'Fast bowling is about imposing yourself on the batsman with your belief'

Getting swing while bowling fast - Waqar Younis knew how to do that. He talks us through the art and science of it

Interview by Nagraj Gollapudi

October 17, 2012

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	"Bowling is all about bringing the batsman forward: you have to make him come at least halfway in front, keep him guessing" © Getty Images  Enlarge
Related Links Players/Officials: Waqar Younis | Imran Khan | Wasim Akram | Dale Steyn | James Anderson | Jade Dernbach |Allan Donald | Zaheer Khan | Ishant Sharma Teams: Pakistan

Is swing bowling an art in decline?
I do not think it is dying, because there are a lot of bowlers who can swing and know how to master it. The art that is in decline is pace, especially in the subcontinent. We do not really find fast bowlers who can bowl consistently at a rapid pace. Young bowlers come into cricket bowling at 140-145kph before fading away in a year or two. Irfan Pathan, Ishant Sharma are two good examples. Pakistan may be an exception because their youngsters follow fast bowling much more closely. Fazal Mahmood, Imran Khan, Wasim Akram, myself are heroes to many youngsters. In India it is the batsmen that a youngster normally idolises.

With the bowlers - they enter with an aggressive mindset but over the years the pace goes down.

What are the requirements for a good swing bowler? 
You need a combination of a good action, timing, rhythm and energy. Swing bowling is not at all about slowing down or increasing the pace. And it is not only about the seam position and the roll of the wrists.

The very basic of swing bowling is your action. You need to have a really good action. It does not really matter whether you are side-on or front-on. If the timing of the release of the ball is perfect, then it will swing, regardless of the playing conditions. I hear TV commentators saying the seam position was good, so why did it not swing? That is because there was something amiss in the release or in the action. The wrist position is important when you talk about swing bowling.

What is the appropriate wrist position? 
The fingers should be right behind the ball. When the ball comes out of the hand, the seam should be upright. For that your wrist needs to be straight at the point of release. If it is not straight, it will stop swinging. You might be able to bowl quick but it will be up and down.

Can you give an example? 
Pakistan fast bowler Wahab Riaz is a good example of a bad wrist position. His wrist breaks at the time of delivery. He is a good case of other things not being in order, due to which his wrist breaks. At the crease he is not balanced and then he has to push the ball really hard. Then his head falls and the wrist breaks. Your body position at the crease while you are delivering the ball needs to be correct.

Do you lose control of swing if you are trying for pace? 
I do not agree at all. That is a wrong idea completely. Look at Dale Steyn. He bowls at 150kph-plus and he swings it big. Big bananas come out of his hand. His wrist is in such a beautiful position when the ball comes out, and all his energy is going through the crease nicely. That last part is due to his fitness.

Fast bowling is not an easy art. You need to have a brain, you need to be smart to understand what bowling is all about.

I can give you my own example when I first started playing for Pakistan. I was lucky that I had other senior fast bowlers who were really doing well, and I had a bit of competition with them. I also had Imran Khan use me nicely. He understood me better than myself. I did not have any idea what fast bowling was. All I knew was to bowl fast. It is important to have someone who can guide the youngster and tell him it will come. But it takes a lot of time to master the art.

Can you revisit those days of Waqar Younis, the young fast bowler, and how Imran shaped you? 
Sometimes it is good not to know too many things. When you see a fast bowler trying too many things, it is not good for his future. I was lucky that I knew only one thing, to bowl fast. Whenever I asked Imran what I should do, he only said, "Hold on, you don't really need to do anything. I just want you to bowl quick. That is it." That really worked for me because he wanted me to become a fastbowler, not a medium-pacer.

The first six years of my career, I was really quick. Imran would use me in the middle overs, so I could get the ball to reverse. Reverse is a touch easier than conventional swing, because the ball is in your control more than when you are bowling normal swing. He used me smartly for the three years he was there, before he quit the game in 1992. By then I knew the tricks. Later Aaqib Javed was bowling with the new ball for a few years. By the time he faded away, I was ready to deliver with the new ball. So I went through all the phases: quick bowling, reverse swing and then the new ball.

Nowadays a youngster at the age of 21 tries to do different things immediately on entering international cricket. They try to learn too many things too quickly. But I again point out the example of Steyn: he does one thing, the outswinger, and he is very successful. He keeps it simple. Batsmen are scared of him because the ball comes at 150-plus.

So in those first six to seven years, were you not a complete fast bowler? 
In those first six to seven years I was in the team, but I did not know much about bowling. I learned a lot about fast bowling by asking Imran. Me and Wasim would stand at mid-off and mid-on, good positions to learn about what the bowler is trying, and we would talk to each other and quickly grasp the subtleties. For about the first five seasons I was not given the new ball. I would bowl with a new ball in the nets but not in the match. I would be the fourth bowler in the attack because Imran would only bring me on when the ball started to reverse. I would keep wondering why he passed me the ball when it was 25-30 overs old. But it worked for me and now I understand why he did what he did.

We did the same thing with Shoaib Akhtar when he broke through the ranks. It was unfortunate injuries and other stuff that sidelined him, because he was a true match-winner.

	"Whenever I asked Imran what I should do, he only said, 'Hold on, you don't really need to do anything. I just want you to bowl quick. That is it'"

What is the difference between bowling with the new ball and the old ball? 
It always helped me, going from the old ball to the new ball. The other way around is harder: it decreases your pace as a bowler, because with an older ball you bowl quick and tend to add an extra yard or two of effort. But when it comes to a new ball, you could sort of cut down on pace a little bit. I started bowling with the new ball around 1995. By then I knew more about what my body requires, how much rest I need, how much I can bowl. Now this is done by the coaching staff. We used to monitor ourselves on our own.

Learning in the nets is a vital part of development for every fast bowler. What was your training regimen like? 
I broke down a couple of times in my career. Every bowler breaks down at least once, but I broke down after doing really well on the field. People rely on the gym more now than during our times. I am not saying that is wrong. It has done wonders in terms of strength, conditioning and looks. But do bowlers have enough gas in their tanks, especially in the subcontinent, to keep going? I fear people will continue to break down.

So the point I am driving is: focus on the basics. Bowling and running were major parts of my training. I did very little gym because nobody was there to tell me that it could have helped with my strength. I guess that helped me in a way, because my body would not have coped with going to the gym and then bowling. The kind of action I had, which was very side-on, I needed to be flexible and have an elastic body. We were jogging, running, sprinting freaks. When Imran was there, we would run five laps before we did anything. Being in the gym - it was all about looking good.

Do you agree that stamina is more important to a fast bowler than anything else to generate speed? 
Stamina and endurance always help. You just need to have a heart to keep running. My bowling was my training, because I had a long run-up and I would bowl a good six to seven overs on the trot and then have a break of 30-40 minutes before returning for a short burst of three overs. All that without bowling a no-ball. Even Aaqib and the rest of that lot, we just ran fast. We used to tell each other: we are not bowling a no-ball, even in the nets. We are going to bowl within our limits and then try and trouble the batsman. Even now as a coach I tell the guys never to bowl a no-ball in the nets. It puts all your energy and effort to waste otherwise.

Are fast bowlers more protected now? 
Biomechanists probably would disagree with me, but based on my experience, most fast bowlers in the 1980s and '90s never had people telling us to change or modify our actions, and that if we did not do it we would break our backs. Your body is your best judge. It learns over a period of time to adapt. These days Level 3 and 4 coaches put a lot of emphasis on certain specifics due to the numerous video cameras that have come into play. But I have always believed in allowing the bowler to play with his body and understand the best position and action for himself.

Take the case of Ishant. When he first came on the scene, I thought: here is a good bowler with an open-chested action, tall and hits the deck and gets bounce. Then he started making changes in his action, going wider, started losing pace and rhythm. He is looking better now, but in the last two years he had lost it. I do not know whether it was the coaches who tried fiddling with him or whether it was his own decision.

What was he doing wrong? 
He did not get wickets because he was bowling a little short of length. He reminds me of Javagal Srinath, who bowled a similar length throughout his career. With his body and the momentum he generated through his run-up, Srinath should have taken a lot of wickets, but he did not pitch the ball up. Venkatesh Prasad, with limited ability, pitched it up and did well.

Bowling is all about bringing the batsman forward: you have to make him come at least halfway in front, keep him guessing. Unless you are playing on fast pitches, like Perth of the past, there is no point pitching back of a length. Young fast bowlers in the subcontinent predominantly play on flat pitches at home, so you have to adapt first at home and be more consistent. Yes, the pitches are flat, they are slow, but you have to learn. We learned it too.

Why are Australia so good? Why were England so good against Australia and India in the last few years? They pitched the ball up. Look at the best bowlers, like Allan Donald, Shaun Pollock or anyone else - they would pitch the ball up. You have to bring the nicks into play. You cannot give the batsman time to go back and play once the ball has pitched. You have to attack the stumps. You have got to make the batsman play. Especially with the new ball. You cannot allow the batsman to settle early on. You have to pitch it in his areas of discomfort. Once he settles, he will be comfortable in any area you pitch.

How did you learn to unsettle the batsman? 
Over the years what I learned came through my own experience. I got hit [for runs] myself, but I learned through that. The more you get hit, the more you learn. Take a look at my overall strike rate or runs per over - it was higher than most of the bowlers. Around that time, if there was a bowling coach it could have been different. We were just told "Aage phainkon, dande udaaon [Pitch it up, send the stumps flying]."

I rarely relied on the slips. My main aim was to target those stumps. If you aim six balls in an over, at least once the batsman might miss. Yes, he might also hit you for fours, but if I pitch 12, 14, 18, 20 deliveries continuously on the off stump, the batsman is bound to miss at least once. It will get me that one wicket.

Reverse swing taught me a lot. You need to pitch it fuller to reverse, so you adjust your lengths. Fast bowling is all about belief also: if I do this, this might happen. You need to impose yourself on a batsman with your own belief.

You said that reverse swing came naturally to you. Can you explain? 
Nobody really taught me reverse swing. When I saw others doing it in international cricket, when I saw Wasim doing it, Imran Khan doing it, I felt it was easy. Honestly, I did not know how I did that. I played very few domestic matches before breaking into the Pakistan team.

	"Me and Wasim would stand at mid-off and mid-on, good positions to learn about what the bowler is trying, and we would talk to each other and quickly grasp the subtleties" © Getty Images  Enlarge

I played in an Under-19 Test match against India and bowled quick but sprayed it all around. I was dropped. I went back to domestic cricket and played for Union Bank of Lahore against Pakistan National Shipping Corporation on a green top. The ball started swinging and I did not know how it was happening. It was conventional swing. I got six wickets. I was picked for the final Test against the Indian Under-19s again, which included Ajay Jadeja, Nayan Mongia, Jatin Paranjape. I picked up five wickets.

Later on, Imran polished my reverse-swing skills. The big part of his coaching was that he never interfered much during the matches. If I told him "Outswing is happening", he would only say, "Okay, bowl outswing." He would never tell me where to bowl from, what to bowl. I did go against his suggestions at times, but he never felt bad, because he knew I was learning. He understood that the youngster is going against my views, but if he feels that he can do it, then it is good. That really helped me.

An essential part of reverse swing is maintaining the condition of the ball. Can you describe your method? 
I knew how to take care of the ball. You make sure you do not put too much sweat on it. You have to keep the right balance between keeping one side shining and the other side very dry.

Everyone does reverse swing these days. But during my day it was a controversial issue, with allegations of tampering flying around. Reverse swing is an art. And I still honestly believe that art has not been explored. Very few have managed it: Darren Gough, Lasith Malinga and probably myself. You need a certain kind of bowling action to execute reverse swing. Of course, Wasim was an exception. He was lethal because he was a left-armer. With a very high action, reverse swing is not as effective. Brett Lee did it too, but if you have a side-on action, reverse becomes more effective. And remember this: it is not swinging the ball, it is about dipping the ball. And when you have a side-on action, the ball dips more.

Also, you do not need to have the seam upright, as is the case in conventional swing. The seam should be slightly tilted. So, say, you have the seam tilted towards first slip, with the shiny side on your right, and you are bowling a (reverse) inswinger. The ball will move towards the first slip, but around the 20th yard it will dip. That is when the batsman could take his eye off the ball. It works well with a side-on-action bowler mostly. With a high-arm action, the batsman can judge it at a good distance once the ball has been released, as to which way the shine is.

How does Malinga keep coming up with those reverse-swinging yorkers? You can't even block them at times. That is because at a certain point, as the delivery is coming towards him, the batsman takes his eyes off it. I know this only because it happened when I was bowling, and I was hitting the stumps more than anyone else, just like Malinga does now. About a metre and a half from the batting crease, the ball starts dipping. The batsman thinks it is in his batting area and takes his eyes off. Some batsmen are good and look at the ball till the very last instant. But at least 80% plant their foot to kill the swing. They get lbw or get bowled by a yorker.

According to Allan Donald, ball-tampering should be made legal. What is your opinion? 
What is tampering? Let me ask that question first to all the pundits. Is applying Vaseline or creams on the ball tampering? Is scratching the ball tampering? Is picking the seam tampering? All these are ways of tampering, because according to the law, you are changing the condition of the ball. Even in the 1970s and '80s, famous fast bowlers would use their nails to pick the seam. But now everybody is able to get reverse swing, so nobody is worried. You have so many cameras in the game now, but nobody is worried. Why was it only in the 1990s, when we got the ball to reverse, that people questioned us? Because we were too good. I bet there is still some sort of tampering going on: people using mints, nails etc. Now there is a law stating fielders in the inner circle have to throw directly and not hit the surface before it reaches the wicketkeeper. But what about the outfielder with a weak arm? People will always find ways. So I am not sure if making tampering legal is a solution, because it only will make things ugly. Batsmen will obviously cry foul.

Are you saying reverse swing cannot be achieved without doing one of the aforementioned things? 
No, you can achieve reverse swing without resorting to any of those means. A major part of getting the ball to reverse is done by the pitch, because you are landing the ball on that, and if you know which side to land it on, you will get the job done.

How do you control the swing? 
Reverse swing and control come with the condition of the ball: when it is really old, it swings more, and then you have to bowl accordingly, and the energy you put in is different. So when it is reversing big, you have to aim at a different place, and when it reverses less you land differently and use the crease a lot. If the ball is 50 overs old, it will probably swing more, and if it is 30 overs old it will swing less. As for what is the earliest the ball can reverse, it depends on the pitch. If the pitch is really abrasive and devoid of grass, the ball could start reversing after 15 or 20 overs.

	"Aggression is good and that is towards the batsman, but within yourself you need to be calm and sensible. I was thinking inside myself what the batsman was planning and how I needed to out-manoeuvre him"

When do you decide to bowl the yorker: at the start of the run-up, mid-stride or just before delivery? 
Most things in bowling, you decide before you start running. There are very few occasions when you are mid-stride and you change your plans. Also, your plans are set based on the batsman. So by the time you take that final leap, you know what you are doing.

Mike Selvey, the former England fast bowler, wrote that you don't bowl or aim a yorker, you feel it instead. 
That is a very good comment. It is not like you are aiming at a certain place. You feel it and you tell yourself you are going to do it and it is going to be there. You can ask Malinga and even he will tell you that he never aims the yorker at a particular spot. It is another thing that he bowls too many yorkers for my liking. He can be a lot more effective if he bowls the length ball more. But a yorker is a delivery that one needs to feel - you feel the energy is going to shift, the momentum is going to shift.

Is the yorker dead as an ODI weapon? Batsmen have kind of worked it out so that balls of a full length which got wickets ten years ago often get hit for fours now. 
I do not agree. If you see the real fast bowlers, they are still successful at executing the yorker, and at will. Yes, the batsman is more alert and aware now, especially against reverse-swinging yorkers. Yes, you are not going to get as many wickets as we did, because during my time only the bowlers knew more about reverse swing, not the batsmen. We would cover it. Now the batsmen look at which side is shining and how the bowler is holding the ball. What that has done is forced the bowler to rethink his strategy.

The variation of the slower ball is a creation of modern cricket. Take the back-of-the-hand slower ball, which Jade Dernbach, the England fast bowler, delivers really well. I don't know how he does it because I cannot do it, especially with a good arm speed.

Does the new ICC rule about using two new balls in an ODI hurt fast bowlers? 
It is already hurting bowlers, especially in the subcontinent. You should have seen the last Asia Cup. Fast bowlers are going to be finished. I am glad I am not playing, in a way. A fast bowler has to be a lot smarter now. With batsmen carrying a thick piece of wood in their hand, you should bowl away from them when they move. In our days, umpires would signal anything out of reach of the batsman as a wide. Now you have the tramlines, so you should use them cleverly. I can see a lot of fast bowlers already aiming at those lines, and that is good.

Who are your all-time best fast bowlers? 
I can only talk of fast men I saw. Malcolm Marshall was extraordinary. Glenn McGrath was not really quick, but was amazingly skilful. He was a good classical seam bowler. Whenever we went to Australia, we would say he is tall, he gets bounce on the hard pitches at home, it is very hard to face him, considering the nagging lengths he bowls. Let us see if he is good enough when he tours Pakistan. He came to Pakistan twice - in 1994 and 1998 - and picked up 19 wickets on those two tours. He was smart. Mind you, I am talking of fast bowlers during my time outside of Pakistan. Otherwise Wasim Akram would be up there - such an amazing talent.

Talking about the fast men at the moment, Dale Steyn is the best in any conditions. James Anderson is good too. I would have put Zaheer Khan of two years ago in the same bracket, because he was using his experience cleverly then. He has lost a little bit of sting now. He bowls very well with the new ball, but by the time he comes back for later spells, the speed dies. It is the age, really. Injuries have caught up with him. By the time you are 34 or 35, in the morning when you wake up, your ankle, knee, back hurt. You have to really mentally gear yourself up to inspire yourself. It is not an easy job.

You once said about Akram: "He contributed to 50% of my success. We shared the burden and complemented each other." 
That is a fact. What he did for me while I was playing was amazing. As I said earlier, we would stand at mid-off or mid-on and chat to each other. He had a big hand in my performances and the wickets I took. He had a lot more control with the ball in hand than I had. What I probably gained from his success is, I wanted to take more wickets than him in every game. He might say the same if you ask him. That was a healthy competition we had. He was, and is still, a great friend.

Did you guys take wickets at times by the sheer weight of reputation? 
You could say that about the tailenders. When we were bowling at the top batsmen, they knew they had their reputation at stake. What really satisfies a fast bowler is when the batsman is a lot more alert and using his skills to the maximum. So when you bowl against a Lara or a Tendulkar, he knows he can't give away his wicket easily. It is a healthy competition between bat and ball.

	"Look at Dale Steyn. He bowls at 150kph-plus and he swings it big. Big bananas come out of his hand" © PA Photos  Enlarge

But towards the end of your career, did you manage to take wickets by the sheer force of your personality? Take the seven-wicket haul against England in the ODI in 2001. 
That was one hell of a tournament. Two days later I took six wickets against Australia. Both those performances came because of my experience more than personality. The conditions were very conducive to fast bowling and it was a simple matter of pitching the ball in the right place. And to do that you need a lot of bowling behind you. I did not bowl very quick. I bowled like a medium-pacer, but I swung the ball like anything. It comes with age.

Pace, skill, accuracy, aggression, courage are what make a good fast bowler. What more can you add to the list? 
You need calmness also. Aggression is good and that is towards the batsman, but within yourself you need to be calm and sensible. That is one reason I was not interested in hitting batsmen. I had the pace but I never bowled successive bouncers in a row to hit or hurt someone. I was thinking inside myself what the batsman was planning and how I needed to out-manoeuvre him. You need fire in the belly but also an icy head. You can disturb the batsman with a smile by saying something that is not explicitly a sledge. You need to look into the batsman's eyes and unsettle him. Of course, it can backfire and there are batsmen who can stare back at you. Robin Smith was an exception. He would give it back to you. Then there were the Aussies. So being calm in those instances is the key. Because you then turn back and switch off and plan the next delivery. You learn with the passage of time.

Shakeup of A-levels

Reforms expected to include eventual scrapping of A-level modules and introduction of dissertations of up to 5,000 words

• Nicholas Watt, chief political correspondent
• The Guardian, Wednesday 17 October 2012

Michael Gove's plans have been criticised by Labour, who say they ignore important subjects such as computing and engineering. Photograph: Gideon Mendel/Corbis

The education secretary, Michael Gove, is to shake up the A-level system as he moves to introduce the principles of the international baccalaureate (IB) to schools in England.

Students hoping to attend the elite Russell Group of universities will be expected to write dissertations of up to 5,000 words and to show an academic breadth of knowledge.

Anyone studying arts subjects, such as English and history, would be expected to choose a "contrasting" subject in the sciences or maths. Those studying the sciences would be expected to take a "contrasting" arts subject. The changes are designed to answer universities' complaints that too many students have a narrow outlook and often lack basic literacy skills.

Gove's latest move follows his announcement last month that he is to scrap GCSEs in favour of what he regards as a more academically rigorous English baccalaureate (EBacc) system.

In the next stage of reforms, Gove is not planning to scrap A-levels, but is hoping to drive up standards by developing an overall framework known as the ABacc. Students would still sit A-levels, but there would be major changes:

• It is expected that A-level modules would eventually be scrapped. Gove has done this with GCSEs and is minded to do so again with A-levels, though he is expected to move at a slower pace.

• Students would be stretched by being asked to write dissertations of up to 5,000 words. This would probably be in addition to their A-levels and would give them a higher overall ABacc grade. Many universities have complained that students often struggle to write longer essays.

Liz Truss, the new education minister who campaigned in favour of improving the teaching of maths in her days as a backbencher, has advocated longer essays.

While Gove is introducing the principles of the IB, he does not want to introduce the actual IB system across English schools, although it is favoured by many public schools. The qualification is managed from abroad and demands a breadth of subjects that would stretch many schools.

A Department for Education spokesman stressed that the plans, first disclosed in the Times, were at an early stage. "A-levels will not be replaced under any circumstances. There are public consultations about reforming A and AS-levels. There are also numerous suggestions about new ABacc league table measures but no decisions have been made." The Times said the mix would also include voluntary work.

Stephen Twigg, the shadow education secretary, said: "We support the concept of an ABacc. However, Labour would ensure it includes a broad range of subjects and sits alongside our proposed vocational courses. If these changes include community work, an extended project and a wider range of courses, then that is welcome.

"Unfortunately, Michael Gove seems to be ignoring important subjects like computing and engineering which are critical for the modern economy. The government must address the big challenges to ensure a One Nation education system – ensuring a gold standard route for vocational education and every pupil studying English and maths until the age of 18."

A wake-up call for Pakistan's broken society

Karamatullah K Ghori

The barbaric attempt on the life of a 14-year-old schoolgirl last Tuesday by Taliban terrorists has spawned a state of trauma and national mourning in Pakistan. It's unlike other incidents that have hit the tragedy-prone country with a devastating frequency in recent years.

Malala Yusafzai, the innocent victim of the Pakistani Taliban's bloodlust, rose to prominence three years ago when, as an 11-year-old from the picturesque Swat Valley, she challenged the Taliban edict that girls shouldn't get an education. The Taliban, with their archaic, stone-age mentality, were then in control of Swat, and the Pakistan Army had just mounted a major military offensive against them. The militants had torched scores of schools for girls and threatened to deface with acid burns any girl seen going to a school.

The brave and indomitable Malala - whose father runs a private school for girls in Mingora, the administrative seat of Swat - had publicly defied the Taliban obscurantism by reminding their religious brigade that education was her birthright as both a Pakistani and a Muslim. She had the gumption to remind them that what they were demanding of her, and every other Pakistani girl, flew in the face of the Prophet Muhammad's categorical command that pursuit of knowledge was incumbent upon every Muslim man and woman.

Malala's bravado made her a celebrity; she became an icon to those who abhorred the Taliban's anachronistic and wayward interpretation of their religion. Once the Taliban brigands had been driven out of Swat, Malala was showered with government recognition and accolades. She became a standard-bearer of the Pakistani secularists and religious moderates who loathed the Taliban's craving to turn the clock back to the Middle Ages and deny the benefits of education to half the country's population.

However, for the revanchist Taliban, whose bloodlust is apparently insatiable and who believe in settling every issue at the point of a gun, Malala had become a marked person, irrespective of the fact that she was just a child.

It was not that Malala was not conscious of the danger she faced at the hands of the barbarians she had brazenly challenged on their own turf. In an interview with the British Broadcasting Corp a year ago - when she was still basking in the spotlight of fame and popular recognition - she had so stated:

The situation in Swat was normal until the Taliban appeared and destroyed the peace of Swat. They started their inhuman activities; they slaughtered people in the squares of Mingora, and they killed so many innocent people. Their first target was schools, especially girls' schools. They blasted so many girls' schools - more than 400 schools and more than 50,000 students suffered under the Taliban. We were afraid the Taliban might throw acid on our faces, or might kidnap us. They were barbarians; they could do anything.

The "barbarians" managed to get back to their quarry and shoot her, in broad daylight in Mingora when she and her classmates were returning home from their school in a bus. It has shocked Pakistan's 180 million people out of their wits that, despite the military establishment's touted claims that it had purged Swat of the Taliban scourge, the pestilence has not only staged a comeback butwith a bang by settling scores with its well-known nemesis. It does not, apparently, bother the conscience of the bloodthirsty avengers that their nemesis was just 14.

The Pakistani people are shell-shocked, not only at the daring of the Taliban but much more at the appalling failure of the country's military and civil establishments to provide security to a brave little girl who was known to be a marked target in the Taliban book. The country's political leadership had cheered Malala's courage to take on the Taliban jackals in their lair but apparently did precious little to save her from the reach of their predatory revenge.

For the Pakistani intelligentsia and the infamous "silent majority" the shock is, however, anchored in something much larger than the hourly media sound bites keeping them up to date on Malala's medical condition, or the dismaying pictures from her bedside at the Combined Military Hospital in Rawalpindi where Pakistan's top-notch doctors and surgeons were fighting hard to save her life. (On Monday, Malala was ferried to Britain in an air ambulance provided by the United Arab Emirates government for special medical treatment and care.)

The trauma of Pakistan's thinking and chattering classes is focused on the larger question: Why did this happen? How could a society as traditional and ritualistic as Pakistan's - where women are sheltered and protected with special attention because of common perception of their being the weaker gender - allow a frenzied band of religious zealots like the Taliban to acquire so much power and authority as to become a menace to everyone - men, women and even children?

The answer, or answers, to this and related questions are of course well known to any Pakistani with his thinking cap on his head; it's another matter entirely to state the answer loud and clear.

The scourge of the Taliban has become a men-eating and children-devouring monster, not overnight but because of the laxity the whole society of Pakistan has been showing to this menace over a long period.

The genesis of the Taliban is generally traced to the Afghan struggle against the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. The religious-minded zealots were plied with money and weapons by all those - Pakistan and its Arab and Western friends included - who thought that these firebrand mujahideen inspired by the religious sense of martyrdom could knock the ground from under the feet of the Russians. They did. But once that feat was achieved, the genie refused to go back into the bottle.

Pakistan virtually committed hara-kiri by treating the Taliban with kid gloves and allowing them to dig their heels into Pakistan's welcoming soil. The military and political establishment was daydreaming that the Taliban would provide strategic "depth" to Pakistan, vis-a-vis Afghanistan, and give a free hand to its forces against the "real enemy", India.

However, to the Taliban there couldn't be a more fertile place to sow the seeds of their archaic version of Islam than Pakistan's moribund society, already plagued by a decaying feudal system and afflicted with mendacity, corruption and wanton illiteracy.

The rest, as they say, is history. The Taliban have feasted on the inadequacies and glaring contradictions of Pakistan's broken society, where the word of mouth of a half-baked mullah carries more weight with hordes of illiterate masses than the writ of the government.

The rational segment of the Pakistanis - woefully fewer in number than the legions of faux messiahs with ready-made potions of elixir to cure the nation's festering wounds - have known for long that the menace lies within the body politic of Pakistan. The brazen attempt on the life of a 14-year-old social activist - whose crime in the eyes of her predatory assassins was that she preached education for girls of Pakistan - should be an eye-opener to anyone inclined to stem the rot.

Since the enemy is within, the battle against it will have to be waged by the Pakistanis themselves. They must take on the genie unleashed by them because of their weird logic and convoluted sense of religion. The time to act is now; delay will only escalate the cost and whet the appetite of the monsters threatening to bring down the ramparts of Pakistan.

Karamatullah K Ghori is a retired Pakistani ambassador and career diplomat, now a freelance columnist and commentator. He may be reached at K_K_ghori@yahoo.com.

The Muck and the Top Brass

MoD lobbying claims: 

The fact that some of Britain’s leading ex-servicemen were prepared to lobby the Ministry of Defence on behalf of foreign arms companies is just the latest example of the cosy but compromising revolving door between Whitehall and the private sector, says Andrew Gilligan.

By Andrew Gilligan

6:45AM BST 15 Oct 2012

199 Comments

For the British people, the Royal British Legion’s Festival of Remembrance is a chance to honour the men and women killed and maimed in our name. For the Legion’s president, Lieutenant-General Sir John Kiszely, however, it is also “a tremendous networking opportunity” which “commercial people can get in on”.

The general’s tongue had been loosened by a £110,000 offer from South Korean arms dealers, who wanted his help selling their products to the Ministry of Defence. His Legion role, he told them, was “extremely useful for all these contacts”. As he explained: “If I tried to book in… to have a meeting on behalf of a company, I probably wouldn’t get past the door.” But “with Andrew Robathan [the Armed Forces minister], I would get into his office by saying, 'As president of the British Legion, you know, it’s time’… and that’s when you sow the seed.”

To the same generous Koreans, Admiral Sir Trevor Soar, ex-Commander-in-Chief Fleet and self-proclaimed “MoD warrior”, offered to “target” his former subordinates and “get them interested”. Sir Trevor, who only left the Navy this year, is still covered by the two-year lobbying ban commonly imposed on retired officers, but told his would-be clients that the restriction had “no legality” and he would “just basically ignore it”.

General Sir Mike Jackson, head of the Army during the Iraq War, offered to “dangle a fly in the waters” on the Koreans’ behalf. General Lord Dannatt, another ex-chief of the general staff and former adviser to David Cameron, boasted about how he’d avoid anti-lobbying rules by “targeting” an old school contemporary who happens to be the MoD’s permanent secretary. For a “reasonable” £100,000 for 24 days’ work a year, he’d set up lunch with the chief of defence procurement, Bernard Gray. Air Chief Marshal Lord Stirrup, former chief of the defence staff, told the South Koreans he would “grill” former colleagues and ministers on their behalf over private dinners at his house in London. “When do we start?” he asked.

This morning, amid the ashes of several distinguished reputations, the question is: where will it end? The chequebook-ready Koreans were, of course, undercover reporters from The Sunday Times. Of the eight senior former officers they approached, only two refused their blandishments completely. And for the Ministry of Defence, the implications are particularly seismic. The department is notorious throughout Whitehall for signing colossally expensive contracts that deliver poor value for taxpayers. Can there possibly be any connection between this and the fact that so many of its people go on to work for defence contractors? 

One of the most heavily criticised recent contracts is for the Royal Navy’s two new aircraft carriers. These will cost taxpayers more than £6 billion, even though one will be immediately mothballed and the other will carry no aircraft until 2020. At least four top officers and ministers involved – including the heads of the Navy and the RAF, the vice-chief of the defence staff, and the defence procurement minister, Baroness Taylor – went on to join companies involved.

Then there is the contract dubbed the “worst deal in history”: to give the Air Force 14 new Airbus A330 transport/tanker aircraft. Bought by a civilian airline, A330s cost as little as £85 million each, or £1.2 billion for 14. But the MoD is paying £10.5 billion – for aircraft it will not even own, but lease. Nor did the price include standard military fitments such as flight-deck armour, meaning that the jets were unable to fly into any war zone.

Roughly half the price, according to the National Audit Office, comprises financing costs and profits for AirTanker, the PFI consortium that actually owns the planes. Over the last few years, more than 30 MoD officials, including some directly involved in negotiating the deal, have moved from the ministry to the companies concerned. As Paul Flynn, a Labour MP who has campaigned on the issue of defence procurement, told me: “I am not suggesting misconduct by any individual here, but the prospect of retirement work is potentially corrupting.”

All this is known as the “revolving door”. In 2009/10, the latest year for which full figures are available, 326 officers or MoD officials were cleared to join the private sector. Of these, 240 went to defence companies. Fully 20 were generals, admirals or air marshals.

The problem is not confined to the MoD. At the Cabinet Office, John Suffolk has moved from the highly sensitive post of chief information officer to become global cybersecurity officer at Huawei, a Chinese company accused by the Pentagon of having “close ties” to Beijing’s military. Lord Hunt, the former Labour health minister, joined Cumberledge Connections, a health lobbyist run by a former Tory health minister. Baroness Smith of Basildon, once the minister responsible for information technology, has joined Vertex Data Science, a computer outsourcing firm.

The body supposed to regulate all this is called Acoba, the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments, part of the Cabinet Office. When they leave public service, ministers and senior officials must ask the committee to approve any jobs they’re offered (more junior staff, including the vast majority within the MoD, are dealt with at departmental level). But Acoba seems extremely reluctant to place its foot in the revolving door. In fact, over the past 15 years, it has not vetoed a single application. According to its annual reports, it considered 944 applications between 1996 and 2011. Of these, 412 were approved with conditions and 532 unconditionally. None was rejected.

Even where conditions were imposed – typically a ban on lobbying former colleagues – none has ever lasted for more than two years. Acoba’s chairman, the former minister Lord Lang, told MPs that longer prohibitions would be a “restraint of trade” and against applicants’ human rights. And, as Sir Trevor told the undercover reporters, even the existing bans have no legal or contractual standing. Acoba itself has no powers to police them: Mr Suffolk, the Huawei employee, has been told he must not “draw on any privileged information” from his time at the Cabinet Office, but that condition seems almost impossible to enforce. Last year, 13 former ministers, officials and military officers – including the former Cabinet Secretary, Lord O’Donnell – did not even bother to approach Acoba before taking new jobs.

Lord Lang has insisted that the committee “works extraordinarily well”. But in 2010, rather more extraordinarily, he was himself filmed by undercover reporters – this time from Channel 4’s Dispatches – offering his services to a fake lobbying company, though he told them he would do no lobbying personally. Mr Flynn says that the Commons’ public administration committee wanted to veto Lord Lang’s appointment to Acoba, but could not do so because it had already been announced. Instead, it has this year published a report calling for the entire organisation to be scrapped.

This week’s scandal seems sure to hasten that event. But replacing Acoba will be complicated. Those exposed yesterday have enjoyed careers for life and lavish pensions – one more reason why their conduct is so questionable. But younger civil servants and officers no longer have such luxuries. If they are to be able to support themselves, any new system must allow them to transfer between employers without penalising them for their periods of public service.

More broadly, yesterday’s disclosures might trigger a wider reappraisal of Britain’s reverence for its top military officers. The brass are among the few senior public servants still relatively immune from public criticism, with the monumental failures of Iraq and Afghanistan customarily blamed on dishonest politicians or cheese-paring officials. In fact, many of the most pig-headed mistakes were made by Britain’s military leadership.

Yet old generals can also be a vital check and balance in the system: protesting against defence cuts, criticising the Government when it strays off course. Ministers will love it if they are banned from the MoD’s precincts, as the current Defence Secretary, Philip Hammond, suggested yesterday, but the Forces may well come to regret it. Still, should that happen, the generals really will have no one to blame but themselves.

The graph that shows how far David Cameron wants to shrink the state

If the Tories get their way, within five years the UK will have a smaller public sector than any major developed nation

• 
• • Aditya Chakrabortty
  • The Guardian, Monday 15 October 2012 20.00 BST

Government spending as a percentage of national GDP. Photograph: IMF WEO Database Oct 2012

This column is normally accompanied by a photo; an illustration that takes its cue from the text. But not today. The chart you see on this page is plainly not decorative: it is the main event. All I'm going to discuss is its implications.

Drawing on IMF figures published last week, the graph compares what will happen to government spending in Britain up to 2017 with the outlook for Germany and the US. And what it shows is that the UK will plunge from public spending on a par with Germany in 2009, to spending less than the US by 2017. Had France, Sweden or Canada been included on this graph, the UK would still come bottom. If George Osborne gets his way, within the next five years, Britain will have a smaller public sector than any other major developed nation.

Fan or critic, nearly everyone now agrees that this government wants to shrink the state, but very few take on board what that means. This graph shows just how radical those ministerial plans are. Particularly striking is the fact that Britain will end up spending less as a proportion of its national income than even the US, the international byword for a decrepit public sector. According to Peter Taylor-Gooby, professor of social policy at Kent, this will be the first time it has happened since at least 1980 and possibly in recorded history. For it to take place within half a decade is a shift so dramatic that few people in frontline politics, let alone among the electorate, have understood its implications.

Forget all that ministerial guff about the necessity of cutting the public sector to spur economic growth. Had that argument been true, British businesses would be in leonine form by now, instead of their current chronic enfeeblement. It was notable at last week's Tory party conference how Osborne and David Cameron didn't even try to argue for the economic benefits of austerity – how could they? – but grimly asserted that there was no alternative.

Forget, too, the argument that only cuts have kept Britain's borrowing costs from rocketing. In the IMF's summer healthcheck for the UK was another chart which showed that the only nations where interest rates had spiralled upwards were those in the eurozone, and those without control of their own currency and monetary policy. Every other major economy, no matter what their debt load, was able to borrow from the financial markets as cheaply as ever.

Strip away the usual economic and financial alibis for such drastic austerity and what you're inevitably left with is a purely political motive: namely, a desire to transform the British state from being recognisably European, with continental levels of public spending, to something sub-American in its miserliness.

Let me make two caveats. First, there was no way Britain was going to maintain public spending at 2009 levels. That year, the Labour government threw the kitchen sink at the economy, after which you would expect some belt-tightening. Still, as Carl Emmerson of the Institute for Fiscal Studies points out, after both world wars, the level of public spending in Britain rose permanently; you might expect something similar after a once-in-a-lifetime financial crisis. Given how fast Britain is ageing, and how much we will need to spend on pensions and care for the elderly, there is no reason why the state in Britain should shrink back to some magic level of 40% of the economy.

Second, this chart is based on current US budget plans: if Mitt Romney moves into the White House next January, or even if Barack Obama is re-elected and has to strike a bargain with intransigent Republicans, then Washington is also likely to make stringent cuts. But that last qualification only reinforces the larger argument. Whether in Britain or the US, the right are trying to whip the rest of us into a giant race to the bottom, where public services, welfare entitlements and employment rights are all to be tossed overboard.

Cameron admitted as much in last Wednesday's conference speech. Lumping together Nigeria with China and India and Brazil, he described them as "the countries on the rise … lean, fit, obsessed with enterprise, spending money on the future – on education, incredible infrastructure and technology". As anyone who has ever tried to keep a car on the potholed roads of Bihar, in northern India, will know, that description is a giant porky. But Cameron wanted to draw a comparison with "the countries on the slide … fat, sclerotic, over-regulated, spending money on unaffordable welfare systems, huge pension bills, unreformed public services".

From compassionate Conservative to growth rainmaker to state-shrinker, Cameron has gone through a huge change since 2005. But that is nothing like what lies ahead for the rest of Britain in the next five years. Prepare yourself for welfare to be downsized into American-style workfare, for public-sector jobs to be turned into a second-class employment and for services, from school to healthcare, to demand that users pay more to get something decent. The future is American.

Planet with four suns discovered by 'armchair astronomers'

Planet believed to be six times the size of Earth is named PH1 after Planet Hunters website used by two American volunteers

• Press Association
• guardian.co.uk, Monday 15 October 2012 19.44 BST

An artist's impression of PH1, the planet with four suns discovered by Planet Hunters volunteers. Photograph: Haven Giguere/Yale/PA

A planet with four suns has been identified by two "armchair astronomers".

The bright new world, almost 5,000 light years away, is believed to be six times the size of Earth. It orbits one pair of stars and is in turn circled by a second pair, meaning four stars light up its skies.

A handful of planets are already known to orbit pairs of binary stars, but the new find is said to be unique.

"It's fascinating to try and imagine what it would be like to visit a planet with four suns in its sky, but this new world is confusing astronomers – it's not at all clear how it formed in such a busy environment," said Dr Chris Lintott, of Oxford University.

The planet was discovered by two American volunteers using the Planet Hunters website run by scientists including Lintott. It allows visitors to identify dips in the output of stars as a result of their light being blocked by "transits" of orbiting stars.

Kian Jek, from San Francisco, and Robert Gagliano, from Cottonwood, Arizona, spotted the effect as the new planet passed in front of its suns.

A team of professional astronomers confirmed the find using the Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. The planet has been named PH1 after the Planet Hunters website.

Dr Arfon Smith, of Adler planetarium in Chicago and another member of the Planet Hunters team, said: "It's an amazing discovery, but what's even more exciting is that, with more data currently being added to planethunters.org for anyone to explore, we really don't know what our armchair astronomers will discover next."

Details of the discovery were presented on Monday at the Division for Planetary Sciences meeting in Reno, Nevada.

The Chávez victory will be felt far beyond Latin America

Popular support for Venezuela's revolution shows the growing space for genuine alternatives in the 21st century

• 
• • Seumas Milne in Caracas
  • The Guardian, Tuesday 9 October 2012 21.30 BST

Hugo Chávez celebrates his re-election as Venezuelan president. Photograph: Jorge Silva/Reuters

The transformation of Latin America is one of the decisive changes reshaping the global order. The tide of progressive change that has swept the region over the last decade has brought a string of elected socialist and social-democratic governments to office that have redistributed wealth and power, rejected western neoliberal orthodoxy, and challenged imperial domination. In the process they have started to build the first truly independent South America for 500 years and demonstrated to the rest of the world that there are, after all, economic and social alternatives in the 21st century.

Central to that process has been Hugo Chávez and his Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela. It is Venezuela, sitting on the world's largest proven oil reserves, that has spearheaded the movement of radical change across Latin America and underwritten the regional integration that is key to its renaissance. By doing so, the endlessly vilified Venezuelan leader has earned the enmity of the US and its camp followers, as well as the social and racial elites that have called the shots in Latin America for hundreds of years.

So Chávez's remarkable presidential election victory on Sunday – in which he won 55% of the vote on an 81% turnout after 14 years in power – has a significance far beyond Venezuela, or even Latin America. The stakes were enormous: if his oligarch challengerHenrique Capriles had won, not only would the revolution have come to a juddering halt, triggering privatisations and the axing of social programmes. So would its essential support for continental integration, mass sponsorship of Cuban doctors across the hemisphere – as well as Chávez's plans to reduce oil dependence on the US market.

Western and Latin American media and corporate elites had convinced themselves that they were at last in with a shout, that this election was "too close to call", or even that a failing Venezuelan president, weakened by cancer, would at last be rejected by his own people. Outgoing World Bank president Robert Zoellick crowed that Chávez's days were "numbered", while Barclays let its excitement run away with itself by calling the election for Capriles.

It's all of a piece with the endlessly recycled Orwellian canard that Chávez is some kind ofa dictator and Venezuela a tyranny where elections are rigged and the media muzzled and prostrate. But as opposition leaders concede, Venezuela is by any rational standards a democracy, with exceptionally high levels of participation, its electoral process more fraud-proof than those in Britain or the US, and its media dominated by a vituperatively anti-government private sector. In reality, the greatest threat to Venezuelan democracy came in the form of the abortive US-backed coup of 2002.

Even senior western diplomats in Caracas roll their eyes at the absurdity of the anti-Chávez propaganda in the western media. And in the queues outside polling stations on Sunday, in the opposition stronghold of San Cristóbal near the Colombian border, Capriles voters told me: "This is a democracy." Several claimed that if Chávez won, it wouldn't be because of manipulation of the voting system but the "laziness" and "greed" of their Venezuelans – by which they seemed to mean the appeal of government social programmes.

Which gets to the heart of the reason so many got the Venezuelan election wrong. Despite claims that Latin America's progressive tide is exhausted, leftwing and centre-left governments continue to be re-elected – from Ecuador to Brazil and Bolivia to Argentina – because they have reduced poverty and inequality and taken control of energy resources to benefit the excluded majority.

That is what Chávez has been able to do on a grander scale, using Venezuela's oil income and publicly owned enterprises to slash poverty by half and extreme poverty by 70%, massively expanding access to health and education, sharply boosting the minimum wage and pension provision, halving unemployment, and giving slum communities direct control over social programmes.

To visit any rally or polling station during the election campaign was to be left in no doubt as to who Chávez represents: the poor, the non-white, the young, the disabled – in other words, the dispossessed majority who have again returned him to power. Euphoria at the result among the poor was palpable: in the foothills of the Andes on Monday groups of red-shirted hillside farmers chanted and waved flags at any passerby.

Of course there is also no shortage of government failures and weaknesses which the opposition was able to target: from runaway violent crime to corruption, lack of delivery and economic diversification, and over-dependence on one man's charismatic leadership. And the US-financed opposition campaign was a much more sophisticated affair than in the past. Capriles presented himself as "centre-left", despite his hard right background, and promised to maintain some Chavista social programmes.

But even so, the Venezuelan president ended up almost 11 points ahead. And the opposition's attempt to triangulate to the left only underlines the success of Chávez in changing Venezuela's society and political terms of trade. He has shown himself to be the most electorally successful radical left leader in history. His re-election now gives him the chance to ensure Venezuela's transformation is deep enough to survive him, to overcome the administration's failures and help entrench the process of change across the continent.

Venezuela's revolution doesn't offer a political model that can be directly transplanted elsewhere, not least because oil revenues allow it to target resources on the poor without seriously attacking the interests of the wealthy. But its innovative social programmes, experiments in direct democracy and success in bringing resources under public control offer lessons to anyone interested in social justice and new forms of socialist politics in the rest of the world.

For all their problems and weaknesses, Venezuela and its Latin American allies have demonstrated that it's no longer necessary to accept a failed economic model, as many social democrats in Europe still do. They have shown it's possible to be both genuinely progressive and popular. Cynicism and media-fuelled ignorance have prevented many who would naturally identify with Latin America's transformation from recognising its significance. But Chávez's re-election has now ensured that the process will continue – and that the space for 21st-century alternatives will grow.