CNG racket
THE use of natural gas, a vehicular fuel, has turned into a racket from which there seems to be no extrication. It has been almost 10 years since Gen Pervez Musharraf’s government made the decision to ‘migrate’ large numbers of vehicles to CNG in an effort to keep auto transport affordable in an era of sharply rising oil prices, as well as check the growing oil import bill. In the short term it worked. The number of automobiles on the roads multiplied faster than during any other decade in Pakistan’s history under the former general’s rule, a fact he touted as an emblem of his success. And CNG stations sprang up like mushrooms all over the country. Today, the CNG sector is amongst the largest consumers of natural gas in the country, with high rates of loss and theft, pumping growing volumes of precious fuel into highly inefficient engines, and has grown into such a lucrative enterprise that no government has been able to shut it down.
The present government has also wearied of its efforts to restrain the sector’s unending appetite for precious and dwindling fuel. Instead of further curtailing the sector’s allocations, the Economic Coordination Committee is exploring a proposal to allow the import of LNG specifically to feed CNG stations around the country. The proposal has been supported by the All Pakistan CNG Association which has agreed to a curtailment of almost 22 mmcfd of gas from its quota if this can be made up from imported LNG instead. But in order to keep costs constant, the government will have to give considerable tax benefits to the LNG imported under this proposal, a step the IMF has already frowned upon. The government has limited options though since further curtailment to the sector is proving politically impossible. So while they’re talking about a proposal to arrange alternate supplies for the sector, perhaps a market pricing model can also be bundled into the measures to further encourage efficiencies and reduce losses.
Disaster compounded
Yet again, large parts of the country stand inundated. And yet again, Pakistan’s disaster management authorities have been caught napping. Now that the scale of the disaster has become evident, officials from all quarters, including the prime minister, can be heard expressing regret and giving out assurances that not only is the government doing the best it can, but that it had also prepared as well as was possible before the deluge and that mitigating the effect of natural calamities remains a priority. How far from the truth this is — indeed, what outright falsification this is — can be easily gauged by one hard fact: the National Disaster Management Commission, which is headed by the prime minister and is the forum at which the highest-level decisions can be taken about disaster management, has not met since 2012. A 10-year plan to improve the country’s capacity to cope with future disasters in the wake of the 2010-2011 floods that was formulated at the last NDMC meeting in February 2012 has yet to be ratified because the commission has not bothered to meet since then.
Among the officials who have utterly failed to make this issue a priority are, other than the prime minister himself at whose call the NDMC meets, the four provincial chief ministers and governors, opposition leaders from the Senate and National Assembly, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff committee and representatives of key government departments such as the railways and the motorway authority. All of them are supposed to attend when an NDMC meeting is called, and should presumably be aware that drawing attention to disaster management is part of their duties. But having the state and government wake up to its responsibilities in Pakistan has historically been a daunting task, and those who have sworn to act for the benefit of the citizenry often prove to be enduringly hard of hearing when it is time to make an effort. If this is the level of interest shown by top government functionaries regarding an issue fundamental to the citizens’ welfare and safety, and national economic prospects, there can be little wonder that matters have reached this pass — yet again.And little hope can be har boured for any positive change in the foreseeable future. The country has now seen floods in 2007, 2010, 2011 and 2014. How much havoc will the next one be allowed to wreak?
A perilous path
IT may, rather will, drop out of the news cycle quickly enough, but the claim that the attack on a naval facility in Karachi last weekend was facilitated by insider information and/or help has profoundly troubling implications for the armed forces. To wit, the problem is neither new nor unheard of: for years, perhaps even more than a decade, the problem of militant ideology penetrating the ranks of the armed forces — often but not only the smaller forces, the navy and the air force — and terrorist recruitment taking place time and again has bubbled up, only to be quickly taken out of the public arena by a military that zealously suppresses its less savoury secrets. Only a thorough and honest reckoning with the problem will ensure that the armed forces are able to put their own house in order. Unhappily though, that would require more transparency and scrutiny than the military leadership is perhaps willing to allow. Sunlight can be a disinfectant, but it also makes clear where blame must lie and which heads must roll — something most institutions reflexively oppose. Mostly what is reported in the public arena is that infiltration of the armed forces are isolated incidents that are quickly and emphatically dealt with. But tracing the origins of the problem suggests that the military is either in denial of the true scope of the problem or is unable to do much about it.
Two phases are of critical importance: the Zia era, when Islamisation of state, society and the armed forces was official policy and vigorously pursued; and the Musharraf era, when an about-turn was attempted, sparking much anger and fury over the alleged betrayal of the now-established ideological roots of the armed forces. In addition, the profound changes in Pakistani society, from which the armed forces are drawn, made it more difficult to sell to the forces the theory of a professional military with non-religious, non-ideological roots devoted to the protection of the country’s territorial boundaries. Instead, increasingly, the forces were seen by military personnel as the first and foremost defenders of an ideological, religion-based version of what Pakistan ought to be. The road from there to active support for militancy within sections of the armed forces may not have been a straight line, but it was short enough. If the confusion is to be done away with, both the Zia and Musharraf eras need to be re-examined unflinchingly. The alternative — the inadequate alternative — is what Gen Musharraf’s successors have hit upon: label anyone attacking the Pakistani state and its security apparatus as anti-state — without doing anything to explain why the Zia Islamisation was misguided and the Musharraf policy was clumsy. The latter choice will cause insider attacks to continue, and the corpus with its head buried in the sand may eventually be decimated from the inside out.
Published in Dawn, September 13th, 2014