| 09 February 2004 | Monday | 17 Zilhaj 1424 |
The cost of ignorance
Militarization of civil society
Ever since the US emerged as a superpower at the end of the Second World War, the annual State of the Union address by the US presidents to Congress has been followed closely by the international community. It has been used not only to reassure the country about the success of the administration's domestic and foreign policies, but also to spell out its prescriptions and plans to deal with the world's problems.
President Bush's address on January 20, 2004 was basically concerned with his re-election, so that large parts were not applauded by the opposition Democrats. There was some disappointment in the international community, notably in Europe, over the return to unilateralist rhetoric, after signs that some lessons had been learnt from the pre-emption in Iraq.
Both in terms of its military success, as well as the justification for the resort to war, the US government had not escaped unaffected by the barrage of criticism Prime Minister Blair had faced in Britain.
Evidence had accumulated that President Bush had exaggerated the threat from Saddam Hussein's regime, when in the State of the Union speech of 2003 he had referred to the evidence of the purchase of uranium by Iraq from Africa.
Bush had also dramatized the threat from weapons of mass destruction being developed by the Baathist regime in Iraq. After the military victory, which was inevitable given the US edge in quantity and quality, the Coalition forces faced growing resistance, with the US suffering higher casualties than during the war itself.
This led to a decision in November to hand over power to an interim Iraqi government that would also assume the main responsibility for internal security through vastly expanded Iraqi police and paramilitary forces.
With the justification for launching the war in tatters after failure to find any weapons of mass destruction, and Iraqi resistance taking a mounting toll of US lives, a growing number of voices within the US and abroad became highly critical of the doctrine of pre-emption, specially as Saddam Hussein remained at large, and even Afghanistan had not been pacified after two years.
The need to associate the UN, both with peace-keeping and reconstruction in Iraq was realized as US efforts to persuade other countries to send forces to Iraq got nowhere. Though the Turkish parliament agreed to send Turkish forces, the Iraqi governing council vetoed the idea.
Secretary General Kofi Annan is sending a mission to Iraq to see whether the security situation will permit the sending back of a UN mission. Partly to reduce pressure on the US forces, and partly to accommodate the demand for a greater UN role in Iraq, the US was seen as ready to entrust a much larger role to the UN as late as November 2003. The neocons appeared to be in retreat.
A couple of dramatic developments in December have given a new lease of life to the advocates of pre-emption. These included the capture of Saddam on December 13 and the announcement a week later that Col.
Qadhafi had agreed not only to open his programmes of WMD to inspection but also to terminate them. Though a columnist in the New York Times pointed out that Qadhafi's compliance had been secured through diplomatic negotiations over nine months, in which certain carrots were also offered, the neocons have drawn the conclusion that unilateralism works.
President Bush has adopted a strident tone in the State of the Union speech, calling on other countries allegedly building WMDs such as Iran, Syria and North Korea to follow suit, affirming that the US reserves the right to act alone if it has genuine security concerns.
Though he has referred to the role expected of the UN, the impression that emerges from the address is that his unilateralist approach that has been criticized both by European allies and the international community at large would be retained.
This strategy is considered to be a key plank in the high rating he has enjoyed for handling the war against terrorism. This rating went up after the events of December, and the raising of the threat level in the US over the Christmas and New Year season.
So long as he projects himself as the determined commander-in-chief of a country at war with a continuing terrorist threat, he and the neocons around him believe he will be unassailable for re-election.
The fact that intelligence reports were misused and the threat of Saddam's WMDs overplayed to justify the war in Iraq is being downplayed, though it is bound to figure in the election campaign until November.
Many analysts noted that the State of the Union address highlighted the successes achieved by the Bush administration, notably in ensuring national security, but did not contain any ideas on dealing with issues that remain unresolved.
There was hardly any mention of Palestine, where the US has the most important challenge in promoting peace, and in winning the hearts and minds of the people of the Middle East.
The address was also found wanting in outlining US plans for fighting the real problems of the world, where the US record is considered wanting, as evident from the outcome of the Cancun meeting of WTO.
Though the Bush strategists may feel confident about carrying majority support in the election in November, the war in Iraq has not been going well, with mounting US casualties.
There may be many problems relating to the manner in which an Iraqi government will be formed in July this year, notably as the US-proposed method of regional caucuses has found little acceptance, and direct elections have been demanded.
It is not clear how the US can divest itself of its military role, as Iraqi police and security forces may not be ready to deal with the insurgency by July. Ethnic tensions are rising, with Shias and Kurds keen to control the areas they inhabit.
As much of the flak from the opposition Democrats has been coming on the domestic performance of the Republicans, President Bush has sought to paint a rosy picture of the country's economy. The rate of growth in the third quarter of 2003 was claimed to be 8.2 per cent, highest in over a decade. President Bush also defended his tax cut and urged the Congress to keep it in force.
However critics of the administration point to the budget deficit, now likely to exceed $500 billion. They also maintain that the tax cut favoured the rich, a person with a million dollar income saving $20,000 in taxes, whereas a family earning $30,000 got relief of only $47.
Over three million jobs had been lost since Bush took power, and there had been no significant growth in employment despite the economic growth that was benefiting the rich.
Even the social action programmes of President Bush have drawn criticism. The Medicare reform has not extended medical insurance to several million Americans, and the main benefit has gone to the drug companies. Similarly, the Democrats have been critical that while insisting that no children would be left behind in the school system, the administration did not provide adequate funding to achieve that.
Taking the thrust of the State of the Union speech, it is mainly concerned with the Bush campaign for re-election, and does not strike the broader note expected from the leader of the sole superpower.
In the context of security, the influence of the neocons appears to dominate, after the successes claimed for the Bush doctrine during 2003. On present indications, a second Bush term would witness a pre-occupation with maintaining US hegemony, rather than addressing the real issues of poverty, disease and backwardness.
The speech hardly encourages optimism that the role of multilateral institutions would be strengthened. Though the prospects of a Bush victory may appear bright at present, the Democrats will use every stratagem to defeat him. That is what democracy is all about.
The writer is a former ambassador.
The cost of ignorance
In Pakistan, everyone teaches, and yet no one learns. Can one support that contention with a statistic? Admittedly not, for the obvious reason that a nation that does not know the size of its own population can hardly be in a position to determine the extent of its own ignorance.
The government traditionally uses the ability to sign one's own name as a measure of literacy. The public uses another measure. It gauges the level of literacy in the country from the uncouth behaviour of its elected representatives in the national and provincial assemblies, all of whom are supposed to be university graduates.
And by that yardstick, there are some members of the public who feel that such inept legislators should be punished for being elected under false pretences, and their former teachers arrested for inflicting permanent damage to public property.
Had the illiterate in Pakistan been at the geriatric end of the population spectrum, as occurred for example thirty years ago in countries like India, China, Malaysia, and Thailand, the situation might not have been so sinister. The uneducated would have gradually died out and been replaced by a better-educated generation of fresh, younger citizens.
In Pakistan today, the situation might almost be said to be the reverse. An older generation, better educated than its successors, is gradually being depleted and finds itself being substituted by a breed of semi-literates.
The fault - and it is a grievous fault - is not that of the young. Youth may make a poor pupil, but it cannot be expected to be also its own teacher. That responsibility devolves on every government as the parent of the state and upon every generation that goes before.
Ever since the 1980s, this responsibility has been abdicated successively by each government. It is now being flouted by the private sector, which sees education as less a vocation than a commercial business, a continuous production line, a single-shift (an occasionally double-shift) factory that spins illiteracy and weaves ignorance.
The first generation of Pakistanis that was middle-aged or older at the time of independence is now in its grave. The second generation is preparing for it. The third has yet to address the problem, and the next generation flounders in search of a solution to its predicament.
That solution can never be a foreign curriculum. If following a Cambridge curriculum was the answer, more enlightened nations than ours would have adopted it more extensively, rather than moving away from it, as Malaysia and India have done, to name only two ex-colonies. Even countries with smaller populations than Pakistan have had the self-respect to develop their own curriculum, tailored to their own national needs and objectives.
Over here, education is gradually breeding a caste system as rigid and uncompromising as that of the orthodox Hindus. The Brahmins go to English-medium schools and then go abroad for higher studies; the Kashatriyas go to army schools and then to military academies; the Vaisyas go to Urdu medium schools or madressahs; and the untouchables get the education they cannot pay for.
One argument put forward for the perpetuation of this stratification is that our children will not get places in foreign universities unless they have a qualification at the secondary level that is internationally recognized. Had that argument possessed any validity, the Indians would never have secured places in American or British universities.
And yet, to take just the figures of Indians studying at US universities in the year 2000-1, the ratio of post-graduate students to undergraduates is just over more than 3:1.
India has sent 39,797 graduates abroad for post-graduate studies and only 12,259 for graduate studies. During that same year 2000-1, Pakistan sent 4,478 students for undergraduate studies and less than half that number - 2175 - at the post-graduate level.
These may seem like only numbers until one attaches a cost to them. According to a conservative survey, a foreign student enrolled in the US costs his parents an average of $20,000 each year.
It is true that this figure may vary from college to college, state to state. It is equally true that some fortunates get scholarships, others support themselves.
The bulk of them though rely upon their families for financial aid. For a four-year undergraduate programme, therefore, the outlay would be $80,000, with another $40,000 should the student wish to continue into the post-graduate level. A Pakistani Brahmin parent would be expected to arrange between $100,000 to $120,000 to have his child educated in foreign sastras.
Multiply that figure by 6,250 being the number of student visas issued by the US Embassy in Islamabad last scholastic year, and add by another multiple of 6,134 student visas by the British High Commission here, and you have a vision of what it costs to educate our upper classes.
Even by the most conservative calculation of 12,000 students spending only $50,000 over the period of their studies, our country is paying out $600,000,000 every four years. Think how many universities that could build. Think how many faculty members that could pay for. Think how much better equipped the student might be to contribute within his own community. Just think.
There will undoubtedly be person who will cite the universities that are mushrooming all over the country. The Higher Education Commission purports to approve and to regulate them. The provincial governments encourage them and often grant charters that have as little value as the degrees awarded on the strength of that charter.
New private universities to qualify for a charter must show that they have a plot of land upon which they already have or plan to build a campus. This explains why so many of the fledgling universities are located on the outskirts of cities, distant, inaccessible and detached from the life of the community they are designed to nourish with their output. They subsist in every sense on the periphery of society.
And what is that output? Lawyers, engineers, economists, commerce graduates, IT specialists, MBAs, and now Accounting hopefuls. The order of this list is deliberate for it mirrors the specializations that achieved popularity, became overcrowded, waned and then yielded place to a newer fashion. As each batch entered the job market it swelled the ranks of the unemployed, because each batch was for all practical purposes unemployable.
The chronic state of mismatch between these mind-processing plants and the market into which they were being dumped is relived every time a candidate applies for a job, and then reveals during the interview how woefully unprepared he or she is to do it.
The recent interviews conducted by a committee to select a fresh batch of trainee officers for induction into the State Bank of Pakistan might provide an insight into their predicament.
Against forty or so vacancies, over 6,000 applicants sent in their resumes from all over the country. They were required to undergo a written test and out of the successfuls, about 280 were shortlisted for interview. All of them were graduates or higher.
The answers given by some during the interviews were memorable. Many knew nothing about the functions of the State Bank, others had not bothered to consult its website. Some could not describe the main elements of a bank's balance sheet, and one when asked what were that assets of a bank, replied in an unwitting extension of Mr Bhutto's forcible nationalization of banks: 'The assets of bank are ...the contents of its lockers.'
In an age when places in universities are limited, in an age when universities themselves are limited, in an age when jobs are limited, in an age when the future appears bleak and limited, an unemployed under-educated young man could be forgiven for not putting his faith in the power of his education. He had not failed his studies; it was his education that had failed him.
Militarization of civil society
One of the most significant developments that have taken place during the last 20 years in the employment sector in Pakistan, is the gradual and almost subliminal militarizing of civil society.
The public is no longer surprised when it hears that a retired general, admiral or air marshal has been appointed to head one of the country's utilities or corporations, or to represent the flag abroad - sinecures that have been traditionally the preserve of the civil or foreign service.
At first the intrusions were slow and cautious, and the officers felt it prudent to test the temperature of the water, before taking a dip in the lake. But as time passed, all caution was thrown to the wind. The dips became longer and more frequent as programmatic changes altered the elemental moorings.
The process had its genesis in Ayub Khan who, while still in his starched battle fatigues, was appointed defence minister in 1953, in the shaky cabinet of Mohammed Ali Bogra.
Who could have predicted at the time that five years later this secular, progressive soldier would turn the 1956 constitution on its head and take over the stewardship of the country? However, it must be said that with one or two rare exceptions, the military was in those days, largely confined to the barracks, and hadn't yet been given the opportunity to try out its marketing and managerial skills in the public sector.
But with the rise to power of the retrogressive and obscurantist dictator, Ziaul-Haq, the military discovered how easy it was to dig its own tributary and divert it to the mainstream of civilian employment. Between 1980 and 1985, according to published figures, 211 officers from the armed forces were inducted into the central superior services. The die had been cast. But as subsequent events proved, this was only a trickle.
When the secular, progressive Pervez Musharraf took over and made the usual gestures and promises, what began as a trickle turned into a regular flow, and the tributary started to overflow its banks. During the four-year period after 1999, this newspaper recorded that 1027 personnel from the fighting forces had been inducted into jobs previously reserved for civilians.
There was a temporary mopping up in October 2002, when around 400 serving officers either returned to military service, or left because their contracts had been terminated.
But this aberration had not really affected the trend which continued unabated. What made some of the senior civil servants wince, was the fact that when the wholesale induction of the men in uniform took place, there were around 700 surplus civilian employees, waiting to be given a posting.
The increasing militarization of society in Pakistan and the regular inroads into the civilian job market by the men in uniform has caused considerable resentment among the people.
This has led to a political polarization which is both undesirable and dangerous, as it has unnecessarily brought the fighting forces into disrepute and tarnished their image. Politicians, particularly those that represent the views of the minority provinces, have repeatedly pointed out that the military brass should stick to the jobs for which they were recruited, and that incursions into areas which have always been the preserve of the civilians, might ultimately affect their professionalism.
The armed forces were hired to defend the first ideological state of the Muslim world against foreign aggression. And even in this area, according to the politicians, who have formed their value judgments mainly on the experiences of the 1965 and 1971 wars with India, they have not distinguished themselves in any special way.
Why didn't the gallant forces of the republic press their advantage in 1965, when they had a numerical and material superiority in Khem Kharan, Chawinda and Chamb, the critics want to know.
The armed forces were certainly not hired to start upper class housing societies, clubs, banks, schools, airlines, security services, co-operative farms, leasing companies and enterprises like the NLC, which have actually hurt the government, by diverting freight from the railways to road transport, not to mention industrial and commercial enterprises, worth over five billion dollars.
The politicians are now rubbing salt into the wound by maintaining that it is no longer the fighting forces that are giving the country a semblance of security, but the nuclear programme initiated by Nawaz Sharif.
If one looks at the issue in the cold light of reason, one would probably come to the inescapable conclusion that in spite of the hype and the protest and the moral indignation expressed in print and from the pulpit, the continued military inroads into civilian life in Pakistan, where the sword has always been mightier than the pen, is inevitable and likely to grow.
After all, the president is still wearing two hats, and even if he takes off his uniform in December 2004, as he has promised to do, there are no grounds for assuming that he will not continue to enjoy the support of the new chief of army staff. The armed forces provide a disciplined, highly motivated political constituency for any military president with political ambitions, and the servicemen provide the anchors of stability in the system.
There is, however, another point which is less obvious, which centres on the issue of superannuation. Military personnel follow strict retirement rules and often hang up their boots long before their civilian colleagues do. In the armed forces, which analysts are now beginning to regard as top heavy, this can create all sorts of problems.
Senior surviving officers feel they have a moral obligation to help such people, and attempts are made to accommodate some of the brighter officers into the Shaheen, Bahria or Fauji foundations. But there is a limit to the number of people who can be employed in these organizations. And so efforts are made to award grants, contracts and industrial permits. And if that fails, well, there's always the civilian sector.
It would be naive to suggest that things will ever be different in this country. But if the president, who is a reasonable man, would like to do something about his own public image, and the image of the fighting forces, he should, for starters hire a consultant to look into the issue of future recruitment in the military.
E-mail: a-mooraj@cyber.net.pk.