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A host of steps is necessary for meeting that prospect — from shedding the perverse nonsense that leads so many to lionise those who assault our country: witness the campaigns for Afzal Beg; to exhuming the ideological bases of Islamic extremism; to showing up the pretensions of ‘Islamic states’ — how come, as Pervez Hoodbhoy, the Pakistani physicist asks, that such states are among the richest in the world and yet their work in science and technology is so far behind? How come, as Maulana Wahiduddin has asked, while it is claimed again and again that no religion gives as exalted a place to women as Islam does, the position of women in every Islamic state is woeful? For exhuming the ideological bases and nailing such pretensions to reviving the Northern Alliance so that, even if the Taliban win, they remain busy within Afghanistan; to supporting groups that are struggling for the most elementary rights in POK, in Gilgit-Baltistan, in the northern territories of Pakistan; to ensuring honest and effective governance in Kashmir... first we have to clear our minds. First we have to give up what has become our fixed policy — hoping that something will turn up.

Till then, let us be clear, the best possible outcome for us, one for which we can do little, is that a discredited and besieged Musharraf continues in office — so that the fount of decisions remains preoccupied with his own problems. And that the Pakistan army remains encoiled in protracted and bloody hostilities with the extremists that it and ISI, and so on, have reared — so that the trust and working alliance between them is ruptured. If prayers are to be the only policy we are capable of, pray for these, not for democracy!