While not a prolific Twitter user, Mubasher Lucman has over the past 24 hours been quite active. The TV host notes that he is “not in politics”, but then also posts the following question about PML-N’s governance of Punjab:

Now, this is a fair question for a journalist – are you satisfied with governance during recent years. But his question takes on a different meaning when read alongside his following Tweets about PML-N’s competitor, PTI:

and in case you had any doubt how Lucman saheb really feels…

But Mubasher Lucman does not stop at merely praising Imran Khan, he also makes a prediction about the outcome of the next elections:

That’s right. If Imran Khan doesn’t win, it’s because the election was rigged. Why even bother with elections, we wonder? Mubasher Lucman has already decided for us.

But his undying support for Imran Khan is not the only way that Mubasher Lucman is “not in politics”. Here’s his unbiased analysis of the ‘memogate’ case:

All the evidence that it requires to what? Obviously all the evidence that it requires to decide the case, but with his next Tweet, the Dunya TV host makes us wonder whether the Supreme Court is even necessary since Mubasher Lucman has already decided who are “the corrupt few”. It is also telling that Lucman describes the current Supreme Court hearings as a “crusade”, and not an objective inquiry.

Mubasher Lucman is “not in politics” in so far as he has never been elected by anyone to anything. But he has also clearly inserted himself into politics by actively campaigning for his selected favourites and terming anyone he disagrees with (or just doesn’t like) as “corrupt”. That’s what political operatives do. It’s not journalism.

In a detailed front page story of The News on Sunday, Ansar Abbasi asks, ‘How did Musharraf become a billionaire?’ While questions about the source of Gen Musharraf’s personal fortune are legitimate, they typically focus on public information – how was he able to afford his London home? What is his current source of income? But Ansar Abbasi points to new information about Musharraf’s personal wealth, and it is not only the information, but how Ansar Abbasi was able to access it that raises troubling questions.

In his article, Ansar Abbasi spends no less than nine paragraphs listing details of Gen Musharraf’s personal accounts with banks and trading accounts in UAE. Not only does Ansar Abbasi list the amounts each account contains, but the account numbers themselves. All of this information is attributed, as usual, to “a source”.

Musharraf has announced that he will return to Pakistan this month to participate in the next parliamentary elections. The question must be asked who would have access to such private financial information as overseas bank accounts, including their account numbers and amounts? And why would those with access to this information be interested in revealing it to Ansar Abbasi? Is it merely a coincidence that Ansar Abbasi’s “source” has revealed this information at this time? Or is Abbasi’s article intended as blackmail to prevent a politician from participating in elections?

This blog has no way of knowing whether the information provided by Ansar Abbasi is true or false. If it is true, we also have no way of knowing where the money came from – whether from looting the national treasury as seems to be implied by the article, or from legitimate sources such as book sales and speaking fees. It is in the public interest to know that politicians are not building personal wealth through corruption, but it is also in the public interest to know how such private information becomes public. Ansar Abbasi does not need to reveal the name of his anonymous source, but it may be in the public interest to know whether his source is an employee of the bank – which is the bank’s concern, or an employee of some other organization – which may be a concern to democracy.

Nadeem Ul Haque was not scheduled to speak against the nuclear programme at NDU. Actually, he wasn’t scheduled to speak at all. He had been asked to speak on the Planning Commission’s (PC’s) New Growth Framework (NGF), but the event had been cancelled due to lack of interest. This interaction raised certain questions for Nadeem Ul Haque about the role that media plays in improving the status of the country – or impeding it.

I also told him that society at large and the media seem to be uninterested in reform, economic development and growth. The media needs to give more attention to these issues alongside security and other issues. Unless a society takes interest in reform, it will not happen. Pakistani intellectual space, which is fuelled daily by the media, is too preoccupied with issues other than economic development. Because of this, economic reform remains little understood. Unless this changes, there will be no economic development in the coming years.

Despite the need for investigative journalism and informative articles on issues of development and economic reform, the media appears fixated on headlines against the government, he wrote. If there are problems with policies or reforms, why not write about those problems so that they can be fixed? Rather, the media only takes the issues as the basis for political attacks against whoever happens to be in government at the time.

I keep telling the media that our mindset is not the result of the policy or views of any one government. I know they want a headline against the current establishment. Consequently, I tell them that all governments regardless of creed and origin have avoided serious governance/civil service reform. All have failed to change the paradigm on market competition. No government has attempted to use public service delivery to underpin our governance approach. No government has reviewed our current approach to urban development that produces a sprawl. This government has adopted the NGF, which is taking up these issues. Let the media review the NGF! But then why blame governments? Society also unveils its preferences through discussion and debate. Our intellectuals’ efforts, evident in the media, display little interest in these crucial issues. Countries seeking development spend a far larger proportion of their public debate on crucial development issues than we do.

As we wrote on Sunday,

“The media serves a function in a democratic society other than simply ‘infotainment’. We rely on the media to inform us of facts and developments related to the most important issues of society so that we can make informed decisions about how to transform the country.”

If reporters are hunting for headlines against the government with utter disregard to whether their stories are factual or in any way useful to the country, they are failing in an important responsibility as journalists. Issues and policies should be investigated and reported, but that is not mean that such reports should be turned into political attacks. Media needs to focus its energy on helping the nation achieve reforms and stop selling it for sensational headlines.

Is the government threatening the security of the country by cutting development of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme? Or is the government improving the security of the country by investing in a modern nuclear weapons programme? According to The News (Jang Group) the answer is yes to both.

In Monday’s copy of The News, Ansar Abbasi warns that Pakistan’s nuclear programme is not a top priority of the present regime, and that because nuclear development has not been funded properly, it “has been stopped”. According to Abbasi, an “informed source, who has been one of the top nuclear managers of Pakistan’s nuclear programme” (his initials wouldn’t happen to be AQK, would they?) explained that because of the policies of the present government, our nuclear programme is experiencing “technical roll back”.

This is a particularly interesting situation to be in since in May of this year, The News reported that Pakistan under the present government is on path to become the 4th largest nuclear state and is quickly outpacing other nations in both number of warheads and technology.

Former UN weapons inspector David Albright, reported that Pakistan appears to be building a fourth plutonium reactor at the Khushab complex, and is expanding plutonium separation capabilities at another site.

Another report, from a US think tank, says Pakistan now has 70 to 90 nuclear warheads, more than its rival India. This puts Pakistan on track to command the world’s fourth-largest nuclear weapons arsenal by the end of the decade.

The evidence suggests that Pakistan is trying to develop a second-strike nuclear capability. Pakistan has tested cruise and other missiles that can carry strategic warheads from land or even from submarines.

That hardly sounds like the defence policy of a government that is turning a blind eye to security. In fact, The News reported advancements in Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme in April also when the military successfully tested the Nasr, a ballistic missile of Hatf series, capable of carrying a nuclear warhead can hit targets up to 60 km.

Strategic planners term the test a ‘new and very significant development’ since the missile falls in the category of tactical nuclear weapons. “This is a low-yield battlefield deterrent, capable of deterring and inflicting punishment on mechanised forces like armed brigades and divisions,” said an expert in the field of missile technology. “This takes care of the Indian Army’s obsession with finding space for limited war under the nuclear umbrella.”

Addressing the gathering at the undisclosed location, DG SPD Kidwai said the test was a very important milestone in consolidating Pakistan’s strategic deterrence capability at all levels of the threat spectrum. He said in the hierarchy of military operations, the Nasr Weapon System now provided Pakistan with short-range missile capability in addition to the already available medium- and long-range ballistic missiles and cruise missiles in its inventory.

The president and prime minister have congratulated the scientists and engineers for their outstanding success and warmly appreciated the successful test.

In November of this year, Ansar Abbasi himself reported that ‘Pakistan’s nuclear programme has made some extraordinary progress by developing one of the world’s smartest nuclear tactical devices’.

The defence budget increased 15.3 per cent in 2009, in 2010 saw a 17 per cent additional increase, and in 2011 ballooned by an additional 12 per cent. Since taking power, the PPP-led coalition government has increased defence spending by at least 44 per cent over the budgets under the previous regime.

Is Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme threatened by budget cuts made by the present regime? Years’ worth of reporting by Jang/Geo provide ample evidence that successive governments including the present one have dedicated a vast amount of resources to the nuclear weapons programme that have yielded great advancement in both the number of warheads as well as advanced tactical technologies. In trying to accuse the PPP of weakening Pakistan’s nuclear programme, Ansar Abbasi only exposes his own lack of credibility.

This statement brought the expected silent glances followed by deep laughs and uncontrolled coughing from our chain smoking friends. But the more we discussed it, the less it seemed like a joke. After all, if Zardari goes, what will all these private cable channels talk about? Ansar Abbasi and Shaheen Sehbai will be completely out of material. Even the media’s fawning over Imran Khan only makes sense as long as he is the under dog foil to the mastermind of Asif Zardari.

Abbas Zaidi, author of Two and a Half Words and Other Stories, explained the phenomenon beautifully in a column for Daily Times earlier this week.

The point is: what will happen if Zardari quits politics and goes into retirement? What will happen to hundreds of journalists, thousands of politicians and their various flunkies, and millions of Pakistanis? Zardari has spawned an entire genre of yellow journalism. He has never sued, jailed, or harmed anyone for levelling the basest and meanest allegations at him. Thus, in a way, he has encouraged the journalistic industry, which lives off his ‘misdeeds’.

Once Zardari is out of office, he will be sorely missed, I can assure you. Where in the world will you find a president who is incessantly and viciously demonised, but never says a thing? One media house has been publishing one shameless lie after another, but Zardari has never said a thing. Our corps commanders hold a meeting and reject the Kerry-Lugar-Berman Act, but Zardari does not have them sacked for their insubordination. The Americans finish off Osama, but no general is sacked for complicity or incompetence (or both). There is not a single political prisoner in Pakistan today. But no one will give Zardari the benefit. People like Zaid Hamid openly invite the army to take over because Zardari is bad, but nothing happens to them. Can anyone cite just one example from Pakistan’s history where people got away with insulting the head of the state and the largest political party?

Zaidi sahib makes an especially noteworthy point there at the end – it may have been Musharraf who opened up the media flood gates as part of the efforts to hold onto power, but it has been Asif Zardari who has weathered such unprecedented attacks without threatening to pull the plug. Actually, the private channels themselves have done more censoring than the embattled president. It was All Pakistan Cable Operators Association that censored the broadcast of foreign channels. And even when Geo Super was running their anti-censorship campaign, it was Geo itself that was censoring the transmission, not the government.

As the oppositions ‘Go Zardari Go’ campaign is being gleefully projected from every corner of the media, we can’t help but imagine that these same journalists are carefully updating their CV for presentation to PTV. After all, the next guy in president’s house might not be as patient as this one and that might be the only channel left.

According to the report, Imran Khan was “extremely insecure” and acted in “dictatorial fashion” simply because he met with the American officials privately. The reporter compares Imran Khan’s behaviour to former dictator Gen Musharraf saying that “there is no record anywhere about his various meetings with the world leaders as he kept everyone out, including the note taker” without considering the statement of PTI Information Secretary Shafqat Mehmood that even though he was unaware of the meeting maybe it was the case that Imran Khan did not have time to gather a team. Instead, the reporter quotes Shireen Mazari saying that she asked to attend but was told by Imran Khan that it was a private meeting between himself and the Americans, but the reporter did not note that Shireen Mazari has been unhappy with PTI for some time.

Baabar goes on to ask “will Pakistanis now have to rely on WikiLeaks to know what transpired at the PTI central secretariat on Thursday?” Why should anyone rely on WikiLeaks to know what transpired? Why doesn’t the reporter simply call Imran Khan and his spokesman and ask for a briefing. Or is the reporter, without even trying to learn the facts, already assuming that Imran Khan is a liar?

Whether Imran Khan chooses to take his senior advisors to a meeting or whether he chooses to go alone is a party matter. It may be newsworthy that the PTI chief is holding secret meetings with American officials, but the responsibility of a journalist covering such a story is to carry out careful fact checking and investigative work to get to the bottom of a story, not attack the politician and create an aura of conspiracy.

Having finished his studies in the UK, Bilawal has recently returned home. This, along with some statements by his father, set off a firestorm of speculation about Bilawal’s future in politics. This speculation was quickly dampened when Bilawal explained that he would not contest the 2013 elections. That was that for a while, until Bilawal began visibly taking part in party politics. The grandson of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and son of Benazir Bhutto, one might think that politics is part of Bilawal’s DNA. He is also co-chairman of Pakistan People’s Party founded by his grandfather, so most people were not surprised that he has become involved. Still, though, he has turned down a ticket saying that his goal is to spend the next years learning politics before diving in head first.

In a time when popular slogans include terms like ‘untested’ and ‘change’, one might  be forgiven for thinking that Bilawal’s interest in politics would not be seen as a bad thing, especially by a media that seems fixated on another recent entry to politics. Like most of the population, Bilawal  is young. Unlike many sitting politicians, his degree is not only valid but quite respectable. Unlike many of the elites, he is not asking his father to secure him a ticket – actually, quite the opposite as he turned one down. Instead, he is spending his days traveling the country and visiting the people. No one has to praise Bilawal, but we are hard pressed to find some justification for a front page attack. Yet that is exactly what we saw on the front of Monday morning’s The Nation.

According to the reporter, Zamir Sheikh, ‘Debutant Bilawal to carry a lot of baggage’. The piece, which is published as if it were news and not merely the opinion of Zamir Sheikh, begins the very first sentence saying “he lacks the charisma of these two leaders and would find it difficult to handle the affairs of the party and lead a campaign in the coming general elections whenever they are held”. The second sentence, just in case you didn’t read the first, claims that the charisma and egalitarian ideology of his grandfather and mother “would be missing when Bilawal goes out in public to garner support for his fast declining party”.

Since Bilawal has not demonstrated any lack of charisma or anti-egalitarian ideology, the author obviously cannot provide any evidence to support these attacks, so he spends the next several paragraphs complaining about the President and Prime Minister, neither of whom are named Bilawal.

Most shamefully, though, the author closes his article with an obvious attempt to inject a family feud into Bilawal’s life, alleging that he will be opposed by the Bhutto family. Zamir Sheikh does not offer any quotes from any member of the Bhutto family, he only throws this claim out as if he were the Bhuttos’ official spokesman and not a journalist. Judging by this article, it is not clear that he is legitimately either.

This blog takes no position on Bilawal Bhutto Zardari entering politics. In a democracy, all citizens have the right and responsibility be involved in politics, and any citizen who is eligible has the right to contest elections if he so chooses. Targeting one person who is not an elected official and has not been accused of any wrongdoing suggests that powers opposed to him are afraid of what he might accomplish and have begun to launch a ‘preemptive strike’ against the young man. Bilawal should not receive any special treatment, but neither should he be the target of special attacks – especially when he hasn’t even done anything yet.

Anjum Niaz tried to keep her piece short, possibly as a way to avoid drawing too much attention to the fact that her column is completely without substance. She even admits that the source, Mansoor Ijaz, is a “coup master” who “thrives on conspriracy theories” and is “driven by an uncontrollable ego to showcase himself as a kingmaker”. Then, after all but terming Mr Ijaz a bald faced liar, Anjum Niaz suggests that perhaps we should at least consider his claims anyway.

And then we get a hint to Anjum’s game:

First, Mansoor Ijaz must have provided irrefutable proof to the editors at FT. They will have gone over the “phone calls and emails” exchanged between Ijaz and the diplomat to establish the authenticity of the information. Publishing such slanderous material is to invite libel.

This blog has already investigated in detail just how credible Mr Ijaz is, but let’s consider Anjum’s argument on it’s own merits. According to Anjum Niaz, the Financial Times ”will have gone over the “phone calls and emails” and therefore anyone who uses basic common sense to question the credibility of Pakistan’s James Bond is wasting his time. Perhaps. But FT never actually said that they saw any evidence, Anjum Niaz just assumes it is so. It should also be noted that Mansoor Ijaz’s piece for the FT was not an investigative news report, it was an opinion piece. Even if he were asked to provide some evidence supporting his sensational claims, we don’t know how much or of what quality this evidence is. Presumably it was of the same quantity and quality of evidence he showed the Wall Street Journal when he claimed to have been a secret negotiator between Sudan and the United States government – a claim for which America’s National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States “found no credible evidence”; or the quantity and quality of evidence he provided the Los Angeles Times in 2003 when he claimed that,”the growing body of publicly available evidence offers sufficient proof of Baghdad’s mendacious designs to warrant the immediate use of force”. We remember how credible that ‘evidence’ turned out to be. Mansoor Ijaz even claims to have brokered a ceasefire between Kashmiri mujahideen and Indian army, although Jang Group reporters who were there tell a different story.

Next year, Khalid Khwaja tried to fix a meeting between American businessman Mansoor Ijaz and Kashmiri militant leader Syed Salahuddin. Khwaja contacted Salahuddin through his friends in Jamaat-e-Islami and informed him that Mansoor Ijaz wanted to deliver a letter from Bill Clinton. Syed Salahuddin came to know that Mansoor Ijaz had meetings with Indian Army officials in Srinagar in early 2000 and also with then Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. He smelled a rat and refused to meet Mansoor Ijaz.

As we see, even a decade ago people were questioning the credibility of Mansoor Ijaz’s sensational stories and smelling ‘a rat’. And shouldn’t Anjum Niaz also be making the same assumptions about the evidence Mansoor Ijaz provided to back up his claim that the ISI is “a sponsor of terrorism” that “undermines global antiterrorism efforts at every turn”? She conveniently leaves out this entire part of Mansoor Ijaz’s latest conspiracy theory.

From there, Anjum spirals downward into a confused mess of speculation.

[I]f the account is accurate, Pakistan must identify the senior diplomat who allegedly contacted Mansoor Ijaz and prepared a dossier on behalf of Zardari for the White House and Admiral Mullen with Mansoor Ijaz as the messenger. How did the diplomat gain access to our military’s top secrets to pass them on to the White House and Admiral Mullen? Who gave them to him?

What if the senior diplomat was Hussain Haroon! What if it was Maleeha Lodhi, who Anjum’s colleague Shaheen Sehbai notes was Ambassador when Mansoor Ijaz supposedly arranged secret meetings between Nawaz Sharif and American national security officials at the White House! What if Gen Pasha gave away our military’s top secrets to the White House to the supposed diplomat! What if the national agencies are filled with Bharati agents! What if it was Anjum Niaz, pictured below with American President Bill Clinton who is the selling the nation!

Or, what if this is all just hair-brained nonsense…

Which bring us to the other Jang Group journalist who attempts to squeeze a controversy out of a conspiracy.

Shaheen Sehbai has been suffering humiliation for over three years now since Asif Zardari was elected to the presidency and not immediately booted out, as Sehbai incorrectly predicted. During these years, he has penned a number of pieces based in little more than rumour and speculation, and that appear to be aimed at pitting the civilians and the military against each other. His blatantly selective reading of Mansoor Ijaz’s opinion piece for FT is only the latest strike in this sad campaign.

In a way, Shaheen Sehbai and Mansoor Ijaz have much in common. Both are prone to speculation, and both are known not to let inconvenient facts get in the way of a political agenda. Speculation plays a key role in this piece by Shaheen Sehbai also, as the author admits when he says that “The real facts would come out if and when the full text of that [alleged] memo ever gets out”. Lacking “real facts”, Sehbai decides to invent his own fantasy scenarios and wonders whether Zardari would offer to replace the present Army leadership with a team more friendly to the Americans. Unfortunately for Sehbai, such lazy speculation doesn’t pass a test of basic common sense – Zardari has already granted unprecedented extensions to both General Kayani and General Pasha, and sacking the leadership now to replace them with a more pro-American team would not discourage a coup, it would practically invite one.

Ironically, the one person who comes out smelling like roses is one of Shaheen Sehbai’s favourite punching bags, Husain Haqqani. After all, if Shaheen Sehbai is correct, Zardari knew that he could not trust his Ambassador in Washington to deliver such a pro-American, anti-Army message to the American government, so he had to turn to Mansoor Ijaz. So much for the old slander that says Husain Haqqani is ‘America’s ambassador to Pakistan’s embassy’, Zardari’s man in Washington who the Army doesn’t trust. Instead of being a pro-American Ambassador, Husain Haqqani is now a diplomat that must be worked around if an anti-Army message is to be delivered to Washington.

This brings us to the point that Shaheen Sehbai spends most of his time on: Mansoor Ijaz’s credibility. Unlike his colleague Anjum Niaz, who stops short of opening her column by terming Mansoor Ijaz a liar, Shaheen Sehbai goes out of his way to try to turn the “coup master” who “thrives on conspriracy theories” into a saint. He starts by echoing Anjum Niaz’s line that “the FT is not likely to publish something which it cannot substantiate if it was so required”. Some might find it curious that two ‘journalists’ working for the same media group would write the exact same speculative theory on exactly the same day, despite that fact that whether or not Mansoor Ijaz’s piece “invites libel”, they have no evidence to suggest it is true; or that if Mansoor Ijaz is in fact telling the truth, it has far greater implications for the subjects that both Anjum Niaz and Shaheen Sehbai conveniently left out of their ‘analysis’.

This gets to the obvious, though utterly predictable, failing of both Shaheen Sehbai’s and Anjum Niaz’s pieces for The News. Mansoor Ijaz’s column for FT included a brief accusation against Zardari in the opening paragraphs, but the bulk of the piece was directed not at Islamabad, but Rawalpindi. The title of the piece, it should be reminded, was ‘Time to take on Pakistan’s jihadist spies’ – nothing to do with Zardari. Mansoor Ijaz stated his conclusions and recommendations quite clearly: “More precise policies are needed to remove the cancer that ISI and its rogue wings have become on the Pakistani state…The enemy is a state organ that breeds hatred among Pakistan’s Islamist masses and then uses their thirst for jihad against Pakistan’s neighbours and allies to sate its hunger for power”. If Anjum Niaz and Shaheen Sehbai are to be believed and Mansoor Ijaz’s claims are above reproach, our security services are overrun with jihadis bent on overthrowing the government an installing a terrorist state.

But neither Shaheen Sehbai’s nor Anjum Niaz’s readers would know this, since Jang Group‘s ‘journalists’ conveniently ignored all of Mansoor Ijaz’s claims that were not convenient to their amateurish attempt at political point scoring and driving a wedge between army and civilian leadership. This highlights a major failing in our so-called ‘news’ media. Too many of our alleged ‘journalists’ are nothing but aging political gossips who act as if they would gladly sink the country for a juicy bit of drawing room drama. That’s not journalism. It’s not even a very good political hatchet job. Really, it’s just embarrassing.

On Monday, Mubashir Luqman discussed the supposed American threat of attack on his show Khari Baat. At the end of the programme, though, surrounded by his invited guests Maleeha Lodhi and Hamid Gul, Luqman lashes out at Najam Sethi (forward to 8:51).

This seemed to be a strange turn for the conversation to take, but what was even more strange was when Luqman went out of his way to attack Najam Sethi on PTV’s Morning Show.

As you can see, Noor becomes visibly uncomfortable with Luqman’s unprompted attack on Najam Sethi. Some might think that Luqman’s strange behaviour was the result of a personal feud between the two men, but then our attention was pointed to another article attacking Mr Sethi which appeared on a website ‘Views Times‘.

Like Mubashir Luqman’s attacks, the article accuses Mr Sethi as a tool of American policy. Only, this piece goes even further and makes the bizarre claim that Najam Sethi is advising the American government.

The Americans were left with no choice–they halted the 800 million in aid to the Pakistani military. They were banking on the advice given to them by Mr. Njam Sethi and gang.

Though he is an internationally renowned and award-winning journalist, it’s rather far fetched to claim the American government was taking policy dictation from Najam Sethi.

In stark contrast to Najam Sethi’s career, his attackers are mostly non-entities from an exposed propaganda ring. The website, Views Times is one of several fake news sites associated with propagandists like Ahmed Quraishi and Major Raja Mujtaba.

Actually, a Google search for a random line in the piece on Views Times found 49 results – all fake news sites like ‘Times of Bombay’ and ‘Times of Kabul’ and ‘Karachi Telegraph’. Oh, and the incredibly well funded PKKH, a project of Ahmed Quraishi, Shireen Mazari, and Hamid Gul.

Like too many of our fellow journalists, Najam Sethi has already suffered for giving voice to views that were unpopular in some quarters. He was ‘preventatively detained’ by Gen Zia, and later imprisoned by the government of Nawaz Sharif for exposing corruption. Of course he was accused then with the all-too-familiar charge of ‘treason’.

For his unwillingness to cower in the face of intimidation, Najam Sethi has received the Journalism Under Threat award from Amnesty International and the International Press Freedom award from Committee to Protect Journalists.

Whoever is behind this campaign to attack Najam Sethi, the question that must be asked is whether Pakistan’s media is truly ‘free’ so long as journalists are smeared, threatened, or worse when they report views that some do not like.

Talat Hussain’s response to the situation in Dawn notes that “the provincial capital, has slipped into hellish violence, its peace buried under the ever-increasing piles of dead bodies”. And where does the senior journalist lay blame for this hell on earth? Where else, but the convenient scapegoat of President Zardari and the PPP-led government.

There are several problems with this piece by Talat Hussain, but we will mention only two. First is that the author’s thesis rests on one initial premise that completely misses the point – namely, that it is not “Sindh” that slipped into a war-like state of violence, but Karachi. This is important to note because Talat Hussain’s blame game rests on the fact that the provincial government is indeed led by the PPP. But despite being in Sindh province, Karachi is not controlled by PPP. This is an important point because the complex politics in Karachi are behind much of the violence there. It is hard to believe that Talat Hussain does not know this.

Actually, it would be wrong to lay the blame at the feet of any single political party, though it is a common reaction by party activists to blame their opponents by terming them as gangsters. This gets to the second major problem with Talat Hussain’s column – in order to place blame with Zardari and the PPP, he oversimplifies a complex situation.

According to Talat Hussain, the solution to the crisis in Karachi is simple.

It is important to recount all of this to contextualise the endemic problem of violence in Karachi. These incidents do not happen without warning. There is a well-established pattern followed by any serious law and order breakdown. It is for the government to closely monitor this pattern and position resources and strategies to ensure that the slide down the path of chaos is halted. It is also for the government to engineer long-term and effective administrative solutions to address chronic sources of violence.

In the case of Karachi, this means taking on gangs that have virtually overthrown the writ of the state from vast swathes of the city and run these areas like their fiefdoms. The attempt to disinfect the city of these gangs through `reconciliation` was bound to fail since most of these gangs are politically aligned, with their roots embedded in the provincial body politic. You might set a thief to catch a thief, but that is hardly the way to deal with killers.

The PPP government and all of the party leadership should know this. After all, they have been the biggest proponents of strong-arm action against extremists in Fata and elsewhere, saying that this is the only way to deal with, in American idiom, `irreconcilables`.

So this is Talat Hussain’s solution to violence in Karachi? He believes that Gen Kayani should march troops through the streets to ‘clear and hold’ the city of 20 million? Perhaps he suggests drone attacks on Orangi?

The crisis in Karachi is the result of complex economic and demographic issues, not simple law and order problems. Certainly there are gangs and mafias, but these are the symptoms, not the disease. Anyone familiar with the history of politics in the city would know that a PPP government going into Karachi with guns blazing would be like pouring petrol on a flame. The fire would not be quenched, it would grow and spread. The solution to the violence in Karachi lies not in more violence, but in honest analysis and open dialogue between all affected parties to work out a political solution.

In a lame attempt at humour, Talat Hussain concludes his piece by suggesting that “Perhaps in his next speech, President Zardari can offer tutorials to his opponents in the useful skill of how not to govern”. And in this, Talat Hussain has clearly offered a tutorial on how to not to write critical analysis.