Let’s move on
September 17, 2012
As expected, last week too, the attorney general turned up at the hearing of the Asghar Khan petition without the notification that enabled the formation of the ISI’s political cell. After the court has itself ruled that there is no longer any ambiguity about the role of intelligence agencies in Pakistani politics and when it is a fact as clear as daylight that the ISI’s political cell was set up by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1975, how could the notification have disappeared off the surface of the earth? Or, as the chief justice himself asked on Thursday, when the political cell has been active for decades and up to all sorts of mischief, including distributing millions of rupees of public money among anti-PPP politicians to manipulate the 1990 elections, how is it possible that the notification that enabled this cell to be set up in the first place is nowhere to be found? It’s not with the ministry of defence. The ministry of interior has no clue where it disappeared. The Cabinet Division has also come up with zilch. Nargis Sethi has no answers either. So where does one turn to – the intelligence agency itself perhaps? Does the ISI have a copy and should the court summon one from it?
The larger point here is that, when the Asghar Khan case was first revived for hearing before the Supreme Court on February 29, many looked upon it as a litmus test of the Supreme Court’s resolve to extend accountability to even the godliest altars of power in Pakistan. But as each hearing goes by, it looks like the hope for meaningful results will be dashed by those adamant not to allow the truth to come out. At this point then, in order to let proceedings move forward, we suggest that since the court has already ruled in two separate orders that money was indeed distributed by the ISI to influence the 1990 election and also that the ISI cannot legally operate a political cell, it is time for the process of real accountability to begin. We already have several definitive statements from the court that the non-uniformed aren’t the only ones accountable for their transgressions and that the political forays of the uniformed must stop. It is thus time to move on to punishing those who clearly transgressed all constitutional limits and sentence all those who willfully acted outside the ambit of the law and constitution in the discharge of, what they claim, were official duties. This is a chance for the court to draw red lines and not allow victory to those standing in the way of this case reaching its logical conclusion. In the recent past, the court has rightfully suspended the national assembly memberships of parliamentarians for breaking the law. It has even sent a prime minister home for placing his parochial political interests before his allegiance to the constitution. Good precedents have been set with all these rulings. It is now time to take to task top army officers who knowingly violated their oath of office and defiled the constitution, and in this way set a precedent against the political workings of the ISI and the army. Most importantly, such a precedent will also serve to save the institution itself from the illegal actions of a few officers.
Fading away
September 17, 2012
President Zardari was in an exculpatory mood last Thursday as he talked informally with the BBC after a lunch at the presidency. While he was quick to say that 3,500MW of power had been added to the national grid during his tenure, he omitted to mention that most of that came from projects initiated by the last government. He did admit to a failure to beat the power crisis or restrain inflation, but blamed the global financial crisis and the eternally increasing price of oil – on which we are perilously dependent to power what is left of our generating facilities. It was, as ever, somebody else’s fault, except that it isn’t. The economy is falling apart. The textile manufacturing industry has taken flight en-masse to Bangladesh. Unemployment rises steadily and as the world recovers from the financial disasters of the last five years – all of them very much man-made let us not forget – Pakistan has failed to keep pace with the growth in global trade.
Our share of global trade has reduced from 0.20 percent in 1990 to 0.18 percent in 2011. All of our neighbours and other regional players, with the exception of Afghanistan, have increased their share according to newly-published figures from the World Trade Organisation (WTO). India has taken its share from 0.40 percent in 1995 to 1.80 percent in 2011, a four and a half times jump. China, in the same period, quadrupled its share to reach 9.8 percent of all global trade. Our exports were valued at $25.344 billion in 2011, against imports of $44.012 billion in the same year. One does not have to be a financial wizard to understand that these figures are bad news. The reasons why we lag behind are equally obvious, and the frustrations at lost opportunity expressed by industrialists and businessmen entirely understandable. Our market share of the global textile trade has declined from around two percent at the turn of the century to 1.34 percent today. Textile and clothing make up 60 percent of our exports. We lag behind because, unlike our neighbours and competitors, the government has not offered the incentives and facilitations that have promoted growth in other countries. If our textile industry had the same access to financing, at the same preferential rates as in India and China, our exports could quickly increase by 40 percent according to one industry analyst. Another opined that our chronically poor law and order situation, inflation and the crippling power crisis probably knocked off 30 percent from our production capacity in this one sector alone every year. The drop in productivity cannot be laid at the feet of those with the capacity to produce. They can deliver the goods but only if the government delivers on its end of the deal – and that it has signally failed to do.