Masud Mufti Barack Obama's charge that Pakistan's fragile civilian government cannot deliver basic social services and rule of law, and Hillary Clinton's accusation that Pakistani government has abdicated to the militants are only loud echoes of our own local voices in the world. But when notable American sources predict two weeks of life for the Pakistani government and six months of life for the state of Pakistan, they display, (if not pretend) complete ignorance of what is happening in Pakistan. They need to know the following After Quaid-e-Azam's death in 1948 the country was stratified into upper Pakistan of feudals and lower Pakistan of people. The upper tier gradually began to banish all that could make the lower tier grow or assert itself i.e. education for all, land reforms, constitution, merit, justice, accountability, good governance and rule of law. Other non-democratic forces (military dictators and religious opportunists) soon joined with the vaderas into a triple alliance, which kept on sucking all the resources upwards for six decades resulting in luxury at top, poverty below and estrangement in between. As a reaction East Pakistan revolted in 1971 and other parts are doing now. What we are seeing today is the crumbling of the upper tier. It is not the failure or melting of Pakistan, but is simply the break up of the long status quo. We need to study this process closely. It is God's law of nature that a system driven by lies, deceit and corruption is ultimately destroyed by its own tools. Having touched the lowest level of collusion among all the corrupt elements (euphemistically called National Reconciliation Ordinance---NRO), our tripartite system has run full circle under God's law and is now reaping what it has been sowing all along. Its policy of persistently denying education to all could only produce an illiterate crop of misguided fanatics, and the illegal protection of the vested interests could only breed injustice. Rising heaps of illiteracy and injustice, therefore, produced two big bangs of Lal Masjid and judicial crisis creating two tidal waves of uneducated people (Taliban) and the educated people (lawyer's movements). These days we are facing the first torrent of these two waves symbolising violent (Taliban) and non-violent (lawyers) modes of public resentment in the lower tier. This torrent, however, is yet to gain full momentum. After long pregnancy of this anger, Pakistan is now undergoing convulsions due to the birth pangs for the slow delivery of peoples' power and civil society. One group (lawyers) is trying for a normal birth, while the other group (Taliban) is bent on a Caesarean operation, but the objective of the both is to recreate the prolonged emotional hurt in physical shape. As always, the upper tier is determined to crush the emerging head of the infant, but is itself stumbling in the scuffle due to the advanced stage of its internal decay. The current civil war is thus a clash between the 62-year old fragile system and its newly emerging fresh reaction. This clash was inevitable because our non-transparent system has been raised on anti-people foundations, aiming at all-round sadistic exploitation of the masses. It has never allowed the people to participate in the affairs of the state and has diabolically suppressed any form of human resource development. To attain these objectives the system has deliberately broken the state structure during its hold. Parliament's sovereignty was reduced to rubber stamp, judiciary was made a guardian of dictators, district administration was shattered and the abandoned citizen was thrown to wolves of various mafias. With such compound fractures in its skeleton the system does not have the capacity to survive this clash. It is not a desire or prediction for the victory of Taliban, though it does recognise that, before their final defeat, the Taliban will badly jolt and loosen the status quo. Our ruling elite, however, will not change their spots even after that and will continue to misgovern as before, thereby hastening the system's demise. In the meanwhile, the clash will be severe because the naked barbarism of Taliban is as inhuman as was the selfishly smooth performance of our socio-political system. Both are genetically programmed to pursue the same objective of killing or exploiting the innocent for their own narrow interests. Having suffered the blood-stained power of both, Pakistanis will not jump from the frying pan into fire. The pain of birth-pangs is also giving new strength to the people to defeat both of them after they have mortally injured each other. But there is a big hurdle to cross. The corrupt culture of more than one hundred political parties, carved by four military dictators, is a formidable hurdle. They are an integral part of this system, and embody the same anti-people soul. These undemocratic, autocratic and hereditary family jagirs do not allow internal elections, dissent or expression of public opinion. Having successfully demolished the welfare state of Pakistan's early period their elitist mindset will not allow the germination of peoples' power. In the name of democracy they have been every minute stabbing democracy in the back. The people will have to abandon these parties, and their repeatedly tried leaders, if they want to find their own voice. As of today the gradual fall of upper tier is pushing us into a power vacuum, anarchy and chaos. Occasional disjointed long marches without broad-based and well-knit political organisations will only aggravate these. If Pakistanis can re-organise themselves into genuinely democratic political parties by openly electing new leadership from grassroots on the entire soil of Pakistan, they will be able to communicate with, and understand, each other much better across the artificial barriers of provincialism and sectarianism, deliberately created by the divide-and-rule policies of this system. Through national reconciliation among the masses (NRM), instead of corrupt elements only through NRO, they will be able to clear the falling debris of upper Pakistan fairly soon. If not, they will groan under it, and the consequential anarchy, for a long time to come. Right now, unfortunately, we are neither ready, nor willing, to re-invent lower Pakistan in this shape, but ultimately we will have to do it because this is the only way to harness peoples' power. The sooner we do it, the better it is for all of us because the advanced process of the break up of upper Pakistan is now irreversible, and ensures the rise of lower (real) Pakistan. The writer is a retired civil servant. E-mail: masudmufti@hotmail.com