The West generally equals democracy with holding of elections whenever the constitution stipulates on a certain political system but bigger realities are usually ignored. The Indian political system is a glaring example of this understanding where the Western nations see India as an established democracy and conveniently ignore the mammoth annual increases in the defense spending while nearly half of the country's population barely hovers around the poverty line.

The West today has established democracies and is attempting to "help" replicate and facilitate the experience in countries where despots, dictators and democrats alike are busy shaping up the democratic and constitutional future of their nations.

In a broader sense, the West generally equals democracy with holding of elections whenever the constitution stipulates on a certain political system but bigger realities are usually ignored. The Indian political system is a glaring example of this understanding where the Western nations see India as an established democracy and conveniently ignore the mammoth annual increases in the defense spending while nearly half of the country's population barely hovers around the poverty line. Today, India has dreams to guard the international oil and trade routes in the blue waters while a huge populace lingers on choked sewages, disease and subhuman living. Keeping in mind the global power politics that now knows preemption as an established norm of the international law, international players ignore or downplay the importance of the need to rapidly improve on the domestic indicators.

While the capitals of the Western world remain busy in the strategic future planning of the world map, their "civil society" and "non government" organisations focus on various issues like "social development," "capacity building," "political empowerment," "ensuring freedoms," "guarding liberties" and much more. Very few in the developing world -- also known as the Third World -- would know the exact meanings of these terms but people in these countries keep hearing these on daily basis.

Keen observers raise many questions as to why would the West be so eager to ensure liberties, guarding liberties, empowering people and socially developing the countries that hardly matter on the world map. Do the Western organisations working on these issues really "mean business" or there's something bigger floating underneath the surface than the tip itself?

The food for thought comes when the series of "color revolutions" started in various Central Asian Republics (CARs) and all the governments that came to power were clearly pro-West and on the threshold of an emerging Russia. The Russian policy makers saw this pattern as a clear threat to the Russian interests in the "near abroad" and thus acted in reaction by lobbying with many other nations in the region. In this counter action offices of the Open Society Institute (OSI) of the Soros Foundation were closed in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. There were many allegations of corrupt practices on OSI in Tajikistan via methodically bribing many pro-West politicians and various social and media organisations. Were these offices closed in mere reaction or there was more to what could be observed with the naked eye? The observations of varied development critics in the developing world agree to the latter option. There's certainly more to the whole gambit than the mere democracy agenda of President Bush and the West's effort to liberalise, empower and socially develop the societies of the Third World.
 
In many ways, these organisations work exactly the opposite by systematically indulging with and obtaining valuable action oriented information from various socio-political groups from trade unions to media organisations and political parties. These valuable details are then utilised by the respective Capitals for ensuring and securing their interests that also usually involves safeguarding the ruling elite or the man on the top: the dictator. This connection between sloganeering liberties and democracy in the developing world and realities to protecting the dictatorships has been proven many times in various parts of the world in the recent history. Pakistan being the most recent one where President General -- now retired -- Pervez Musharraf has stayed in power over the last eight years although with a declining domestic support but a firm and consistent international support from the US and her allies. The "unity of command" in global war on terror was preferred against the modern political and democratic norms that the whole nation was crying for over the past many years.

The liberal agenda of the US has many instruments to further the agenda that mainly the intelligence community and the various "thinking Congressmen" would set to help safeguard "what is good for America is good for the world!" And this "good" may not necessarily be good for various peoples where these ‘liberators’ operate and among them the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED) being the largest and the most systematic with a clear agenda and mission. President Regan founded the NED in 1982 originally to combat the Soviet influence and communism however, not many in the world know that most of the historic figures involved in the CIA's covert actions have, at some point, been members of the NED's Administrative Council or of its board of directors; among them Otto Reich, John Negroponte, Henry Cisneros or Elliot Abrams. The renowned French journalist and political activist, Thierry Meyssan, in his astonishing piece of research in 2004 noted that "the NED is simply the continuation of the CIA's covert actions through other means." The US Government provides funds to the NED from the Federal Budget and its budget is approved by Congress as part of the State Department's appropriations for the US Agency for International Development (USAID). In a bid to keep the NED look more like an independent initiative, it also receives donations from various private funds of which the main donors are Smith Richardson Foundation, the John M Olin Foundation and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. All three of these foundations are indirectly financed by federal contracts.

The funds for NED are managed by an Administrative Council in which the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, the US Chamber of Commerce and the American Federation of Labour and Congress of Industrial Organisations (AFL-CIO) are represented. Each of them suggests actions that have to be accepted by two thirds of the membership. In 2004, President Bush doubled the annual funding for the NED and he announced that in his State of The Union address. Seemingly, the NED has started enjoying a better health even after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Meyssan also noted that while NED "pretends to be engaged in the promotion of democracy, it actually subjugates countries where it reproduces the contradictory interests of the American ruling class." In this way, the NED is probably the one responsible for the crisis of democracies around the world but it never stops assimilating democracies into good administrations to apparently benefit various peoples.
The NED has four satellite organisations:  American Center for International Labor Solidarity, Center for International Private Enterprise, International Republican Institute and National Democratic Institute for International Affairs. All of these four are at the moment actively working in Pakistan on the issues of "social development, capacity building, political empowerment, freedoms and liberties." It is to be seen as to how much of these the people of Pakistan have really experienced thus far or if the old game of replacing democracy with good administration is being repeated here, one more time!