IF we have come to be regarded as a lawless society, should it not be the same case with our governments? I have all the reasons to suspect that there is something seriously wrong with our governments becoming increasingly wayward, violating the Constitution and the laws, breaking them with aplomb and impunity that they themselves have sworn to protect and follow. Here lies the biggest of all problems that the people of Pakistan are facing. This has created a serious situation in Sindh.

The reason is that the democratic credentials of the present government are suspect. The largest political party of the province has been marginalized through electoral fraud, manipulation and use of governmental machinery to reduce it to a minor position in the Assembly where it can only make lot of noise but nothing else. The point I want to emphasize here is that when the governments become lawless themselves, the general population cannot be persuaded to follow the laws for the good of society. A few examples will suffice to support this assertion.

Recently, minister of finance, government of Sindh moved a summary for the cabinet proposing amendments in the Sindh government rules of business 1986. Surprisingly, the preamble of the summary or its objective part eulogizes the government of Mr. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto saying that those rules were framed by ‘a democratic government in 1973’ and that a bureaucratic government under martial law framed the said (1986) rules which, it said, need to be amended.

The factual position is quite contrary to the stated one when one compares the relevant rules. In fact, the summary has gone beyond the 1973 Rules. It seeks to clip the powers of the chief minister and allows ministers more powers than what the 1973 rules had vested in them. It even seeks to empower advisers with powers of ministers though under the Constitution there is no provision for advisers in the provinces.

The amendment has made the chief minister helpless and the secretaries of the departments have been relegated to a position akin to private secretaries of their respective ministers. One can read a lot between the lines and see in what direction the present dispensation is leading the province. This has been made possible due to the undemocratic and unrepresentative nature of the coalition government in Sindh.

Once, not so long ago there was talk by the present head of the state of decentralization of power and ensuring checks and balances. Recently, it was reported in the press that the federal government has asked the provinces to establish independent prosecution services under the secretary, law department. The above amendments and other measures definitely run counter to that objective. There is no grain of independence and neutrality left among the civil servants.

For that matter all the major agencies have lost their spine after the referendum that ‘elected’ Gen Pervez Musharraf as the president. Come the devolution plan, and there started a scramble by the establishment to get the nazims of their choice elected. This meant utilizing the services of the civil servants to sabotage holding of fair and free elections. This was done and repeated during the general elections to National and the Provincial Assemblies held in October 2002.

The present government has made an administrative, financial and political mess in several districts of Sindh. See, how the smooth running of the local government has become chaotic. In Nawabshah, the district administration is being run by a couple of nominated advisers whereas all members of NA and the Provincial Assembly were elected on the PPPP ticket and the Nazim is a sister of Asif Ali Zardari who has been in jail for the past seven years. In Khairpur district, the nazim has popular support. In the number game, however, her support is being reduced by force through misuse of police. The government party is trying to oust the district nazims that do not fall in line and is harassing the councillors, forcing them to vote out such nazims.

In Naushahro Feroze district all the officials’ transfers and postings are made as desired by the nazim whereas several of his close relatives adorn treasury benches in the Senate and the Assemblies concentrating power in a closed group. Development schemes of the district have been given on the basis of their loyalty to the nazim. Space does not permit a detailed analysis. Just one example will suffice.

One recent sanction for a new road construction allocates Rs 15 million to the nazim’s family’s NA constituency schemes of low priority and Rs 5 million to my NA constituency. Police, particularly the investigation officials have been manipulating cases as per the wishes of the nazim and his party and harassing their opposition in order to settle scores. There is no let-up in partisan politics here. Complaints to Election Commission about rigging in election and misuse of power by police and other authorities are ignored. This is how law and order is undermined.

In fact, there is enough evidence to suggest that all this mess, though highly detrimental to stability and integrity of the country, is being created by the powers that be for the purpose of involving the people in district politics and to undermine national politics and political parties. Strong national and popular political parties and figures do not appear to suit the present government leaders. Divide and rule is the practice being followed. Apparently, the method of running the government in the aforesaid manner is inconsistent with the plan declared by Gen Pervez Musharraf after his coup of October 1999. A brief look here at his agenda will be in order. Those were:

1. Rebuild national confidence.

2. Strengthen the federation, remove provincial disharmony and restore national cohesion.

3. Revive the economy and restore investor confidence.

4. Ensure law and order and dispense speedy justice.

5. De-politicize state institutions.

6. Devolution of power to the grassroots level.

7. Ensuring swift and across the board accountability.

Unfortunately, after a passage of a couple of years every thing took a wrong direction. This has made life difficult for the common man and hurt economic activity. In Sindh the popularly elected party has been marginalized through rigged elections and by cobbling together a puppet government in the province. The result has been a negation of the popular will of the Sindhi people on major national issues such as the sharing of Indus waters. This has alienated the population from the governmental system. The federation has been weakened.

The state institutions have become more and more politicized. A coterie of politicians and bureaucrats has taken administration and politics hostage. The ‘districtization’ of Pakistan, which is what the devolution plan has come to mean, has proved a disaster turning Sindh into a battlefield. Obscure local politicians have been vested with vast administrative and financial authority. Recent bye-elections to the local bodies in Sindh have clearly shown that the rulers do not care for justice and fair play but instead want their own decisions to be foisted on the people. In Sindh at least, a single party state system has virtually taken over.

Thus either the promises of Gen Pervez Musharraf are fallacious or he is not concerned with what is going on under his government. This bodes ill for the country. The dark side of his rule in Sindh cannot be hidden from him. A swift change of policy to avoid a disastrous situation such as is looming large on Sindh’s horizon needs to be planned and implemented. Unless this is done effectively, all his points will be counter-productive and no good will come there from.

The writer is a member of the National Assembly.

I CONCLUDED last week’s column with a question: Now that new aid money was arriving in Pakistan to help reform the education sector, how should the government put it to use? This is not the first time Pakistan has received large amounts of donor dollars for the social sectors, including education. The last time this happened was under the aegis of the Social Action Programme sponsored by the World Bank. Then, several hundreds of million dollars of assistance was provided to help Pakistan develop its systems of education and health.

Now, half a dozen years later after the SAP monies were exhausted, even the World Bank admits that a good part of the aid provided by it and other donors was wasted. What went wrong with the SAP?

The SAP’s design had one major fault. It relied upon a dysfunctional bureaucratic system to deliver a series of well-intentioned objectives. That couldn’t — and didn’t — happen. The departments of education that became the principal implementing agents for the programme needed to be reformed before they could implement such an ambitious undertaking. As is now well known, in spite of the enormous amount of money provided for social development, Pakistan’s social indicators showed no improvement after the programme was over compared to the situation before its start.

The World Bank and the community of donors it had assembled to support the SAP recognized, midway through the implementation of the programme, that some corrections were needed to be made. To understand what was going on, it created a large implementation office as a part of its resident mission in Islamabad. That was not the right step to take since the Bank should have known, as its own documents had begun to recognize, that no programme aimed at bringing about massive social change can succeed without the full ownership and commitment of the recipient agencies. The Pakistani departments involved with implementing the SAP had shown neither.

This brief assessment of the SAP leads to another question. How the various policy-makers and opinion-makers in the country should be made to recognize that Pakistan is currently facing a major crisis in its social sectors, particularly in the sector of education? To get this recognition it would be useful to understand how the sector of education is currently structured.

Pakistan, in fact, has three parallel educational structures. The largest of these is the system of public education managed by the departments of education in the country’s four provinces and a number of autonomous universities funded, in part, by the public sector. I don’t have the numbers but I would imagine that about fourfifths of the population is served by this system. The quality of education provided is generally poor. There are some exceptions but these are at the tertiary level. At the primary and secondary level, the system is not doing a good job.

Largely as a response to the failure of the public educational system, space was created for “educational entrepreneurs” to enter the sector. The institutions they established were for profit. Hundreds — if not thousands — of schools were founded, mostly in the country’s large cities and mostly providing education based on curricula developed in the UK and the United States. These entrepreneurs also established some institutions in the tertiary sector. For some time there was a flurry of activity in the area of information technology but, following the collapse of the technology boom in America, there was considerable slackening of interest in this part of the educational sector.

The third segment of the educational system is made up of madressahs. While religious schools have existed for a long time in the subcontinent, they received a boost in the eighties when the US was interested in arming the Afghan mujahideen in their war against the occupation forces of the Soviet Union. These schools were not interested in teaching modern subjects; their main aim was to produce an army of young men deeply influenced by a highly conservative form of Islam. The graduates of these schools not only fought in Afghanistan but also participated in what they called jihads in Bosnia, Chechnya and Kashmir. It appears from some newspaper accounts, that the madressa trained young men are behind some of the suicide bombings in recent months.

According to one account, “of the four suspects named in the bombings that traumatized Istanbul, three hailed from Bingol, a gritty mountain town about 1,000 miles away in Turkey’s eastern mountains. Notably religious, each of these suspects bore the markers of Islamic militancy familiar in biographies of suicide bombers, including travel to Pakistan for religious training.” It is clear that the government in Pakistan has to regulate these madressahs in order to ensure that they don’t keep on producing dysfunctional youth as their graduates who damage our reputation abroad and have the potential to cause us hurt at home.

Much of the new money coming into education is likely to be spent on primary schools, both in the public sector and in the reform of the madressahs system. Is this the right way to obtain the best results from this additional resource? I am of the view that in using this new resource the government should come up with a holistic approach that touches on the entire sector of education and not just primary schools.

The emphasis on primary education is laudable provided this form of instruction is seen as one small part of the process of educating and training people to participate not only in their own economic betterment. They must also play an important role in the economic and social modernization of the countries to which they belong. By just focusing on primary education, governments in the developing world are not preparing their people for taking advantage of the opportunities offered by the evolution of what is sometimes called the “new economy.”

A recent World Bank report, “Constructing Knowledge Societies: New Challenges for Tertiary Education,” accepts some of the criticism levied against it by some practitioners of development. “The Bank is commonly viewed as supporting only basic education; systematically advocating the reallocation of public expenditures from tertiary to basic education; promoting cost recovery and private sector expansion, and discouraging low-income countries from considering any investment in advanced human capital.” The Bank, by implication, accepted the need for reorienting its approach.

Broadening the scope of intervention in the sector of education has acquired great importance in view of the significant changes that have occurred in the global economy in the closing years of the 20th century. These changes have opened new opportunities for developing countries. Knowledge has become the most important contributor to economic development. A recent study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development concluded that underlying long-term growth rates in rich countries depend on maintaining and expanding the knowledge base. The same conclusion was reached by the World Bank’s “World Development Report 1985/1999,” according to which “today’s most technologically advanced economies are truly knowledge-based. . . creating millions of knowledge related jobs in an array of disciplines that have emerged overnight.”

These conclusions are supported by some recent trends. For instance, in the world’s more developed countries, growth of value added for the 1986-94 period was three per cent for knowledge industries compared with only 2.3 per cent for the business sector, as a whole. Between 1985 and 1997, the share of knowledge-based industries in total value added rose from 51 to 59 per cent in Germany, from 45 to 51 per cent in the United Kingdom, and from 34 to 42 per cent in Finland.

Another indication of how knowledge is changing the fortunes of many countries across the globe is to look at the composition of goods traded among nations. The proportion of goods in international trade with a medium-high or high level of technology content rose from 33 per cent in 1976 to as much as 54 per cent in 1996. The message conveyed by these numbers is clear: today, economic growth is as much a process of knowledge accumulation as of capital accumulation. In rich countries, investment in the intangibles that make up the knowledge base — education, software development, research and development — now exceeds investment in physical equipment. Again, the message policy-makers should receive from this finding is that they should shift their focus from capital accumulation as such to policies that promote the use of capital and labour in a more productive way. This can only happen with an improvement in society’s base of knowledge.

Some lessons can be drawn from the experience of one developing country that used education to bring about not only an acceleration in economic growth but also to become an important player in the new global economic system. The country that has achieved this is South Korea. The Korean government, while ensuring a move towards universal primary education, also focused on developing tertiary education. This was done in four phases, each planned with great foresight. In the first phase, in the 1950s, the Koreans expanded tertiary education in the public sector but with some cost sharing. While 70 per cent of the cost was met from the government’s budget, 30 per cent came from the tuitions charged from students.

In the 1960s, the Korean government encouraged the establishment of private institutions, with limited public funding for capital costs and scholarships. In the 1970s and 1980s, the government turned its attention to the expansion of engineering and technical education to meet the manpower requirements of an economy that was rapidly modernizing. Finally, in the 1990s, the government focused on improving the quality of research and development while introducing performance-based funding of all educational institutions, public and private.

The government of Pakistan should take its cue from a country such as Korea that successfully modernized its economy by developing its human resource. As Seoul did, Islamabad should also turn its attention to all aspects of educational development. It should move the country as quickly as possible towards universal primary education for both boys and girls and in all regions of the country. This should be done with the help of the recently empowered local governments which should be given the funds, based on their performance measured against established goals.

The government should aggressively move towards the reform of the madressa system and not limit its intervention to registering these institutions. They should be made to follow a core curriculum in addition to providing religious education.

Finally, the development of the tertiary education needs to be addressed. In 1995, only three per cent of the relevant cohort was in tertiary institutions in Pakistan compared to 6.6 per cent in India. In the same year, India spent 13.7 per cent of the public sector expenditure in education on the institutions devoted to tertiary education. The comparable figure for Pakistan was only 4.0 per cent. Pakistan, therefore, has to go a long way before it begins to catch up with its neighbour. My main point is that the new donor dollar should be spent wisely and a part of it should go to reforming the entire educational system and not just improving access to primary education.

THE ever-increasing resistance to foreign occupation in Iraq is becoming deadlier by the day. Ordinary Iraqis are increasingly siding with forces of resistance. Not only Iraqis, but a large number of people all over the world, including those in the United States, doubt the US ability to stamp out the resistance by the people of the occupied country.

Certainly, the Iraqis are not going to be intimidated. They have demonstrated that they are able to strike at US forces with painful consequences for the latter. Hostility towards the US is increasing. Tactics used by the US military, such as aggressive raids aimed at weeding out insurgents, have proved counter-productive. How can the support of people be secured by kicking their doors and asking for their cooperation.

Now a new US military offensive called “Operation Iraq Hammer” has been launched. This includes firing satellite guided missiles with 500 pounds war-heads, in addition to using tanks and armoured vehicles. The new get-tough policy is likely to make the situation spin out of control.

Apart from earlier bombings and shooting down of helicopters, more than two dozen people, including 18 Italians, were killed recently. It was the deadliest attack suffered by non-American coalition forces since the occupation began in April. According to a report by Mines Advisory Group, 172 US and British soldiers were killed during the war (March 20 to May 1) and another 222 died between May 2 and October 20. Mounting US casualties have gone much beyond that figure since May 1 when Bush declared the end of the war.

The same report says between 21,000 and 55,000 people have died as a result of the US-led offensive. The health of the Iraqi people is generally worse than before the war. Women and children are particularly at risk because of the breakdown of law and order and damage to infrastructure.

An intelligence report has painted a grim picture of the political and security situation in Iraq. It says that events so far have proved that Iraqis have no faith in the Americans and are disillusioned. So is the case with the rest of the world, particularly the people of the region. The report concludes with the remarks that a rapid transfer of power to the people of Iraq is the only way to protect the security of the country and the region and indeed international peace.

Large numbers of people all over the world who said “No” to the war against Iraq were dead right when one sees the shambles created after Saddam’s disappearance. The European Union has been asking for a swift restoration of Iraqi sovereignty and greater UN involvement. The French believe that “only a political approach” would resolve the current difficulties. Right from the beginning Germany has been leading the opposition to war and now expects the US to rethink its exit strategy in favour of a speedier withdrawal.

Having taken the so-called pre-emptive action in Iraq, Bush continues to ignore the advice from the EU, UN and some members of the US Congress. He needs the UN help only as a legitimizing cover for occupation. He said the other day that the US-led coalition would not yield control of Iraq until free elections were held under a new Iraqi constitution framed. Bush said, “The Iraqis need to develop a constitution and then have free elections ... and then we deal with the sovereignty issue.” The latest statement on the subject says that coalition forces will stay in Iraq even after handing over power.

Bush wants to defeat terrorism before giving authority to the Iraqis over their own country. Does he realize that what he calls terrorism and the resulting crises is his administration’s own making?

The Iraqi governing council had declared that Iraq will have a new transitional government with full sovereign powers by the end of June 2004 and will have a constitution and a democratically elected government by the end of 2005. The US-led Provisional Authority will be dissolved and the state of occupation will end. The Bush administration seems to insist however that any transfer of power must include arrangements for continued US and international military presence in the country.

Paul Bremer, the top US administrator in Iraq, paid a visit to Washington recently to consult President Bush and his advisers, saying that “we are in a very tense period in Iraq”. Several options to move forward were considered, as Bush administration is getting worried about lack of progress by American appointed Iraqi governing council in producing a new constitution and holding elections. The Afghan model of nominating an interim leader who would have the authority to govern Iraq until a new constitution was written and elections held was also considered. This too is fraught with risks, as can be seen in the situation prevailing in Afghanistan today.

Paul Bremer is now back in Baghdad and apparently the time schedule mentioned above has been agreed upon. The conditions for the restoration of sovereignty remain unsettled as US forces will continue to stay after elections are held and an elected government is installed.

Remarks made by Javier Solana, the EU’s foreign policy chief, who speaks for 15 governments, deserves serious consideration by those who formulate US policies. He says, “Nothing can be solved without a political dimension and a rapid transfer of sovereignty to the Iraqis. It is not a question of sending more troops but taking a political decision. The soldiers are seen as an occupying force: that must change.”

US Defence Secretary gives no indication of reducing the deployment of US troops abroad. In South Korea there are 37,000 US troops against which demonstrations by South Koreans, have started. There are 50,000 American forces in Japan, with two-thirds of that based in Okinawa. The US military presence in Okinawa has sparked strong opposition from the Japanese since 1995 rape of a 12-year-old school girl by three US marines. There are more than one thousand American troops in Mindanao, the Philippines, to crush the freedom movement launched by the Muslims of that area.

In fact, in the light of the remarks by Javier Solana, the US leadership must rethink and reshape their international policy of maintaining the continued presence of American troops outside the United States. That is the only way to ensure peaceful conditions in the world and solve problems faced by people, particularly in the underdeveloped countries.

The writer is a retired major-general of the Pakistan army

e-mail: genumar@yahoo.com

CEASEFIRE! Will it hold? Both Pakistan and India are being cautious, both see it as a first step rather than a giant leap forward. Pakistan took the initiative but made it clear that the ceasefire along the LoC was without prejudice to its principled stand on Kashmir.

The Indians are muttering about cross-border terrorism. But the villagers on either side of the LoC must be relieved that the shelling has stopped and for the time being, the artillery guns have been silenced.

Both countries are nuclear powers and this would suggest that war is not an option. Ironic that the possession of weapons of total destruction should be a guarantee of peace. Not the fact that wars are wasteful both in human lives and resources. But it is a fragile guarantee for wars can be started by accident or through an act of lunacy.

The fact remains that since Hiroshima and Nagasaki atom bombs have not been used though nuclear arsenals have been built up. It is chilling to recall that Eisenhower offered the French nuclear bombs in their last ditch stand in French Indo-China and Nixon toyed with the idea of using them in Vietnam and there was the Cuban missiles crisis which was a close call. But peace should be based on something else other than the reality of mutual destruction, what H. G. Wells, long before the nuclear age, had called “a victory of the dying over the dead.”

The LoC ceasefire should be considered as a kind of deposit and an earnest peace process must begin. Both countries must undergo a detoxification programme so that the poison is drained out and the healing can get started. It is not going to happen overnight. There is a backlog of 55 years of hatred that has to be disposed off. What is bred in the bones must come out in the flesh.

Consider simply this outrageously frivolous answer given by the Indian fast bowler Jagaval Srinath who has announced his retirement. Asked what was his most memorable achievement in a long and distinguished career, he said that it was beating Pakistan in three World Cup matches. It was a political answer to a cricket question. He was giving vent to feelings that went beyond cricket rivalry. This is the mindset that has to be changed, an instinctive hostility to any thing Pakistani.

This mindset exists in Pakistan as well. And why shouldn’t it? We have both tampered with history. I went to a British school and it has taken me a long time to unlearn the history that I was taught. I read about the Black Hole of Calcutta but not about Jallianwalla Bagh. About the good deeds of the British and their civilising presence but not of the plunder and how heavily they sat on the back of the natives.

The white man’s burden was enlightenment even though the brown man carried it. It is reasonable to assume that the text books in India and Pakistan would be no better, would be half-truths passed off as whole truths. Jinnah would be a villain in one country as Gandhi would be in ours and television channels spew hatred. It’s going to be a long haul, this unlearning process.

The Americans are trying hard to understand why there is so much anti-Americanism. We in Pakistan and India must make the same effort. We may come up with some political answers but we will have to go deeper. There is no natural law that makes us hate our neighbours. There is today a European Union and discussions are going on for a European constitution in which even a common foreign policy is being considered. Yet Europe is where the two world wars started.

Why this turn about? National self-interests. Each European country stands to gain by this cooperation, stands to lose by isolation. The case for a community of interests in South Asia is a compelling one but it is stymied because India and Pakistan are at loggerheads.

But there is no way of getting away from the fact that the Kashmir dispute will have to be resolved and the Kashmiri people will be the ultimate arbiters of their destiny. The winds of change are raging at gale-force. The status quo has become untenable. India’s claim that Kashmir is an integral part of India defies logic. In which other part of India is there a military presence of thousands of soldiers?

They are performing a police function, they are putting down an insurgency as surely as the coalition armies are doing in Iraq. Why should there be an occupation force in a region that is an integral part of India? Thousand of people have died, thousands rendered homeless. Would this suggest peace and contentment? Look at what happened in Georgia. It should provide a sobering lesson.

An estimated hundred thousand people took part in a march in London on the occasion of President Bush’s visit. These were people who were sick and tired of the war in Iraq. There is a hunger for peace all over the world. It would be foolish to believe that there is no such hunger in India and Pakistan. The people of both countries have come to understand that the continued hostility will only bring more misery. It will not put food on the table.

The ceasefire should be seen as a window of opportunity. It will not hold unless immediate steps are not taken to move the peace process forward. Now is not the time for “ detailed preparations done first at a lower level” as the Indian Foreign Minister Yahswant Sinha is proposing. This is bureaucratic in the way that a camel is a horse designed by a committee. This is the time for leadership, of seizing the day.