THE outcry from the far right about re-inserting the religious column in the national passport is activity quintessentially Pakistani: great storm and pother over a non-issue. Even so, spare a thought for the holy fathers of the MMA — chief amongst them Qazi Hussain Ahmed of the Jamaat and Maulana Fazlur Rehman of the JUI — who have been reduced to seeking a face-saving device in the form of this issue.

Feeling duped by Gen Musharraf regarding his uniform — convinced they had a solemn promise he would take it off but discovering that the promise was not as solemn as they thought — they threatened an agitation, leading hasty individuals like me to believe that some kind of ‘autumn of the patriarch’ was at hand.

As it turns out, the promised agitation has been a damp squib, Pakistan’s sorely-tried masses making it amply clear that they are filling the nation’s squares and arenas at the call of no political party.

Subtle tacticians, the maulanas retreat to a second line of defence, hiding their embarrassment under a new proclamation that the most important problem facing the nation is the religious column in our passports. The failure to revive it will put Islam in danger. It takes no genius to figure out that the strident stand on this fake issue masks a weakening of resolve on the uniform issue.

Remember the time when naove people thought this was a chance for Pakistan’s political parties to come together on this one point agenda and press Gen Musharraf to stick to his promise? Well, we have a united front but of a different sort altogether. Barring Nawaz Sharif’s PML-N which doesn’t really count in this equation, all the other political parties have virtually bowed their heads in submission before the great national imperative of the general remaining the offices of both president and chief of the army staff.

The damp-squib rallies of the MMA show that the religious alliance, Qazi Hussain’s fire-and-brimstone speeches notwithstanding, have no stomach for a fight. Maulana Fazl understands the realities of power (as indeed does Qazi Hussain whose Jamaat-i-Islami has a long history of military collaboration). Don’t blame the general for laughing all the way to his dinner table.

As for that tribune of the masses, the PPP, it has always had other things uppermost on its plate, never the uniform issue. Benazir Bhutto and husband Asif Zardari were persecuted and witch-hunted by the Sharifs. They had no quarrel with Gen Musharraf and indeed looked upon him as their deliverer when he seized power and put the Sharifs behind bars.

Relief from their ordeal was all that Benazir Bhutto and Zardari wanted, in return for which, as they made all too clear, they were willing to extend the hand of collaboration. The Q League, the rump which under the impact of military engineering broke away from the Nawaz League, emerged on the national scene a bit later. Through gesture rather than word, the PPP was first with its offer of possible cooperation.

But in those early and heady days Gen Musharraf rode the wind and had other things on his mind. Making no distinctions, he denounced all politicians in equal measure, holding them responsible for Pakistan’s problems, conveniently forgetting the military’s no-small-role in helping create those problems in the first place.

The general and his colleagues are wiser now, their political education — undertaken at the nation’s expense — having come a long way. If they didn’t realize the need to have political allies before, they do now. To their surprise, however, they are getting more potential collaborators than they can conveniently handle.

Sprung from the ‘soft’ prison he was in, his status as VIP prisoner never questioned under military rule, Zardari has been given his passport and is flying off to Dubai to celebrate the New Year (one hopes in style) with Ms Bhutto. This takes care of one Nelson Mandela.

The other Mandela, ruing his decision to leave Pakistan’s strife-torn politics and opt for soft exile in the Holy Land, is cooling his heels and counting the days before he can return to Pakistan in distant 2010.

There are Mandelas in the Q League too, sharp-eyed characters who swore by the Sharifs when they were in power but lost no time in bolting towards the other side when ISI and Military Intelligence (MI) erected the portals of the Q League. Consider how much better off Pakistan is than South Africa, or indeed the world, in having more than one Mandela.

What about his master’s voice, the prime minister of wooden manner who could do with a bit of loosening up? His elevation is instructive about the intricacies of Pakistan’s power structure. Right until the end the presumed favourite was Humayun Akhtar. At the eleventh hour (for once not a misplaced clichi), the president pulled a rabbit out of his hat by telling his courtiers that it was Aziz and not Akhtar.

A telephone call from our ever-indefatigable eyes-and-ears in London informed Akhtar that glory’s cup had slipped his lips: quite a roundabout way for info to flow.

One of my New Year resolutions is to know high-flying Dr Nasim Ashraf of the largely mysterious National Commission for Human Development — a mouth-filler this one — better. As someone savvy about what cooks in the Republic, he’s someone worth knowing.

But the person credited with the eleventh-hour conversion in presidential thinking about who should be prime minister — Aziz, not Akhtar — is MI chief, Major Gen Nadeem Taj, which goes to show his influence or powers of persuasion.

I have an interest in these matters because in the 2002 elections I went to sleep a winner and woke up a loser, my mistake being to put faith in Justice Irshad Hasan Khan’s Election Commission rather than in Pakistan’s real election commission, the one with the power to turn victory into defeat and defeat into victory, with no more effort than it takes to wave a magic wand. Therefore my second New Year resolution: keep on MI’s right side. Can’t afford any more miscalculations.

A paradoxical situation we face. The press is free, freer than at any time since Pakistan’s birth. Critics of military rule are running out of adjectives. When you say dictator, dictator, too many times, the word loses its sting. The opening of more and more TV channels is leading to an alarming shortage of pundits. Who could have thought Pakistan would face this crisis?

Political parties are free to meet, find space in the press, and pass strongly-worded resolutions. Opposition members in parliament can shout themselves hoarse to their hearts’ content.

Political suffocation breeds discontent, shackled tongues looking for other means to express themselves. But when intelligentsia, press and the intellectual class can say what they want, where steam can be let off, the need for dangerous political activity — launching movements, raising barricades in the streets — is vitiated. If the press had been free in Field Marshal Ayub Khan’s time there would have been no agitation against him.

In my time at the Pakistan Military Academy, the maitre d’ in our Khalid Company Mess was Head Butler Azad, an imposing figure with Central Asian beard and brass buttons gleaming on his tunic, face always impassive, as if it was beneath his dignity to smile.

Whenever you said the curry was bad or something not quite right he nodded gravely and said, yes, he too was of the same opinion. But if you asked him for the complaint book he never gave it to you. He agreed with all your criticism, like a higher sage agreeing with something brought to his notice, but in the entire recorded history of the PMA there is not a single instance, at least not to my knowledge, of someone wresting the complaint book from Head Butler Azad.