Focus on poverty reduction

Two-Thirds of the South Asians are living in poverty, and only a re-distribution of the benefits of the economic growth will lift them out of misery, says a senior official of the Asian Development Bank, keenly interested in assisting Pakistan.

He told foreign correspondents in New Delhi that well over two-thirds of the people of India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nepal lived under the poverty line of two dollars a day which is not much money after the depreciation of the dollar in relation to many other currencies.

Mr Gert Vander Linden, vice-president of the Manila-based ADB, said it was clear the struggle against poverty in Asia would be protracted. "Policy makers should hence focus on generating high rates of sustainable growth, and also ensure the benefits of that growth are spread to all sections of society.

Undoubtedly, a country like Pakistan needs a high rate of growth - 6.6 per cent this year, eight per cent next year and ten per cent after three years - but it will be a folly to hope that prosperity will filter down to the people through the normal process.

Instead, official policies must be designed in a manner that the new wealth reaches the people as quickly as possible instead of letting the proverbial middlemen to grab it all.

What we have done in Pakistan in respect of poverty assessment is something utterly unacceptable. While the ADB moves from the poverty line of a dollar a day to two dollars, officially we have fixed the poverty line at Rs. 748 a month or under Rs. 25 a day or close to two-fifth of a dollar. And that helps the government show the number of people living under Pakistan's poverty line as far less and improving steadily.

While some of the efforts against poverty in South Asia are foreign funded, the dwindling foreign aid may shrink further. The target set by the international community for cutting the world's poverty by half by 2015 could be missed by more than a century, says Gordon Brown, Britain's Chancellor of Exchequer. He has been pleading the cause of the poor and developing countries very strongly at international conferences and elsewhere.

He says the millennium development goals (MDGs) were agreed in New York in 2000 to be achieved by 2015 to dramatically reduce poverty by half, cut infant mortality by two thirds and ensure every child had primary school education by then.

He said that instead of meeting the millennium goals in Africa in ten years they will be met in 100 years. He said the richest countries cannot continue setting targets, failing to meet them and then expecting the poorest countries "to trust our world." Writing in The Independent of London he urged all nations to reach 0.7 per cent of their GDP as aid and them move to higher aid levels.

He has also been urging the rich countries to back his proposal for an International Financial Facility (IFF) which would raise annual aid to the poor countries to 100 billion dollars from the current 50 billion dollars. His plan requires donor countries to make payments until 2015.

The IFF would then use that as a collateral for a bond issue in the international capital market to provide cash now and to provide extra grants for health, education and debt relief. Fifty countries have supported his proposals so far.

The IMF's watch dog, the Independent Evaluation Office, also says that poverty programmes are falling short of the goal. Far more can be and should be done in that direction.

The Indian prime minister Dr Manmohan Singh has also voiced his doubt about the millennium goals being met. Clearly the UN is lacking in its positive approach. If it cannot make the world a safer place, it cannot make it a better one for the poor.

The focus of the world, more so of the western world, has shifted from poverty and human misery to terrorism without looking into its root-causes. President Musharraf has been trying to drive home this point to the western leaders; but with only nominal success. They agree with him in principle but are not ready to take substantial initiatives.

Their faith in free market capitalism is unshaken, although its ability to deliver is becoming increasingly doubtful. There was a large demonstration in Moscow against capitalism which the agitators say has brought misery to s-called 'liberated' Russia.

Now there is a gang of corrupt and utterly bloated capitalists who were unheard of in that country until recently. We too have our stock market kings or emperors who were until recently unheard of in Pakistan.

The people are being treated to a kind of semi-regulated market capitalism after they had been 'liberated' from the kind of muddled economy which was a mix of state capitalism managed by bureaucrats and private sector.

While we hear of the new rich, real estate agents have become millionaires owing to sky rocketing prices of property. In fact estate prices are so high that those who were dealing in gold until recently have taken to trading in land and find it more profitable whether it is done in the old cities of Pakistan or in Gwadar, or Dubai and other cities of the UAE.

In such a razzle dazzle world of the rich when we point out to the failure of the West to keep its word to the developing countries, evident from the dwindling foreign aid, they say they have their own economic and social problems to attend to, particularly in Europe.

Combating terrorism has to have a far higher priority for them as it is spreading fast, as in the Russian town of Beslan where 320 persons, mostly school children were killed recently.

They say Pakistan itself is giving top priority to fighting terrorism and seek more foreign assistance for that than for poverty reduction currently. President Musharraf has now told Pakistanis in the Netherlands that it is the first country in the whole world to forego aid under the Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility after the current programme of the IMF comes to an end by the end of the year. And yet the unemployment, low wages and poverty are real. It is futile to obscure all that. But when high unemployment and low wages and the high inflation are pointed out to the Western leaders as a major contributory factor for terrorism, they say they too have a major unemployment problem in most countries.

Right now Belgium which has the headquarters of the European Union has a 13.2 per cent unemployment rate, Germany 10.6 per cent, and Spain 11 per cent - and the Euro region as a whole 9 per cent. The US has a 5.4 per cent unemployment rate compared to 6.1 per cent a year ago. But a good unemployment figure is said to be 5 per cent the US.

Unlike those in the West, the Pakistani workers do not have social security coverage. In the West, many members of the family are employed, including husband and wife while the children may be doing part-time work.

Then, workers in the West have large savings. Pakistan workers without job security do not have most of these benefits and support a large family. Now less workers go to the West because of the fear of terrorism and severe visa restrictions.

Gulf countries are sending back hundreds of Pakistan workers for illegal overstay or for smuggling themselves in, or they have lost their jobs. Hundreds of them came back from Saudi Arabia recently. And many were sent back from Oman earlier.

Last week 86 Pakistanis were taken off a plane for trying to travel on fake documents. The had all paid their travel agents heavily to transport them to various countries.

If unemployment is widespread and wages are low they are afflicted further by rising inflation, particularly food price inflation. The Sensitive Price Index has risen by 12.7 per cent within a year, according to official figures and now the support price for wheat which was raised to Rs. 350 for 40 kg last year is being raised to 375 and even to Rs 400 to encourage and reward the wheat farmers. And the butchers have refused to lower their high prices, except by 10 per cent during Ramzan.

The government did well not to raise POL prices during the last several weeks when world prices hit their peak of 50 dollars a barrel, then dropped down and again shot up and it was merciful of the government to reduce the LPG prices.

Unemployment is on the top of the agenda of Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz. The problem, particularly of the educated unemployed, is grave. The affluent private sector which has welcomed the arrival of Shaukat Aziz must cooperate and rise to the occasion in alleviating the problem of joblessness.

They should not restrict themselves to making more and more money from stock market manipulations. This is the time for transparency and honesty on the part of the private sector. And this is the time for the West to respond to the call of Gordon Brown positively and step up their aid to 0.7 per cent of their GDP and the total aid to 100 billion dollars a year instead of just 50 billion.

The money will eventually go back to the West for purchase of goods and machinery. A developed world in place of the developing countries will be their better economic and political partners than a string of under-developed countries with varied ills. The rich nations must now make sure they do not fail the UN's millennium goals.

Hostage-taking crisis

By the time this article appears, Kenneth Bigley could be dead. Eugene Armstrong and Jack Hensley, the two Americans captured with him were killed days ago. Their deaths took to 27 the number of foreign hostages beheaded/shot in Iraq.

The deadline for the release of all Iraqi women prisoners (the demand made by Bigley's captors) has come and gone many times. The group believed to be holding him is headed by Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, among the most ruthless of the terror elite. If Kenneth Bigley does indeed survive it will be a miracle.

Kenneth Bigley has been the most prominent captive in the news, but he is by no means alone. The fate of some others captured before him is still unknown. Four employees of an Egyptian telecommunications company - two Egyptians and two Iraqis - have been seized since Bigley. The total number of foreigners taken hostage there since March 2003 exceeds 100.

The terror provoked by such hostage-taking - the kind that more often than not ends in decapitation - has a unique intensity. The heart-wrenching appeals made by the hostages on grainy videos, the utter desperation and fear on their faces, the agonizing wait for families back home in America, France, Pakistan (two of the dead were ours), Italy and so on, and the knowledge that there is nothing anyone can do - makes for a uniquely terrifying and sad situation.

Watching the familiar chronology unfold, one can't help thinking it would have been better to have fought back initially (when being captured) and been killed, than spend one's last days so awfully.

Better a quick, no-time-to-think death, than the agony of reflecting on family, friends, places, activities - knowing they will never be seen or experienced again. A hostage death in Iraq is a truly awful way to go.

Some of the hostages taken in Iraq were charity workers, others journalists. Bigley and his American associates were engineers, working on electricity and other projects. The French pleaded for their journalists' freedom on the grounds that France opposed the Iraq war, the Italians that their two women (subsequently released) were helping ordinary Iraqis.

All the families have appealed on humanitarian grounds for the freedom of their loved ones. Such appeals can all expect a sympathetic response, but the appeal that Armstrong, Bigley and other civilian contractors were in Iraq to "help the Iraqi people" beggars belief. Paid upwards of $1,000/day, civilian contractors in particular should not be trumpeting their "services" for the Iraqi people.

There is another question that can be asked specifically of those foreigners in Iraq to make a quick buck: why are they crazy enough to be working in Iraq? Haven't they seen the fate of so many of their colleagues? Don't they know that the risks are real? Do they think the rewards of contracting in Iraq are worth the risk? The same people who yesterday accepted lucrative work offers in Iraq, would today give anything to be free. Crudely put: if you are willing to take the gamble, be ready to face the consequences when you lose.

Sympathy for the hostages, certainly, but what of the other victims? Dozens of Iraqis are killed everyday - by American bombing and firing, by anti-American (resistance/militant) bombing and firing, and by the overall hardships and suffering that they face everyday: lack of food, clean water, medical care, and so on. No one remarks on those daily deaths.

No one prays that they will survive for one more day. Their fate - death or survival - is not news. How then can you expect them to sympathize with Bigley and others in his situation?

There is another big difference between these Iraqi deaths and those of the hostages. Foreigners in Iraq chose to be there (this applies to contractors, charity workers, journalists and troops - American soldiers might be desperate to leave now, but when they enlisted in the US Armed Forces they implicitly accepted they could be deployed anywhere, even Iraq).

The Iraqi people did not choose to live in the hell that is currently their homeland. The former had some control over their fate, the latter none. George Bush and Tony Blair are quick to condemn the barbarity of the hostage-killers.

They are firm in their resolve not to give in to the demands of terrorists like Zarqawi. In this they are quite right. Beheading or shooting helpless hostages is an act that has to be unreservedly condemned. National policies can never be made according to the dictates of terrorist executioners. But again there is more to the story than meets the eye. Bush and Blair offer condolences to the families of American and British dead (in the latter's case all victims of war and violence - no hostage dead yet).

But they make no mention of their own contribution to those deaths. For what is happening in Iraq today - Armstrong's execution at the hands of Zarqawi, for example - is a direct consequence of decisions made months ago in London and Washington.

What are the terrorists - in their admittedly sick way - trying to achieve? Their actions are not always rational: taking French hostages when France so actively opposed the war, for example.

Their demands might be outrageous: expecting the French government to reverse its headscarf ban in schools simply to save the lives of two journalists. The results of their deeds are often counter-productive: Iraqi terror victims far exceed foreign ones. But there is an underlying reason to their madness: ridding Iraq of American and allied occupation.

Apologists for the war have a habit of conceding that things might have been done wrong in the past, but 'what's done is done'. This ability to merrily divorce past actions from present consequences is truly infuriating. The tendency to shift self-created problems on to others - the UN and international community in this case - is glib in the extreme.

It is something they cannot be allowed to get away with. Any international support for "fixing" Iraq has to start with an open and full admission of guilt by those responsible: Washington (and London). Solutions to the hostage-taking crisis in Baghdad cannot be found without facing up to the root causes.

But that is far far down the line. What of tomorrow? What will become of Bigley and the other hostages? - And the many others likely to join them in captivity? The sad fact is that, even with the best will in the world Iraq will still take years and years to fix.

The mess there is so complex that right now it is impossible to see even how one would start clearing it up. Hostage taking is the new weapon of choice for insurgents in Iraq.

There are, by definition, no quick solutions (giving in to their demands might release one hostage but it would cause many more to be taken). The outlook for those held captive in Iraq can therefore only be bleak.

Kenneth Bigley appealed to the British Prime Minister to save his life. He is too late. The appeals that could have made a difference to his fate should have been made before Blair and Bush went to war in Iraq. Today, all the British prime minister can do is join Bigley's family in prayer.

New threat to civil liberties

Momentum is growing for efforts to dramatically reorganize the US intelligence community in the few weeks before Congress adjourns for the elections. But while there has been much arcane debate on budgetary authorities, one important aspect of the reform proposals has gone largely unnoticed: the serious threat they pose to civil liberties.

While the Sept. 11 commission rejected a proposal to establish a domestic intelligence agency along the lines of Britain's MI5 agency, many of the current proposals would create a back-door domestic spy agency.

The proposed intelligence agency restructuring would, in columnist William Safire's words, marry the law officer and the spy by placing the FBI's domestic counter terrorism activities and counter terrorism operations by the CIA and Defence Department under the authority of one spy master.

Foreign and domestic intelligence activities are now in different agencies reporting to separate masters because intelligence methods used overseas - dis-information campaigns, secret kidnappings, etc. - are fundamentally different from those allowed in the United States. Here, the FBI can engage in secret surveillance, but it must arrest and charge individuals in ways consistent with due process.

FBI domestic operations are also subject to public scrutiny, because they are ultimately answerable to the courts in a way that is not true of such CIA activities as secret interrogations in unknown prisons overseas.

Under the proposals being considered, there would be no protection against the reappearance of covert operations targeting Americans by the CIA and the Pentagon. There are no legal prohibitions against the CIA or defence intelligence agencies conducting covert campaigns against Americans.

Although the National Security Act excludes the CIA from law enforcement and internal security, it has never been read to prohibit domestic covert operations done for a "foreign intelligence purpose."

Indeed, President Ronald Reagan granted such authority to the CIA in a 1982 executive order that remains in place. The only protection against such operations has been bureaucratic arrangements and the CIA's under standing that its primary mission lies overseas.

Those bureaucratic protections would disappear with the establishment of a new intelligence director with the power to turn to the CIA or Defence Department and order domestic covert operations in the name of counter terrorism.

These proposals also threaten to transform the FBI's counter terrorism operations by putting an intelligence czar, rather than the attorney general, in charge. Despite civil libertarians' many criticisms of the FBI, it operates with much greater accountability than the CIA, because the line of command goes to the Justice Department, which has an institutional responsibility for the protection of constitutional rights.

The pending bills call for the creation of a national information-sharing network. (This is not part of the intelligence agency restructuring.) Congress would require building the technological capability for an FBI or CIA officer sitting at his desk to access all information about any American in any existing database.

This would make it possible, for instance, to generate complete dossiers on all political protesters in Seattle or all Arab Americans in Michigan. Instead of building one massive central database, this proposal envisions a system whereby thousands of government officials would have instantaneous access to multiple databases.

No laws currently restrict such dossier-building or limit the government from using such information against anyone for any purpose. Only the lack of capacity stops the government from putting this into practice today.

The proposals do contain references to privacy and civil liberties protections, but they abdicate Congress's constitutional responsibility to enact such protections.

Instead, they direct the White House to write privacy guidelines for the new information network. Neither administration guidelines nor the proposed civil liberties board is an adequate substitute for public debate and congressional legislation on the complex issues posed by such a massive new information-gathering programme.

What is to be done? As CIA Director Porter Goss has recognized, we urgently need a national debate on the domestic spy powers of any new intelligence director before such powers are given to him. If there is to be a new national intelligence director, domestic covert operations should be outlawed.

While a new intelligence director should ensure that foreign and domestic information is shared and that agencies operating at home and abroad coordinate their efforts, the FBI should remain under the direction and control of the attorney general.

Before Congress gives its blessing to the largest-ever surveillance information network, it should conduct a serious examination of the need for such government capability. It should then look closely at the implications for individual privacy and liberty in concentrating such power in the government. Only then, if it determines that such a capability is needed, should it authorize its construction and write the laws necessary to protect individual rights.

In the end, there will be an added security benefit from respecting civil liberties because limited government resources will be focused on actual terrorists and not on American Muslims or political dissidents. The writer is director of the Centre for National Security Studies, a civil liberties organization. -Dawn/Washington Post Service

The enigma of promises

When on December 24, 2003, President Musharraf announced that he would take off his uniform by December 31, 2004, it appeared as if the promise had been forcibly wrested out of him by the MMA.

It also appeared as if it was a fair trade-off, with the religious alliance in return for providing him with their votes for the two-thirds majority which he needed to get the 17th amendment passed by parliament.

In retrospect, however, it appears as if both Gen Musharraf and the MMA were reinforcing each other with some high quality but under-the-table help. The former, by appearing to be submitting to the MMA's pressure, had actually bestowed on the alliance a level of credibility that it had required to sell to the public its image as the real opposition inside and outside parliament.

And the latter, by providing President Musharraf with enough constitutional room in the 17th amendment to continue to head the elected parliament in uniform, enabled him to keep the post of the COAS for as long as he believed it was in the national interest.

Without going into a debate as to whether or not the relevant clauses in the 17th amendment bind the president to keep his promise by the due date, one can say without the fear of contradiction that the MMA, by helping to make these clauses part of the Constitution, has in fact legalized the notion of a uniformed president heading an elected parliament. But then this notion was given constitutional sanction in the eighth amendment which had mentioned President General Muhammad Ziaul Haq by name in the Constitution and allowed him to head the elected parliament of 1985 for the next five years.

If General Zia had not died in a plane crash, he would certainly have remained the constitutional head of the country for the residual two years if not more, without of course giving up his uniform.

What Gen Musharraf has actually done is he picked up on October 12, 1999, the baton that General Zia had let go on August 17, 1988. And the MMA seems to have helped him restore the constitutional continuity of a uniformed president in return for allowing them to rule one full province and be a coalition partner in another even though, as Gen Musharraf himself used to say before the 2002 elections, that they had never won more than two to three per cent of seats in past parliaments.

They must also be beholden to President Musharraf for looking the other way while the Supreme Court continues to keep its ruling reserved on the position of those parliamentarians who were allowed to contest the elections on the basis of sanads (degrees) issued by non-statutory wafaqul madaressahs.

So, if the military-mullah alliance was moving in sync and helping each other to consolidate their respective political and constitutional positions and pre-eminence with the passage of the 17th amendment, where was the need for the president to create the impression in his December 24, 2003, speech that he was bound by the relevant clauses in the amendment to take off his uniform by December 31, 2004?

Also, if one went back to the year 2003 to see if anything of significance had happened then to persuade Gen Musharraf to take off his uniform in a year's time, one comes back with the impression that except for the stage-managed agitation by the MMA on the uniform issue, there was not even one single domestic event which one could regard as having made it impossible for the president to keep his uniform for more than a year.

If anything, there were events that took place in that year which he could have easily used to justify his continuation in uniform for at least a couple of years more.

He had escaped two deadly attacks on his person in December 24, 2003. And both of these incidents had taken place in the most secure place in the country - the vicinity in which the GHQ is located in Rawalpindi.

Also, it was in the later part of 2003 that the IAEA and the US had started putting pressure on Pakistan on the issue of nuclear proliferation and KRL's connection with world nuclear black market had become known. The crisis in Waziristan too had started rearing its head with full force in 2003.

In fact, if one compares the happenings of the current year with that of last year's, one feels that the situation has greatly changed for the better. Except for the attack on the person of the prime minister in August in Attock during his election, campaign, there has not been any serious Al Qaeda activity in the country so far. Many of their operatives, instead, have been either killed or rounded up in the last nine months.

The Wana operation is a combined responsibility of Pakistan and the US as President Musharraf himself said recently. The US has to deliver on the Afghanistan side for Pakistan to be able to flush out foreigners from Wana.

What is happening in Balochistan has been actually instigated by the federation itself. If tomorrow the prime minister were to announce that he has taken back the decision to build cantonments in the heart of Balochistan, things would perhaps improve overnight in that hapless province.

So, we come back to the same question again. If he was under no real pressure from the MMA and the on ground realities in 2003 seemed to be dictating that he continue to keep the uniform for at least some more years, what was it then that forced him to make the promise that he is finding it extremely difficult to wriggle out from today?

Well, through a process of elimination, it is not very difficult to reach a plausible explanation. In June 2003, at Camp David, President Bush had promised Pakistan a generous five-year aid package of three billion dollars subject to the approval on a yearly basis by the US Congress which, being a democratic body itself, always feels obliged to ask searching questions about the state of democracy in the recipient country before doling out its taxpayers' money.

Next, both the Commonwealth and the European Union was in no mood in 2003 to give any relief to Pakistan unless it showed some significant progress on the democratic front.

But within months of the announcement that he would take off the uniform by December 31, 2004, the EU had ratified the third generation agreement which it had signed with Pakistan way back in 1999. Next, the Commonwealth re-admitted Pakistan into its fold and the US Congress approved $600 million dollars from the aid package for the year 2004-2005.

Now that all these things have happened in accordance with his wishes, Gen Musharraf may feel that he can now put off his promise. He knows that the Commonwealth would not expel Pakistan again if he does not take off his uniform by the due date and neither would the EU withdraw its ratification of the third generation agreement.

As for the US Congress, he has at least about nine months to come up with a plausible excuse to get it to vote for next year's aid tranche. So, he is home with his uniform and the presidency both.

However, in the process he seems to have divided the federation. With Punjab and Sindh provincial assemblies voting in favour of the uniform and the NWFP (by voting against) and Balochistan (by withdrawing a favourable resolution) assemblies disagreeing, we see the sad spectacle of a nation divided right in the middle. And for what? Not for the sake of dams or on the issue of distribution of financial or water resources, but on the matter of the president's uniform.

Also, by saying that 96 per cent of the population supports him on the uniform issue, Gen Musharraf seems to have made the post of COAS an elective one for all practical purposes.

What would stop the next COAS to make the same claim and refuse to leave his post after the completion of his service tenure? One wonders why he did not take the issue to the NSC instead of asking the provincial assemblies to vote on the uniform.

Going by his own claims about the NSC, this is an institution with the ability to tackle issues which threaten the unity of the nation. With four of his services colleagues sitting on the 13-member council along with two military-friendly politicians (the NWFP chief minister and the leader of the opposition), it would have been very easy for him to have got a majority vote in the NSC to keep the uniform.

But, of course, this would have exposed the mullahs, reducing their ability to help him get out from other corners which he might find himself in at some future point in time. Also, perhaps he did not want to test the loyalty of the two about-to-retire generals.