Budget and the economy

THIS is the third budget presented on the television rather than to the National Assembly. In the absence of a parliament where the budget is thoroughly debated for three weeks, the national press has an enhanced responsibility to discuss different aspects of the budget and the state of the economy.

The success of any budget and the policies on which it is based depends on the overall state of the economy and several economic, political and social factors that influence it. It should be clear from a study of key economic indicators presented with the budget that the overall economic situation is far from satisfactory, and the much promised recovery of the economy is nowhere in sight:

* The average GDP growth of 3.3 per cent per annum in the past three years is the lowest in 12 years. It was on average 4.6 per cent during the 1990s, with 7.7 per cent in 1991-92 and 6.5 per cent in 1995-96.

* Overall investment as a percentage of GDP has been declining steadily from 20 per cent in 1991-92 to 17.3 per cent in 1997-98; it went down below 14 per cent in 2001-02. This is the most serious manifestation of an economic slowdown because it will not only affect the pace of economic growth in the coming years but also many other key sectors like employment and exports.

* This decline in investment is shared by both the public and private sectors; but public sector has declined more sharply in the past 10 years — from 9.1 per cent to 4.7 per cent of GDP — while private investment has gone down from 10.1 per cent to 7.6 per cent of GDP. In the public sector, development expenditures have declined from 6.7 per cent of GDP to 2.8 per cent of GDP.

* Exports have continued to stagnate and will probably be lower than $ 8.9 billion in 2000-2001 against a target of $ 10 billion.

* The rate of unemployment has also gone up from about five per cent in the early 1990s to 7.8 per cent in 2001-02. The figure for under-employment is much higher.

* The incidence of poverty has also increased correspondingly during this period primarily because of a marginal growth in per capita income.

* On the positive side, there has been, despite the stagnation in exports, a significant improvement on the external front following the rescheduling of bilateral loans, revival of foreign assistance and an upsurge in foreign remittances. There is a current account surplus of over $910 million and foreign exchange reserves have gone up to $ 6 billion.

* There has also been a continued decline in the rate of inflation to about three per cent this year.

* But the third indicator of macro-economic stability — the fiscal deficit, having improved to 5.3 per cent of GDP in 2000-01 again deteriorated to seven per cent of GDP in 2001-02.

Thus, overall, of the 18 indicators, only four have moved in a positive direction while 14 of them are showing a deterioration. More significantly, indicators, which directly affect the life and well-being of citizens, namely economic growth, investment, employment, and poverty, have become worse, whereas stabilization indicators to which the IMF gives priority, have improved, particularly after the events of September 11.

Every budget has some positive and some negative features. The main positive features of the Budget 2002-03 include the incentives to promote investment and business activities, the priority given to the development of water sector and the fact that, for the first time, the overall size of the budget (Rs 742 billion) is lower than last years’s budget (Rs 752 billion original budget and Rs 773 billion revised estimates).

But many measures announced in the budget will increase the burden on the common man. These include the imposition of 15 per cent General Sales Tax on ghee and medicines. Normally, food or essential items used by low-income groups are not taxed. Similarly, the increase of sales tax on agricultural inputs like fertilizer and the proposed changes in the price support system for agricultural crops will not only reduce the incomes of farmers but also weaken incentives for increased production. The developed countries are providing farm subsidies of $ 360 billion a year.

Pakistan cannot afford large subsidies, so its modest price support programme was only intended to even out fluctuations in agricultural prices and subsidize the cost of transport and storage for remote areas. Under the harsh conditions agreed with the Asian Development Bank for the agriculture sector loans, Pakistan’s drought-stricken farmers will be further impoverished.

Throughout the past three years, the actual fiscal deficit was higher than the target agreed with the IMF (6.4, 5.3 and 7.0 per cent of GDP against the target of 4.3, 4.6 and 4.9 per cent respectively). In fact, in the current year, the projected fiscal deficit of seven per cent will be the highest in six years.

The finance minister has set for himself, and for his successor after the October elections, a very ambitious target of Rs 162.5 billion or four per cent of GDP against an actual deficit of Rs 257 billion or seven per cent of GDP. Hardly any country has ever achieved a reduction of three per cent in the fiscal deficit in a single year, even if some items of expenditure in the current year were of an exceptional one-time nature.

The achievement of this target of slicing the deficit by Rs 95 billion will require increasing tax revenues by Rs 60 billion — from Rs 400 to Rs 460 billion — and restricting non-development expenditure to Rs 608 billion. In the current year, neither of these objectives has been achieved since revenues are Rs 50 billion lower than the original budget and current expenditures are Rs 22 billion higher than the estimates. The only casualty in chasing unrealistic fiscal targets is invariably the development budget, which this year is at least five billion rupees lower. The next year’s allocation of Rs 134 billion,if actually spent, will be only 2.8 per cent of GDP, the lowest in our history.

The prospects for achieving the other important objective of reviving investment in the economy appear equally dismal because the non-economic constraints and difficulties, which have affected our investment climate for several years, have become even more serious. These include the deteriorating law and order situation, which has forced most foreigners to leave the country; the dark shadows of the war in Afghanistan; the continuing tensions with India; and recurrent political instability. Many other negative factors, which affect investor confidence and the level of domestic savings, are structural and deep-seated. These include the inefficient delivery of public services, hurdles created by bureaucratic red tape and the low productivity and training of our labour force.

The recent accountability drive and the campaign to document the economy have also scared away domestic investors, many of whom have shifted their capital abroad. In the face of these overriding constraints, the investment incentives provided in the budget will have only a limited impact.

The writer is a former finance minister of Pakistan.

Keeping an eye on schools

JUNE is the month for financial stocktaking in Pakistan. It is also a time when the term “human resource” — plainly put, the people — finds eloquent mention by policy makers, who all of a sudden discover the merit of an educated and trained manpower for the national economy. In this scenario a new trend has emerged of late. The government has begun to openly concede its failure in the education sector.

The Economic Survey 2001-2002 lays bare all the facts and figures pertaining to our poor performance in the field of education. This has been done very unabashedly and what better yardstick would there be than the literacy rate. In the last 11 years since 1991, the literacy rate has grown from 34.9 per cent to 50.5 per cent, so it is officially claimed.

In other words the growth rate of literacy every year has been on an average 1.4 per cent when the population has increased by 2.16 per cent per annum. The number of illiterates in Pakistan has been growing, and this is confirmed by the measly primary school enrolment rate in the country. At 65 per cent, it is lower than that of Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka.

How does the government in Islamabad analyze the factors responsible for this abject failure? Although it is conceded that literacy and education alone can take the country on the path of economic progress, it is not clear how this is going to be done. A knee-jerk reaction was to promulgate an ordinance making primary education compulsory and stipulating a fine on parents whose wards in the 5-9 year age group are not enrolled in a school. This is not the first time such a measure has been announced. Primary education has been made compulsory umpteen times and it has lost all credibility.

The Sindh government realizing how this can backfire decided to select one town in every district for a pilot scheme. On paper, its plan to begin on a modest scale was ideal. It could then move to the rest of the towns by 2004, the deadline for universal elementary education. But this scheme is still in the air more than three months after it was launched with much fanfare. The community organizations in Lyari, which work at the grassroots, know nothing about it. Lyari is the town in the District South of Karachi, which has been chosen to spearhead the enrolment drive,

The fact is that the loud boast of Education Sector Reforms (ESR) notwithstanding, the government is not very clear about how it wants to proceed in this matter. Confusion reigns supreme. There is lack of communication and coordination between the various sectors involved in educating the people.

Take a few examples. On the one hand, it is clearly conceded that primary education constitutes the foundation of the entire system. Yet the focus appears to be on the universities. In one year the number of universities more than doubled from 26 in 2000-2001 to 68 now.

This was done by liberally handing down charters to various institutions of higher education and encouraging the private sector to expand in a big way. As a result there are now 28 private universities in Pakistan. A task force for higher education has also been set up and is now working on the recommendations for restructuring the universities.

Had this been a part of an over-all and balanced restructuring of the education system, it would have made some sense. What comes as a cause of concern is that this emphasis on university education appears to be at the expense of primary education.

The same year that the number of universities shot up 160 per cent, the number of primary schools registered an increase of only three per cent.

Only 4,000 or so new primary schools were opened in 2001-2002. All this makes one wonder if the investment in universities is not a waste of resources. With the academic standards of the school students falling so drastically, it is inevitable that they will pull down the quality of university education as well.

It is the schools which really need to be looked into on a priority basis. The government has finally conceded a role for the private sector in education, though it has yet to be clearly defined. The high-profile presence of the private sector in education in the urban areas has had the effect of blowing out of proportion the share it has in school education. The census of private educational institutions conducted by the Federal Bureau of Statistics has made it possible to assess the situation on the ground in respect of the private sector educational institutions.

There is no denying that many of the private schools (especially the so-called elite ones) are providing quality education to Pakistani children. There are nearly 15,000 primary schools in the country (10 per cent of the total) which are privately-owned.and they have about 4.5 million students on their rolls (22.5 per cent of the primary school enrolment).

These schools are staffed with 22 per cent of the total strength of primary level teachers. The private sector spent about 19 per cent of the total education budget in Pakistan in 1999-2000 - of course all of it was recovered as tuition fees from the students).

All this data which is now documented helps explode the myths which have been perpetuated about the private sector schools:

* The public sector’s role in education is no longer so important

* The private sector spends much more than the government on education

* All the government schools are overcrowded

* The teacher-pupil ratio is better in private schools

With all these elements being equal, one may well ask: why is it that the academic standards in the private sector institutions is infinitely better than in the public sector schools? Why has enrolment in the government schools been falling for the past few years? The key factor that has made all the difference is school performance. It is now admitted that dropouts in government schools have increased because parents are discerning and withdraw their children when they feel that education is not productive. Poverty has also been described as a major factor in the parents’ decision not to send their child to school.

But now people working at the grassroots confirm that parents want to educate their children when they feel assured that education will in the long run facilitate poverty alleviation. They don’t send their offspring to school when they find that the teachers are missing and when the teachers are there the books and courses are found to be quite irrelevant to their future quest for a livelihood.

It is school performance which needs to be urgently addressed. Corruption (in the form of absenteeism and ghost schools), lack of motivation, apathy and the absence of teaching skills and good books have reduced public sector education to the state of decay we find it in. The need is to focus on monitoring and mobilization so that optimum use is made of the available resources. Some efforts have been made in that direction.

The Sindh Education Foundation launched its adopt-a-school scheme a few years ago. It has also encouraged community participation by establishing community schools. In one case the Sindh government has allowed an NGO in Karachi to actually manage a government school. These experiments have produced mixed results. They have, however, palpably demonstrated the positive impact truly committed citizens can create by being personally involved in education.

Now that the National Reconstruction Bureau has in its ultimate wisdom decided on the devolution scheme which has placed the administration of the government primary schools under the nazims in each district, theoretically it should make it possible to rescue the missing element of monitoring and re-introduce it in the school system. But how this will work out in practice is still too early to say.

Given our anti-education culture, it is not surprising that not all nazims are deeply committed to the cause of promoting education in the area under their jurisdiction. Where the nazims are interested, they often encounter financial constraints. The provincial government’s record of passing on the budgetary allocations to the local bodies has not been unimpeachable. After the new system was introduced in August, there has been a hue and cry about teachers not being paid their salary. Finally, much would also depend on the degree of politicization that is allowed to take place. If the primary education sector falls a prey to politics, devolution may prove to be a major disaster.

Back on the old trail?

THE bastioned triple walls and deep dry moats that gird Rhodes, this magnificent fortress city of Greece bear martial witness to the long struggle between Europe and the Muslim world. In 1522, the epic resistance here of 650 knights of St. John and 1,200 soldiers against a besieging army of 100,000 Turks is one of history’s most glorious battles.

Even today, no one would call Greeks and Turks friends: in 1996, they almost went to war over a barren islet in the Aegean. But in recent years once poisonous relations have improved to the point of frequent civility and occasional cooperation.

Nevertheless, tensions between these two old foes are never far below the surface. Recently, Turkish fighters scrambled to intercept Greek warplanes over the Aegean, and the ever contentious issue of divided Cyprus caused tempers to flare.

Greeks and Turks have been at scimitar’s drawn for over a thousand years, a millennium before “recent’ feuds between Indians and Pakistanis, or Arabs and Israelis. Greeks have never completely accepted the Turkish conquest of Ionian Asia Minor and (Istanbul) Constantinople, two cradles of Hellenic civilization since early history. Greek children are still raised on lurid tales of Ottoman atrocities from the 1820s war of independence, but rarely informed about atrocities committed by Greeks and their Balkan allies against Turks and other Muslims.

Past Greek governments have too often beaten the war drums against Turkey to distract voters from financial scandals and economic woes. Today, however, a new maturity is creeping into Greece’s view of its much larger neighbour.

Many Turks stereotype Greeks as bitter, wily enemies intent on sabotaging Turkey’s attempts to join Europe and undermining Turkish rights in the Aegean and Cyprus. In recent months, the tough generals who run Turkey behind a tattered facade of parliamentary government have grown angry and menacing as the European Union increasingly supports the Greek view over the divided island of Cyprus.

Late this fall, the EU will make a key decision over Cyprus, which is due to be admitted to the Union by 2004. The side that has been most cooperative in finding a solution will be favoured. As of now, the EU strongly backs the Greek Cypriots and their leader, Glafcos Clerides. The Turkish Cypriots and their patron, Turkey, are regarded as obstructionist and uncooperative.

If the EU determines the Greek Cypriot government has been most constructive, it will go ahead with admission of a Greek-run Cyprus and ignore protests by the Turkish minority that it must be treated as an equal partner with the Greeks. Turkish Cypriot leader Rauf Denktash, underlined this point in an interview with this writer, insisting he would never accept being a junior partner in a Greek-dominated government. Thirty thousand Turkish troops, reinforced recently by a new brigade, are backing him up.

Turkey refused to budge on the issue of the right of return of Greek Cypriots driven from their homes in the northern part of the island when Turkey invaded after Greeks began killing Turkish Cypriots. Turkey, like its close ally, Israel, denies the refugees they created have any right to former homes and lands and , like Israel, is moving settlers into ‘expropriated‘ (polite for stolen) properties.

Europe, which has never been friendly to Turkey, is showing little patience with the Turkish view of Cyprus. If the EU admits a Greek-run Cyprus into the union, Turkey threatens to annex northern Cyprus. The Cypriot government could then turn to the EU and demand it impose trade and financial sanctions on Turkey as an illegal occupier of northern Cyprus. Turkey’s hopes of becoming a full EU member would then be dashed. The Turks face a no-win situation over Cyprus.

Turkish Northern Cyprus is deeply depressed economically and would greatly prosper from joining the EU, as will industrious Greek Cypriots whose side of the island is booming. But Turkish pride and distrust of the Greeks prevents Ankara and its Cypriot orphan mini-state from agreeing to a minority role, however protected, within a majority Greek state.

Turkish reservations are understandable given the violent history of the past 50 years, marked by communal violence and Greek animosity towards Turks. This is too bad: admission of Turkish Cypriots into the EU might well ease the way for later admission of Turkey, or at least lessen Europe’s growing racist fears of being flooded by Muslims from the east.

Turkey badly needs Europe’s help to rebuild its rickety finances and provide new markets for Turkish industry and agriculture. So urge Turkey’s diplomats and politicians, but the generals in Ankara, who consider themselves guardians of the nation, will not back down over Cyprus and are convinced the Greeks are in cahoots with Muslim-hating Europeans to get control of the oil and mineral wealth believed to lie under the Aegean Sea.

All this is a pity because the Greek and Turkish Eastern Mediterranean is one of the world’s most delightful places. The make-tourism-not war Italians, who occupied Rhodes from 1912 until after World War II, had the right idea. They planned to transform Rhodes into a second Capri. — Copyright Eric S. Margolis 2002

Recalling the 1967 war

THIRTY-FIVE years is not much as anniversaries go, but there are things to discuss so it will have to do. It is just thirty-five years since Israel won a crushing victory in the June, 1967, war and quadrupled the amount of territory it controlled in less than a week. It was a calamity for both sides, though only one side realized it at the time.

For the Arabs, the catastrophe was complete, immediate and largely irreversible. In their first two wars with Israel, there had been excuses for defeat despite their huge numerical superiority. This time, there was none.

In Israel’s 1948-49 war of independence, its Arab neighbours were just emerging from centuries of colonial rule, and still lived under the rule of corrupt and incompetent monarchs like Egypt’s King Farouk.

In 1956, when Israeli forces attacked the Suez Canal in secret alliance with Britain and France, the Arab defeat could be blamed on their great-power opponents.

But in 1967 the Israelis were on their own, and revolutionary young officers across the Arab world were promising unification, material progress and, above all, victory over Israel. For ten years they made blood-curdling threats about ‘a battle of destiny’ — and then were dumbfounded when the Israelis took their threats at face value and struck first.

The Arab front-line states lost their air forces in the first hour of the war. Over the next 132 hours they also lost the Sinai peninsula and the Gaza Strip (Egypt), East Jerusalem and the West Bank (Jordan), and the Golan Heights (Syria). The despair and psychological demobilization across the Arab world were so great that even the regimes responsible for the defeat were allowed to survive. (Indeed, they survive still.) And that should have been the end of it.

Like most other countries, Israel is built on land that was previously occupied by somebody else. It’s no big deal, historically speaking. There is usually a good deal of fighting in the early stages, as the previous tenants resist eviction and their neighbours lend a hand, but then if you win a few wars they accept your borders and the confrontation subsides. By 1967, Israel had effectively reached that stage — so why is there still an Arab-Israeli conflict 35 years later?

Prime Minister Levi Eshkol understood that the 1967 victory could be the basis of a peace settlement guaranteeing Israel’s place as an accepted if unloved neighbour of its former enemies.

On June 19, 1967, less than a week after the shooting stopped, his cabinet secretly agreed to withdraw to Israel’s pre-war frontiers in the Sinai peninsula and the Golan Heights, returning all the captured land in return for peace, diplomatic recognition, and demilitarization of the territory that would be returned to Egypt and Syria.

But that offer was never actually sent to the Egyptians and the Syrians, and the cabinet was never able to agree on returning the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem at all. After four months, it even dropped the idea of a land-for-peace’ swap with Egypt and Syria.

“Poor little Samson,” as Eshkol put it: the choices opened up by the 1967 victory completely paralyzed Israeli diplomacy.

The problem was that Israel’s victory was too big. Ultra-nationalist and messianic elements in Israel seized the opportunity to expand into the new territories, setting up settlements everywhere with the explicit purpose of making the conquests politically irreversible by creating facts on the ground.

If anybody objected, they argued that the old borders were unsafe — although Israel had just beaten all its plausible opponents without even working up a sweat.

A surprise Arab attack in 1973, though launched for strictly limited objectives and rapidly defeated by Israel, subsequently persuaded Menachem Begin’s government to trade the Sinai peninsula for peace with Egypt, by far the biggest of Israel’s Arab neighbours, but all the rest of the land captured by Israel 35 years ago is still under its control.

Many Israeli leaders have tried to create a domestic consensus on trading it for a lasting peace, but it’s just too tempting to hang onto it. — Copyright

Twists and turns of standoff

THERE are, doubtless, numerous benefits attached to doing the bidding of the world’s sole superpower. But one also has to pay for it. The bomb blast outside the US consulate in Karachi on June 14 took its toll in the shape of ten Pakistanis dead and more than five times as many injured.

It is our good fortune that there were no US or other western casualties. The heavens would have fallen if there were and, since Pakistani lives would seem to be more or less expendable, that has not happened. However, as an emergency security measure and sealing our fall from grace, the US diplomatic mission in Pakistan has had to be temporarily closed down.

Perhaps we should be trying to see the wood for the trees. Granted that the situation on the subcontinent is enormously complex, it still ultimately has to do with 9/11 and the fact that a new world order, purged of Islam if not nominal Muslims, has, since been decisively on the West’s agenda. The devastation of Afghanistan and the bloodletting of Palestinians are ample testimony that the West has met with considerable success in its geostrategic objectives.

Yes, the bomb was in all likelihood the handiwork of Islamic radicals. But that only suggests that what the global counter-terrorism drive has above all achieved is a radicalization of Islam in this region such as it had known only during the anti-Soviet Afghan jihad. Cornered, militant Islam here has by no means disappeared from the scene but is on the march as never before. This is an irony which policy planners in Washington would do well to mull over before blindly blundering on.

In any case, the thesis of the political establishment of the US, as put forward by one of its more articulate spokesmen, Henry Kissinger — that the so-called ‘war-on-terror’ is a historical and indeed moral imperative for the world’s major states — does not convince except as a piece of imperialist cant. His more recent statement, bearing on the new era of “cooperation” between the US and India — with the role, for India, along with the US, of co-policeman of the South and South-east Asian region — is no less fraught with superpower predatoriness and paranoia. None of this may augur well for Islam in these parts or Pakistan. But, given the global reach of Islam, it does not do so for the West either. And, since the ‘axis of evil’ as conceived by George Bush has still to be targeted, it poses a grave threat to world peace.

Yet the US is pressing ahead all the same. In a subtle foreign policy shift, stemming logically from the war in Afghanistan, it appears to have resolved, regardless of the cost in physical, moral or material terms, to make diplomacy subordinate to the use of force in pursuit of its geo-political goals. In other words, for the US, force is the officially preferred option. This, then, is realpolitik, the genuine article, at play. It is on the strength of this, in a kind of flashback to the operation to get Manuel Noriega, of Panama, that US elite troops are being readied to capture President Saddam Hussein of Iraq dead or alive.

Under the circumstances, our own nuclear capability does not seem such a bad thing after all. It is on account of this that what began as a standoff between this country and India has gradually turned into a sort of war of attrition in which neither side stands to gain. As we are well aware, this is a by-product of the ‘war on terror’. That, unfortunately, has made for logistical confusion. On the one hand, we are, at the behest of the US, engaging Al Qaeda and the Taliban on the run to our west. On the other hand, to our east, we are confronting a battle-ready and menacing India — an India, ironically, supported by the US on the issue of Kashmiri militancy.

This has resulted in the rather bizarre double-take and inevitable political contortions in which President Musharraf has allowed himself to become implicated in relation to the issue of Kashmir. It is this impossible duality of our situation that we should be seriously looking at with a view to extricating ourselves from it as expeditiously and deftly as possible.

Of course, it can be argued that this is easier said than done, that it is not possible to resolve a contradiction inherent in our very ‘alliance’ with the US. Yet resolve it we must. It is a course of action incumbent on us to follow if we are not to hurt the Kashmir cause irretrievably. The fear is that we may already have done so.

Whatever the case, there is no reason why we should make any further concessions to India than we already have. It is enough to have briefly played the devil’s advocate and contained cross-border “infiltration” into Indian occupied Kashmir. Even that was one concession too many and indeed one that cost us dear since it simply served to justify India’s stand on Kashmir while simultaneously sanctifying the new-fangled, highly questionable Bush doctrine. We cannot, certainly, agree to India’s latest demand that we dismantle the Kashmiri militants’ camps in Azad Kashmir. That would be tantamount to granting the LoC the status of a permanent boundary and finally dismantling the Kashmir cause itself, which is, at some level, central to the very existence of Pakistan. Pakistan has taken all the initiatives possible or necessary for detente with India. We have been on the defensive for long enough. The virtues of secularism notwithstanding, why should we apologize for the Kashmiri jihad? In any case, it is up to India now to recognize the value of President Musharraf’s steps with regard to Kashmir and offer to initiate a dialogue with his government.

We know that there is a general perception among India’s top brass that India is currently onto a good thing in the shape of the global counter-terrorism campaign. Ad we understand that this is why they feel they can, with their troops and weaponry on our border and the blessings of the US, have recourse to a variety of pressure tactics with us on an indefinite basis and simply do not need to talk. This thinking is sadly flawed and will lead to needless economic constraints for a country with a population of over a billion, a vast number of whom are either starving or destitute.

At the same time, we ought to remember, when dealing with India over Kashmir, that it has a sense of almost hysterical insecurity about it. This has to do with a certain endemic fissiparousness about India, in particular with those of its states with well known separatist histories: Punjab, Assam, Nagaland. The apprehension appears to be that, in the event of Kashmir going out of the Union, a chain reaction could easily ensure as a result of which the whole edifice might eventually collapse like a house of cards.

But that phobia is not Pakistan’s headache. What we must bear in mind at all costs is that, when it comes to dialogue, India seems, on account of its long democratic tradition, to be better able to cope with civilian rather than military interlocutors. So if and when tensions between the two countries ease and a political climate conducive to the resumption of talks between them prevails, we will have to think of putting together a team of representatives at least less gung-ho than those who took part in the Agra summit. Indeed, we shall be needing negotiators both skilled and suave, equipped with the language of diplomacy and a realistic brief and able to drive a hard bargain and produce results.

Blaming the bureaucracy

POOR President Bush. First his own campaign staff thoughtlessly included atmosphere-warming carbon dioxide in a list of power plant pollutants he promised to seek to control through mandatory caps if elected.

When EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman took that commitment seriously and cited it as part of the administration’s response to global warming, there was a howl of protest from coal and other industry interests. Mr. Bush made a quick about-face, saying such controls would be too costly for energy consumers, and a spokesman said campaign aides had made a mistake.

Now it’s “the bureaucracy” that has produced a report acknowledging the human contribution to climate change and detailing possible damage to the United States.

Though it lays out exactly the same policies, or lack thereof, for responding to climate change that Mr. Bush announced in February, the report goes farther than the administration previously has in acknowledging that human activity is contributing to warming temperatures that may produce serious effects on the United States, from dwindling Western snowpacks to heat waves and loss of coastal marshlands.

Publication of the report on the EPA’s Web site drew outrage from those who challenge climate-change science. Mr. Bush, questioned by reporters, was quick to dismiss “the report put out by the bureaucracy.”

Never mind that it was produced by officials of his own administration and submitted by the United States to the United Nations in response to treaty obligations that Mr. Bush said he wants to honor even as he abandons the Kyoto protocol. The key fact here, promptly seized upon by both sides in the debate, is that if you acknowledge that climate change can be expected to do bad things and that human activity bears a significant share of the blame, then you might logically feel obliged to take tougher steps to lower U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases than Mr. Bush has been willing to take. —The Washington Post