RECENTLY, freedom of speech has been speaking much of past lies and deceptions in Pakistan's civil and military politicking. How do you tell the factoid from the fact, given a multitude of anchors adrift?

Befuddled by Babel, it is hard to decide between heroes and villains. If the ISI stinks in the exposes, the political parties and their leaders do not come out smelling of roses. Nor for that matter do an acquiescent judiciary and benefiting bureaucrats.

Should people chide the media for bingeing on freedom and going toxic yellow? Or should they detect the fine scripting of oligarchs and democrats manqué bent on robbing Pakistan's democracy of its vital fourth estate? There is no denying the media's investigative potential diminished along with its credibility as conflicting allegations and conclusions were aired ad nauseam. An overdosed public may turn media-immune reportage on corruption and cloaked government policy today is muddled with yesterday's tales, and loses definition.

In terms of US-Pak relations, while the clauses of the Kerry-Lugar bill were being vetted, debated and redrafted for legislation in Capitol Hill, Pakistan's parliament failed to show a matching interest in discussing its content. Popular discourse too stayed centred on the past context of US-Pak reciprocities rather than the future. The bill may have received occasional references in point-scoring or reports on its progress at Capitol Hill, but media audiences in Pakistan were more absorbed by details of the Musharraf-Powell phone chats and the nature of the ex president's concessive agreement with America.

Yet all that is a closed chapter, whereas the details of the Kerry-Lugar bill and the present president's concessive endorsement is very much a matter of present concern and future directions and controls. Parliament's debate gets started when governments are on the verge of signing on the dotted line. And it might never have got underway but for the media's initiating its own fierce public debate, albeit at the eleventh hour.

Democracy and citizens need the free press despite its vagaries and excesses. One responsible insightful moment redeems hours of bias and trivia. The provisos of the bill have many ramifications for Pakistan and its people have a right to know what they may be getting into in exchange for the proverbial handful of silver.

The government is dismissive of misgivings and scathingly advises the parliamentary opposition to read the bill. The vox populi has it that the bill is deliberately so vaguely worded as to allow America ominous scope for adjusting interpretations as to what is proper and sufficient payback by Pakistan in the form of being a good nuclear baby and adequately fighting and containing terrorism.Pakistan would have to meet as yet unspecified (but perhaps knowable) future stipulations every step of the way if it agrees to aid as presently envisaged in the bill. Why should the government obtain a mortgage on the people's account?

In the meantime the army expressed misgivings. There was a predictable outcry as to reprehensible signs of the army trespassing on civil domain. Actually, wearing uniform does not disqualify the representative individual from having and expressing views on national politics and policy. Bear in mind also that it is the army which will have to bear the brunt of implementing the war bits. The presidency and the American embassy are safely bunkered, but ordinary Pakistanis are gravely exposed to fallout from a war on terror strategy that places American interest first and last.

The Kerry-Lugar bill has been a long time in the making, and from its inception funding was linked with army abstention from political intervention. During initial visualisations, Benazir was America's favourite ex-Pakistan civil democrat and Musharraf was being pushed to accommodate her. Disillusioned with Musharraf, and ready to welcome back exiled politicians generally (not just in the person of Benazir) it made sense to Pakistan's public that the army stay out of politics. Post Benazir and Musharraf, Pakistan's internal political perspective is altered.

It has a democratically elected civilian president with overwhelming latent power. He has not cared to modify a prevailing conviction that he is untrustworthy. His party leads parliament and — with a few exceptions —parliamentarians are perceived as highly responsive to the carrot and the stick. In such circumstances, where orders and policy are passed within an arcane presidency, parliamentary government can become meaningless.

Presuming an obtuse and obstinate elected parliament ignores public opinion and shies from further electoral reference, the routes to change are the infamous constitutional amendment which serves presidential discretion; street power, as in the case of the restoration of Pakistan's deposed chief justice; or army pressure, again as in the standoff between the government and the masses in the restoration of the chief justice, when even the US felt no need to object.

Apart from the fact that Pakistanis may have sound reasons for blaming parliamentarians for a parliament's undoing; they do not see the army as the sole villain or failure in Pakistan's obstructed democratic path. They condemn military transgression, but they do not go along with a reflexive badmouthing of the army, any more than they would with thoughtless condemnation of a democratic or dictatorial Pakistan's judiciary, legislature or executive. They rather view the proposed Kerry-Lugar circumscription on the army as a way of allowing an indifferent aberrant government a free hand to do things America's way, regardless of national sentiment.

Can a bankrupt cash-strapped Pakistan manage without American aid? Pakistan has no choice! But wasn't that what Musharraf had said post his phone chat? And aren't things meant to have changed now?

There just are not enough carrots and sticks — inside or outside the Kerry-Lugar bill — to appease Pakistanis if they feel America's government is manipulating a coterie in their own government to act against the electorate's understanding of the essential Pakistan. In the Kerry-Lugar bill approach to the war on terror, perhaps, this time it is America that has no choice. Is it too strong to understand limitations?