HOW to turn Pakistan’s large and young population into an economic asset is a question I have asked in this column on a number of previous occasions. I come back to it today to add a bit more substance to the theory I have advanced earlier. I have been suggesting that a large and rapidly growing population such as the one in Pakistan need not become a burden if it can be educated and trained.

A well educated workforce is of tremendous use to the countries that have deliberately promoted the sectors of the economy that are dependent more on human skills than on capital equipment. This was the secret of the success of the “miracle economies” of East Asia in the last quarter of the 20th century. The same strategy is now being repeated with spectacular results by China at the start of the 21st century. Our neighbour India is not far behind. Its IT industry has created a large presence for itself in the world’s markets. In 2003, Indian IT exports were closer to $10 billion, almost equal to Pakistan’s total exports.

The Indians are now moving into a number of other areas that depend on the ready availability of a large number of highly skilled young people. They are now focusing on developing health services in order to provide support to the hard-pressed health sectors in the West, not just in the United States but also in Europe. They have also begun to do economic and financial analytical work for American and European firms that use relatively low priced Indian workforce to do what has come to be called “back office” operations. India now has tens of thousands of people answering telephones in hundreds of call centres scattered around the country.

Pakistan has the same demographic attributes as India but it has not taken advantage of the quiet revolution that is taking place in the structure of the global economy. If anything, Pakistan with continuing high rates of fertility, has a population even younger than that of India. Why hasn’t Pakistan fared as well in taking advantage of the opportunities created by this silent revolution? But to begin with, what is the nature of this revolution? It is the consequence of two developments.

The first development is what is perhaps best described as demographic asymmetry. While the populations of the developed world are rapidly ageing, a number of populous countries such as Pakistan continue to have very young populations. Our rate of fertility remains high. Although it has begun to decline it is not likely to reach for a while the level of 2.1 births per woman. It is at that level that populations attain a steady state, when the number of births equal the number of deaths. This level was reached by the West several decades ago. Now, most developed countries have much lower fertility rates. With fewer births than deaths, populations in several European countries and in Japan will begin to decline in size. It is imperative for these countries to turn to the world’s more populous nations with relatively younger populations to maintain a reasonable rate of economic growth. It is this demographic asymmetry that provides countries such as India and Pakistan windows of opportunities. India has opened this window for itself and is drawing enormous benefits already. The window remains closed for Pakistan.

The second development behind this revolution is a deep restructuring of the global economy with emphasis on the service sector — particularly the part of the sector that needs highly skilled people to produce the products demanded by the populations in the rich countries. Health, entertainment, and communications are the obvious examples of the growth of this kind of knowledge-intensive service industry.

In the articles written earlier on this subject — mostly before 9/11 I had suggested that preparing a segment of the Pakistani population for export should become an important component of our development strategy. In that way we could draw benefit from the quiet revolution described above. It is my view that the fears of “brain-drain” that had been put forward by a number of development economists in this context are not well founded. The reason is that the numbers of “brains” potentially available to large developing countries are many more than could be absorbed at home, in the domestic economies. They should be prepared for export.

The opportunity to export brains to the West, in particular to the United States, has been considerably reduced as a result of 9/11. Young people from Pakistan are finding it increasingly difficult to get visas that would allow them to work in the United States. There is an anti-immigration sentiment developing in Europe as well. This is particularly directed towards the migrants originating in Muslim countries. Does this mean that the window of opportunity created by demographic asymmetry has closed permanently for Pakistan whose citizens are faced with greater discrimination in the United States — the world’s largest market for highly skilled workers?

The answer is not necessarily so. Before explaining why policy planners in Pakistan should not give up on the strategy for exporting a part of its large human resource, it would be useful to go a bit deeper into the sources of resistance migration from the developing to the developed world is currently facing. Economics is almost always the main reason for bigotry. The anti-migration movement in western Europe has strong economic roots. There is a growing belief that migrants are putting pressure on the continent’s labour market. Although there is some substance in this fear, wrong conclusions are being drawn by a segment of the European society. Migration, as we will indicate at present, has brought new dynamism to the European economies. There is a possibility that today’s resentment against foreigners may translate into tomorrow’s gratitude for reviving the continent’s moribund economy.

The old European model was producing low rates of economic growth. In 2003, European economies will grow by only 0.5 per cent average and unemployment will hover around 8 to 9 per cent of the workforce. Such an anaemic growth rate will mean a decline in the real income of the poor. This decline will be exacerbated by a cut-back in social programmes to keep the national deficit within 3 per cent of gross domestic product as mandated by the latest treaty that bind the various European countries in the European Union. This one-to-two punch on the poorer segments of the population has fuelled the rise of anti-migration political right which has gained considerable traction from Denmark, to the Netherlands, to France, Italy and Spain.

But the same numbers on employment, wages and salaries point towards a rosier picture. In most mature economies of continental Europe, wage costs as percentage of the GDP have fallen quite dramatically, in large part because of the migrants’ willingness to work for less. In 1980, wages as per cent of GDP in the European Union were some five percentage points higher than in the United States, 75.2 per cent as against 70.7 per cent. The share of wages in national product was the highest in France (78.5 per cent) with Germany a little lower (74.5 per cent). Two decades later, in 2003, the EU average at 68.3 per cent is the same as that for America. The most dramatic decline has occurred in France, the country with the largest number of non-European migrants in the workforce. The wage to GDP ratio in France has declined to 67.6 per cent, a drop of 11 percentage points over this twenty year period. It is now below that of the United States.

This restructuring of the economy has made Europe once again competitive with the United States. Worker productivity is the other side of the coin; as the share of wages in GDP decline, labor productivity goes up. As Jean-Paul Fitoussi who runs the influential Paris based research center Observatoire Frangais de Conjectures Economique puts it, Europe as a result of the restructuring of the labor markets is now as competitive as the United States. “So the evidence does not readily support claims that the Continent is technologically behind. Exports from France and Germany, for example, are highly competitive with the rest of the world’s and, unlike the United States, both countries export much more than they import.”

While the realization that migration was bringing about a healthy change to the host economies was slow in coming to Europe, it was readily recognized in the United States that foreign workers had contributed significantly to the spectacular productivity growth in that country. The Americans were generous in admitting highly skilled workers into the country. One way of doing that was to grant H-1B visas to foreign high-tech workers in ever increasing numbers. In 2001, the limit on the number of visas in this class was increased to 195,000 by the US Congress. And then three things happened: in March 2001, the dotcom bubble burst, reducing the demand for tech workers; in September 2001, Muslim terrorists struck America, creating a deep suspicion against migrants from the Muslim world; and in 2002, the US economy went into recession putting a pressure on wages. The most immediate impact of all this was to turn the Americans against immigration; in particular against the immigration of young males from Muslim countries. Pakistan by far was the hardest hit country because of its proximity to Taliban’s Afghanistan. How has this change in the American sentiment materialized?

On September 30, Congress let the cap on H-IB visas issued to foreign high-tech workers shrink back to its old level of 65,000. Bills are pending in several state legislatures barring state government projects from using foreign high-tech workers. There is pressure on U.S. corporations not to outsource their work to the countries such as India.

But, it has now become apparent that skilled workers don’t have to leave home to provide their input for the products and services being produced by the West’s hi- tech industry and financial and medical institutions. The enormous amount of investment made by the large telecommunications companies in laying down fibre optic cables connecting different parts of the globe created capacity far beyond the demand for it. This has brought down the price of connectivity. Overseas cable costs have fallen as much as 80 per cent since 1999. This has made it possible to transmit huge amounts of data from corporate headquarters in the United States to companies doing outsourced work in the developing world. Mathew Slaughter, associate professor of business administration at Dartmouth College, says information technology work will “move faster [than manufacturers] because it’s easier to ship work across phone lines and put consultants on airplanes than it is ship bulky raw materials across borders and build factories and deal with tariffs and transformation.”

India is the current favourite for outsourcing and presents Pakistan with a model that it can replicate. India has more than half a million IT professionals. It is adding two million graduates a year, many of whom are attached to the IT sector. The starting salary of a software engineer in India is $500 a year, about one-eight to one-tenth in the US. This then is the route Pakistan should take but it will need a great deal of government attention and a considerable amount of public and private sectors investment in institutions of technology and high learning.

THE last time I rode through London on board prime minister Blair’s motorcade, it was a fairly low-key affair: a limousine for him, a people-carrier for his staff, a police support vehicle and a couple of cops on motorbikes to hold back lesser mortals.

Modest though this cavalcade was by the standards of many leaders, as we hurtled through the stopped traffic, a senior Blair aide groaned about its negative impact on members of the public watching as the prime minister swept them aside. The aide sighed: ‘I can’t help thinking that every time we do this we lose a thousand votes.’

If that worries them, consider how apprehensive they are inside Number 10 as they prepare to roll out the red carpet for George W. Bush. Downing Street people wonder how many votes will be flushed away each time the American president’s armoured column, complete with mobile arsenal, blood bank and resuscitation unit, brings London’s traffic to a halt. Ten thousand? A hundred thousand? A million? It’s impossible to be sure exactly how damaging George W. Bush’s state visit will be to Tony Blair. The answer may be that it will not be such a massive vote-loser as the critics anticipate if only because the harm done to the prime minister by this relationship is damage already inflicted.

It is easy to see the political advantages that Mr Bush hopes to extract from his three days in Britain. The feasting and flummery of a state visit is an honour that has strangely not been accorded to the 10 previous presidents of the Queen’s reign. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme commander of the Allied armies that liberated Europe from the Nazis, did not get this distinction. Margaret Thatcher did not wrap this ribbon around Ronald Reagan, her soulmate and fellow warrior of the cold war. We know why George W. Bush was so keen on a state visit because his election strategists have been completely unembarrassed about it. They freely chatter about the advantages of adding pictures of President Bush banqueting at Buck House to the international showreel they are preparing for next year’s contest for the White House. They want to present their candidate as well travelled abroad and well liked there, not the blundering gunslinger who has isolated America that is portrayed by his domestic opponents.

Their template is the re-election campaign of Reagan in 1984 and they mention how well it played for him to be filmed riding with the Queen. For the people of a proud republic, many Americans have a curious awe of Britain’s monarchy. At any rate, they are thought to do so by the people who run American election campaigns.

Added to that are the benefits to Mr Bush of being seen clasped close to Mr Blair, who is much more popular in the United States than he is here, and held in greater regard by a lot of centrist Americans than their own leader.

What possible upside the prime minister might derive from this visit is less immediately clear than its potential for embarrassment. Easy ammunition is provided to his anti-war critics such as Robin Cook, who speaks for a large segment of the Labour Party when he despairs that the prime minister should be ‘offering up Buckingham Palace as the mother of all photo-ops for President Bush’.

Many people in government have been wincing how much better it would be if there had been a way of calling the whole thing off. But among them is not Tony Blair. ‘I believe this is exactly the right time for him to come,’ the prime minister said last week, a statement of defiance which met widespread bemusement. Even if he were minded to, he cannot wriggle free of the ties that bind him to George Bush. The war in Iraq and the afterburn on the two men who made that war has left them dependent on each other.

For both prime minister and president, this transcends every other item straining at the relationship. It might do Mr Blair a power of good with those who accuse him of poodleism if he articulated some of the transatlantic differences during the Bush visit. I very much doubt he will. Blair does not like to ‘do rude’ to other leaders, and Bush takes rude exceptionally badly.

Their shared enterprise into Iraq is now a shared predicament which has strengthened rather than weakened the affinity between the two. Each says he admires in the other a straightness that he does not find elsewhere. When Bush says of Blair that ‘he is the least political person I’ve dealt with’, he means it as a compliment. For his part, Blair has regularly told confidants that he finds it much easier to deal with this American rather than the cleverer but more slippery Bill Clinton.

The judgments of history about their Iraq project, if not their electoral fortunes, are now bound together. Whether people around them much like it or not — and many on both sides of the Atlantic don’t — their fates have become entwined. More than six months after President Bush announced the war to be over, a declaration the more prudent Mr Blair never made, both men have domestic audiences deeply suspicious of the causes they gave for war and increasingly troubled by its consequences.

America’s embroilment becomes daily less popular in America. As the bodybags keep coming home, the shadow of Vietnam darkens over the campaign. Now, more than ever, George Bush needs to demonstrate to the United States that they are not alone in this enterprise. No one performs the role of stalwart friend better than Tony Blair. When American faith in their President’s judgment is fraying, more than ever he needs to show he still enjoys the maximalist support of the prime minister.

Bush needs Blair; Blair needs Bush. He is in too deep to extricate himself from this clasp, even if he wanted to. The prime minister’s second term is defined by the war in Iraq. That decision relegates anything else he has done since the last election and will do before the next one. Public-service reform is so fragile that his flagship foundation hospitals, already stripped down to near-irrelevancy though they are, are in high peril of being torpedoed in the House of Commons this week. His devotion to his European project remains as undimmed as ever, and as stalled as ever.

For good or ill, Iraq is the big item by which Blair’s second term will be judged. At the moment, the definition is nothing like as flattering as he assumed it would be in the immediate afterglow of victory. The fabled WMDs have proved as elusive as Saddam Hussein himself. The verdict of Hutton — to be expected, I’m told, on January 15 next year — hangs over the government.

The war can only become a Blair plus in the ledger of history if Iraq emerges from the present traumas as the civilized, cohesive, pluralistic democracy he has promised. That will demand sacrifice, patience and subtlety from the occupying forces. All three commodities seem to be running dangerously low on the American side as its electoral timetable kicks in.

The abrupt changes to the American exit strategy announced last week contained some adjustments welcome to the British, but it is much more alarming to Mr Blair if this presages an American scuttle from Iraq to get the boys and girls home before the next presidential election.

Bush and those who will demonstrate against his visit have, in this crucial sense, more in common with each other than they have with Tony Blair. Both the protesters and the president want to see US troops out of Iraq.

In the words of Blair, there is only the introduction of ‘some semblance of broad-based government’. Cutting and running from Iraq before his democratic vision for the country is fulfilled would be personal humiliation and political disaster in the eyes of both electorate and history. Much, much worse than the passing discomforts of having Bush in town.—Dawn/The Guardian service

OUR rulers, elected or un-elected, have a historic knack for acting in ways that evoke revulsion in the civilized world. Actions like the arrest and detention of Qazi Hussain Ahmed, the persecution of Asif Zardari, the shabby treatment meted out to Sharif family, the hounding of journalists, and now the incarceration of Javed Hashmi, have a common element — intimidation.

People in power in this country believe in eliminating their political opponents and evicting them from the political scene by smearing or breaking or exiling them. The constant nightmare of our rulers is that unless the voice of dissent is silenced, they can never feel secure.

Javed Hashmi’s case is a classic case of abuse of the judicial process for political ends. His arrest on charges of sedition and mutiny brought back memories of a bygone era. The Ali Brothers were put on trial in Karachi in 1921 on the charge of suborning the loyalty of soldiers. They combined ridicule with defiance in their defence. Very few people know that Mr. Jinnah appeared for Tilak charged with seditious libel in 1908. More famous is Mr. Jinnah’s defence of Bhagat Singh in the Central Legislative Assembly. Going through the record of the case, one is struck by Mr. Jinnah’s brilliant advocacy and his clear-cut views on political trials which are as relevant today as they were in 1929 and bear recalling.

It was 4 in the afternoon when Mr. Jinnah rose to speak in the Central Assembly on September 12, 1929. He had obviously toiled hard over his speech. By all contemporary accounts, his was a magnificent performance. His was one of the most powerful and effective speeches in the Central Legislative Assembly in defence of Bhagat Singh and his comrades. Bhagat Singh’s culpability in Saunder’s murder was not in question. That did not prevent Mr. Jinnah from exposing the farcical character of the trial and deliberate abuse of the judicial process to secure a death sentence. Jinnah did not approve of the action of Bhagat Singh. What he did was to raise the level of debate and went straight to the root cause of the trouble — “this damnable system of government which is resented by the people”.

He went on to say: “Do you think that any man wants to exceed the bounds of law for the purpose of making a speech which your law characterizes as a seditious speech, knowing full well the consequences, that he may have to go to jail for six months or a year? Do you think that this springs out of a mere joke or fun or resentment? Do you not realize yourself, if you open your eyes, that there is resentment, universal resentment, against your policy, against your program, against your government”.

He went on to say: “Sir, it reminds me of a story — an old Persian story. A man got stomach ache because he had eaten some very rotten bread. So he went to the doctor and told him that he had stomach ache. The doctor said, yes, and he promptly started treating his eyes. Then he said, “What have my eyes got to do with my complaint”? Then the doctor said, “Well, if you have eyes, you would never have got stomach ache because you would not have eaten rotten bread”. Similarly, I would say to Honorable the Home Member, “Have you got eyes? Well, if you had, you would never have got this stomach ache”. Now, will you open your eyes? Will you have a little more imagination? Have you got any statesmanship left? Have you got any political wisdom? This is not the way you are going to solve the root cause of the trouble. You may temporarily, provisionally, get over this particular trial. But now let us see what is the real cause of the trouble”...

“And the last words I wish to address to the government are: try and concentrate your mind on the root cause and the more you concentrate on the root cause, the less difficulties and inconveniences there will be for you to face, and thank heaven that the money of the taxpayer will not be wasted in prosecuting men, nay citizens, who are fighting and struggling for the freedom of their country”.

Speaking at a news conference, MNA Maimoona Hashmi said that her father, a member of parliament, president of the ARD and acting president PML(N) was being kept in solitary confinement and his whereabouts had not been made known to anyone, including his family for the last 12 days. The Speaker of the National Assembly had failed to issue his production orders due to pressure of the government. On November 10, the government produced, for the first time, a copy of the FIR. For some inexplicable reason, the court did not provide a copy of the FIR to the petitioner’s counsel but graciously allowed him to jot down the contents of the report. It took the counsel almost two hours to copy the FIR and two remand orders by hand! As a great American judge, Felix Frankfurter once remarked: “The history of liberty has been the history of observance of procedural safeguards”. In the case of Javed Hashmi, every safeguard guaranteed by law has been denied to the accused. It is a classic case of a regime’s attempt to incriminate its foe’s public behaviour with a view to evicting him from the political scene.

I first met Javed Hashmi at a cabinet meeting chaired by President Zia ul Haq in the 80s. I make no secret of my sympathies for Javed though my politics and his are poles apart. I don’t agree with all that he says but as Voltaire said, I will defend to the death his right to say it. History bears witness that whenever the ruling powers in our country, elected or unelected, took up arms against the Constitution and the fundamental rights of the citizens, the court rooms served as the most convenient and effective weapons. The authority of the courts is a force and it can be used, for both justice and injustice. In the hands of a just government it is the best means for attaining right and justice.

But for a repressive and tyrannical government, no other weapon is better suited for vengeance and injustice. Next to the battlefield, it is in the court rooms that some of the greatest acts of injustice in the history of the world have taken place. It is unfortunate that from the country’s first decade, our judges tried to match their constitutional ideals and legal language to the exigencies of current politics. It is our misfortune that the judiciary has often functioned at the behest of the authority and has been used to further the interests of the state against the citizens.

Their judgments have often supported the government of the day. This was their chosen path through the 1950s; during the Martial Law period of the 1960s and 1970s; under the mixed constitutional rule of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and persists till today. When the history of our benighted times comes to be written, it will be noted that the superior judiciary failed the country in its hour of greatest need.

After the fall of Nawaz Sharif, there was a glimmer of hope that intimidation of political opponents would be a thing of the past. Regrettably, that faint gleam of hope has faded away. President Musharraf and his government have adopted the same old tactics in order to browbeat their political opponents. Increasingly, Pakistan’s judicial system is viewed as one more arm with which to persecute political opponents. The law is used not as an instrument to afford the citizen protection but rather as the chief means of his subjection.

When government degenerates into tyranny, laws cease to be binding on its subjects resulting in anarchy. In the words of Palkivala, so long as there is a judiciary marked by rugged independence, the citizen’s liberties are safe even in the absence of cast iron guarantees in the Constitution. But once the judiciary becomes subservient to the executive and to the philosophy of the party for the time being in power, no enumeration of fundamental rights in the Constitution can be of any avail to the citizen, because the courts of justice would then be replaced by government courts.

The lesson of history is that when the dykes of law and justice break, revolutions begin. If Javed Hashmi has committed treason, which is yet to be proved, he must be punished. Treason, no matter who commits it, must not go unpunished and must not prosper, for if it does, none dare call it treason. These are times that try men’s souls. “The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity”. The summer soldier and sunshine patriot will in this crisis shrink from the service of his country, but he who serves it now deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.

The right to personal freedom is guaranteed in our Constitution but the proclamation of this right gives of itself but little security and the right has no more than nominal existence. There is no difficulty, and there is often very little gain, in declaring the existence of a right to personal freedom. The true difficulty is to secure its enforcement and to turn a merely nominal into an effective or real right. In England, the Habeas Corpus acts have achieved this end and have done for the liberty of Englishmen what the high-sounding declaration in our Constitution has failed to accomplish.

In the words of Mr. Jinnah, it is the system, this damnable system of government, which is the root cause and is resented by the people. The substance of power vests in the president who is also the Chief of Army Staff. He is not elected in accordance with the Constitution, is not accountable to the parliament, refuses to vacate his office as Army Chief and doff his uniform. Democracy is in limbo. Parliament is paralyzed. The opposition languishes in torpid impotence. The Constitution is a figment, accountability is a farce. There is apathy in the country. Silence is its accomplice.

This is not Pakistan. This is not the land of the free and home of the brave.