So, the NS scheme is concocted, its scope widened to include all teenagers, and enveloped in high ideals and intent. But there was no discussion about it, no serious thought given, nor how the money would be spent. Nevertheless, a half-baked plan is put into operation. Lucrative portions are farmed out to politically connected UMNO worthies. The high ideals and intent masked a scramble for a piece of the action in which the girls and boys were cannon fodder. If the government was serious about it, it should have handed this scheme to the Armed Forces. They have a history of training recruits into shape and discipline. They know what they do. And I dare say, even with the three months available, those who went through the course would have benefitted much from this. But to do that, they should have been brought into the discussion. They were not. There was no consistent plan. it is doubtful if the NS scheme itself will be a permanent. When the money runs out, or the organisers see something new that could be farmed off for cash, the scheme will be good as dead.

There was once a bilateral agreement between Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur to allow Malaysian forces to cross into Thailand in 'hot pursuit' operations against Malayan Communist Party remnant; and for Thai Armed Forces pursuing its Muslim rebels. But that was abrogated in 1976. In the 1990s, the MCP formally surrendered. Bangkok continues to insist that the Thai Muslim rebels can operate at will because they have sanctuary across the border. There is truth in this. Familial ties exist between families across the border. In the 1970s, Thailand formally objected when Tengku Ahmad Rithaudeen was appinted deputy defence minister, on the grounds that his Thai relatives were immured in the separatist movement. Indeed, his uncle, once an UMNO MP, was the eminense grise of the separatists, a son of privilege, a class mate of a future Thai prime minister. But at that time, such differences could be sorted out by talking through by the leaders. Not now.

GENERAL TAN SRI ABDUL Hamid Bidin, a soft-spoken no-nonsense soldier of old-fashioned integrity who rose from private to Malaysia's chief of the Armed Forces staff, had served his country loyally and with distinction. After he retired, he was ambassador to two countries and as senator, deputy president of the upper chamber. He died at 75 in 1995. His ambition was to retire a sergeant, but he proved the military adage that there is in every private's mess kit a field marshal's baton. But what we did not know is that he continues to serve the country with distinction from the grave. The electoral register lists him a voter nine years after he died. The omnipotent EC cannot be wrong. You cannot mount legal challenges to force changes to the register. The EC, you understand, do not make mistakes. I am a voter in the Bukit Bintang parliamentary constituency, and my name appears twice in the register: one under my new identity card, the other under the old. I had asked that one be removed but the EC did not. But it is a fair bet that General Tan Sri Hamid would not be allowed to vote now: his name would be removed. How could he remain after it is now clear, even the to the EC, that he could not come down to vote even if he wanted to, and deserves, at last, his eternal rest.

On the face of it, this is not far-fetched. How he was appointed deputy prime minister still rankles in the Pak Lah camp. Now a serious practical problem throws the loyalty of the 4,000 voters in doubt. Recently, the air force asked the Treasury to revise the flying allowance of its pilots, now fixed at RM1,500 a month. It wanted this varied for the different aircraft their pilots fly. The Treasury decided on a fixed rate of RM3,500, insisting that since the pilots had only the SPM, the Malaysian school leaving certificate, they deserved no more. If Dato' Seri Najib does not resolve this soon, he could well be the first deputy prime minister to be defeated in a parliamentary election in Malaysia. In other words, a marginal shift in the political winds could force him to step down as deputy prime minister and defence minister. It was a similar problem with the Armed Forces that the then finance minister, Dato' Mustapha Mohamed, was defeated in Jeli, Kelantan in 1999: the army camp there voted solidly against him.

Let us look at the state of play in South Asia at the turn of the millennium. Washington shifted its support from Islamabad to New Delhi, forcing Pakistan leaders to justify what it was once taken for granted. Afghanistan was firmly in Western hands, the last victory of the Cold War, the Taliban, supported no doubt at Washington's request but which it continued after the war. The rise of the Muslim parties threw Washington's goodwill in Islamabad at risk. The destruction of the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon in 2001 changed the confrontational world view from the Soviet Union and communism to Islam and Osama bin Laden. But on the basis of what is known, or rather published, it does appear that Dr Khan's activities could not have gone the way it did if it was not approved. The Pakistan Armed Forces is in control of its nuclear weapons programme. It would not allow a rogue scientist of even national acclaim to do what Dr Khan did. It did not. He was forced to take the blame, but for one who, if the charges against him are true, is guilty of treason is let off with a light slap on his wrist. There is more to it than meets the eye. Dr Khan could not have sold his wares to North Korea without official authority, even if it is for the money it would bring in.

Having found nothing in Iraq, with Washington and London blamed on how they went to war, and Presidential Elections in November, some link had to be found. They focussed on Pakistan. The father of its nuclear bomb programme, a metallurgist named Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan, stands accused of having sold nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and, incongruously, North Korea. Incongruous because Dr Khan in a televised confession said his mission was for Muslim nations to acquire a nuclear capability. That North Korea is in this list suggests that he was a small cog in a large wheel. The Pakistan nuclear programme is controlled by its Armed Forces. Nothing Dr Khan did was as he confessed, a free lance operation to sell state secrets. This programme is so tightly controlled that if Dr Khan was telling the truth, he would have been hung out to dry years ago. But it became useful to have a scape goat while exonerating an important Washington link in this ubiquitous war on terror.

One practical effect of the Court of Appeal decision yesterday is political. The first test of the Anwar affair was in 1999, when the BN government lost ground, and Trengganu because of it. The 2004 General Election is another, the more stronger than 1999, of the Anwar enigma. Dato' Seri Anwar has had five years to prepare for it. His case has unnerved the Establishment as nothing has in 50 years. When PAS met the ambassadors recently to explain its Islamic State Document, the moderator was a solid figure of the Establishment, a well-regarded Malaysian ambassador who was once seconded to the Istana Negara at the request of the then Yang Dipertuan Agung. Defections like these are common place. The former Lord President (chief justice) is a member of the PAS-run state executive council. A former Armed Forces chief is an active member of PAS, as are retired secretaries-general of federal ministries. The political divide continues unabated.

For the Anwar Ibrahim affair is not judicial and legal but political. His arrest on trumped up charges of sodomy and corruption in September 1998 has all but destroyed UMNO. Later that year, UMNO cabinet ministers and mentris besar met in secret at the Putra World Trade Centre, with Special Branch and other intelligence agencies in attendance, to view a manufactured tape of Dato' Seri Anwar committing sodomy. Among those present were Pak Lah and Dato' Seri Najib. Several voiced their concern that the videotape did not appear genuine. One cabinet minister asked how the Malay ground would accept the man in the tape was Dato' Seri Anwar if he himself did not think so. Few were convinced it was genuine. Then one cabinet minister deep in the conspiracy then asked the Special Branch director about the "other tape" - which so unnerved him that he did not know how to react. It was this same tape that was shown to Malaysian ambassadors and the Armed Forces generals, with the same reaction. I have viewed that tape. If the man in it is Dato' Seri Anwar Ibrahim, then I am the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

There is one drastic way out of this mess. Make the police force reflect the population. This means more Chinese and Indians must be recruited. The Government shot itself in the foot, after the 1969 racial riots and the Malay insistence that they alone ruled, when it dismantled the multiracial services to recruit Malays: the Armed Forces, the police, the civil service, the statutory bodies, the universities. The government, as constituted, has no reach to the virtual alternate governments within the power centres of the non-Malay communities. Unfortunately these power centres tend to be gangsters and others of the ilk. It is not surprising that many gangster chieftains have obtained respectability by acquiring titles. Bribery and corruption is rampant in all this, and is as pervasive as in the police force. But in the narrow political calculations Pak Lah and his men bringing more non-Malays into the government is a Damoclean sword, especially when UMNO has yet to annoint him as its president.

When corruption is endemic, as now, and the government insists on proof before it would act, with a tootless Anti-Corruption Agency defanged so thoroughly that those it investigates wear it as a badge of honour. But in the defence purchases it has run into difficulty. The men in uniform who would guard, service and man the weapons and armaments are ignored. They live barely above the poverty line, do not have adequate quarters, their well-being by and large ignored. To the BN government they do not matter except at election time. They are shifted around the country, like pawns in a game of chess, so those cabinet ministers and party leaders who could be defeated get a new lease of life. They are not even trusted to vote. Their officers do it for them. The officer corps ignore their plight, and feed them to the wolves when it can. They deserve more than a living wage but they are looked upon only as cannon fodder. The BN government had earmarked two decades ago a large piece of land in Ampan for servicemen's housing. Nothing was done. The area is now prime land. The defence ministry decided the land was too good for the men, and gave it to the officers instead. And showed how corrupt some of them are in the houses they built. Let us not forget the landslide which destroyed the opulent home of a retired Armed Forces chief, and the safe recovered which contained more money than he could have earned in several lifetimes.

THE ELECTION COMMISSION WANTS to allow political party representatives to observe the uniformed services casting their postal ballots in an election. The National Front (BN) is horrified at the mere suggestion of it. But it cannot openly deny it. When it has to take an unpalatable decision, it asks a cabinet minister who opposes it to decide. Since the soldier, sailor and airman is in the purview of the defence minister, Dato' Seri Najib Tun Razak, and he could be defeated in his Pekan parliamentary constituency if the postal voting is fair and transparent, he understands how dangerous it is. And promptly scuttles it. Armed Forces and police units are reassigned to constituencies where cabinet ministers, state mentris besar and BN party leaders are at serious risk of defeat. Without the postal votes several would have departed from Parliament and the state assemblies a long time ago. So Dato' Seri Najib takes the only decision he can: no political observers since the Election Commission is there to see no harm done, as we all know, it is a constitutional body which would not tell an untruth or do any act which would suggest that the postal voting is unfair and not transparent.

After Dr Mahathir, who is also finance minister, delivered "in what is said to be his last" Budget as finance minister, a Pak Lah-orchestrated round of applause in the Parliament chamber took him by suprise. The succession is in trouble so long as Dr Mahathir shows no sign of stepping down. It weakens Pak Lah politically by the day - and possibly a challenge for the UMNO presidency at the party elections next year. But Dr Mahathir cannot stay on unless he throws caution to the winds and insist he would stay on until the general elections. This was discussed with some army generals who, to everyone's surprise, said if they are brought in for any reason to administer the country, they would leave only when they decide to, not so the politicians want them to. The political indecisions over the Armed Forces, the neglect of the rank and file amidst a flurry of military hardware purchases worth tens of billions of ringgit and forced on them have soured relations between the politicians and the Armed Forces. He has singlehandedly alienated the Armed Forces from the Establishment.

Tan Sri Rashid must now address another practice calculated to favour BN: postal voting. Once it was limited to those civil servants, policemen and Armed Forces servicemen required to be away from their base on polling day. In theory, they voted for the candidate in their constituency of residence. Sometimes, the government builds police and military barracks in constituencies in danger of defeat, but even there postal vorting is how they vote. This rule has been amended so many times to widen this list that today it includes all policemen and Armed Forces servicemen. The cabinet meeting which decided on this was so heated over whether all school teachers should also be included because some were on duty at polling booths.

Malaysia is at the borderline between a dictatorship and a flawed democratic system. Everything from within is corrupt and unworkable. The Prime Minister's word is law. The politicians are there to milk the system for riches and favours. The political rentier system is well-entrenched, the democratic edifice a facade while the system corrupts from within. The gall with which Tan Sri Rashid spouts his nonsense reflects not the corruption of the EC - that is taken for granted - but that it follows every department and part of the state which has. It does not matter which: the judiciary, the Armed Forces, the civil service, the police force, the cabinet, the education system. Corruption in the body politic is not about money alone.

THE DEFENCE MINISTER, DATO' SERI NAJIB Tun Razak is livid. How dare PAS call it an election budget? Does not PAS know the National Front (BN) government would never stoop to such crass electoral tactics? Unfortunately, he spoils his case by some electioneering of his own. The defence budget he says would be equitably divided amongst the three services. Why does he have to say it? Has it not been so in previous years? Is it so the anger within the Armed Forces - more so the soldiers, sailors, airmen - at the politicians for the corruption-ridden penny-pinching upgrading of the Armed Forces, usually ignoring their technical objections could be obviated?

THE ROYAL MALAYSIAN POLICE IS IN a quandry. The Chinese and (though he does not mention it) the Indians do not join it as it believes it should. The Chinese make up less than five per cent of the 85,000-strong force, the Indians even less. The man in charge of recruitment, Deputy Commissioner of Police Dato' Talib Jamal, wants them to have a police career in mind when they seek jobs. Why? "It would make it easier for [the] police to communicate with the Chinese community." He does not talk of the need for Indian policemen for the simple reason it is not critical. And why in his opinion do Malaysian Chinese not join the police force? He gives three reasons: the Chinese belief that a policeman or soldier in the family could only bring trouble to the man and his family; a policeman's lot is regimented with less freedom; that it could not make him rich as, say, a fried noodle hawker could. As usual, he conveniently ignores the most important: a deliberate government policy of keeping the Chinese and Indians out of not only the police and Armed Forces, but in every facet of Government activity.

Dr Mahathir hands over power to his chosen deputy, Dato' Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, in three months. Both have modified their views of an incorruptible Malaysian civil service to now say a few rotten apples have raised corruption to a fine art. They now demand that should cease and desist, that damnation is their fate if they persist, that the law will take its course. So, civil servants beware. But they would not accept that corruption exists not only in the civil service but amongst the politicians, the cabinet, the state executive councils, the judiciary, the Armed Forces, the police, in short, in every nook and corner of officialdom in Malaysia. Corruption is as Malaysian as nasi lemak: one as official food, the other as the food of the masses.

They are given new and creative ways to make money. One company close to the levers of power is given the catering contract for MAS for ten years with an exquisite 80 per cent profit guarantee; the same company gets to provide the Armed Forces with their rations at a nationalist and patriotic price. You must remember that the ordinary unpatriotic and unnationalistic Malaysian business men could sell you a packet of Maggie Mee for less than 50 cents. When patriotism and nationalism is factored into it, anything less than RM8 per packet is a loss. Another great patriot and nationalist has the contract to provide uniforms for the national service recruits, no doubt at a far higher price than it could be provided by unpatriotic and unnationalistic Malaysians.

On the Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange, two companies on the second board, have been star performers: Scomi Group Berhand, in oil and gas; and MTD Infraperdana Bhd, in food, tolled roads and other miscellaneous industries. They have consistently outperformed the stock exchange since their recent listing, often recording the highest turnover on the day, with Scomi Berhad more than three times more higher now. Both are controlled by a Kamaluddin Abdullah, obviously a tycoon on the make. He graduated from Cambridge University, and made a quite splash in the business world shortly after he went down, helping to win a company his uncle owned and controlled the right to provide rations for the Armed Forces for 15 years and, recently, to take over the catering services of Malaysian Airlines System for ten years.

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