| 14 September 2004 | Tuesday | 28 Rajab 1425 |
No tears for the Iraqi dead
The ostrich of Delhi
Wrong strategy on Iran
The world's Muslim population is variously estimated at between 1.2 and 1.5 billion. About three quarters of a billion is concentrated in what George W. Bush, the US president, calls the Greater Middle East.
That is a stretch of land between Morocco in the west and Pakistan in the east. Pakistan, with 152 million people, is the largest Muslim nation in this area followed by Turkey (73 million), Iran and Egypt (each 70 million), Saudi Arabia and Iraq (each 25 million).
All the people living in these countries are not Muslim but the proportion of non-Muslim populations is very small. Most of these countries have had high rates of population growth, high rates of urbanization, relatively slow rates of economic growth, and poor social and human development.
The American interest in bringing democracy to this part of the world as a part of the Greater Middle East initiative is to counter the increasing popularity of radical and extremist Islam.
How much of a factor is demographic development in creating receptive grounds in some of these countries for the rapid growth of radicalism and extremism? To answer this question, we must look not just at the rates of population growth and urbanization but probe deeper into the way these populations have developed their thinking, attitudes and worldview.
Pakistan is an interesting case study for beginning to understand how a fairly large number of its people turned towards these forms of Islam to express their beliefs. By 2004, Pakistan had become an epicentre of these movements.
How did this transformation come about? Population growth, arrival of millions of refugees into the country from India soon after Pakistan was born, rapid urbanization, the chaotic growth of Karachi, migration of millions of people to the Middle East, events in the Muslim world, the way America waged its war against Islamic terrorism all played a role in this transformation.
In 2004, 57 years after its birth, Pakistan had a population of 152 million people; nearly five times more than the population at the time the country was born on August 14, 1947. In 1947, what was Pakistan then, including what was later to become Bangladesh, had a combined population of 72 million.
At that time, "old" Pakistan was the largest Muslim state and the fifth most populous country in the world. In 1971, Bangladesh separated and became an independent state.
That notwithstanding, in 2004 "new" Pakistan overtook Russia and became the world's sixth largest country, after China, India, the United States, Brazil and Indonesia. This continuous climb up the demographic ladder was the consequence of a very high rate of fertility, which translated into a high rate of population growth.
For much of Pakistan's history the country had one of the highest rates of fertility in the world with more than five children born per woman. One result of this was that Pakistan today has one of the youngest populations in the world, with 54 per cent of its people below the age of 20. Over the last few years, the rate of fertility has begun to decline and the rate at which the population is growing has slowed.
The government estimates the current rate of population growth at 2.1 per cent a year. Nonetheless, demographic inertia will continue to increase the size of the population and, if present trends don't change, Pakistan could overtake Indonesia, Brazil and the United States and become the world's third largest country by the year 2050.
Could Pakistan's much higher rate of population growth be attributed to the influence of Islam and the power of the mosque? Circumstantial evidence indicates that this might be the case.
The Muslim countries in the Middle East have considerably higher rates of fertility than the countries subscribing to different faiths. India, Pakistan's neighbour, not only has a lower rate of increase in its population, fertility rates have been declining significantly in recent years.
The only administration in Pakistan's history that made population planning a prominent part of public policy was the one headed by President Ayub Khan. This led to a stiff opposition by Islamic groups and contributed to his eventual fall.
For the population to be persuaded that it is in their interest to limit the size of families, the poor will have to be weaned away from the preaching of the illiterate mullahs. This can only be done by educating the masses.
In what way did the sharp increase in the country's population impact on its development? This question can be answered from several different perspectives: economic, social, political, and geo-political, of which the first usually receives the most attention.
Since the days of the British demographer Thomas Malthus, economists have worried about the burden a rapid population increase places on the economy. Malthus's particular concern was that agricultural production, especially food output, would not keep pace with population growth. He saw famines becoming commonplace unless a determined effort was made to control the increase in population.
In fact, recurrent famines in British India vindicated the British demographer. They also deeply influenced the economic growth of the areas that were later to become part of today's Pakistan.
In 1780, a huge famine killed a third of the population of Bengal - some five million people. Another famine in 1783-84 killed more than a fifth of the population of the Indian plains, this was followed by severe scarcities in 1791, 1801 and 1803.
The British administration studied the famine problem by appointing several Royal Commissions and eventually came to the conclusion that the only way out was to make large public investments to increase India's capacity to produce additional amounts of food.
This, they decided, could be done by bringing virgin land under cultivation, most of it in the provinces of Punjab and Sindh. Investments would be made in surface irrigation, in a network of roads and railways, and in the development of the port of Karachi.
These investments paid off handsomely and turned the wastelands of Punjab and Sindh into the granaries of British India. For decades, the Indians were spared the scourge of famines.
The last famine to hit the country was in 1943 but, as the Nobel laureate Amartya Sen was to point out in his seminal work on that particular tragedy, the cause was not a failure of food supply but the inability of the affected population to buy it.
The Malthusian fear continued to influence economic thinking until the early 1970s. In fact in 1974, at the World Food Conference held in Rome, there was a widespread apprehension that that moment had arrived.
That did not happen since about that time, new food growing technologies became available to increase the world's output. Pakistan was one of the countries to benefit from this development. The first "green revolution" based on high yielding seed technologies took hold in the country in the late 1960s and the early 1970s.
Between 1966 and 1976, output of wheat more than doubled, increasing from 3.9 million tons to 8.2 tons. This was equivalent to a rate of growth of 7.7 per cent a year, two and a half times the rate of increase in population. For rice the growth rate in the same period was a little lower, at 6.7 per cent a year but still very impressive. Rice production increased from 1.3 million tons to 2.5 million tons.
While Pakistan and other populous countries with rapidly increasing populations may have escaped famines, population growth in many ways became a severe burden.
One way of highlighting the damage caused by that burden is to speculate on the outcome of a somewhat slower rate of population growth, say one percentage point less than the actual rate of increase. In the case of Pakistan, population grew at the rate of 2.75 per cent a year to increase from less than 32 million in 1947 to 152 million in 2004.
In 2004, Pakistan's revised GDP was estimated at $96 billion, which meant an income per capita of $632. Had the population increased at the rate of 1.7 per cent a year, by 2004 it would have been about 84 million.
If the GDP had remained the same, income per capita could have been $1143. That would have been 80 per cent higher than the level reached in 2004. A one percentage point lower rate of growth in population would have pushed Pakistan into the ranks of middle income countries in the first few years of the 21st century, with per capita income higher than that of China.
However, the relationship between population and economic growth is more complicated than suggested by this simple arithmetic. Economists believe that population increase is one of the determinants of an economy's rate of growth since extra hands generally mean more output.
Looked at this way, population need not be a burden; it becomes a burden when the additional hand it makes available is not able to produce the amount of expected output. This happens when human development does not keep pace with population growth.
This was certainly the case in Pakistan. One reason why the country has done so poorly in terms of developing its vast human resource is that it did not have the wherewithal to commit for education and health.
A large and young population that does not have the education and training to enter the various sectors of the modern economy creates frustration, unhappiness, antagonism and ultimately leads to anti-social behaviour.
Such a population can become - in many cases it did become - the recruiting ground for extremist groups. In a way, therefore, Pakistan was to become an epicentre for Islamic extremism in part because of the rapid increase in its population.
There is also a direct correspondence between the rate of population growth and the incidence of poverty. Demography can keep the poor trapped in poverty in several different ways.
For a variety of reasons, poor families have higher rates of fertility than those located higher up in the income distribution scale. It takes education to recognize the economic advantage of small families.
The poor are generally not educated or poorly educated and tend to have larger families. When families are large, children tend to be closely spaced and this affects the health of the mother and also, with her inability to give enough time to her numerous children, the health of the entire family.
Large poor families are usually beset with serious health problems. When families are large, mothers tend to turn to their daughters for help with household chores, including the care of younger members of the family.
This makes it difficult for poor parents to educate their daughters; they cannot be spared from work in the house to go to school. This leads to illiteracy among women. Poor uneducated women have larger families and the link between high fertility rates and poverty continues to move along a vicious cycle.
Persistent high rates of population increase have kept the rate of economic growth relatively low, the incidence of poverty high, and the level of human development much below than what is expected of a country at Pakistan's stage of development.
It will take much more than simple acceleration in the rate of increase in GDP growth to break this cycle. But without a concerted effort to improve people's well being, the poor and the deprived in Pakistan will continue to be attracted towards extremist movements.
No tears for the Iraqi dead
We have all drunk our cup of cherished grief and expressed our revulsion at what happened at Beslan. There has been wall-to-wall television coverage of the funerals.
There are a lot of questions that need answers but given the Russian obsession with secrecy, these answers will not be forthcoming and we will never know what really happened beyond the fact that a large number of people were killed, many of them children.
The assumption is that the hostage-takers were Chechens and the inclusion of some Arabs among the perpetrators raises the intriguing possibility of a global terrorist connection. No proof has been provided. Indeed no one knows for sure who the terrorists were.
Russia has been engaged in a brutal war in Chechnya for many years but it has escaped our consciousness and is seen as Russia's private war. Russia is no longer seen as an 'enemy'.
Imagine if the Cold War had not whimpered out and the Soviet Union had not imploded, Chechnya would have been high on the list of human rights violations. Morality is the weed that bends with the winds of change and unlike Shakespeare's love, alters when it alterations finds.
When a large number of people are killed at the same time, it is called a ' massacre' or a 'carnage'. Not so when a steady stream of people are killed on a daily basis.
A thousand US troops have died so far in Iraq but no count is kept of Iraqis who have been and are being killed and they are in the thousands. Included in this death-toll are women and children.
Television channels do not show tearful funerals nor placing of flowers or candle-lit vigils. Neither weeping family members nor mothers collapsing at the sight of her dead child.
Are we to assume that the Iraqis are more stoical about death? That they feel no pain or sorrow. Not one leader has shed a tear for these dead Iraqis or mounted a high-horse to send pious sympathies as they have done in the case of Beslan.
This seems to me to be a callous omission unless Iraqis and Afghans fall short of those human qualities that meet the standards of compassion deserving of public sorrow.
Vladimir Putin has made no connection between what happened at Beslan and the war in Chechnya and thus refused to acknowledge his own responsibility. Blaming such events on international terrorism as the Kremlin has done, "allows governments all over the world not to assume their responsibilities for the deaths of their citizens, " said the daily Kommersant.
"It's as if all the children did not die because of a war in Chechnya that has been going on for 10 years, but because international terrorism has been on the attack, " the daily added.
"It is strange that the president neglected the question of Chechnya in his address and did not say that the latest attacks are linked to the situation in Chechnya" wrote the newspaper Vedemosti. "Instead Putin tried to shift responsibility to the people who divided up the country (Soviet Union) in 1991, " the paper added.
Vladimir Putin has decided to be more engaged on the war on terror and has threatened pre-emptive strikes against terrorists wherever they may be, anywhere in the world.
I am not entirely convinced that he quite means this literally. But this is dangerous thinking for it means that the political process in coming to some sort of settlement in Chechnya has been abandoned and this will mean more suppression and more terrorist strikes.
He is making the same mistake that George Bush did. He believes that the war on terror can be won by military means, through the exercise of overwhelming force. It hasn't worked in Afghanistan and though the war in Iraq is not strictly speaking a war on terror, the use of military force has not worked there either.
There is an irony, if not poetic justice, that it was the Soviet Union that invaded Afghanistan and which gave rise to the creation of a multi-national force of Mujahideen, which was armed and trained, by the CIA and Osama Bin Laden became a folk-hero.
The Taliban were seen as the good guys and their leaders were invited to Washington DC and feted. Even a business deal was being negotiated between Unocal and the Taliban for a gas pipeline.
One of the representatives of Unocal was Hamid Karzai. Then it all fell apart and overnight the heroic freedom-fighters became terrorists and have remained terrorists who have spread their tentacles to far corners of the globe and like the French method of crime detection of cherchez la femme, every act of terror produces the response cherchez Al Qaeda. Thus there were Arabs among the hostage-takers at Beslan and it was made to be a part of global terrorism and not of Chechnya.
The war on terror is beginning to have a life of its own and it is seriously affecting freedom struggles all over the world because everything is being dumped in the laundry bag of terrorism. The Palestinians are the worst sufferers and in the cause of rooting out Hammas, Israel is making great progress in fulfilling its ambition of a Greater Israel.
The elections in the United States ensure that there will be no disapproval from its benefactor. Perhaps, after the elections, the United States will be able to look at the war on terror afresh and use its considerable influence (as apart from its military might) to address such issues that contribute to the increase in terrorism.
The ostrich of Delhi
The chief attraction at the Gupta Shudh Vaishnav Bhojanalaya, one of the honourable pitstops for heavy traffic on the highway between Pathankot and Jammu, was a large kiosk selling Lay's potato chips.
I asked Guptaji Junior, who was minding the shop, how multinationals were faring in the struggle against domestic, cottage-industry pakoras, bhujia and samosas. How many packets of Lay's did he sell in a day? "About ten ... sometimes as many as 20. The truck drivers now want Lay's and water."
And the price? Twenty rupees. If you break up the price in one way, it comes to 50 paise for a fried, salted flake of potato: I imagine there can't be more than 40 of them in a large packet.
Dissect the price in another way and it adds up to ten samosas. Guptaji Junior had a third take. He made only two rupees from every packet sold: 18 rupees went to the company.
All it needed was for one friend, or, worse, relative, to drop in and pick up a packet. The earnings out of ten packets disappeared. What could one do? You can't be rude to a relative.
Life was much better in the pre-Lay's era, when all a relative wanted was a cooked savoury. The per-unit cost of hospitality had jumped sharply with the arrival of Lay's. And then there were the rats, who were even worse than relatives.
Once they nibbled off all the packets on display. "I tried to return those packets to the company but they refused, saying that they were into selling potato chips, not rat insurance." I could feel his pain.
But Guptaji Junior ended on an optimistic note. "From October the samosa will be king. In winter no one will buy these packets. Everyone wants a hot samosa in winter."
The most popular contemporary demand in Srinagar is azaadi from BSNL, or Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited. The arrival of mobile phones last year was advertized as the return of normality. The catch was that only the government-owned BSNL was permitted operations.
When young Kashmiri kids want to have fun they sit in restaurants and phone each other on their mobiles. There are chortles of glee when they hear that the line is busy, or the phone is busy, or whatever. BSNL has become the code word for anything that doesn't work. But this week should bring good news. Private networks have finally been granted permission.
The reason why Jammu and Kashmir was kept out of the mobile loop was security. As a policy this must rank among the higher grades of stupidity. The last thing any terrorist wants is to talk on a mobile phone, where records are maintained of every call made and to which number, and then locked into a computer until the policeman comes along. On the other hand, anyone who does want a conversation across the border can simply use a pre-paid chip on a satellite phone.
Apparently, on one occasion when the supreme commander of the Hizbul Mujahideen and chairman of the United Jihad Council, Syed Salahuddin, was holding a clandestine press conference on this side of the LoC he generously offered his phone to anyone who wanted to make a call anywhere in the world.
An advertizement in Greater Kashmir of Wednesday, September 8, (or 22 Rajab, as also noted in the dateline) offered "Congrats to Maroof Sayeed Shah, s/o Dr M. Sayeed Shah of Gulbarg Colony, Haiderpora, on being the first Kashmir boy selected for an international canvas ball cricket tournament to be held in Pakistan next month". The advertizement was paid for by "Nears and Dears and well wishers".
Canvas cricket is the sort of cricket I now dream of. I would be able to look the ball in the eye once again. But I had no idea that canvas cricket was a feature on Pakistan's sporting calendar. On the other hand, the age of surprises is upon us.
This week I saw an American cricket team on television, playing against New Zealand. The shock became slightly more explicable when one noted that it was a black-brown American XI. Clearly there is no tariff on the import of cricketers from West Indies.
No wonder Brian Lara has to make do with a scratch side. All the potential Sobers, Kanhais, Huntes, Worrells, Weekes, Lloyds, Richards and Chanderpauls are now queuing up for American visas.
I presume young Maroof will have no problem getting a visa to Pakistan. I hope that Indian immigration will not be too intrusive about his performance when he returns.
BILLBOARDS STILL PROCLAIM: "Muzaffarabad 170 kilometres". But last year's possibilities have retreated into the distance. Srinagar greeted the Indo-Pak talks in Delhi with a shrug.
The sense of faint excitement through much of last year has dissipated with the hard lines drawn by Home Minister Shivraj Patil, who believes there is nothing to discuss with anyone in the valley, and Foreign Minister Natwar Singh, for whom time froze in 1972 in the mountains of Shimla. No one was particularly disappointed because no one expected anything much.
Shabbir Shah and Yasin Malik left an unusual marker in Delhi when they publicly suggested that some movement forward between India and Pakistan might be possible if Atal Behari Vajpayee were asked to head a Kashmir committee, but since that is not going to happen, they can keep waiting.
I was in the city for the launch of the fourth volume of the collected speeches and writings of S.A. Shamim, organized by his ebullient sister Qurratulain. Shamim was a brilliant lawyer who burst upon a stagnant political environment in 1971 and set it alight.
One of the great tragedies was that he died 24 years ago, in 1980. He stood as an independent in 1971 and, to everyone's surprise but his own, he won. He asserted himself in parliament with unique aplomb, exemplary courage and great wit. I will quote from a speech Shamim made in February 1973 when the Telangana movement had set Andhra Pradesh alight. (Thirty years later, it still could!)
Mrs Indira Gandhi was prime minister after a historic mandate but already a sense of complacency had set in (too many governments believe that they are going to be in power for the next 20 years). Shamim told the government to recognize the dangers:
"Violence does not erupt for nothing. It is not that people are seized of a mad instinct to destroy property. What happened in Andhra? Andhra was peaceful. Six months ago an objective situation existed there.
The prime minister and her colleagues with their pride and prejudices did not want to recognize the realities... That is what has given rise to such vast destruction of life and property in Andhra.
It was a French student who said a few years after the disturbances (in 1969 in France): we had to burn a few buses and buildings so that they should take notice of us..."
Then came his sharp message about Kashmir, leavened with wit: "There is a conspiracy of silence in every corner as far as the state of Kashmir is concerned ... the reason being in Kashmir there is no violence... There is no response because there is no violence in Kashmir.
If tomorrow there is violence, the way we have in Andhra, Mrs Gandhi and her colleagues would sit up... Unfortunately for us who are in Kashmir, there is no railway property to destroy... I do not think the situation will remain as it is..."
And then there was a memorable comment on Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, who had unilaterally accepted the reality of Kashmir's accession to India but was still kept out in the cold: "You can today ignore Sheikh Abdullah but once he is no more on the scene, the new generation will not understand the language of secularism and the language of Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi..." Is there need to say more? Once again the ostrich has descended on Delhi...
The writer is editor-in-chief, Asian Age, New Delhi.
Wrong strategy on Iran
Iran, despite its ritualistic denials, appears to be accumulating technology and expertise for the construction of nuclear weapons. Unlike events in Iraq, the Iranian situation has produced a consensus position among the United States and its European allies - namely, relying on the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to defuse Iran's nuclear challenge. There is only one problem with this strategy: It may just ensure that Iran becomes the next member of the nuclear club.
As a watchdog organization, the IAEA focuses on preventing states from acquiring the technology necessary for nuclear weapons. By conducting inspections, limiting Iran's access to proscribed technologies and invoking prospects of economic sanctions, the IAEA seeks to curb Iran's appetite for nuclear arms. But none of these procedures addresses the core of Iran's motivation for the bomb.
While it is convenient to dismiss Iran's quest for nuclear arms as a product of radical Islamic doctrine, this dangerously misconstrues the genesis of the Iranian programme.
Rather than religious dogma, Iran's nuclear ambitions are born of the compulsion - crystallized by the bitter experience of its eight-year war with Iraq - to craft an impregnable deterrent capability.
In the post-September 11 period, the massive projection of American power on Iran's periphery and the Bush administration's shrill "axis of evil" rhetoric have further enhanced the value of nuclear weapons in the clerical cosmology.
Despite these dire developments, no one should presume that the perennially fractious Iranian theocracy has settled on its course. Within the corridors of clerical power, a subtle yet significant debate regarding the strategic utility of nuclear weapons is going on.
For while all of Iran's contending factions are united on the need to sustain a vibrant nuclear research programme, the prospect of actually crossing the nuclear threshold has generated vigorous disagreement.
Through bilateral diplomacy involving direct negotiations between Washington and Tehran, the United Sates can still affect Iran's nuclear deliberations.The primary exponents of a nuclear breakout option are hard-line clerics closely associated with the supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
A fundamental tenet of the hard-liners' ideology is the notion that the Islamic republic is in constant danger from predatory external forces, necessitating military self-reliance. This perception originates in a revolution that sought to refashion regional norms.
The devastating war with Iraq, in which Saddam Hussein employed chemical weapons against Iran with impunity, reinforced such views. Given its paranoia and suspicions, the Iranian right does not object to international isolation and confrontation with the West. Indeed, for many in this camp such a conflict would be an effective manner of rekindling popular support for the revolution's fading elan.
In contrast to the hard-liners, a coalition of pragmatic conservatives and reformers that questions the strategic value of nuclear weapons has gradually emerged. Moderate conservatives such as the powerful secretary to the Supreme National Security Council, Hassan Rowhani, and President Mohammad Khatami's reformist allies in the foreign policy bureaucracy are pressing for restraint.
This cohort challenges the hard-liners' central argument by suggesting that the possession of such arms would actually accentuate Iran's vulnerabilities. Should Iran cross the nuclear threshold, the Persian Gulf states and the newly independent Iraq would probably gravitate further toward the American security umbrella.
Moreover, such a brazen act of defiance would probably trigger debilitating economic sanctions and estrange Iran from its valuable European and Japanese commercial partners.
Iran's moderates are increasingly drawn to the North Korean model: Pyongyang has adroitly managed to employ its nuclear programme to extract economic and security concessions from the international community.
Through a similar posture of restraint and defiance, threats and blandishments, perhaps Iran can also use its nuclear card to renegotiate a more rational relationship with its leading nemesis, the United States.
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi alluded to this stratagem by claiming, "We are ready for discussions and negotiations, but we need to know what benefits the Islamic Republic would get from them."
The United States, by relaxing its economic sanctions and granting Iran a voice in the postwar Persian Gulf deliberations, could disarm clerical hard-liners who require American belligerence for perpetuation of the nuclear programme.
In exchange, Iran would have to accept verifiable restraints on its nuclear activities.Indeed, an Iran whose strategic environment is stabilized and enjoys expanding economic ties with the United States is likely to be a more constructive interlocutor on issues ranging from terrorism to human rights.
This is a case where neither the unilateralism of the Bush administration nor the multilateralism espoused by the president's critics will provide a durable solution.
Rather, bilateralism, a deal between the United States and Iran, is what's needed - much more than relying on the IAEA and economic and military threats. In the end, such nuanced diplomacy is the best way to stem another proliferation crisis in the Middle East. -Dawn/Washington Post Service
The writer is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.