What luck for rulers that men do not think, said Adolf Hitler. The Fuhrer should know, having proved himself a successful, if rather demented, leader of men.
Successive rulers of Islamic Republic of Pakistan seem to have been driven by this cynical piece of wisdom. They come to power with the noblest of intentions and promises but always end up as the prisoners of their own delusions of grandeur.
The Greek philosophers had warned the rulers and leaders against hamartia, t...

Just scratch your memory to recall under what circumstances Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi, in 1979, left Iran for Egypt where the American protégé, who loved to be called “Arya Mehr” breathed his last? Equally, relevant is the question with regard to the Afghanistan despot, Zahir Shah, another US lackey in the South East Asian region. Why the Afghan king had to flee his country and die a lonely death in a foreign land?

 

Now with Pervez Musharraf gone Pakistan’s another tryst with democracy begins. This is a unique situation when both the two leading parties are, one way or the other, sharing power. In some way a parallel can be drawn with India where the Congress and BJP are equally powerful but rely on different sets of regional parties to come to power. But India does not owe this emergence of two-party system to any army rule as Pakistan does.

The time, however, has come to analyse th...