| 04 March 2004 | Thursday | 12 Muharram 1425 |
The limits of lunacy
Another spying allegation
Demography is - or, perhaps, it would be more accurate to say, it could be - destiny. I have explored this theme in this column on several previous occasions. I will indicate in a short while why I am revisiting it.
I have said before that those charged with making economic policies and plans would do well to acquaint themselves with some of the recent demographic trends around the world.
This is critical for Pakistan since we now have the seventh largest population in the world. In the next four to five decades we could become the fourth largest country behind India, China and the United States. Ours is also one of the world's youngest populations with one half of the people below the age of fifteen.
A very large number of the young are poor and, what is worse, they are poorly educated. They are looking for work the economy will only be able to provide it if grows at a rate of six to eight per cent a year.
In moving towards the high growth path we will need to get increased output from the sectors that can employ more workers. At the same time the quality of education and training provided to the young must prepare them for the modern and more productive sectors of the economy.
But what has the inter-twining of Pakistan's demographic and economic situation got to do with the rapidly changing population trends in several parts of the world? We should take some cognizance of what is happening around our borders and in some cases even well beyond our frontiers to turn our population into an economic asset.
This can be done in two ways. One, by the physical movement of the people with requisite skills and training to the parts of the world where serious skill shortages have begun to occur.
Two, by developing the industries and enterprises at home to which labour and skill intensive work can be out sourced by the countries that are running out of young workers. This is the line I have taken in the several articles previously contributed to this space that focus on population as an asset.
I am revisiting the subject today for the reason that some new developments have begun to be noticed that may have a serious bearing on this argument. Before listing these developments let us go back for a moment to the demographic trends, both global and regional, that had begun to interest population experts in recent years.
A number of predictions about the size and distribution of world population have turned out to be way off the mark. Instead of the demographic explosion feared by many analysts, what is happening is a demographic implosion in many post-industrial societies.
These societies are mostly in Western Europe and North America and also include Japan and some small East Asian countries such as Singapore and Hong Kong. In most of them, the rates of fertility have declined much more rapidly than was expected a few years ago.
The birth rate has fallen so sharply in several countries that over the next several decades we will see a precipitous decline in populations in several countries around the globe. I will illustrate this point by looking at one example of a western, post-industrial society.
Unless Germany, by far the largest European country in terms of the size of its population and the size of its economy, allows a large number of immigrants to come into the country, its population will decline by one half over the course of this century.
Germany will see its population decrease from 82 million in 2001 to just over 40 million, by the end of this century. Not only will the German population be so much smaller, it will also be considerably older.
If you open the obituary pages of any German newspaper, you will see how long lives have become. This trend is likely to increase as a result of the enormous advances being made by health science and health care.
Such a projection of demographic change in the post-industrial world poses a number of questions about the economic, social and political prospects of the countries such as Germany.
In this respect Germany, of course, is not alone. We will, in all probability, see the same phenomenon repeated in many other parts of the post-industrial world. Italy and Spain are two other candidates for the same kind of demographic implosion. Japan has already begun to go down that route and to the great surprise of many experts the rapidly growing economies of East Asia may be about to experience the same phenomenon.
Many parts of the post-industrial world are simply running out of people at the two ends of the workforce spectrum. There are shortages of people with well developed skills and education and also of those with low level of skill development but required for difficult manual labour. Without these two types of workforce most post-industrial societies will lose economic dynamism. How to cope with this situation?
The United States and Canada are the only two post-industrial societies that have, at least for the moment, succeeded in bucking their demographic trends. Good explanations of demographic trends are generally not easy to provide.
Demographers work mostly with three variables - the rates of birth and death and migration. Any of these can change quite suddenly and unexpectedly. Not many people had predicted that both America and Canada will see the arrival of so many people under various immigration programmes adopted by them in the quarter century between 1975 and 2000.
The vast majority of these newcomers were from the developing world - from the countries with large but young populations and with few attractive job opportunities available at home.
This wave of migration provided the two North American countries the workers they needed to fill a number of gaping holes in their economies. The migrants came in not only prepared to work in the sectors where there were serious labour shortages.
They also brought with them a different set of social values, including the preference for large families - large, at least, in the context of Canada and the United States. This means that for several years what experts call demographic inertia will keep the population of America and Canada growing, while that of Europe, Japan and some parts of East Asia will begin to decline.
There is much talk today of "post-modern societies" - societies that no longer depend on the manufacturing sector for producing the bulk of the national product or for providing most of the jobs to the workforce. It is no longer accurate to describe North America, Western Europe and Japan as industrial countries since they don't obtain a significant part of their income from industrial activities. Industry also is no longer the main employer of the workforce.
What is happening to manufacturing is what happened to agriculture many decades ago. As they did in agriculture, industrial workers have simply moved out of the factories and gone into offices, shops, hospitals, universities, the government and many other parts of the service sector.
This transformation has been much more profound in the United States and Canada where the governments have been more willing to let the winds of change sweep the economic landscape, particularly in the agricultural sector. That is not always the case in Europe.
The continent's notorious common agricultural policy, has sought to arrest the pace of change in the countryside. But the CAP is now under serious attack as the Doha round of trade negotiations makes some halting progress.
One of the more notable manifestations of the unfolding of post-modern and post-industrial societies is at the way people spend their time. Considerably more time is spent on holidays; on entertainment; on visits to doctors, hospitals and health care workers; on eating out, rather than cooking at home. People also want bigger and better homes with more art work, better crafted furniture, bigger and roomier cars that can also provide all forms of entertainment.
Those who have the money to spend - and there are many more of these than ever before - look for professional help to manage special events. They turn to marriage consultants, and dinner party planners; they let travel advisers work out detailed itineraries; they even turn to professionals to help plan how evenings should be spent.
The point of all this is that these enormously important - but still not fully grasped - lifestyle changes will have a great consequence for the way the global production system is structured and how the world's workforce gets to be distributed.
Among the changes we have already begun to notice is the way the world industrial production system is being restructured and reorganized. I will use a few examples to illustrate this point. China's south-east, the area contiguous to Hong Kong and generally known as the Pear River Delta, has already become the world's one large factory that produces a vast variety of goods.
There is little the Chinese workshops are not churning out these days. Their output ranges from toys and shirts, to sophisticated consumer electronics, to auto and aircraft parts.
China is using its vast, disciplined, educated and highly skilled workforce to capture a share in world trade that, at times, is being gained at the expense of the countries such as Pakistan.
And then there is India, another mega-population country that has, more by accident and less by design, become the most rapidly growing "back-office" for the post-industrial, post-modern societies.
India is providing the workforce committed to such repetitive and unexciting activities as accounting, medical and legal transcriptions, telephone call centres, bookings for airlines. In other words, China and India by pure happenstance are exploiting in different ways the problems of demographic transition now faced by the post-modern societies.
Would an economic growth strategy focused so much on improving knowledge base of the indigenous population work in a world that has become increasingly sensitive to admitting new immigrants? The answer is "yes."
Given the enormous demographic change taking place in the developed world, the countries that fail to utilize the dynamic inherent in the young populations of the developing world will suffer badly.
Fortunately, with the unexpected demographic revolution has come the revolution in information and communication technology that has made it possible for the countries rich with young people to provide their labour without physically moving to the countries that have serious skill shortages.
This phenomenon now has a name - "outsourcing." It is resulting in the movement of hundreds of thousands of jobs away form the countries that don't have abundant supplies of skilled people (such as America, Europe and Japan) to those where such labour is available in abundance (such as China, India, the Philippines). Why is Pakistan missing from this second list and how could it be included is a subject to which I will return next week.
The limits of lunacy
Never in the history of Pakistan (and I have witnessed all of it from Day One) has so much of the population discussed the political, economic and social situation of the country - to which you may now add the nuclear situation - as today.
I was 23 years old, and working, when Pakistan came into being. I rejoiced at its birth and I wept while following the cortege of the founding father. So I can speak from first-hand experience of the entire 56 years and seven months.
In the early period the political-situation did not bother the common man, while the news about the war in Kashmir was boosting his morale. (Sardar Ibrahim was the hero of the time.) People talked of the economic condition only in the context of the steadily rising dearness.
As for the social conditions there was nothing noteworthy to say. The terrible riots had left the Punjabi in a trauma. He was supposed to fill the vacuum of the departed Hindus and Sikhs, though he also missed their colourful presence.
But I must tell you that somehow, at that time, every fault in society was being laid at the door of Pakistan. So much so that if there were too many mosquitoes around, the invariable comment was, "It was never this bad before Partition." Honestly, this is what people said.
Another traumatic shock came with the secession of East Pakistan in December 1971. However, the less said the better about that. Soon after August 15 (I refuse to believe that Pakistan was born on August 14), Punjab and Sindh were swamped by refugees.
They had their own problems; very serious problems of 'roti, kapra aur makaan', but the public in general, the sitting locals that is, were leading a calm, almost contented life, with many of them thriving on the booty left by the non-Muslims. The police and politicians had not yet learned to behave like criminals, and many of today's evils were nowhere in sight.
In such a state of affairs, which sounds utopian as compared to today, what would be the percentage of the mentally affected in the population? I ask this because, during one of his last public appearances, the late lamented Hakim Said of blessed memory, thought it fit to observe that nearly 25 per cent of the population of Pakistan had almost gone mad.
Since I read quotations of his speech in an Urdu newspaper, I might as well tell you that the words cited were "taqreeban paagal ho chuke hain." He must have meant that 25 per cent of the people were on the verge of becoming unsound of mind, which is a stage considerably short of actual lunacy and even near-lunacy.
The comparison with the early years of Pakistan arises out of Hakim Sahib's assertion that the rulers of today are no less affected by this mental deterioration.
Many of their decisions and actions, he said, are symptomatic of the fact that their nerves have given up and they are resorting every day to invocations to the Almighty to set things right in national politics.
A deeply religious man, with a firm faith in the integrity and soundness of Pakistan as a sovereign country, Hakim Said also chose to say something about the then impending 15th Amendment.
The newspaper article paraphrased his remarks in this manner. "The rulers claim to solve the problems of the people through enforcement of the Shariat. The Shariat can only be a help (in solving problems) if character-building is undertaken first."
Hakim sahib did not elaborate whether all our rulers fall within the category of the 25 per cent in Pakistan who are about to go around the bend. The trouble is that he is no longer with us to explain his statement. But one thing is certain.
As an outstanding physician of indigenous medicine, and counting among his patients the best in the land, he could be depended upon to tell a psycho from a mentally sound person when he met the two together. But this is the age of statistics, and those studying applied psychology would really like to know to what extent the figure is to be relied upon.
We have no organization, official or non-official, that has ever conducted a study to determine the spread of near-lunacy in the country, as also to gauge the effect of the actions and policies of near-lunatic rulers on the overall mental health of the population.
However, without going into statistics I can present to my readers one criterion. It may not be the last word in evaluating madness but can serve as a measure.
In every democracy there usually are two main political parties, with a another lesser one serving as refuge for those who run away from either of them. One can say that the two main parties in Pakistan are the PPP and the PML(N).
There is also a third, the PML(Q), but those seeking refuge from the other two (or not seeing any material benefit in them) have boosted it into the ruling party. I know that Qazi Hussain Ahmed, Maulana Fazlur Rahman, Sardar Farooq Leghari, Mr Hamid Nasir Chattha, Mr Imran Khan, the pir of Pagara and Mr Altaf Hussain will not be happy at this discrimination on my part, but let us be realistic for once.
If you were to conduct a serious study into Hakim Said's assertion, and you were to go through the newspapers of the past decade, placing side by side the allegations of these two parties against each other, you will arrive at the conclusion, that, in the considered opinion of each, the leaders of the rival party are not only devoid of common sense but any sense at all.
That they lack ordinary understanding of the people and their problems, and that their policies on national and international issues could only have been pursued by persons ripe for the loony bin.
If Hakim Said were alive today he could possibly have added that nothing more was needed to confirm this judgment than the fact that the two main parties were now of one mind against the ruling regime and were operating in tandem, thus negating the very reason for their existence.
If you think I am exaggerating you can invite experts from abroad to undertake this exercise. If their conclusion is different from the one given by me, and if they issue a clean bill of mental health against the leaders, I shall consider myself certified, pack up my suitcase and enter the mental hospital in Lahore for an indefinite stay. I now leave it to the readers to decide whether Hakim Sahib was correct in his perception or not.
Another spying allegation
For almost a year Tony Blair has been grappling with one Iraq intelligence headache - over his government's claims that Iraq had WMD and the opposition claims that intelligence was manipulated to make the case for war.
Now he faces another potentially more damaging one - over the charge that Britain spied on UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in the run-up to war. The former (getting it wrong about WMD) could plausibly be explained as a failure on the part of the security services.
But there is no way to avoid the conclusion generated by the latter (if proven): the British government ordered what was a clear violation of both international law and ethics. Tony Blair will need all his political skills to get out of this one.
The charge that Britain spied on Kofi Annan was made by Blair's former international development secretary Clare Short in an interview with the BBC's flagship Today programme. [An interview on the same programme triggered the Kelly affair and Hutton inquiry.] The context of the interview was the decision by the prosecution service to drop charges against GCHQ whistle-blower Katherine Gun.
Gun was sacked from Britain's premier intelligence listening agency, after she leaked a memo to the press in which the Americans asked Britain to spy on UN diplomats. Gun was freed after the prosecution said it could offer no evidence. When asked to comment, Clare Short said Britain had spied on Kofi Annan. She claimed to have seen for herself transcripts of his conversations.
Taken alone, Short's allegations could plausibly have been dismissed. Here is a woman with ample reason to hate the prime minister. Having threatened for months to resign her ministerial post if Britain went to war without UN backing, she was flattered into staying by Blair - 'Iraq would need her in the post-war reconstruction'.
Weeks later, having belatedly realized that she'd been suckered, she finally quit her post. By then her reputation was in tatters. Since resigning she has been engaged on a campaign to malign Blair and the Labour Government. Little wonder that, given this background, the government's main defence has been to attack Short and her motives.
Given that background, one could well find oneself agreeing with the government. Perhaps this is just a case of sour grapes: venting of frustration and anger by a woman who has lost her place at the cabinet table, her credibility, her career. Clare Short could be dismissed as a woman out for revenge.
But hold on. Short might well be bitter and desperate, but her words have a ring of truth. Consider the corroborating evidence. Katherine Gun's for one. The memo she leaked in January 2003 was from Frank Koza of the US National Security Agency, asking British intelligence to spy on six non-permanent members of the Security Council. Of the six Security Council members suspected of being targets of Anglo-American spying, two have since confirmed this.
Boutros-Boutros Ghali, Annan's predecessor, has stated that he was spied on and he is sure the same thing is happening with Annan. Scot Ritter and other UN weapons inspectors have also reported being bugged by the Americans and Brits. Consider also the discovery last year that British intelligence was plotting to plant bugs at the Pakistani High Commission in London during its refurbishment.
Add to this the context in which Britain is alleged to have spied on the Secretary-General. In early 2003, America and Britain were bent on waging war against Iraq.
The sole purpose of their engagement with the UN was to secure Security Council backing for military action. The UN and its Secretary-General however, were equally bent on preventing the war. UN weapons inspectors, returned to Iraq after years and enjoying Iraqi cooperation, were finding no weapons. Hans Blix, chief weapons inspector, wanted more time.
Six members of the Security Council - including Pakistan - were still wavering about whether they would support a war resolution. As Washington and London considered placing such a resolution before the Security Council, it would have been extremely useful for them to know which way these countries were bending, and what role the Secretary-General was playing. The charges of spying on the UN are thus all too plausible.
Then there is the Prime Minister's less than ringing denial. His 'offensive defence' move (attacking Clare Short as 'irresponsible') and his taking refuge behind the convenient umbrella of 'national security interests', do not wash. They have the stamp of evasion all over them.
The 'national interest permits absolutely no discussion about the security services' line is a cop-out. No one is asking about who Britain's spies are and how they carry out their operations. The issue here is who decides their operations and on what grounds.
This is not a discussion about the security services: this is a discussion about the political manipulation and abuse of intelligence and intelligence resources. Democracy demands that this discussion be held - openly and quickly.
Listening to Blair's attempts to stifle such a discussion, one gets a depressing sense of deja vu. Last summer, when the BBC's Andrew Gilligan alleged that intelligence dossiers were 'sexed up' by Downing Street, it reacted by attacking the BBC.
The resulting confrontation successfully deflected attention and criticism from the failure to find WMD in Iraq. At least for a while - too bad for the government that David Kelly killed himself and shifted the focus firmly back onto intelligence. Now again we see the government attacking its accusers (Short and Gun) and thereby trying to deflect attention from the allegations they made.
Blair could plausibly use the defence that, as the evidence presented above highlights, spying on other countries' diplomats (including UN diplomats) is widespread and has been going on for years. [Some say the US government pushed in 1945 for the UN to be headquartered in America, simply to make it easier for the NSA to spy on it.] Though a violation of international law, it is something that everyone does and accepts.
The defence that 'everyone does it' is no defence. As any child who has used it knows all too well, it is not important what 'everyone else' does but what you do. Britain and Tony Blair have to take responsibility for their own actions.
If something is morally and legally wrong - and spying on the UN Secretary-General definitely fits both those categories - it should not have been done. The Anglo-American war-mania that motivated it makes it even less savoury and acceptable.
For Britain's prime minister, the allegations of spying on the UN (if proven) have all manner of worrying implications. The obvious one, of course, that Britain broke international law.
Two, that Blair's overtly 'I count him as a friend' posture towards Annan is deceitful and hypocritical. Three, that he has made Britain such a lackey of Washington, that it even carries out these dirtiest of tasks.
And four, it is further proof that Britain (and America) went to war on totally false pretences. To what we already know - that there are no WMD in Iraq, that the threat was deliberately played up by Washington and London, that intelligence was manipulated, that the UN and international law were blatantly, even arrogantly, ignored - we can add this new episode. The decision on whether or not to place a war resolution before the Security Council was based on spies' reports of overheard conversations.
There is also a fifth issue, already raised by some MPs: who else have Britain's security services been spying on? In particular, who in Britain? - Anti-war activists, political opponents, Members of parliament? Should that come out, Blair will not be able to use the 'national interest' defence.
Blair has been lucky so far. The Hutton 'whitewash' report got him technically off the hook after the Kelly-Gilligan intelligence scandal. Lord Butler has been appointed to investigate the intelligence that led Britain to declare that Iraq had WMD. But the mandate of his inquiry is so tight, that the government has little to fear from his findings.
Now, however, Blair's luck could run out. The outcry generated by Short's allegations could finally lead to an independent (and non-establishment) investigation into how Tony Blair took his country to war. Answers to this question are long overdue.
iffatidris2003@yahoo.co.uk.