Growing isolation
Cyril Almeida | Opinion | From the Newspaper


NOW that we’ve taught the Americans a lesson and they know we mean business, a question: what next?

Our security mavens think they know the answer: to engineer a face-saving exit from Afghanistan the US needs Pakistan, and while the US is still loath to accept that reality, domestic political and fiscal imperatives in the US will force that realisation sooner than later.

It’s like Tom Cruise in that silly movie Knight and Day using hand gestures to explain to a blonde Cameron Diaz her chances of survival. With us, the chances of a face-saving exit from Afghanistan for the US are shoulder-high; without us, they are knee-high.

The Pakistani security apparatus’s calculation could well be right. But it could also be wrong. The US isn’t exactly known for doing what others think it will do or want it to do.

The problem for Pakistan is that the national-security folks have bet the house that they are right. Conditioning its support for the US project in Afghanistan on an acceptance of Pakistan’s view of what needs to be done in Afghanistan is a high-stakes bet:

what if the US chooses otherwise?

Imagine an alternative scenario in which the US decides to do things its own way in Afghanistan and determines that Pakistan is the problem, not just in Afghanistan but generally when it comes to dealing with the terrorism threat regionally and globally.

You don’t even have to try very hard to imagine this alternative scenario: tune in to the commentary on Pakistan emanating from the US and you’d think we’ve already been declared the enemy.

Bill Keller’s piece in The New York Times this week is extraordinary precisely because his relatively sympathetic view of Pakistan is so unusual; patience and tolerance for Pakistan in world capitals is otherwise perilously low.

Scarier than the increasing international isolation of Pakistan, though, is the nonchalance and dismissiveness with which it is being treated out here.

Policymakers here appear so sure the US doesn’t have any choice but to work with Pakistan that they have been blinded to signs that various power centres in the US are increasingly opposed to working with Pakistan.

Maybe some American generals get that they need to work with Pakistan but many influential senators and congressmen do not. And maybe many in the State Department and the White House understand the indispensability of Pakistan but there are
powerful voices which believe otherwise.

More often that not, what emerges as policy from the US is a compromise between its various power centres. When, according to the national-security folks here, the US hasn’t done the right thing in 10 years, why are we so sure the same US
policymaking apparatus will now converge on the outcome that we desire?

And it’s not just the US which is tiring of us. The whispers from Europe too are increasingly worrying. Before we could rely on the Europeans privately acknowledging that the US had made many mistakes in Afghanistan and that Pakistan was protecting
some legitimate national interests.But patience with Pakistan in Europe is increasingly thin. It’s not just a recalcitrant army that is the problem: the perception that Pakistan is being run on the civilian side by a ‘ruinous kleptocracy’, to use Bill Keller’s phrase, that doesn’t have the capacity or interest to govern a state teetering on the edge has exasperated anyone who does want to help Pakistan.

Even Canada — Canada! — is tiring of us. This from a Dec 1 op-ed titled ‘Why is CIDA sending aid to a de facto enemy?’ in the National Post, a conservative newspaper:

“This week, in response to a deadly border incident that involved Nato troops, Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani declared that there will be no more ‘business as usual’ with the United States. Canada should make precisely the same declaration in regard to its own bilateral relationship with Pakistan….

“Every dollar that we spend on civil projects in Pakistan is another dollar that the country’s security establishment has available to it for providing material support to the Taliban and the Haqqani network in the Afghan-Pakistan borderlands. In replacing Pakistan on its country-of-focus list, [the Canadian International Development Agency] can pick from plenty of other poor countries that aren’t supporting the terrorists who are planting the roadside bombs that kill our troops.”

Pakistan may fulminate against the outside world’s unfair attitude towards and betrayal of us but the outside world is just as tired of Pakistan. Right or wrong as the outside world’s thinking may be can Pakistan afford to ignore it?

A state on the verge of bankruptcy, blamed by the world’s military superpower for nudging it towards defeat in its longest war, viewed by the world at large as a hub of terrorism, and critically dependent on exports to and remittances from the very countries that are tiring of it — what about that configuration suggests Pakistan is on a path to anywhere good internationally?

And yet policymakers here are clutching at straws. Hope is seen in the Arab Spring, the situation with Iran and fresh US-Russia tensions.

The thinking is that the Arab Spring has deprived the US of a major ally in Egypt while relations with Turkey are complicated.

Meanwhile, with the West and Iran on a collision course, a second massive crisis in the region will be avoided. And with Putin coming back to power and US-Russia relations slipping backwards, Pakistan’s position on Afghanistan may be listened to more sympathetically.

Because of these other international exigencies, Pakistan will not face serious international punishment, the thinking here goes.

Of such fallacies are great defeats made.

The writer is a member of staff.

cyril.a@gmail.com

The poverty debate
Sakib Sherani | Opinion | From the Newspaper


FOR the past several years, a debate has raged in the country regarding the ‘true’ number of people deemed to be below the poverty line.

While a healthy debate has been going on for a long time on the methodology used to assess the size of the poor population, including on the relevance of a nutrition-based approach (as opposed to more multi-dimensional criteria) and on the actual demarcation of the poverty line, of recent the discourse has taken a somewhat less-pleasant and non-academic turn.

The controversy revolves around the last official headcount poverty ratio estimate available, for the year 2007-08. Showing a dramatic decline to 17.2 per cent, from a peak of 35 per cent less than a decade earlier, the estimate produced in the Musharraf-era has been dogged by the same credibility issues that have clouded the reliability of much of the economic data pertaining to that period. As such, apart from the Planning Commission, leading poverty specialists in the country (such as Dr Akmal Hussain and Dr Sohail Jahangir Malik), have dismissed the poverty estimate as flawed and misleading.

This criticism has been rejected by the person responsible for overseeing much of the economic data for the Musharraf
period, the economic adviser between 1998 and 2008, Dr Ashfaque Hasan Khan. Dr Khan believes that since the World Bank has ‘validated’ the poverty estimate, it should be accepted. Ironically, Dr Khan as economic adviser had himself rejected the World Bank’s poverty assessment in the early 2000s — going to the extent of accusing the World Bank’s lead specialist on poverty at the time, Tara Vishwanath (of Indian-origin), of deliberately acting against Pakistan’s interests by reporting a higher poverty estimate under Gen Musharraf!

Unfortunate ironies apart, what are the specific reservations regarding the poverty estimate of 2007-08. These can be summarised as:

— No specific drivers of such a large purported poverty reduction are readily recognisable. While GDP growth was indeed reported to be very high for a three-year period (fiscal years 2004, 2005 and 2007), it is unprecedented for such a large poverty reduction to occur over such a small period — quite apart from the serious questions raised about the quality of the growth statistics.

— Doubts have also been raised for several other good reasons. Wage employment rose nominally during the period in question, given the capital-intensity of the growth (forcing the government to add ‘unpaid family help’ to the labour data in order to boost employment figures). In addition, real wages remained static (and quite possibly declined). In sum, it is difficult to square the data with the poverty estimate.

— In fact, at around the same time, an inter-agency assessment of the United Nations estimated that at least 77 million Pakistanis were food insecure (roughly 48 per cent of the population). Given that the assessment methodology used approximated the same core criterion used in the official poverty estimate, such a large divergence between the two is hard to explain.

In the light of such weak foundations, the halving of poverty in Pakistan would be unprecedented. However, doubts aside, the reduction could conceivably still be possible given the high concentration or ‘bunching’ of the population around the poverty line.

A period of ‘bubble’ growth in the economy could result in a large movement of people above or below the poverty line. If this indeed was the case, however, then it raises serious questions about not only the longevity and sustainability of the claimed poverty reduction in the country, but more importantly, about the desirability of the economic policies pursued that produced such transient gains.

The debate on poverty is extremely important — and has been surprisingly completely missing from the policy discussion for the past four years under a supposedly ‘awam dost’ government. Without placing poverty reduction and alleviation at the core of the country’s economic vision and any government’s economic programme, an unacceptably large number of Pakistanis will continue to fall through the cracks.

Policy drift on this count has been exacerbated by the ‘freshwater’ thinking of the Chicago-trained deputy chairman Planning Commission, who believes that unfettered markets and properly incentivised private economic agents are all that are required for an economic revolution (and ‘no government’, of course!).

Dr Nadeem ul Haq is in good company. This thinking is not new to Pakistan, where elitist policymakers since Independence have been growth-centric to the point where achieving high rates of GDP growth has been an end in itself. As a result, without addressing the weak and skewed institutional foundations of sustainable and inclusive growth, growth has been episodic with volatile boom-and-bust cycles, while largely favouring the ‘middle classes’ — leaving well over half the population untouched (actually, worse off in relative terms).

(Several years ago, when ‘India Shining’ was a hot political slogan, respected columnist and editor M.J. Akbar summed up the iniquitous nature of India’s economic boom with a heading for his column ‘India’s 9% growth for the 9%’). By and large, the narrow base or ‘capture’ of the benefits of growth has not been too worrying to our policymakers — much like the ultra-hawk general in the classic Stanley Kubrik film Dr Strangelove, who believed that 20 to 30 million Americans killed in a nuclear
exchange with the Soviet Union would be ‘perfectly acceptable’!

The only exception to this ingrained policy apathy was, not surprisingly, the period under Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. Statist, interventionist and welfare-driven policies were pursued.

For all its fatal flaws, ZAB’s philosophy and economic vision delivered arguably not only amongst the biggest social welfare gains the country has seen, but has also managed to sustain his party through years of lacklustre performance in government subsequently.

The debate about the poverty estimate goes well beyond a mere statistic, and touches upon the fundamental nature of the social contract of the state with its people.

The writer is a former economic adviser to government, and currently heads a macroeconomic consultancy based in Islamabad.

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Real richness is that you are so expensive that no one can buy your character.

Between a rock and a hard place
Gulman S. Afridi | Opinion | From the Newspaper

MOST of the tribesmen of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata) are going through a period of difficulty unprecedented in their history.

Their lives, properties and, indeed, their very existence are threatened from both within and without. Yet they are unable to get their act together to face the danger.

Their region has been turned into a war zone at a time when the tribal institutional structure is characterised by chaos that has resulted from modern pressures and governmental apathy.

For too long, the tribal population remained stuck in time because of the primitive Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR).

Meanwhile, the winds of change have greatly weakened the age-old tribal structure. The tribesmen’s inability to respond to
recent challenges shows that the tribal system has outlived its utility.

Fata’s socio-judicial and political system evolved over a long period of time, but the inaccessibility of the area meant that this evolution occurred in relative isolation. During a long period of socioeconomic and cultural stability, the system flourished without the need for change.

However, improvements in communication, transportation and the flow of information during the last 50 years or so have brought about tremendous changes in the socioeconomic conditions of tribal society.

These changes have improved the quality of life to some extent but caused considerable instability, inequality and unpredictability as well. In the absence of any effective mechanism in the tribal system that could help absorb the changes,
the social cohesion, values and traditions of Fata’s tribal society have come under serious pressure.

The degree of impact varies from tribe to tribe depending on the proximity to communication centres and exposure to modern influences.

This region’s indifferent and callous rulers left the tribesmen to their own devices and at the mercy of political officers whose only interest was in maintaining law and order.

Instead of helping tribesmen adjust to change, the political agents allied themselves with tribal maliks whose sole interest lay in seeking favours for themselves and misusing development funds. A new class of privileged persons was born which dealt a
deadly blow to the hitherto relatively egalitarian social and political tribal structure.

A growing number of educated young people started questioning the governing process and the tribal laws and traditions.

Most of them abhor the FCR and the laws under which a whole tribe can be punished for an offence committed by one person.

For an educated young man, it would be anathema to cast a vote for an aspiring member of the National Assembly who can do nothing for the tribes after being elected as he cannot make any law for Fata.

Simultaneously, corruption crept into the administration of justice where laws are manipulated to suit the rich and powerful.

The importance and role of basic tribal institutions such as the status of elders was considerably eroded.

Maliks are no longer trusted to lead the people, and the cohesion of the tribe, sub-tribe and family has weakened greatly. More and more people have started looking for answers in non-tribal models, and those who could afford it migrated to the cities.

The edifice of the social-political and legal tribal system was thus weakened to the extent that a severe jolt could destroy it completely. That jolt has come in the form of the Taliban.

In the past, too, the tribesmen had rallied behind religious leaders, but the issues involved were always temporal. The role and influence of the mosque and hujra were clearly defined, with the former representing religious obligations while the latter
dealt with all matters of tribal society: social, cultural, judicial and political.

The tribesmen’s involvement in Afghanistan towards the end of the last century and the increasing ineffectiveness of tribal leadership mixed up religious and temporal matters and brought religious leaders to the forefront of tribal politics.

The Taliban promised to remove minor vices from society and were initially welcomed since the tribesmen could not do this themselves. Quietly, though, they increased their numbers, recruiting persons from all areas and communities and thus
further reducing the tribes’ capacity to resist.

Persons who could rally the people against the Taliban were eliminated and whole sections of tribes who dared to offer opposition were terrorised through the tactic of killing scores of people while jirgas, funerals or sporting events were being
held.

This sort of warfare was entirely new to the tribesmen, who were used to fighting a known enemy and keeping the damage to an acceptable limit for mutual coexistence. The Taliban changed all that.

Now, most tribesmen live like hostages in their own homes, threatened from many sides but too poor to escape. They suffer the brutalities of the extremists as well as the collateral damage of military action and drone strikes. Many went to Karachi — but many dead bodies came back too.

The huge Fata secretariat is unable to highlight the tribes’ sufferings or seek help for them. Meanwhile, the internally displaced of the region are carelessly handled. For their part, the tribesmen are reluctant to bring their families to live in the poorly
managed and congested tented camps.

Everything they have known is crumbling before their eyes but the government is seen as trying to perpetuate the misery through mere minor amendments in the FCR laws.

These are people caught between the devil and the deep blue sea.

Piecemeal amendments to the FCR will not help as the internal dynamics of the tribes have changed over time.

The primitive socio-judicial and political system of Fata, which has no inherent capacity or mechanism to adjust itself to change, cannot cope with the ever-growing demands of modernity. The system has already given way and, as expected, it has
failed to respond effectively when challenged.

The FCR laws and the general mindset regarding Fata need to change. The people of the region must be given fundamental political freedoms and basic human rights by bringing them at par with the rest of the country in a graduated manner.

The writer is a retired army officer from Fata.

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Real richness is that you are so expensive that no one can buy your character.

Chains not needed
Zubeida Mustafa | Opinion | From the Newspaper

A RECENT report about 50 young boys being kept shackled in a madressah has triggered a lot of wild speculation. The police said the place was being used as a detoxification centre for addicts. But a common belief is that the boys were being trained as suicide bombers.

This is outlandish. One must strongly condemn any unauthorised person who wrongfully confines another, whatever be the ground. But it is also unbelievable that a suicide bomber can be created against his own will. A person may be duped into this heinous crime but he can’t be coerced. That is why young boys, at an age when they are gullible, can be won over so easily by false promises and emotional blackmail.

The reaction to this news shows how little is known about terrorism and its roots. In its World Development Report 2011, the World Bank lists the security, economic and political stresses that heighten the risks of conflict and violence in a country. The internal factors are the existing legacies of violence, low income levels, youth unemployment, natural resource wealth, severe corruption, rapid urbanisation, ethnic or religious competition, discrimination, and human rights abuses.

These factors actually pave the ground for the growth of two kinds of violence. One is the expression of discontent that is not focussed on the achievement of specific, well-articulated goals. Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, defines it as “social protest” against a “system” that is perceived to have failed and which cannot be corrected by the electoral process and needs pressure from the street.

The second kind of violence is one that is planned with the idea of bringing about a radical transformation of the system to give political power to those referred to as terrorists. The leaders of this kind of violence are not affected directly by poverty, the lack of education or discrimination. They exploit these conditions to recruit the foot soldiers that are indispensable to them in their scheme of using violence to seize power.

Researchers who have probed into this phenomenon have found that the existence of the conditions listed above create the mindset in the youth that makes them likely recruits for the leaders of terror. They are the ones who are trained as suicide bombers.

It is actually political ambition and not religion that drives the top leadership of all militant organisations — national or international — as much as it does our political and military leaders. But as is quite common in Pakistan, religion is used by all aspiring for a political goal. The founder of the nation used it to win popular support for the goal of creating a homeland for the Muslims in the subcontinent. The army has used it by giving its military campaigns the garb of an Islamic mission and using slogans such as “Allah-o-Akbar”.

If the Taliban are now using religion to achieve their goal of winning power, they are not doing something new. Others have done it before. It is the extremist, violent and brutal nature of their strategies that distinguishes them from the others, although some political parties in mainstream politics also resort to violence.

Hence the phenomenon of extremism should be studied at two levels, with both being indispensable to each other. One is the leadership level and the other is the rank and file level without which the leaders cannot function.

The spread of obscurantist views along with the factors listed at the beginning of this column help the extremist groups acquire muscle power. Textbooks are commonly blamed for the spread of extremist views in our mainstream school system. There is no denying the fact that a number of books encourage exclusivity and hatred and do not promote tolerance.
But given our poor education system, it appears that more than the books, the pulpit in the mosques and the TV channels should be held responsible for creating the mindset in the youth that provides extremist leaders with their followers.

Besides, the techniques the extremists use to enlist the youth for their cause should tell us what is otherwise missing from the life of many young people. More than the physical hardship that poverty brings, there is the absence of recognition, an acute sense of injustice and the lack of self-esteem that characterises the psyche of all who have resorted to terror. It is the motivation and mobilisation factor that really counts. In our country’s conditions, the young are most vulnerable to the attractive promises held out to them of Paradise and the dignity and esteem they will find there.

How many of our schoolteachers interact with their students and give them a sense of self-esteem, providing them goals in life that they can look forward to? As for those who do not attend school, the vacuum is greater.

With few teachers who are viewed as heroes that inspire the young, it is unsurprising that conditions are such that they create a breeding ground for suicide bombers.

In the film Terror in Mumbai, broadcast on HBO, the point to be noted is how the Lashkar-i-Taiba “controller” communicates with the 10 terrorists with whom he is constantly in touch on the cellphone during the 60 hours of terror that shook the city in November 2008. The transcript of the conversation has been replayed in the film. The attackers are constantly addressed as “brothers” and receive a lot of encouragement by being reminded of the “greatness” of their deed and the bounties that await them in the next world. No chains were needed.

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Real richness is that you are so expensive that no one can buy your character.

A troubled country
Khalid Aziz | Opinion | From the Newspaper


PAKISTAN is in the midst of several crises. The picture at this stage appears dismal. However, even in this period of despair there are exceptions that inspire confidence in the future of our country.

The other day I was fortunate to witness such an instance, during a PIA flight from Islamabad to Lahore. I was struck by wonderment when I heard a woman’s voice announce, “This is your captain and it is a pleasure to welcome you aboard; I will be flying you to Lahore.…” PIA has a few women pilots in its service, but it was my first time to take a flight captained by one of them. Well done.

If Pakistan has been able to provide such opportunities to its women (though sadly not to a larger number), then there is still hope for us despite the very poor and venal leadership provided by some of those who head our leading institutions.

I am a believer in the dictum that if there are a few good men left amongst us at the helm, then we shall emerge much stronger from our struggles than many may think. The point that is worrisome, however, is whether we will be able to retain our institutional coherence that is essential for stability; without strong and vibrant institutions a country stops progressing and begins to decay.

Pakistan has been no stranger to turbulent times since its birth. It was the resilience of its citizens and some of its leaders heading various institutions that kept it going. By early 1960 it was marked as one of the upcoming Asian tigers with a head start compared to others.

Those were the years when the Koreans and others came to learn how to develop economies and how to create national airlines and many other things. Our promise was nipped in the bud by the crass stupidity of initiating a war with India. Had we not made that error of judgment, the fate of Pakistan may have been quite different today.

The recent deterioration in the civil-military governance structure is yet another step taking us down. Generally speaking, such results are expected when expediency rather than principles prevail. It is not understood why we criticise the US vehemently when we ourselves forced it to intervene as revealed recently by the publication of Condoleezza Rice’s account of how the US brokered a deal between President Musharraf, who was then the army chief, and Benazir Bhutto, leader of the PPP who was tipped to become Pakistan’s next prime minister.

Ms Rice’s account indicates that Gen Musharraf manipulated Washington to become a player in Pakistan’s internal affairs. It brings to mind a comparison with the ongoing memogate affair in which the conduct of Husain Haqqani, Pakistan’s former ambassador to the US, and by implication that of President Asif Zardari, has been challenged in the Supreme Court; if their conduct is considered treasonous, one wonders if Gen Musharraf was not equally culpable.

The recent downward slide in US-Pakistan relations took a turn for the worse when the US Senate passed the defence authorisation bill, freezing the roughly $700m earmarked in aid to Pakistan, pending assurance that Islamabad would take steps to prevent militants from using improvised explosive devices (IEDs) against US-led forces in Afghanistan.

According to an article in the National Journal, “the number of IED attacks in Afghanistan has spiked to an all-time high [according to US military officials], because of the free flow of critical bomb-making materials from neighbouring Pakistan.

“Senior military officials said there were more than 1,600 strikes involving so-called ‘improvised explosive devices’ in June, setting a new record for the long Afghan war, and underscoring the dangers posed by militants operating inside both of the troubled countries. The number of IED strikes in June 2011 is nearly 25 per cent higher than the monthly average for the conflict. In May, for instance, there were 1,250 IED attacks.”

Connecting Pakistan to the IEDs opens up yet another Pandora’s box. What is the message from Congress to Pakistan — that it should prevent Afghan militants from laying IEDs? It has not been possible for the International Security Assistance Force to do so since 2004. Or is the message more threatening and is the US charging Pakistan for the presence of the IEDs in Afghanistan?

This truly may be a flight of the imagination if that is what is meant. Yet, another more pernicious deduction perhaps is that Pakistan is being pressured to act against the Haqqani network that is considered to have singular expertise in the use of IEDs.

However, research indicates that IED warfare was unknown in Afghanistan and was a skill that was brought by Arab fighters from Iraq after 2004 and was allegedly encouraged by the Iranians.

According to a 2009 report in the Middle East Quarterly, the Iranians were providing some Taliban Iranian-made IEDs as well as heat-seeking missiles against the western forces. Though the Iranian government denied any such involvement, sections of the Iranian establishment were alleged to be behind such moves.

Several media reports from Afghanistan suggest that Iran has been increasing its operations in Afghanistan in an effort to gain influence with the contending insurgent factions and to hasten the departure of US troops from the country. This analysis tends to show that Pakistan has limited influence in the IED matter.

On the other hand, the recent declaration of jihad by the Defence of Pakistan Council, a forum for hard-line Islamist parties, indicates the need for caution and the lowering of institutional tension, otherwise larger social unrest may follow soon.

The writer is chairman of the Regional Institute of Policy Research in Peshawar.

azizkhalid@gmail.com

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Real richness is that you are so expensive that no one can buy your character.