I have drawn upon this account from the memoirs on which I am working these days because of its relevance for the times through which Pakistan is currently passing. In November 1996, I received a call from the then-President of Pakistan, Farooq Leghari, with whom I had become good friends while both of us were students in the early 1960s at Oxford. He told me that, using Article 58.2(b) in the Constitution, which had been inserted by President Zia ul Haq, he had fired Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto along with her cabinet and ordered new elections in four months.

He asked me to take the next flight to Pakistan and join the interim government that he was going to swear in under the leadership of Meraj Khalid, who had long been a member of the Pakistan People's Party, the PPP, to which Bhutto belonged. I said I couldn't do that, as that would hurt my career at the World Bank. Besides, my wife Jahanara was not prepared to return to Pakistan.

He asked me for President Conable's telephone number, which I gave. Half an hour or so later, the Bank's president called me. When I went to his office, Ibrahim Shihata, the Bank's senior legal counsel, was sitting with him. "I heard from the President of Pakistan that he wants you to go to Islamabad for a period of four months to serve as finance minister, but you said that you couldn't do that, as that would disrupt your career at the........

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