Substandard drugs
Monday, 27 Jul, 2009


PUBLIC-sector hospitals in Pakistan are beset by many problem, not the least of which is their inability to provide all the required medicines to patients. Another major problem they pose is that of the quality of the drugs that are being dispensed. As the media has been reporting on and off, more often than not the drugs are substandard and administering these to patients may well prove fatal. Even if they are not lethal they do nothing to ease the patient’s distress and can actually aggravate the problem. At the root of this scourge is the government’s drug policy and inability to check corruption. With the health budget not keeping pace with the escalating number of patients at government health facilities, hospital finances in the public sector are in dire straits. As a result, hospital pharmacies are not well-stocked. Limited resources allow them to provide only a few low-cost drugs. Patients are asked to buy their own medicines elsewhere.

That is bad enough. But what is worse is the corruption. Hospital pharmacists are known to sell their stocks to pharmaceutical stores. Cases have been reported of people purchasing from these stores medicines with stamps indicating that they are meant for use at government hospitals. In many cases these are replaced by substandard drugs at the hospitals. If there is corruption at the health department’s level, then poor quality stocks are supplied to the hospitals with money being siphoned off elsewhere. This problem needs to be addressed seriously if the poor – who regularly visit government hospitals — are to derive some benefit from the healthcare the government has to offer. The least they should be entitled to is attention from medical professionals, decent diagnostic facilities and life-saving drugs that are of good quality and not stocked beyond the expiry date. The proposed health policy will hopefully address this issue.


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The ghosts of Kargil
Monday, 27 Jul, 2009


THE ghosts of Kargil continue to haunt us, and will continue to do so, unless we get to know the truth. Surprisingly, nobody talks about it more than the two men responsible for the disaster — the prime minister and the army chief in 1999. We have heard their versions many times, and they keep repeating themselves. Pervez Musharraf says that Nawaz Sharif was “on board” all along and that he was briefed by the military high command beforehand. We have also seen some photographs showing the prime minister being briefed — with maps and all that — and Mr Sharif somewhere in Azad Kashmir. That proves nothing.

In his latest TV interview with an Indian channel, Gen Musharraf referred to Kargil, saying Pakistan had the upper hand militarily. He also claimed that it was Kargil that brought India to the negotiating table on Kashmir. Meanwhile, Mr Sharif’s claims have not enhanced his image. If a war could be planned and launched without his knowledge then what does that say about civil-military relations? Musharraf attributes the disaster to the prime minister’s visit to Washington to meet then President Clinton. As the Musharraf version goes, Mr Sharif surrendered to pressure from the US leader and ordered a withdrawal.

Since Kargil brought the two nuclear-armed neighbours to the brink of war, one would like to know exactly whose brainchild it was. The hope for findings to be made public is slim, because our track record is dismal, and findings by commissions set up with great fanfare have hardly ever been made public. Two decades after the mysterious Ojhri camp blast that sent heat- seeking missiles in all directions in Islamabad-Rawalpindi, we do not even know the precise number of casualties. Two commissions were formed to probe the disaster, but the truth was never revealed as everything was hushed up. Let this not be the case with Kargil. To fix responsibility, we need a bipartisan parliamentary commission that should go into all aspects of the Kargil conflict. Was Clemenceau’s dictum — war is too important a business to be left to the generals — followed or was Kargil an all-khaki affair?


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OTHER VOICES - North American Press US relations with Iraq
Monday, 27 Jul, 2009


IRAQ was George W. Bush’s war, but President Obama now has the complex task of helping Iraqis stitch together a stable nation. To succeed, Obama will have to enhance diplomatic, economic and cultural cooperation, even as the US military role in Iraq shrinks….

Towards that end, Obama held talks this week in Washington with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. The Iraqi leader [is] … understandably worried about a message Vice-President Joe Biden delivered … that if Iraq experiences a resurgence of sectarian violence, Washington may distance itself from Iraqis and their problems. The Iraqi officials rightly fear that such a public message only encourages terrorist groups to step up their bombings of soft targets.

Obama’s challenge is to distinguish between requests from Maliki that reflect Iraq’s true needs and those that merely reflect his own political interests. Maliki should be heeded when he asks for … lifting UN sanctions on Iraq … and persuading Kuwait to forgo its claim on reparations for Saddam’s invasion of that oil-rich country. Obama should also support Maliki’s campaign to encourage … western investment in Iraq….

The US now should support Iraqi efforts to resolve their disputes over who will award oil contracts and whether regional autonomy is preferable to a strong centre. Obama needs to transform the occupation of Iraq into a respectful friendship.— (July 25)

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Counter-terrorism

Monday, 27 Jul, 2009

While the Waziristan agencies and other parts of Fata may be ground zero of militancy in Pakistan, the country’s cities and towns are also havens for militants of all stripes. However, as elaborated during a seminar organised by the Pakistan Institute of Peace Studies in Islamabad on Friday, the state’s counter-terrorism capabilities are hampered in the cities and towns by lack of reform in the police forces of the country.

The laundry list of complaints by top police officials is a familiar one: lack of proper resources and equipment, shortage of manpower, lack of specialised training, poor coordination between governmental agencies, etc. And yet, despite repeated promises, committees and proposals, there has not been any significant change for the better on any of those fronts. Given the urgency of the problem and the seriousness of the threat, there is simply no justification for delay in equipping the police with the tools it needs to increase its counter-terrorism capabilities.

However, it must be noted, the problem will not be solved by simply throwing more resources at the police. Even with the present level of intelligence, it is hard to imagine that in places like Karachi, Lahore, Peshawar, Quetta, Faisalabad and the dozens of smaller cities and towns the success rate in breaking up terrorist and militant networks could not be higher. Many mosques, madressahs, residences and other buildings are well-known havens for militants, and off the record officials freely admit their knowledge of such sites. So why isn’t action being taken against such targets? The answer is clearly political, since meaningful action is beyond the powers of local police officials who work in organisations that are tightly controlled by the political forces.

Moreover, procedural bottlenecks delay the handing over of real-time intelligence to the police in many ways. Consider that the police have routinely complained that while militants and terrorists use mobile phones to communicate, the police must go through a cumbersome process to obtain the relevant data. Admittedly, there are concerns about privacy and the misuse of personal data, but the process can surely be streamlined to reduce the waiting period from months to days, if not hours in some circumstances.

Given that SIM cards are still easily available, despite attempts to register them, the intelligence trail can dry up quickly, or worse the terrorists could have already carried out their plots by the time the police catch up with them. Such problems of semi-, or non-, efficiency are endemic in Pakistan, of course, but they can and must be addressed urgently when it comes to fighting terrorism.