The last week has shown the best and worst of Pakistan cricket…and by “best,” I really mean “worst.”

By now, we’ve all seen the grainy videos in hotel rooms and vans that implicated Mohammed Asif, Mohammed Amir, Kamran Akmal and captain Salman Butt in spot-fixing. That was bad enough, and has prompted enough anguish and hand-wringing to last us a few years.

But what followed was, in many ways, more disheartening. Instead of dealing with the fallout like a mature, competent organization, the PCB has bumbled its way to embarrassing lengths. Truth be told, no one could have expected it to be any different. After all, this is the same organization which did not see a single resignation after the Sri Lanka terrorist attacks in the spring of 2009, nor any high level departures after our brilliant tour to Australia, where we managed to win a grand total of zero games. But to see our worst fears about the ineptness of the PCB confirmed in these last few days has been galling.

Here’s the basic story, for those disgusted enough to have buried their heads in the sand. Once the scandal broke out, the PCB faced a choice: The first option was that they could act swiftly; take the accused players out of the firing line and withdraw them from the touring party; cooperate fully with the ICC, Scotland Yard and the Metropolitan Police in their investigations; and understand the gravity of the problem.

The second option was to deny that any evidence of wrongdoing on the players’ part; insist that they would play the ODIs and T20s; push back against the ICC’s Chief Executive recommendations that the players be temporarily sidelined; and force the ICC’s hand in suspending the players .

Which do you think the geniuses at the PCB opted for?

It comes as no surprise that Haroon Lorgat announced the suspensions of Amir, Asif and Butt, pending the completion of the investigation. They cajoled and urged all they could, but the PCB was adamant: these were mere allegations, they said. And people are innocent until proven guilty.

Which is true, technically speaking. But when the charges are this serious, and the initial evidence is so compelling, it behoves responsible adults to comprehend the stakes involved. The removal of Amir, Asif and Butt from the touring party would not have been an admission of guilt; it would’ve been the simple and sensible thing to do under the circumstances. It would’ve served the purpose of sending a signal to the rest of the cricketing world than we mean business, and we’re going to handle things properly. And it’s not as if the three players would have been in tip-top mental, emotional and psychological shape to play cricket anyway. But as it is wont to do, the PCB shunned its responsibility, and made the ICC do its work for it.

And that’s not all. You could almost excuse – almost, I said – the PCB not suspending the players straight away. Perhaps they wanted to send a message of solidarity with the players. Perhaps they didn’t want to appear as if they were kowtowing before the big, bad ICC. Or perhaps they simply wanted to be stubborn. Whatever the rationale, you can at least understand it, if not agree with it.

But what’s decidedly worse is the denialism that seems to have engulfed the usual suspects. Not to step on Nadeem F. Paracha’s toes, but it is truly amazing how blind to reason and fact segments of our society – and government – can be. Saying the players are innocent until proven guilty is one thing. But it is most assuredly another thing to suggest that the players have been “set up” – as the High Commissioner to the UK Wajid Shamsul Hasan did – or that the players are the victims of a conspiracy hatched by Indian intelligence agencies.

People actually believe this. Evidently, the Indians were in cahoots with a man who was the agent for half our team for years, as well as British tabloids, all for the express purpose of derailing the careers of our young stars. (It should be said that the conspiracy theory does have one thing going for it: it accounts for how Kamran Akmal has somehow escaped punishment – only the darkest and most nefarious enemies of Pakistan and Pakistan cricket would spare him).

These are probably the same people who believe the floods were an Indian/American conspiracy. Over the years, I’ve learned the hard way to not bother to try and convince these paragons of intellectual rigor.

The bare facts of the case point almost incontrovertibly to the players’ guilt. And if that’s not enough, I challenge you to watch Salman Butt’s first interactions with the press after the story broke – watch this video from about 4:05 to 4:55 – and tell me with a straight face the guy’s not involved. He certainly couldn’t manage it.

Thankfully, the people who believe that this is a convoluted conspiracy are not the ones in charge of investigating the case, nor are they the ones handing out the punishments. From here on in, the ICC is in charge, for better or worse. One hopes that they do not brush things under the carpet, and take full toll of anyone found guilty.

I also hope – contradicting what I said in the immediate aftermath of the scandal – that Mohammad Amir be shown some leniency.  As many have argued, he is as more a symptom than a cause of the corruption in cricket. In a society such as ours, where devotion to ones elders is paramount, it is exceedingly difficult to imagine standing up to so-called “senior” players like Asif and Butt if they are encouraging you to partake in their shenanigans.

This is not to say that he should get off scot-free, or even anything close. But it is to say a full understanding of the circumstances here is in order. Amir is an 18-year-old kid. That he can bowl better than 99% of men ever born does not make him a man. He’s still a kid, who merely happens to do one particular thing as capably as a man: bowl a cricket ball. I can’t be the only one who wants to see him demonstrate that again.

Ahsan Butt is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of Chicago, and he blogs at Five Rupees.

The views expressed by this blogger and in the following reader comments do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the Dawn Media Group.

An interesting public debate has started between two economists, Paul Krugman and Raghuram Rajan. The debate being that Krugman wants the interest rates to be kept low whereas Rajan wants them to be raised gradually.

Both Krugman and Rajan are economists of international repute. Rajan was the former chief economist of the Internal Monetary Fund and is currently a professor of economics at the University of Chicago. A native of Bhopal, India, Rajan has a doctorate in economics Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has authored the book Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists.

Krugman is a Nobel Laureate (2008) and currently a professor of economics at Princeton University. An op-ed columnist and a blogger for the New York Times and the author of numerous books, Kurgman’s biggest contribution is making geography relevant to economics again, and explaining the topic without any jargon so that the layperson could follow the economic debate.

So why is that two very brilliant economists have such divergent views about interest rates? There are numerous explanations for this academic fissure in opinions.  Rajan belongs to the Chicago school of economics, which has favoured lower taxes and less regulation of the private sector. It also supports efficient market hypothesis, which posits that the financial markets have all the information they need to make decisions. Until the 2008 recession, this hypothesis was considered as real as the law of gravity.  However, the recent recession has put some serious dents in this hypothesis.

Krugman is a Keynesian and believes that private sector may not have the perfect information all the time and it may lead to inefficient macroeconomic outcomes. The recent recession, which was brought about primarily by greed where unsecured housing loans were morphed into complex financial derivatives that were sold the world over, suggests that those who bought these products and those who declared these derivatives to be investment grade had no clue of the risks they were taking.

Keynesians argue for more involved government oversight and they also favour lower interest rates in times of recession to encourage businesses to borrow funds at cheaper prices to grow their businesses and create jobs.

Despite their divergent academic roots, their difference in opinion is not merely academic, but cultural as well. Rajan is rooted strictly in the scholastic culture in which an academic usually resides in an isolated intellectual universe and is seldom voted out of the job for offering the wrong advice. Therefore, Rajan advocates raising interest rates without waiting first for the unemployment to decline.

Krugman, on the other hand, is not just an economist, but also a popular columnist and an avid blogger. He is also a political animal and realises that in a very interdependent society, interest rates would impact unemployment, which would eventually determine the electoral outcomes. He knows well that in the past an increase in the interest rates followed an increase in unemployment rates in the United States. Raising interest rates now, when the unemployment is already in double digits in the United States, would have the same lagged effect a couple of years down the road.

I also believe that raising interest rates, even gradually, is likely to force scores more out of work in the next couple of years, which could eventually lead to the President of the United States (elections due in November 2012) and other Democratic legislators losing their jobs in the forthcoming elections.

An increase in unemployment would hurt the Democrats more than the Republicans. First, the incumbents always pay for any political or economic failure. Thus the Democratic President faces greater political risk in November 2012. Secondly, the geography of unemployment is rather uneven in the United States. The states that are mainly Democrat, such as New York, California, and Michigan, are experiencing above-average unemployment. Voters in these States who are sitting on the fence and who may have voted for Democrats in the past could vote for Republican the next time around should the economy fails to improve.

At the same time, the states that overwhelmingly vote Republican irrespective of the state of economy, such as Idaho and North Dakota, have lower than average unemployment rate that is unlikely to benefit Democrats.

So exactly who benefits by higher interest rates? My answer is Republicans, which is why it would be in the best interest of  President Obama and his team of economic advisors to follow Krugman’s policy of keeping interest rates low so that those Americans who currently have a job, can continue having one in the coming months.

Murtaza Haider, Ph.D., is a professor of supply chain management at Ryerson University in Toronto. He can be reached at murtaza.haider@ryerson.ca.

The views expressed in the following reader comments do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the Dawn Media Group.