OCCASIONALLY, I watch a news show in which the host interviews experts on selected issues. He begins with an explanation of the issue or situation to be examined, and then suggests the avenues and approaches one might take in dealing with it. No wonder then that he gets answers that confirm his own interpretations rather than the ones the interviewee might have provided had he been left untutored.

All of us, even little children, ask questions. Some of them are customary, as for instance when we ask someone how he is. These are not taken seriously. The same goes for rhetorical questions. Children ask questions to know why things are the way they are and, even more often, why they can’t do what they want to do.

Questions can be serious and vital, and they can be idle and frivolous. The man who asked what pulls things that have been thrown up back to the ground discovered gravity and its workings. Indeed, no advance in knowledge will take place unless relevant questions are asked. But one does not always know what these are. The ability to ask the right question is not to be taken for granted. It is an art that has to be acquired and cultivated. It calls for study, reflection and reasoning.

Let us look at a couple of questions and answers with which one of Plato’s dialogues, ‘Crito,’ opens. Socrates is in prison, awaiting the cup of poison to which the Athenians have condemned him. One of his friends, Crito, comes to see him before dawn one morning, and Socrates wants to know why he is so early. But the way he phrases his question suggests that he is in no hurry to get the answer. He says: “Why have you come at this hour, Crito. It must be quite early.” To this Crito replies: “Yes, certainly.” Thus, he has agreed that it is indeed early, but he has not told Socrates his reason for coming that early.

If Socrates had asked why Crito had come at that hour and stopped right there, the latter would have had to give him an answer. But by adding to his question the observation that “it must be quite early,” he gave Crito an opportunity to evade his question. It is not until after six more exchanges on other subjects that Socrates returns to his original question and says: “But you have not told me why you come at this early hour,” and it is then that Crito tells him he has brought an important message.

Plato’s ‘Phaedo’ opens with a direct question that Echecrates asks: “Were you yourself, Phaedo, in the prison with Socrates on the day when he drank the poison?” He gets an unambiguous answer: “Yes, Echecrates, I was.” But the next question gets to be open-ended: “What did he say in his last hours?” Considering that Socrates may have said a whole lot of things (as indeed he did), the question allows the respondent a great deal of leeway, including the option of saying nothing for the moment. Unsurprisingly, then, Phaedo evades Echechrates’ question, and asks one of his own. “Did you not hear of the proceedings of the trial” (that of Socrates in Athens)?

Questions fall into several categories, depending on one’s purpose in asking them. They may be designed to elicit factual information in which case they will usually begin with interrogatories such as “whether,” “what,” “where,” and “when.” You may, for instance, ask someone whether, where, and when he had dinner the previous evening. Answers to questions such as these will most likely be short and crisp. I read the other day that once a newspaper editor asked an astronomer to say in 1,200 words whether there was life on Mars. His answer consisted of two words: “nobody knows.”

Then there are questions that seek the respondent’s opinion, interpretation, or analysis of certain events or situations, and many of them will begin with “why” or “how”. Responses will not necessarily enlighten the questioner, for the questions have allowed the respondent to go as the spirit moves him, even without strict relevance to the subject in view. In other words, these questions are easy to evade.

Once I saw the transcript of a newsman’s interview with Mr Sajjad Ali Shah, a former chief justice of Pakistan, that took place a few days after General Musharraf’s coup. Their dialogue proceeded as follows (my paraphrase).

The journalist (J): “Are you in favour of a caretaker government?”

Mr Sajjad Ali Shah (SAS): “it is a good idea, and let it stay until all corruption is eliminated.”

J: “How can corruption be prevented from arising within the caretaker government itself?”

SAS: “Through accountability for all across the board.”

J: “Do you feel General Musharraf’s action (coup) is justified?”

SAS: “Yes, under the doctrine of necessity, and if there was no other way to save the country.”

J: “Can Pakistan withstand external pressures?”

SAS: “Yes, if we can be united, if our purposes are lofty, and if we can learn to be self-reliant.”

J: “What in your view should the new government be doing?”

SAS: “It should stop corruption, enforce accountability, establish the rule of law, abolish discrimination, and reform the system.”

J: “What do you think of Benazir Bhutto’s demand that elections be held within 90 days?”

SAS: “The needed reforms cannot be put into effect within that short a time.”

It will be seen that the questions posed to the former chief justice called for his opinions and assessments. Opinions may be naive or even perverse, but the categories of true and false (or those of correct and incorrect) do not apply to them. Most of Mr Sajjad Ali Shah’s responses in this interview would appear to have been more platitudinous than insightful, containing little that might be rated as noteworthy.

But it is the journalist, more than Mr Shah, who is to be blamed for this deficiency. He showed poor judgment in his choice of the interviewee. His concerns were mainly political and they should not have been addressed to Sajjad Ali Shah, for he has no known expertise in these matters. His understanding of politics may be no greater than that of his neighbour who is, let us say, a physicist.

It may be noted also that statements of personal preference pertaining to matters of taste, beyond the realms of law and morals, do not lend themselves to examination. That a certain individual prefers peaches to pears may be useful for his host to know, but his preference is not open to discussion. The same goes for beliefs.

Students in a classroom may ask questions to get information they do not have, explanation of a complex connection between ideas or events that they have not fully grasped, or to require evidence in support of their instructor’s reasoning or interpretations. Teachers and scholars, on their part, advance the frontiers of knowledge by questioning the validity or adequacy of the relationships between events or trains of thought, which others have made. But if this process of asking questions is to be productive, certain conditions have to be met.

The scholar concerned should be reasonably well conversant with the relevant subject. He should have figured out what it is that he wants to know or establish. The same conditions apply to other investigators such as journalists. It may be safe to say that persons in any field of endeavour become successful because they have been asking the right kind of questions. That the great majority of humans are only moderately, or even marginally, successful would suggest that they have not always known what the right questions are.

Listening to the respondent is also important. It is both an inclination and a skill that has to be nurtured. Many persons are poor listeners, lacking the requisite patience or span of attention, which keeps them from excelling as investigators.

Questions are at times asked to embarrass the respondent. Other times the interviewer may be interested mainly in hearing his own voice or in appearing to others as ingenious or clever. Unless the addressee is incompetent, such questions will lead to nowhere. There are also questions that are intended to persuade you to do something, not to elicit information. For instance, a telephone company may have an advertisement at an airport that says: “Did you call home today?” A department store may have a poster somewhere saying: “Have you bought a birthday gift for your wife?” Reprimand may also be framed to sound like a question as, for instance, when a supervisor asks a subordinate why a certain assigned job has not been completed on time.

Politicians can be very vexing as interviewees. The cleverer ones among them are masters of evasion; they will not give a straight answer in response to a simple question. Quite often they have a script on this or that issue, prepared and memorised, which they will pronounce regardless of what exactly a newsman wants to know. Ask President Bush whether the American war in Iraq can be won and the troops brought back home, and you will hear a long discourse on why the invasion of Iraq had been justified and how wicked Saddam Hussein had been.

The other day (June 6) I heard a television newscaster interview the federal minister of state for finance, among others, concerning the budget for the forthcoming fiscal year. He asked what the government had specifically provided in the budget to make life a bit easier for the desperately poor. Instead of providing specifics, possibly because there were none, the minister delivered a long denunciation of all the preceding regimes whose leading men, he said, had plundered the exchequer, bought mansions in England and Europe, accumulated huge balances in foreign banks, and never given a thought to the plight of the poor in their own country or raised a finger to help them. What is the poor newsman to do? I am not sure I know.

The writer is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, US. Email: anwarsyed@cox.net

DESPERATE situations often call for desperate measures. However, a series of measures recently announced by the government to combat difficulties on the administrative and economic fronts show more desperation than the situation demands.

Army colonels will serve as political agents in the tribal areas under the direction of a governor who is a retired general; another retired general is to act as secretary of the recently- formed commission on government reforms; a solitary magistrate appointed in each of the 105 districts will control open market prices; and the sale of pulses, sugar and flour will be through utility stores and at subsidised prices. These are some of the measures. Equally impracticable and desperate measures are said to be in the offing. These may be recounted some other day.

By opting to appoint colonels as political agents, the government, in its wisdom, has determined that, in tandem with the ongoing military operations in the north, administrative dealings with turbulent tribes and their recalcitrant chiefs should also be conducted by army officers. The tribal administration, thus, will be going back in time by more than a century. That the proposition is seriously mooted is borne out by several resolutions, passed by the Q League in the NWFP, supporting it.

The army commanders administered the Frontier tribes in the 19th century. In the earlier part of the 20th century, the basic administrative norm was that while the tribes, in some undefined way, were under British suzerainty the government had no intention of entering the territory they inhabited. The tribesmen were encouraged to come down from the hills to trade and till the land in the adjoining plains but military expeditions to burn and kill were mounted in their territory only to retaliate against plundering raids across the administrative boundary.

For the army officers to act as administrators or political agents in those times and circumstances made sense. It does not any longer. Guarding the administrative borders was the chief concern of the British then, the development of the tribal areas and gradual assimilation of the tribes in the national mainstream is the aim now.

The tribesmen of North and South Waziristan have revolted because the government’s “war on terror” has questioned fidelity within the tribes and also between the “hosts” and “guests” which is a point of honour for them. The guests being their own kindred Taliban, the bombing of their homesteads has incited them to rebellion as their guests do no mischief on Pakistan’s soil. The Durand Line divides the territory but not the tribes. Their right of free movement across the line, that is not demarcated, is protected by tradition and has never been questioned by either government.

Since the “guests” these days are militant fighters who commit sabotage and murders in Afghanistan, hospitality can be denied to them by our tribes under a compact with the government through their jirgas. This approach may work where the bombing and demolition of homes has not. There are a number of former tribal administrators (Roedad Khan, Ijlal Hyder Zaidi, Jamil Ahmad, Fateh Khan Bandial, Amir Usman, Salim Abbas Jilani, Abdul Karim Lodhi, Sahibzada Imtiaz, Ejaz Rahim, etc., who still keep their interest in the area alive) who could suggest a way out of the current bloody mess. The tribal chiefs would certainly listen to them. So should the government. Banking altogether on retired generals and serving colonels will only make the situation worse.

When it comes to reforming the government, it is paradoxical that none of the six members of the commission recently notified has ever worked in government (with the exception of Asad Jehangir whose experience is restricted to the police) and, further, that the secretariat of the commission will be headed by a retired general.

The commission’s chairman is a civil servant who joined the World Bank early in his career and returned at its end to head the State Bank. While his credentials to advise the government on financial and monetary matters must not be questioned (and the other members, too, are eminent men in their own professions), the failings of the administration lie mostly outside their field, and particularly in the maintenance of law and order. Of that they have little experience.

A serving and senior field administrator replacing the retired general as secretary will help the commission keep its focus on the problems of the people and on discovering the best way in which the civil services can be restructured to resolve them. The solutions should be born of experience and not borrowed from the military or from the World Bank.

The greatest worry at the time for the government is the rising prices of essential commodities. The prices have risen and will continue to rise because economic growth has been fast but uneven and consumption-driven. It is amazing that the government, headed by a banker and advised by an economist, should think that a single magistrate in a vast district can keep the prices down under his executive supervision.

It is even more amazing that our financial experts should believe that the subsidised sale of a few commodities through a few hundred utility stores located in urban areas will bring prices down in a million shops around the country. More organised and determined efforts in the past have failed. The shopkeepers, suffering harassment and extortion, only raised prices, which stabilised in the course of time, but at a higher level. The result will be no different this time round.

Controlling prices through an executive order or through financial subsidy as a political gimmick no longer impresses even the most gullible among the people. To the cynics it is a joke. To experience its pain, let adviser Salman Shah sit in a Sunday bazaar one day to enforce the prices of meat and vegetables and then queue up at a utility store to buy a kilo of sugar. Surely, he will return to his office on Monday chastened enough to think of economic remedies.