The business of poverty

THE unveiling of the United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Report for 2003 has confirmed what many economists and development practitioners have known for some time: that real poverty has increased in more than 50 countries, that in 19 countries more than one person in four is going hungry, in 14 countries under-five mortality rates increased and in seven, almost one in four children will not reach his fifth birthday.

Further on, the report states that in nine countries more than one person in four do not have access to safe water, and in 15 countries more than one person in four do not have access to adequate sanitation and the situation is failing to improve or is getting worse. Perhaps the most significant achievement of the Human Development Report is its focus on issues of urgency for the world community. Extremely well-researched, this is a document which is essential reading for anyone who really wants to know where we are headed as a nation-state, ranked 134th within the comity of 174 nations which are compared with each other in terms of the human development Index, a summary measure of three dimensions of human development: living a long and healthy life, being educated and having a decent standard of living.

Even if one adopts the view of the cynic and dismisses the efforts of international and national agencies at focusing on the eradication of poverty as merely a “new flavour of the day” in the international agenda of pontification and pointless discourse, it is imperative that we, as one of the 54 nations marked by increasing poverty and a worsening record of human rights, should be taking the data really seriously if we are to attempt to turn around this terrible trend towards abysmal impoverishment.

Attacking poverty directly, as a matter of human rights, to accelerate development and to reduce inequality within and among nations, has become an urgent global priority. The United Nations evolved the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to approach the issue of poverty holistically, making the connection between providing opportunities for a better life and changing attitudes and institutions which impede the progress of humankind within the paradigm of sustainability and growth.

The eight MDGs are: to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger; to achieve universal primary education; to promote gender equality and to empower women; to reduce child mortality; to improve maternal health; to combat HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and other diseases; to ensure environmental sustainability; and to develop a global partnership for development, connect with each other like inseparable links in a chain, and need to be made integral parts of planning by the 189 nations which have expressed their commitment towards their implementation.

However, the world economic situation poses serious challenges for the achievement of the MDGs. Overall, in the 1990s gross domestic product (GDP) per capita grew by 1.6 per cent in the developing countries. But these slow gains were unevenly distributed, and the per capita GDP of the poorest countries in the 1990s was slower than in the 1980s. The new millennium started with even greater uncertainty. Recent global reductions in trade, spreading economic contraction and new banking and finance crises pose challenges to economic growth.

In Pakistan today, over one-third of the population lives below the poverty line, an assessment arrived at through the calculation of the value of the goods and services required to cover basic human needs. For most of the past fiftyfive years, our planners have grappled with the problem of rising poverty and increasing disparities between the powerful and the poor, between men and women, between regions and between urban and rural populations.

Every five years we have the five-year plan, and every five years we find ourselves standing on the edge of the same precipice which threatens to swallow us if we trip over just a bit more than we already have. What is it that eludes the economists in the Planning Commission and in the ministry of finance? Why is that the most glaring, the most obvious reasons for the growing poverty and increasing despair have escaped the attention of our planners? Why are we faced today with some of the worst human development indicators, while at the same time with some of the greatest concentrations of wealth?

The answers are really right before us, in the basic premise of unequal power relations, in the dynamic of submission and dominance, in the structures of oppression supported by ideologies which have captivated our minds and characterized our attitudes and our institutions. Why have we as a nation not been able to come up with a set of values on which we could base the realization of goals which every political leader and head of state has vigorously announced in the years gone by? Too many years have been wasted, too many plans have gone to seed, too many lives have been lost in this wasteland of thought, imagination, and political will.

The Third Quarterly Progress Report released by the ministry of finance states that the government had made significant improvements in overall fiscal aggregates, but faced considerable challenges in achieving the desired momentum in anti-poverty expenditure. The fiscal interface between provinces and districts regarding releases, bookings, disbursements, and utilization needed to be smoothened to ensure that anti-poverty expenditures remain in line with the government’s medium-term targets.

The question to be asked here is simply: will poverty be alleviated or even eradicated through “anti-poverty” expenditures alone? And what exactly are the government’s “medium-term targets?” Are these available for scrutiny, are these formulated by our own economists, or are these handed down to us by international financing institutions like the IMF and World Bank which have required that Pakistan develop a Poverty Reduction Strategy in order to qualify for development assistance in the form of loans and perhaps some grants, furthering our reliance on these sources?

More and more people are convinced that the planning and development strategies of our country do not come from within the minds of those who seek to address issues of inequality and distributive justice as core to the larger problem of poverty. As a colonized nation we not only unknowingly imitate the superficial behaviour patterns borrowed from our colonial masters (the felt hat and tweed hunting jacket), but we also have internalized attitudes which have perpetuated the institutions predicated on unequal relations of power. In colonial times, the popular explanations of the poverty of people were plainly apologetic, aimed at exonarating the colonial power of the moral and political responsibility for the poverty and development of these people.

It was taken to be an established fact that the people in “backward regions” were living the way they did by choice conditioned by tradition and would not even respond positively to opportunities for improving their incomes and standards of living. Their tendency towards idleness and inefficiency and their reluctance to seek wage employment were seen as expressions of their “want-less-ness”, indicating limited mental horizons.

Today, when Pakistan has held for the first time a participatory assessment of poverty in order to inform its planners and strategists of the perspectives of the poor on poverty, it is ironic to acknowledge the exercise as a continuation of policy diktats handed down by neo-colonial powers in the new millennium.

In recent years, specifically since September 2001, advanced societies have needed to see the writing on the wall so that they are now somewhat better aware of the problems of popular discontent, resentment and anger in poorer countries but not necessarily more helpfully disposed towards them. There has therefore been a redirection of research work in response to the emergence of political forces in recent years.

This shift represents a radical adjustment of research work to the needs felt by western societies. Making the connection initially between lower productivity and low human development indicators, and more recently seeing a linkages between deprivation and desperation, the western agenda in recent years has focused on poverty, initially on its eradication, and now, having looked at the horror of that reality, at its mere alleviation.

The fact is that more than three billion people around the world live on less than two dollars a day. The least developed countries will triple their populations by 2050, with Pakistan as the seventh most populous state today. The number of poor will grow, the resources used by the poor will be further depleted, the abuse of human rights will increase, and the chasm between the powerful and the powerless will become wider still. Despite the shift in research agendas, despite the supposed paradigm adjustments taking place in development practice, the fact remains that there are more people today than ever who are being crippled by unjust structures and the immoral attitude of subjugation.

Unless the framework of development and the war on poverty weave within its fabric the issue of equality and social justice, unless the shift is made from an almost total reliance on quantifiable data based only on empirical economic research to one that addresses issues of human dignity and human rights, we will be treating poverty merely as the business it has become, engendering contracts, providing opportunities for many of us to flourish even as we do our bit for the poor.

Trading with America

BY several measures, the ‘nineties was a lost decade for Pakistan. The economy grew by a paltry 3.7 per cent a year and income per head of the population increased by 1.2 per cent. At such a low rate of growth, it was inevitable that the incidence of poverty would increase sharply. Pakistan ended the decade — and the century — by seeing an enormous increase in the number of people living in poverty. By 2000, some 50 million people were absolutely poor, earning less than a dollar a day. Their number was increasing at a very high rate — by 10 per cent a year.

What is equally worrying is Pakistan’s export performance. The increase in value of exports in 1990-2000 declined to 4.3 per cent a year, from a very respectable rate of 8.1 per cent per annum achieved in the previous decade. This performance was especially disappointing since the ‘nineties saw an enormous expansion in global trade. In 1990, global merchandise exports were valued at $3.4 trillion. This increased to $6.2 trillion by 2001, a growth rate of 5.7 per cent a year. In other words, Pakistan lost a tremendous opportunity to make gains from the remarkable and unprecedented growth in world trade.

Can the country catch up now with economic growth having possibly returned? How should Pakistan plan to take advantage from the next period of world economic growth and trade expansion which may be about to begin? Should Pakistan align itself with other developing countries or should it work towards bilateral trading arrangements with the countries in which it can expand its market share? How important should regional arrangements be in developing a new trade strategy for Pakistan?

These are all weighty questions. They cannot be answered in one article. Beginning with today’s column, I will provide some thoughts on how Pakistan could gain for itself a larger place in international trade. In this series of articles, which will appear off and on over the next several months, I will explore the possibility of increasing trade with the United States, China, Europe and, possibly, also India. I will explore the advantages for Pakistan in regional trade pacts with the countries of South and Central Asia, and, finally, I will examine the role Pakistan could play in the on-going Doha round of trade negotiations.

Pakistan has 2.7 per cent of the world’s population. Measured in terms of purchasing power parity (PPP), it has a gross domestic product of $263 billion, or a bit less than 0.6 per cent of the world’s total of $45 trillion. With $11 billion of exports in the year ending June 30, it accounts for less than 0.2 per cent of world trade of $6.2 trillion. Given both the insignificance of its contribution to world output and world trade, Pakistan does not have much leverage on international economic and trade policies.

What has provided the country with some clout is the role the administration of General Pervez Musharraf is playing in the US-led war against international terrorism. How much economic benefit can Pakistan draw from this role and how much of it should it try to get in terms of a better access for its products in the markets of the developed world?

Pakistan has been reasonably well rewarded by the administration of President George W. Bush for the role it has played to date in chasing Al Qaeda. The US provided a grant of $600 million in 2002 and followed it up with a debt write-off of $1 billion. It also helped Islamabad get additional funding from the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank.

Washington’s support was also important in getting Islamabad a reasonably good deal from the Paris Club, the group that provides debt relief on bilateral obligations to the countries in economic distress. During President Pervez Musharraf’s recent visit to Washington, the US announced a $3 billion aid package that, if approved by the Congress, will run for five years. However, to date the United States has done little to help Pakistan access its markets with a larger volume of exports.

Experience has shown that countries in which the West has strategic interests are able to get more financial assistance than trade access. Once upon a time the slogan “trade rather than aid” was raised by western policymakers as a better way of helping the developing world. Aid produces dependency, it was argued. Trade, on the other hand, produced economic efficiency. It also created jobs for the poor since it was in labour-intensive products that the developing countries generally had a greater comparative advantage. Economists came to believe — correctly, it turned out — that greater emphasis on international trade helped the developing countries to better address the problem of persistent poverty.

But economic theory does not always translate into good economic policies. This is particularly true in the way countries manage international trade. This is not only the case for the developed countries’ trading relations with the developing world. Developing nations have been equally guilty in protecting their markets against foreign imports. One glaring example of this is the way India and Pakistan have conducted their trade policies ever since the two gained independence more than half a century ago.

More to the point, however, is Pakistan’s current trade policies with respect to international trade in general and to trade with the United States in particular. Razaak Dawood, President Pervez Musharraf’s first Commerce Minister, made a valiant effort to translate into greater market access the goodwill that suddenly appeared for Pakistan in the post-9/11 Washington. He made several trips to the US capital; at one point he brought with him a delegation of Pakistani textile entrepreneurs. Represented in that group were both garment manufacturers and those who make purchases from Pakistan for several large retail outlets. The delegation went to North Carolina to convince that state’s beleaguered textile industry that more trade with Pakistan would not do it a great deal of harm. Dawood hoped to increase Pakistan’s access to the US markets by as much as $1 billion.

Not much came of these efforts, but not for the want of trying. In February 2002, Washington gave Islamabad a three-year package of trade preferences including relaxation of quotas on some textile imports. This was not a particularly generous offer since many of the items included in the list were not produced in Pakistan in any significant volume.

In early July, Mr Humayun Akhtar Khan, the new commerce minister, revealed during a visit to the United States that Pakistan had benefited little from the concessions offered to his predecessor. Of the estimated additional exports of $143 million only about $20 million was achieved in the first year. Consequently, the total value of Pakistani exports to the United States in 2002 increased by only 2.5 per cent compared to the year before. This was much below Islamabad’s expectations and much below the historical average.

At this point it will be useful to look at some of the trends in the US-Pakistan trade. Pakistan’s exports to the United States have grown at a rate of 13.2 per cent a year since 1989. But the growth has not been steady; it fluctuated widely depending on how receptive some of the large retail chains were to the Pakistani products. The highest growth rate was in 1992 when the value of exports increased by 31 per cent. The years 1995, 1998, 1990, 1993 and 1989 were also stellar years with growth rates, in descending order, of 18.5, 17.5, 14.0, 14.0 and 12.5 per cent.

It would help Pakistan and its manufacturing and service industries enormously if the growth in trade with the United States was steady and did not have the upheavals which have marked it over the last dozen years. How to achieve this objective? There are two ways of doing it — to negotiate a bilateral trade agreement with Washington or to partner with other developing countries and obtain concessions not only from Washington but also from Brussels, Tokyo and Ottawa. Sensibly, Pakistan is focusing on the first alternative.

During his recent visit, Mr Humayun Khan set the stage for a Trade and Investment Framework Agreement that was signed later while General Pervez Musharraf was in Washington. A TIFA, the acronym for the agreement, does not cover preferences; it is only a promise for talks. “It is really a dialogue,” said Richard Mills, a spokesman for Robert B. Zoellick, the US Trade Representative, after the agreement was signed. “Sometimes you can have a TIFA with a country, and it can just lapse. It is not in itself a demonstrator of further moves.”

This does not sound like a warm endorsement of Washington’s desire, if it exists at all, to develop a strong trading relationship with Pakistan. Given this, Pakistan should not set high hopes on concluding a robust bilateral trade agreement with Washington by taking only the TIFA route. As suggested by the US trade officials themselves, such a route serves the purpose of dragging on a conversation when the will does not exist in Washington to make some hard choices. The hard choice, in the case of Pakistan, is to allow greater access to that country’s textile producers to do more business in the United States.

Textiles is by far the largest industry in Pakistan. It was the only industry that saw a steady increase in its output even in the 1990s. Textile and apparel industries increased the value added of their products by 5.6 per cent a year. In 2000, with output valued at $2.9 billion, this was by far the largest industry in the country. Besides, the industry employs hundreds of thousands of people around the country and has the potential of becoming an even more prominent player in the economy if its products could get a better access to the western markets.

If Washington was serious and if President George W. Bush wishes to use a small amount of his enormous political capital to help Pakistan he would have provided Pakistan’s textile producers greater access into the US’s large market. To do so would have meant overcoming the resistance of the legislators from the two Carolinas, North and South, that have large textile industries of their own. According to David Lowry, a professor of political science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the US president’s “support in North Carolina, and I’m sure it’s even more in South Carolina, is so rock solid that he could do anything to textiles and would have no impact on it.” But the American president has been reluctant to come out so openly in support of a country he has repeatedly called one of his most important allies in the war against international terrorism.

What should Pakistan do in these circumstances? While working with Washington within the TIFA context, it should continue to press very hard for gaining larger access for its textile products in the US market. In making a case for itself in this area, Islamabad should emphasize that by giving a slightly higher share to Pakistan in the US’s very large market for textile products, the impact on Pakistan would be enormous. It would create great goodwill for America in the country’s large cities, home to the country’s textile industry. America needs this goodwill in a Muslim country as important as Pakistan.

Pre-empting history

NOTHING succeeds like excess. Once the Americans had been tipped off that the sons of Saddam Hussain, Uday and Qusay, and it transpires a 14-year old grandson as well, were holed up in a house in Mosul, the combat-ready 101st Airborne Division swung into action.

In the words of Lt-Gen Ricardo Sanchez: “We had an infantry company. We deployed OH58 Delta Kiowa attack helicopters that come equipped with 2.75 inch rockets and machine guns. We had Humvees with TOW anti-tank systems. Humvees that were mounted with Mark 19 and 50 calibre machine guns, we also had AH64 Apache helicopters on station, however we did not use this capability. And also we had the Air Force on station with A-10s (tank busting aircraft) ready to be employed should the need arise.”

Clearly no chances were being taken. Who knew what sort of enemy was housed in the three-storey home? Obviously a formidable one, all of 4 persons, armed with AK-47s who must have put up a stiff resistance for the fire-fight lasted four-hours. This, apparently was not all. Lt-Gen Ricardo Sanchez discloses: “The coalition forces requested additional assets to include a ground reaction force and heavy weaponry given that we knew that we had a fortified site we were going to have to assault.”

Does the death of Saddam’s sons mean that the resistance to the coalition forces has been seriously weakened and should they get Saddam Hussain himself that Iraq will have really and truly been ‘liberated?’ We are getting two versions. The first is, and this contains a good deal of wishful thinking, that the resistance in Iraq is being put up by Saddam loyalists and once Saddam himself is ‘got’ it will collapse.

The other is that the resistance is the start of a full scale guerilla war. There is so much disinformation, so many lies being told that it has become virtually impossible to separate fact from fiction. Many of the battle scenes that we saw ‘live’ on our television sets had been pre-recorded and were the pictures of training exercises. According to a BBC documentary even the rescue operation of Jessica Lynch had been staged and there had been nothing like an assault in John Wayne style as she had simply been handed over by Iraqi doctors who had actually been looking after her.

There is, of course, much rejoicing in the camps of the coalition forces at the death of Saddam Hussain’s sons, representing a victory within a broader victory, President Bush having already announced the end of the military war in Iraq. No one wants any kind of war to continue in Iraq. There has to be a law of diminishing returns as far as human suffering is concerned and the Iraqi people have more than their share of hell. How much responsibility lies with a people for having leaders who are brutal tyrants? And should they be made to pay for it?

This is an extremely dangerous line of thought and not many people of the world would be comfortable with it. Not even the American and British people I would imagine and until the pre-emptive strike doctrine is recognised as being legal in international law, the war in Iraq remains an act that is no better than, say, breaking and entering.

Tony Blair who was in Hong Kong when he was told of the deaths of Saddam’s sons said that that was great news for the people of Iraq and then launched into a familiar diatribe against his regime. He cut short his visit by a day because of an impending typhoon but as one reporter observed he had put forward by a day the political storm that awaited him at home.

He had been in Japan when he had received the news of the death of Dr. David Kelley. He appeared visibly shaken. One would like to believe that it was because of the sorrow he felt for the good doctor rather than the danger he saw to his own political position and to the image of saintly integrity that his spin-doctors have so carefully cultivated, the unique selling proposition in the political marketing of New Labour.

The circumstances leading to the suicide of the 59-year old Dr Kelley, have, in one sense, diverted attention away from the central subject of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction and interest is focused on whether the Ministry of Defence or the BBC must bear the responsibility for his death and everything must wait for the judicial inquiry that has been set up. An optimistic guess makes this about two months and this is a long time in politics and who knows whether the British public can sustain their present concern? Politicians operate on the assumption that the public has short memories. The judicial inquiry is as much about finding the truth as it is about buying time.

History will forgive us, Tony Blair told the US Congress, even if no weapons of mass destruction are found. He is pre-empting history but it should not be history’s forgiveness he should be seeking but that of the families of thousands of Iraqi people who were killed in a war that was waged on false pretences if not outright deceit. A US Congressman appearing on BBC’s Hard Talk said with triumphant reasoning that if the weapons of mass destruction have not been found it does not mean that they do not exist. It is impossible to argue against a negative. If one’s aunt had a beard, she would be one’s uncle!

The Americans are hell-bent on saving the world and don’t need much convincing to make war. They, after all, invaded Grenada, ostensibly because some Cubans had been sighted on that island. But the British people were explicitly told about the imminent threat posed by Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Polly Toynbee of The Guardian appearing on BBC’s Dateline London disclosed that the briefing given to the journalists prior to the invasion of Iraq was so scarifying that all doubters were converted. Forget history, will the British people forgive their government that it led them up the garden path?

Afghan border skirmishes

IT is indeed ironic but by no means surprising that the Pakistan and Afghan forces which launched a joint operation under the supervision of the US military command against the remnants of Taliban and Al Qaeda militants along the southeastern border of Afghanistan during the third week of June have now ended up shooting at each other.

The Operation United Resolve was launched according to the plan decided at a tripartite meeting of American, Afghan and Pakistan officials in Islamabad on June 17. The three allies had vowed to fight the opponents of the Karzai regime who occasionally attack the occupying American and Western forces and their Afghan loyalists. Since Hamid Karzai and the US command believe that the attacks are carried out from the tribal areas of Pakistan which are used as a sanctuary by the insurgents, it is the primary responsibility of Islamabad to see to it that its territory is not used for any hostile operations inside Afghanistan.

At the behest of the US, Pakistan had to deploy around seventy thousand army and paramilitary troops to prevent cross-border incursions all along the Durand Line. The Pakistani troops would, in the course of the operation, enter the autonomous tribal areas. There are Pakhtoon tribes on both sides of the Durand line who have so far managed to preserve their independence by a delicate balancing act, playing off Kabul against the British Raj and later Pakistan.

Under the Sandeman scheme adopted during the last decade of the nineteenth century, the British Indian government guaranteed their local autonomy but exercised authority over the road and communications system. To appease the rebellious tribesmen, the government granted them regular subsides through its Political Agents who dealt with the tribal chiefs and often helped them informally in their day-to-day matters. They also mediated in tribal conflicts. This was done by the highly trained and tactful personnel of the Indian political service. Gen. Iskander Mirza belonged to this prestigious institution and served as Political Agent in the tribal areas during the British rule.

After the establishment of Pakistan the system of tribal administration continued but the Quaid-i-Azam took a bold initiative by ordering the withdrawal of the Pakistan troops from their forward positions in the tribal areas in order to win the confidence of the tribesmen. This step was all the more necessary in order to avoid any head-on collision with the Afghan forces. For any clash between Pakistani troops and the tribesmen could have spill-over effect on the other side of the Durand line; which is what happened during the recent combined operations against the militants.

During the midnight of July 11-12 the Afghan militia fired at Pakistan checkpost in Yakubi Kundau which continued till the next day while the helicopters flew overhead. The Afghan foreign minister, defence secretary and the governor of Nangarhar province all alleged that Pakistan forces had made incursions into the Afghan territory. The central government of Afghanistan hastened to send a team of surveyors to inquire into the incident. The Afghan surveyors reported that the Pakistan troops had not encroached upon the Afghan territory and were confined to their border.

But the Afghan commander Hazrat Ali and the Nangarhar governor Din Mohammad kept saying that Pakistani troops had advanced six hundred meters inside the Afghan territory. This allegation was rejected by General Musharraf’s spokesman, Major-General Sultan Shaukat, who counter-charged that no Afghan government had ever recognized the Durand line on the international frontier, while the prime minister of Pakistan replied that his country was large enough and did not covet the neighbour’s territory. Pakistan government proposed a joint Pak-Afghan team to investigate the matter.

In the meantime as news of the border clashes splashed across the media, an orchestrated propaganda campaign was launched by Afghanistan against Islamabad and violent Afghan mobs raided and ransacked the premises of the Pakistan embassy in Kabul, burned the national flag, attacked and injured the members of the diplomatic staff and other employees on July 8 under the nose of the Afghan police and security forces deployed there.

Pakistan government showed great restraint in the face of continuing agitation against alleged border violation in Mazar-i-Sharif, Kandahar, Uruzgan and Kanter. These demonstrations were led by Hamid Karzai’s brother in Kandahar, leaders of Ahmed Masood’s Shoora-i-Nizar, the members of the ruling coalition and other warlords.

In fact, the first salvo was fired by the Afghan President Hamid Karzai who lambasted his post-September 11 ally General Musharraf for saying that the writ of the Karzai regime did not run beyond Kabul. The Afghan president blamed Islamabad for rampant insurgency in his country.

In this he found reassurance in Zalmay Khalilzad, who accused Pakistan of not doing enough to eliminate the remnants of Taliban and Al Qaeda. He went on to say that the guerillas received arms and training in the tribal areas of Pakistan and carried out cross-border operations in Afghanistan. Unlike his boss, George Bush, Khalilzad is not satisfied with Islamabad’s contribution to Washington’s so-called war on terror and demands 100 per cent cooperation from Pakistan which at present, according to him, is mere 50 per cent. It is an irresponsible utterance by an American representative who attended the tripartite meeting at Kabul along with his counterparts from Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The US representative of the Afghan region, Khalilzad, should be reminded of the days during which the American CIA had been using Pakistan as conduit for cross-border raids into the Afghan territory. He must be knowing about this covert operation in which he was personally involved. He must also be knowing how tortuous is the 1400-mile border which can be surreptitiously crossed at many points and that no army can seal it completely. That is what the US used to tell the Soviet Union during the Afghan “war of liberation”.

The moral of the Afghan conflict is that foreign troops, especially, those belonging to white races, are unwelcome to the local population even if they masquerade themselves as saviours. And no Berlin wall can be built between Afghanistan and Pakistan. One thing more, let the US troops reckon with the insurgents if they so choose but they should not use Pakistan as cat’s paw. It is about time our rulers told this to Washington.

General Musharraf’s biggest mistake was to claim that his forces had advanced so far ahead into the tribal belt where no other army had reached during a century and a half. This bravado provoked the Afghan government into demanding the withdrawal of our troops to their previous positions. Here is where one has to acknowledge the foresight of the Quaid who ordered the Pakistan troops to withdraw from their forward positions.

In fact at some points the border is so tenuous that it is difficult to delimit it with accuracy. Asfandyar Wali, a nationalist leader, and a former minister, has recently observed that the place where clashes had occurred belonged to Afghans fifteen years ago. And this can be inferred from the tall claims of the Pakistani side that they had gone to places where no army had gone before!

In view of the sensitivity of the matter, Islamabad should be better advised to go slow in its hot pursuit of the terrorists lest it steps on the toes of its new found ally. In fact, it is the Americans who put Gen. Musharraf into this predicament. In future Islamabad should be cautious while making forays into the no-man’s land.

The cost for the Clintons

LAST week the special court that oversees the now-defunct independent counsel law batted back a request by former President Clinton and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, for more than $3.5 million in legal fees associated with the Whitewater investigation.

The old law allows the court to award fees to unindicted subjects of independent counsel probes when those fees would not have been incurred “but for” the investigation’s having been conducted by an independent counsel — as opposed to any other federal prosecutor. The court awarded the Clintons $85,000 for the fees they incurred responding to the independent counsel’s final report.

Yet all of the remaining fees, the three-judge panel quite absurdly ruled, would have been incurred even in the absence of Kenneth W. Starr’s long-running investigation: “We harbour no doubt that in the absence of the independent counsel statute the allegations surrounding the Clintons ... would have been similarly investigated and prosecuted by the Department of Justice.”

We doubt many readers can make it through that sentence without chuckling. Mr. Starr himself has conceded that he saw his role as conducting a particularly thorough investigation aimed not merely at prosecuting cases as a normal federal prosecutor would but at garnering and reporting the full truth of the allegations behind them.

—The Washington Post