Ever so often the country gets into a difficult situation by choosing inappropriate solutions to its problems. Indeed, time and again the solutions turn out to be worse than the problems they were meant to solve, of which there are examples galore. Be it in the field of economics or of foreign policy, of defense equipment or of highways, of musical chairs played by prime ministers or of building power plants, of educating the masses or of caring for them, it is not a malaise of today but an on-going string of blunders which, although often well-intentioned, somehow end up being badly conceived or poorly implemented and only compound the problem even further.

One common link in all such poor solutions is the total lack of attention to detail, both in planning and in execution. Random, haphazard decisions, taken without much serious thought or even without careful analysis, are bulldozed through an often compliant and complacent bureaucracy by imperialist leaders who arrogate to themselves the dangerous concept of their own omnipotence.

Take the case of the country's foreign exchange. To solve the problem of meeting the country's foreign exchange commitments self proclaimed financial wizards decided, covertly behind thick curtains, to siphon off the private funds of the citizens without their knowledge and to use them for meeting the state's obligations. A bad solution. But the worst was yet to come. When one day the unsuspecting public came to know, they were informed that all their foreign exchange deposits had evaporated into thin air and they could take rupee equivalents at the government's unilaterally determined exchange rate. That sounded the death knell for home remittances and this bad solution to the problem proved disastrous for the country for years to come.

Remember the sad saga of the IPPs. The problem was the looming fear of power shortages for the expected surge in industrial development. Once again, a handful of the then leaders chosen handmaidens secretly embarked upon the disastrous solution of Private Power. The country is still reeling from this terrible decision, taken in shameful haste without proper study or debate.

Look at that priceless gem of ineptitude, the motorway. Without study of traffic patterns, of national needs and priorities, of resources, a quixotic leader suddenly one day decided to build a grandiose motorway from his hometown of Lahore to the capital, Islamabad. Fair enough. Motorways, even quixotic, do become useful over time as demand grows. But to solve the problem of speedy transportation from Lahore to Islamabad efficiently and economically, no proper study was conducted; not even one to determine an optimal alignment. The existing meandering road from Lahore to Islamabad is 280 kilometers. A new motorway should have been straighter and shorter. The final alignment that emerged out of the whimsical decision making process ended up being not shorter but a much longer 400 kilometers! No wonder that after all these years the bulk of the traffic still refuses to use it.

Shipping has fared no better. To solve the problem of rejuvenating our moribund shipping industry and saving billions of rupees annually a novel method, excluding all procedures and institutions, was devised resulting in an unmitigated disaster. The navy Chief, wearing his additional and most inappropriate hat of "Advisor to the Prime Minister on Shipping" took a couple of cronies to London and made an arbitrary deal to purchase three second hand container ships for about $ 50 million. He is currently under arrest for allegedly receiving several millions dollars in kickbacks which itself is bad enough. But the three ships purchased in this lackadaisical manner, instead of saving money, have themselves lost an additional two billion (yes, two billion) rupees in five years of their operations. Some solution!

Or Afghanistan. Our policies have been consistently flawed and have led from one unmitigated disaster to another, creating in their wake endless horror for the poor citizens of that unfortunate land. A group of very secret know-alls found solution after solution, as each solution they found proved worse than the problem it was meant to solve. It started with the venerable king Zahir Shah who made it his mission in life to oppose Pakistan at every stage, even breaking diplomatic relations. A communist intervention from the north sent the inept king into well-deserved exile. But instead of being beholden to the Soviets for ridding us of a major foreign policy thorn in our side, our intelligence agencies decided to join the Americans in throwing out the Soviets from Afghanistan, which was successfully achieved. Then Afghanistan's horror began. The late venerated Mr Junejo, at the behest of the agencies operating in secret, signed the Geneva Accord, touted as Pakistan's solution to the problems of the Afghans. Over the next few years the monsters who emerged as warlords from this solution raped, looted, murdered and plundered, turning their sad country into a devastated wasteland. The solution became worse than the problem. The agencies in secret decided to handle the new problem through another solution, once again, mind you, in total secrecy, without the foreign office or parliament or the nation's involvement. And the solution they found was in the brand new phenomenon called the Taliban. And what a solution that turned out to be! It took a 9/11, followed by a major international military operation, to rid the world of this demonic solution which, at one time, was touted as the crowning success of our covert agencies.

Perhaps Kashmir falls in the same category. We have maintained for five decades and more that the solution to the Kashmir problem lies in compliance with the UN Security Council resolution requiring Kashmiris to decide to join either India or Pakistan through a plebiscite. We have fought for it. We have championed this solution around the globe. But is it really a good solution? Will it solve the problem? If the Kashmiris opt for Pakistan, will India be happy vacating Sirinagar and Jammu and Ladakh and Siachin? And if they opt for India, are we liekly to cheer the solution while vacating Mangla and Muzzafarabad and Gilgit and Hunza? In fact, either of the two options will inevitably not only lead to more permanent bitterness and hatred between the two countries, but is also against the rights of the Kashmiris, who may well by now be sick and tired of the shenanigans of both the countries and may well decide to go it alone

Perhaps the solution lies elsewhere, not in a change in geography but in a change in the hearts of the people, based not on India's or Pakistan's interests but solely on the rights of the Kashmiris. Such a change of heart occurred in post-war Europe, where historic enemies who had slaughtered millions of each other's citizens in two World Wars have learnt to live in peace and are today integrated into an incredible union. But such a change of heart cannot occur as long as control of the Kashmir policy rests with self-appointed, non-representative, secretive proponents of their own narrow illusions of security, without any debate, any input of society or of parliament or even of any vision and imagination. Their solutions, as in so many other cases, will only continue to worsen the problem.

The musical chairs of prime ministers over the last decade and a half must surely take the cake. Each time the problem of eradicating corruption and bringing about good governance was solved behind closed doors by a coterie of self appointed saviors---usually the president and the army chief, occasionally with a wink from the chief justice, egged on by the sore losers of previous elections. Each such solution, of dismissing governments to bring in better governance, ended up in becoming worse than the problem itself, until our final sorry descent into today's morass. And each change had the same common string running through it, of secret deals and covert actions, never in the full light of day, never under public scrutiny or parliamentary demand or institutionalised decision making.

The constitutional amendment packages of today have the same flaw. The proposed solutions to the constitutional problems of the country may well be worse than the problems themselves, purely because very little, if any, institutional input has gone into their drafting. But on this subject so much has been written and spoken already that there is little to add, except that it conspicuously contains no checks and balances on future actions of army chiefs and chief justices of Pakistan. There's the rub. Ad hocism in solving problems can never substitute institutionalized, systematic and scientific methods of decision making.