August 17, 2011: In South Asia, as in many other parts of the world, national independence days are a time for editors and other commentators to reflect on their country’s state of affairs, spell out what’s going well and what’s going badly, and offer some — hopefully original –ideas about what can be done to set things right. We’ve made it a practice to check out these commentaries. We’ve found that they can often help us and other outsiders get a better idea of the national mood in these countries, or at least of their elites. With this goal in mind we went through the editorials and other commentaries in Pakistan’s English-language press that “celebrated” the 64th anniversary of the country’s independence on August 14.