| 26 October 2004 | Tuesday | 11 Ramazan 1425 |
Identifying causes of terrorism
Need for America to re-discover itself
Pakistani-Americans' stance on polls
Pakistan's economic managers, working in the administration headed by General Pervez Musharraf, promised to revive growth once the economy had recovered from the ravages inflicted on it in the 1990s. That promise was made in 1999 soon after the country's take-over by yet another military regime, the fourth in the country's history.
This writer had argued then that there was no need to adopt a sequential approach towards tackling Pakistan's enormous economic difficulties; that the goals of stabilization and growth could be pursued simultaneously. The decision to pursue stabilization ahead of growth was taken at the urging of the International Monetary Fund. While there is not much point in revisiting that old debate, it is important to determine whether the government is now prepared to go for sustained growth and whether it has adopted the right set of policies for achieving that objective.
In so far as the first question is concerned, it appears from the pronouncements of several senior officials that the decision has been taken to pursue the objective of growth. One evidence of this is Islamabad's signal to the IMF that it would not return to the organization to negotiate yet another programme. One reason for this stance towards the Fund is that Pakistan now has a large foreign exchange reserves available to it, almost equal to the amount required for financing one year's of imports.
The other reason is even more important. It appears that Islamabad is getting ready to let trade policy play a more important role in accelerating growth and alleviating poverty. In an address to the business community a few weeks ago, President Pervez Musharraf expressed the hope that Pakistan's exports would reach some $50 billion in the not too distant future.
He is looking for a four-fold increase in the value of exports, increasing from $12.5 billion to $50 billion. If this were to happen, say, over a period of ten years, that would imply a rate of growth of 15 per cent per annum. This is not an impossible target to achieve.
But achieving it would mean engineering a fundamental restructuring of the economy. To begin with it would mean that the Pakistani economy would become much more open to foreign competition than it is today.
In 2004, trade - both exports and imports - accounted for about 25 per cent of the revised gross domestic product. If Pakistan's trade increased at the rate hoped for by President Musharraf over the 2004-2015 period, if both exports and imports increased at 15 per cent a year, and if the economy grew at six per cent per annum, the share of trade in GDP would increase to 60 per cent by 2015.
This would turn Pakistan into one of the more open developing countries in the world. Before analyzing how this could be done it would be useful to revisit the debate that has gone on for decades about the impact of trade on economic growth.
There is a great deal of empirical evidence available from the works of both development economists as well as development institutions that trade must occupy a central position in any economic strategy designed to produce growth. However, focus on trade can lead to two opposing sets of policies.
According to one, an import substitution strategy is necessary at the initial stages of development to produce growth in the economy without hurting the poor. According to the other, economic openness and focus on the promotion of exports are vital ingredients of any growth strategy, even at the early stage of development.
Exponents of different positions in economic discourse can draw very different conclusions from the same set of information and data. This is also the case with the debate on trade and its contribution to growth. Both sides have mined two sets of data - the performance of a large number of developing countries over the past four decades in particular the experiences of the "miracle economies" of East Asia - to support their different points of view.
What does the record of development shows in terms of trade policy and its contribution to economic growth? Statistics don't lie but they can be arranged to produce certain favoured results. This has been done repeatedly by the economists who are convinced of the truth of what they consider to be the right relationship between trade and economic performance.
However, to find a relationship between trade and growth, one must first settle on the period to be investigated. Which was the period that saw a rapid increase in economic growth, and if this period coincided with a rapid increase in exports then a robust case could be made that trade promotes growth.
However, there is some dispute among economists as to which period in the last 40 years was that of rapid increase in economic output.
Some economists argue that the 1960s and the 1970s were the periods of rapid economic growth in the developing world. If developing countries' performance is seen in terms of the number that achieved a certain level of growth - say three per cent increase in per capita income per annum - then the two decades between 1961 and 1980 seemed to have produced better results compared to the two decades that followed. In the first period, 33 non-oil exporting countries crossed this threshold compared to only 29 in the second.
However, should good performance be interpreted by using the number of countries that crossed a certain threshold of increase in income per head of the population or should the criterion be the number of people living in rapidly growing countries compared to those that were residing in those doing relatively poorly. If the latter is used as the measure, the second period looks better than the first.
During this time two populous countries - China and India - joined the league of rapidly growing economies. Whereas the population of high growth countries in 1961-80 was only 357 million, the number of people living in such countries in the second period was 2.1 billion.
Most of the countries followed restrictive trade policies in the first period when high walls of tariff and non-tariff barriers provided protection to local producers. If the developing countries did well in the first period then it would appear that they were helped by more restrictive trade policies. If they did better in the second period, then the opposite case could be made since by that time most developing countries had begun to open their economies to outside competition.
Instead of finding a relationship between growth and trade by using cross-country data, this debate could perhaps be settled by looking at the performance of a rapidly growing economy. South Korea, for obvious reasons, is a good candidate for this type of investigation. However, even South Korea's remarkable growth performance has been interpreted in two very different ways.
Dani Rodrik of Harvard University is the most articulate and persistent exponent of the import substitution approach. He maintains that countries such as South Korea forged ahead by providing protection to their infant industries. In fact, says Rodrik, the state policy in South Korea was directed initially at encouraging investment and that could only happen if those committing capital for new enterprises in the industrial sector knew that they would not be overwhelmed by foreign competition.
That would not have happened had the Koreans opened their economy at that stage and lowered barriers against trade. According to Rodrik, South Korea grew rapidly since its government "managed to engineer a significant increase in the private return to capital" by "subsidizing and coordinating investment decisions".
The fact that the share of exports in the country's gross domestic product expanded significantly in this period - from 5.3 per cent in 1961 to 33.1 per cent in 1980 - does not necessarily mean that an export oriented policy was pursued by the Koreans. Increase in the share of exports in national output was the passive result of expansion in investment.
The Koreans had to import capital equipment and raw materials to make a success of their investment-oriented approach, and to do that they needed access to external capital. This was obtained by encouraging exports. Using this as the argument, the American economist Larry Westphal arrived at the opposite conclusion from that reached by Rodrik.
According to him, "Korea's industrial performance owes a great deal to the government's promotional policies toward exports and its initiatives in targeting industries for development. If nothing else, policies towards exports created an atmosphere - rare in the Third World - in which businessmen could be certain that the economic system would respond and subsequently reward their efforts aimed at expanding and upgrading exports."
How do economists interpret the role of trade in India's economic performance? Some of them - in particular Colombia University's Jagdish Bhagwati - have compared India's experience with that of South Korea in support of their argument for economic openness. In the 40-year period between achieving independence in 1947, and the adoption by it of the first set of economic reforms in the late 1980s, India, like South Korea, also encouraged investment but it did that behind considerably higher walls of protection.
But this approach did not produce economic growth, which remained at an anaemic level of three per cent a year. India tried, in other words, to industrialize by restricting external competition. According to Arvind Panagariya, another Indian economist who has done research in this area, "by the mid-1970s, India's trade regime had become so repressive that imports (other than oil and cereals) had fallen from the already low level of seven per cent of GDP in 1957-58 to a bare three per cent in 1975-76."
What conclusion should one draw from this debate for South Asia in general and Pakistan in particular? It would appear that "the stage of development" is an important determinant of the approach a government in the developing world should adopt. At an early stage, it is appropriate to protect "infant industries" by building a reasonably high wall of tariff around them. But these industries must not be allowed to languish in this state for too long.
They should be eventually exposed to external competition in order to increase their productivity. Not allowing that to happen encourages them to produce goods that can be marketed only at home and would not have any demand outside the county's closed borders.
That was the experience of India with the products of much of the industry it established in the 40-year period after gaining independence. Indian industries became competitive in the world markets only after the reforms of the 1990s resulted in substantial reduction in tariff and non-tariff protection. In other words, South Asia's industrialization has reached the point at which it does not - in fact, should not - need a great deal of protection. Instead, it needs competition from regional as well as world players.
There is another facet to this debate that needs to be reviewed before reaching some conclusions on what is the appropriate set of policies that would promote economic growth in Pakistan. This concerns the pace at which an economy should be opened to outside competition. I will turn to this subject in a later article.
Identifying causes of terrorism
Following intensive consultations among its members, the UN Security Council (UNSC), unanimously adopted a Russian sponsored resolution on October 8, condemning terrorism and suggesting concrete measures to bolster the existing anti- terrorist machinery and legal norms.
The resolution in question, which calls upon states to fully cooperate in the fight against terrorism, especially with those states where or against whose citizens terrorist acts are committed, stipulates international cooperation to cover those individuals, groups or entities that are perceived to be involved in or associated with terrorist activities, other than those designated by the Al Qaeda/Taliban Sanction Committee.
In the absence of an agreed legal definition of terrorism, the widening of global cooperation in fighting this problem without making a distinction between terrorists and freedom fighters carries serious implications. The powerful nations, with imperialist ambitions for territorial aggrandizement and hegemonic designs, almost always portray the freedom struggles as terrorism and use force to suppress them under the guise of counter-terrorism. The fear is that these nations may use the present resolution to delegitimize the freedom movements and unleash a reign of terror to suppress them, with total immunity.
There have been attempts, from time to time, to define terrorism. However, no universally accepted definition has yet emerged. It is, therefore, necessary to renew efforts to evolve a just and comprehensive definition of terrorism that would distinguish it from peoples' struggle for national liberation, a right that is recognized by the United Nations and sanctified by international law. It may, however, be emphasized that regardless of their motivation, all acts, methods and practices that seek to create an environment of fear should continue to be termed terrorism.
Regrettably, some of the international conflicts and disputes, particularly those involving the denial of human rights, still linger on, for one reason or another, in spite of the UNSC resolutions clearly spelling out their solutions. In consequence of this, a deep sense of despair and anger has been created among the oppressed peoples who, in desperation, have resorted to violence against their oppressors. The United Nations should, therefore, accelerate its efforts to resolve the festering conflicts between the nations, within a reasonable time limit, to save the world from the scourge of violence and terror.
Both Pakistan and China, who are members of the UNSC, while supporting the Russian draft resolution, also urged that anti- terrorist response should be accompanied by a long-term strategy striking at the root, as the fight against terrorism cannot be won without dealing simultaneously with both, the symptoms and causes. Astonishingly, this important and constructive suggestion is not reflected in the resolution in question.
It seems that other members of the UNSC did not realize that the menace of terrorism cannot be eliminated through short-term military, legislative or administrative measures alone. They must be supplemented with concerted efforts aimed at removing the causes which breed terrorism.
The desire to identify the "root causes" of terrorism in order to address them is quite natural. One often hears that socio-economic grievances lead to terrorism. However, the ground realities belie this theory. To illustrate the point it may be mentioned that most of the countries of the world where the majority of their citizens live in extreme poverty, are generally immune from terrorism.
The peoples of these countries suffering from inequities hardly resort to violence to seek redress for their economic woes. This is however, not meant to suggest that no effort should be made to reduce poverty in poor countries, which has its own vices.
It is a well-established fact that terrorists generally come from middle class and in some cases they even belong to fabulously wealthy families. It may be noted that those who masterminded the 9/11 carnage in the United Sates were, without exception, scions of the privileged classes.
These affluent terrorists, however, associate people from lower middle class or poor families only to execute their plans. Their behaviour towards these people is also generally exploitative. As a matter of policy, they are always indoctrinated so that they may commit even the most heinous crimes and acts of terrorism, as a cardinal religious duty.
Regrettably, the West's generally unsavoury attitude towards the Muslims, particularly its close partisanship with Israel in the Middle East, has played an important role in whipping up sentiments against it across the Muslim world and has even placed the moderate Muslim leaders in a quandary.
Their efforts to provide a template for moderation across the globe, as a part of their long-term strategy to fight against terrorism, might suffer a setback if the West does not fundamentally change its policies towards Islam and its adherents.
Terrorism is not an Islamic phenomenon but unfortunately in recent years violent acts have been committed in the name of Islam - a religion which is peace-loving and tolerant and lays great emphasis on its core values of compassion, justice and benevolence.
Ironically, however, the radicals in Muslims societies have taken upon themselves to fight for the Islamic causes all over the world based on their own dogmatic views about their religion.
In these circumstances, it is a travesty to equate Islam with terrorism on the basis of the personal behaviour of the heretics, which runs counter to its fundamental teachings.
The writer is a former ambassador.
Need for America to re-discover itself
Will the world become a safer place after the elections in the United States? Not necessarily because neither George Bush nor John Kerry will do an about-face on what seems an entrenched Middle East foreign policy whose main plank is the security of Israel.
This policy was given a new lease of life after 9/11 and has been thrown into the melting-pot of the war on terror. Pakistan, of course, would like to see George Bush win because there is a rapport between him and President Musharraf and John Kerry is an unknown and has given no indication of what his foreign policy will be beyond accusing George Bush of mismanaging the Iraq war.
George Bush has received unexpected support from Vladimir Putin who has said that George Bush's defeat would be a victory for the terrorists. In days gone this ringing endorsement from a Russian leader would have been a kiss of death. I can imagine a number of former American presidents turning in their graves.
Tony Blair, loyal to the core has dutifully redeployed some British troops nearer to where the real action is - a move seen by his opponents as unashamed support for George Bush. The Bush camp is also slyly suggesting that Yasser Arafat is rooting for John Kerry. Mahathir has meanwhile advised the American Muslims to vote for Kerry as if their votes mattered or could make a difference.
There has been no American presidential election that has attracted so much interest outside the United States than this one. Yet the election will be decided by domestic issues and not by Iraq and even then there are no sharp differences between the Republicans and Democrats.
Neither party is driven by ideology. Both would be described as right-wing and both are funded by the military-industrial complex who hedge their bets so that no matter who loses, they win.
I heard a Mr. Bob Taft who is governor of the state of Ohio interviewed on BBC's Hard Talk. The governor is a supporter of George Bush. The governor was asked some searching questions on the war on terror and Iraq. His responses appeared to come out of a script, which doesn't appear to change despite the unfolding of new information about weapons of mass destruction, which turned out to be a mirage.
George Bush has made the United States a safer place, the war on terror is being won now that the regime of Saddam Hussein has been overthrown and when told that it had been established that there was no connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, he said that Saddam was a horrible man who had gassed his own people.
The interviewer let him of the hook but would not have made any difference if he had nailed him.
He was asked no questions about Abu Ghraib. He would no doubt have said that only a handful of rogue elements were involved and that indeed seems to be the perception of the American public.
I am not surprised that prisoner abuse which took on epidemic proportions has not been a campaign issue especially since John Kerry's war record in Vietnam was brought into question as well as the artful draft dodging by George Bush. Ivan Frederick, a sergeant who was found guilty of acts that bordered on torture and showed Frederick himself as a psychopath has been awarded eight year imprisonment and given a dishonourable damage.
He is the highest rank soldier to be tried and convicted and no one is prepared to say how far up the chain of command went the orders to " break " the prisoners. Forget the Geneva Convention, the almighty United States military is not bound by such pussy-footing rules, this kind of prisoner abuse went beyond an atrocity. It was a barbaric act. George Bush did not raise the issue for obvious reasons of self-preservation and John Kerry possibly because a lot of prisoner abuse went on in Vietnam.
When it comes to hostage taking, I have heard American and British leaders say that, that is the sort of people we are dealing with, mounting their high horse and yet when it comes to prisoner abuse it is their stated and unshakeable opinion that it was just a few, acting on their own. Yet not only the military but the CIA and even the contractors were involved in the interrogation of the prisoners.
Contractors? Did they charge a special fee for every act that violated the Geneva Convention? The profit motive is what fuels the engine of free enterprise. Did Halliburton get any piece of the action? It does seem mind-boggling that private contractors should be an integral part of military operations.
The next administration in Washington DC whether it is a continuation of the present one with a few changes in personnel or a new one will have to take some tough decisions on the war on terror. It seems an open-ended war and there is no way of knowing when it has been won. Will this mean that the United States will not be able to lower its guard and Homeland Security will become a permanent feature of the American way of life? Homeland security has made deep inroads into civil liberties. At the same time there will be the need to mend fences with the Muslim world.
The United States needs to get back the trust and the goodwill of not just the Muslim world but most people of the world. As someone said on BBC's Dateline, it was an American journalist, what is taken as anti-American is really anti-Pentagon. Someone added, not the Pentagon but a clique in it. America needs to re-discover itself.
Pakistani-Americans' stance on polls
The presidential debates have given disconcerting messages to that segment of American population which has suffered major after-shocks of the 9/11 tragedy. There is little hope that the Patriot Act would be repealed or drastically altered to guarantee the rights provided to them under the constitution.
During the second debate President Bush stoutly defended the Act: "As a matter of fact, the tools now given to the terrorist fighters are the same tools that we've been using against drug dealers and white-collar criminals. So I really don't think so. I hope you don't think that. I mean, I - because I think whoever is the president must guard your liberties, must not erode your rights in America. I don't think the Patriot Act abridges your rights at all..."
John Kerry struck a different note: "A whole bunch of folks in America are concerned about the way the Patriot Act has been applied. In fact, the inspector-general of the Justice Department found that John Ashcroft had twice applied it in ways that were inappropriate. We need to be stronger on terrorism. But you know what we also need to do as Americans is never let the terrorists change the constitution of the United States in a way that disadvantages our rights."
His choice of words and diffident approach made the inference too obvious for Muslim Americans: they will remain precariously perched as the Act is likely to remain in force whoever wins the forthcoming election. For the present, their political clout hardly matters. Meanwhile, the American Muslim Task force on Civil Rights and Elections - Political Action Committee (AMT-PAC), in a statement issued on October 21, called on "Muslims nationwide to cast a protest vote for Sen. John Kerry."
AMT-PAC said: "We acknowledge the considerable outreach to our community by Sen. Kerry's campaign, particularly by his campaign co-chair Sen. Edward Kennedy. We also appreciate the ongoing dialogue with Muslim leaders about problems posed by the .... Patriot Act. While the Kerry campaign has critiqued a number of Bush administration polices, it has so far failed to explicitly affirm support for due process, equal justice and other constitutional norms."
It said, the American Muslims were also disappointed that Kerry's campaign has shied away from expressing unambiguous support for principles enshrined in the US constitution that prohibit use of ex-post facto laws, secret proceedings and secret evidence. "Because pluralism is based on partial agreements, support for Sen.
Kerry is premised on our overall effort to help restore liberty and justice for all. Mindful of disagreements with Sen. Kerry on some domestic and international issues, including the war in Iraq, we are willing to work with him to help restore due process and equal justice in accordance with the US constitution."
The muffled tone of the statement is significant. That the priorities of the Muslim world are seriously misplaced was also subtly brought home by a remark of the Democratic candidate during the course of the second debate - the US must match the trained manpower of China and India. One should not begrudge the tribute to Pakistan's immediate neighbours but one must ungrudgingly bemoan the low priority accorded to education and science in the Muslim countries.
Nuclear proliferation is another issue that has dominated the political scene and is likely to figure in the dialogue. As time passes, the focus might shift from Iran and North Korea with a plea to other countries to abdicate their nuclear power status.
How does the Pakistani-American community respond to the present situation? For an answer, let's start on an optimistic note. The formation of the Pakistan Congressional Caucus is a timely initiative, thanks to the enterprise of some embassy officials and prominent community activists. But a lot more needs to be done. Is the Pakistani-American community fully seized of this responsibility? It is the nature of the task, truly challenging, that warrants a reiteration of some earlier observations.
First, the complexion of the Pakistani community in the United States. There are those who make it to the new world in search of a better life - those who work in dingy factories or corporate ventures at a low rung and are content with sputtering a few incoherent words of American English, a sub-standard, pedestrian form of language in such workplaces with funny usages, and worse, funnier accents and pronunciations, to qualify for a scholarship for higher learning.
One must unreservedly thank the US academic and high-tech advances and their corporate spin-offs that make up for the misplaced stress on syllables which is jarring in one's ears. Such Pakistanis, or 'Pakistani Americans' as they pride on being called, have two obsessions: to loathe everything that is Pakistani and to praise anything that is American.
The razzle-dazzle of posh malls impresses them, rather than the inspirational vision of America's founding fathers which finds a vivid manifestation in the dynamic of Cornell, Yale, Princeton, Pennsylvania, Brown, Dartmouth, Woodworth, Columbia and Harvard. They miss the finer values and essential features of this great country, features that accord the United States of America the enviable status of being the world's only superpower deserving the best superlatives for sustained strivings in challenging fields.
Then, there are those Pakistani Americans who have obtained higher education and struck gold in an entrepreneurial undertaking or wealth quite disproportionate to their academic or personal attainments and who have generously contributed to community causes.
Yet their corporate-tinged outlook lacks the perspicacity of the visionaries of Aligarh where the two-nation theory was enunciated and which led to the creation of Pakistan, or the bright minds of Hyderabad where Urdu, a cultural bond of pre and post-independence Muslims, was accorded the status of medium of instruction to strengthen the Muslim identity.
English did not suffer in that great seat of culture and learning, where the quintessence of both testifies to the richness of the past and a commitment to the future.
And if individual vision is to be cited, the name of Dr. I H. Usmani spontaneously comes to mind. As early as the 1960s he drew the blueprints of a nuclear power programme for Pakistan. Thanks to his foresight and the establishment of centres of excellence like the Pakistan Institute of Nuclear Science and Technology (Pinstech) - described as 'best of both the worlds' by TIME magazine - Pakistan succeeded in joining the exclusive nuclear club, and, more recently, in warding off Indian military adventurism.
Another visionary who deserves to be mentioned is Professor Abdus Salam who not only won the coveted Nobel Prize but, more important, set up the UN International Centre of Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy, to act as a one-man multinational corporation busily transferring intellectual technology to the less developed countries of the world. "Salam's strength is that he believes that miracles are possible provided one goes out and helps them on their way," Nigel Calder said of the eminent Pakistani in 1967.
It is a pity we don't have someone quite like him in the community of Pakistani Americans though there are many who are many times richer than him. The inference is obvious: richness of imagination and vision impacts the social scene rather than the opulence of money.
And that explains why the singular obligation of the affluent business class of Pakistani Americans to the community is restricted to the construction of buildings. But do bricks and mortar create institutions pulsating with the creative impulse? And can schools established by the rich for the children of the rich be anything other than a self-defeating exercise? How many Pakistanis can afford to send their children to the schools set up by the community's so-called 'philanthropists'?
One may also ponder the serious question: Are the more affluent among us conscious of the obligation thrust upon the community in the post-9/11 period? The Muslims took, and continue to take, a terrible bashing at the hands of the media because their own press is too fragile to respond. Has anyone done anything to support the fledgling Pakistani and Muslim media? Barring exceptions, our papers continue to be mere rags and TV programmes a theatrical portrayal of our strivings. A sorry spectacle resulting from the indifference of the community's well-to-do ignoramuses.
Finally, there is the younger generation. The more extrovert among them dote on Jennifer Lopez and Jay Leno or fancy the characters of 'Practice and Charm'. Earning grades and counting units, they seem to drift listlessly while yearning for an intellectually stimulating environment that could lend meaning to the newly found Pakistani-American identity with a wholesome Pakistani input.
Prominent Pakistani Americans have to seriously attend to the social and cultural issues touching on the lives of the Pakistanis in the United States. They should make an earnest effort to blend values that could be truly representative of the best of both the worlds.
Arriving in the US is not an achievement; honourable survival is. And in the ensuing process the 'melting pot' experience does not have to be a wholly one-sided affair. Will the Pakistani community rise to the occasion?