tendency to look towards outsiders for settling essentially domestic political issues has expanded to a point where nothing seems to be a purely internal affair of Pakistan any more.

Musharraf allowed former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to go into exile only after a vague agreement guaranteed by an unnamed international personality. It didn’t matter to the general that barring a citizen of Pakistan from returning home under an agreement with a foreign national lacked any legal basis, a fact attested to by Pakistan’s Supreme Court.

There is something clearly wrong with the thinking of Pakistan’s military-intelligence complex that finds it easier to negotiate domestic policy through rich foreign potentates instead of adopting a policy of reconciliation with Pakistanis for the sake of Pakistan.

In the aftermath of 9/11, after an admonition from the United States — ‘Are you with us or against us?’ — Musharraf turned around Pakistan’s mistaken policy of supporting Afghanistan’s Taliban. For several years before the fateful 2001 terrorist attack on New York’s World Trade Centre, quite a few patriotic Pakistanis who had warned about the dangers of Talibanisation had been condemned as alarmists or traitors by Pakistan’s establishment.

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