Know your history
By Shahid Javed Burki
Tuesday, 16 Mar, 2010
WE don’t write much history; we read even less of it. Not much history is taught in schools and the little that is taught is not very accurate and reflects many biases that don’t help us to understand what we are and where we are headed.
I write all this as a prelude to expressing my strong belief that a society that does not come to terms with its past is not only destined to repeat it. It will also fail to draw any lessons from history.
As a person who has been in the field of economic history for decades, what is it that I think we should note from our history that can help us with our present and also give us the tools to fashion the future?
Probably the best way to answer this question is to define the ‘Pakistani way’ of managing the economy. Today I will focus on one aspect of our economic history: how we have allowed ourselves to come under foreign influence in the making of policy. We have done that in spite of a great yearning to be free of external influences. However, we are not prepared to recognise that the two positions are contradictory. To recognise this we have to be more conversant with our history, in particular our economic history.
A number of elements comprise the Pakistani way. The first, of course, is to put far more emphasis on the present than on the future to determine how we wish to spend our time and money. This attitude lends to emphasising consumption over savings and investment. For a person who does not live in Pakistan but travels to the country frequently, I am always struck by our lavish way of entertaining and the way we spend on occasions such as weddings, birthdays, anniversaries, even on events such as Valentine’s Day.
One direct corollary of this is that we have become very dependent on external capital flows for investing in our future. If foreign governments are the source of this flow of money then it is obvious that those who provide it will exact a price for it. Governments don’t normally provide charity. The only time they do that is when they face a natural disaster such as the earthquake in Pakistan’s north in 2005. On these occasions there is enough concern about fellow human beings for rich countries to come to the aid of those that are less fortunate.
In the normal course of things, however, the governments that give large doses of development aid seek to advance their strategic interests. If there is some truth in these assertions, the Pakistanis — or for that matter the citizens of any country — can’t have it both ways. They can’t continue to depend on foreign largesse to finance economic development and, at the same time, crave for an independent foreign policy. To be independent in foreign affairs, a nation has to be self-reliant. This was the basis on which leaders such as Mao Zedong in China and Jawaharlal Nehru in India built their nations.
In the case of Pakistan the leaders who were temporarily successful in the field of economics were those who were able to obtain large flows of external finance from abroad to meet domestic needs. This is why the rates of GDP growth in the periods of Ayub Khan (1958-69), Ziaul Haq (1977-88) and Pervez Musharraf (1999-08) were considerably higher than those at other times.
The fact that all three headed military administrations does not necessarily mean that the armed forces were more inclined to align the country with the West, in particular the United States. What it really implies is that the military did not have to bother about public opinion; it could forge relationships it regarded in Pakistan’s interests and also in its own interest. Sometimes the latter differed from the former.
Various public opinion surveys have shown that the Pakistani public does not approve of the United States and the policies Washington has been pursuing in various parts of the world. This view has not changed in spite of the change of administration in the United States.
There was a view when President Barack Obama took office that he would be able to improve the way the Americans were viewed by the people in the Muslim world. Last June he went to Cairo where he delivered a speech that addressed the main concerns the people of the Islamic faith had about the way his country had conducted itself in world affairs. He said that he was sensitive to the way Muslims viewed Washington’s policies. He had many friends from the Muslim community and several members of his family were Muslims. He had, in other words, heard it all. That was one reason why he travelled to Cairo — to try to build a strong bridge between two cultures; the Islamic culture and the West — so that mankind could work towards the achievement of common goals.
This message resonated well with most of the Muslim world but it seems not to have made any difference to the way the Pakistanis view the United States. Among the many different peoples of the Muslim world, President Obama is least popular in Pakistan. And yet, because of the way in which Pakistanis have managed their economy, they remain dependent on America and institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank over which Washington has considerable influence. This leads me to raise two questions.
First, why are the Pakistanis so critical of the United States and what the country stands for? Two, what needs to be done to translate this antipathy towards Washington into the right set of public policies? I will return to these questions over the next several weeks.