| 01 February 2005 | Tuesday | 21 Zilhaj 1425 |
Issue of quality of service
World getting even more dangerous
Why are we indifferent to poverty?
It is the fate of a weekly columnist to have his plans disrupted by current events. I had promised last week that I would continue in the column this week with the story on global poverty and how the evolution in thinking concerning poverty alleviation should inform policy-making in Pakistan.
But that discussion will have to wait for another week or so. Today, I will take up the more important issue of President George Bush's inaugural address of January 20, and how that might influence America's relations with Pakistan and other countries of the Muslim world.
President Bush took to the inaugural stand after the pundits had declared that second presidential terms are mostly inconsequential. There was enough material in history to indicate that, like the fate meted out to Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, and Clinton, President Bush too was entering a period that would be marked by despondency and difficulties.
By late 2006, with elections due for the US Congress, Bush would be a lame duck president, headed towards history. But President Bush has defied expectations about him before, and with his second inaugural address he did that once more. Once again, he was claiming the centre of the stage for himself.
There was considerable expectation that his speech would be devoted to outlining his ambitious domestic agenda for the second term. He had already said a great deal about reforming the system of social security, about rationalizing the tax code, and about changing the tort law.
None of these issues figured in the address. As one commentator wrote the day after the speech, "what was striking was that the cause of international liberation on which Bush expounded at length subordinated not only his domestic agenda but even the call to combat terrorism." The words "terror" and "terrorism" did not figure even once in the speech.
What appeared prominently was the promise to seek "the greatest achievements in the history of freedom", the liberation of oppressed people everywhere and the end of all tyrannies.
America, Bush claimed, had played a role in advancing freedom in the past; it was planning to do the same with an even greater vigour now. "Through much of the last century, America's faith in freedom and democracy was a rock in a raging sea.
Now it is seed upon the wind, taking root in many nations," Bush told his audience. The word "freedom" appeared 27 times and the word "liberty" 15 times in the 21 minute speech.
In the second inaugural address, President Bush embarked on a new enterprise: not only to project America's view of the world and what it saw as its mission - many have called it America's manifest destiny - but to change the world.
This was a departure for him. He now believes that only by making the world free and democratic will America win new friends. His initial answer to the question - why do they hate us so much even to give their lives to hurt America? - was a simple one.
That hatred was based on envy about what America had achieved and the system of values it pursued. He had disregarded the explanation provided by more serious thinkers that dislike for America was grounded on its support for regimes in the Muslim world that did not allow political and economic space to their citizens.
Much of the Muslim world had seen rapid growths in their populations. In most Muslim countries, populations were young - in many those under the age of 18 accounted for one-half of the entire population.
Large segments of the Muslim youth were very happy with their governments and the elite that dominated them. Since the United States supported the elite and the governments they controlled, it was inevitable that the youth would show its wrath against the United States.
Added to this sentiment was resentment at the way Washington under President George W. Bush had treated the Israel-Palestine conflict. It was not only in the Muslim world that there was anger against the palpable tilt towards Israel.
Even Europe was deeply worried about the course the United States was taking in the volatile region of the Middle East. What further aggravated matters was the utter disregard by the Bush administration in his first term for the concerns and anger produced by his policies.
As he waited to be inaugurated for the second term in office, Bush appears to have reflected on all the excitement he had provoked around the globe since taking office for the first time in January 2001.
With one eye on the world and the other on history, he went in search for a deeper meaning for the way he wanted to deal with the world. He found that in the words "freedom" and "liberty".
Analysts noted the transition. According to Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, Bush's transition has gone through three phases. "The first was realist retrenchment... He would pursue the 'national interest' narrowly defined, with a far more selective approach to involvement overseas."
The second phase began with the September 11, 2001, attacks. Bush "led the United States back to global involvement on a Cold War moral fervour (if not with Cold War's attention to alliances).
In the third phase Bush has taken a giant step. He has grounded American foreign policy in universal principles, in the Declaration of Independence and what Lincoln called its 'abstract truth, applicable to all men at all times'. The goal of American foreign policy is now to spread democracy, for its own sake."
In a way, Bush was returning to the pursuit of principles laid out by a number of former presidents. In 1947, President Harry Truman declared that "it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples."
President John Kennedy pledged in his inaugural address "to pay any price, bear any burden...to ensure the survival and the success of liberty." In 1982, President Ronald Reagan announced a "global campaign for freedom".
But Bush was going further than the abstract thinking of Lincoln and others. He had come round to the view - although in the speech on the day of the inauguration he did not make the connection explicitly - that the roots of global terrorism were to be found in the political systems of the countries from which came the people who perpetrated these acts.
"For as long as whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny - prone to ideologies that feed hatred and excuse murder, violence will gather and multiply in destructive power, and cross the most defended borders, and raise a mortal threat.
There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment and expose the pretensions of tyrants, and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom."
Ever religious, President Bush said that he was drawing his inspiration from the Almighty who was the "author of liberty". But it was not just the "Christian God" who was behind his thoughts.
"Self-government relies, in the end, on the governing of the self. The edifice of character is built in families, supported by communities with standards, and sustained in our national life by the truths of Sinai, the sermon on the Mount, the words of the Quran and the varied faiths of our people".
Having identified freedom and liberty as the twin pillars of the preferred world order, how would the American president go about creating it? Although Bush himself provided two answers to the question in the speech, many more were provided as his words were parsed the moment they were delivered.
Bush suggested two strategies he would use to achieve his lofty goals. One, he would rely on the counsel of America's allies and thus give up some on the unilateral approach he had taken earlier, particularly in the case of Iraq.
"And all the allies of the United States can know we honour your friendship, we rely on your counsel and we depend on your help. Division among free nations is a primary goal of freedom's enemies. The concerted effort of free nations to promote democracy is a prelude to our enemies defeat".
The American president also pulled back a little from the policy prescribed in the strategy statement issued by the White House in September 2001, a year after the terrorist attacks on America.
The US then had indicated a strong preference for unilateral preemptive action when it believed that its strategic interests were being threatened. On January 20, 2005, Bush offered a much more nuanced approach.
While "it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ending of tyranny in our world," America was not planning to "impose our own style of government.
Our goal, instead, is to help others find their own voice, attain their own freedom and make their own way." America, in other words would cajole and help but not use force to advance freedom and liberty across the globe.
"America's influence is not unlimited, but unfortunately for the oppressed, America's influence is considerable and we will use it confidently in freedom's cause." That notwithstanding, President Bush was not threatening the use of force to advance America's mission.
"This is not primarily the task of arms, though we will defend ourselves by force of arms when necessary. Freedom by its very nature must be chosen, and defended by its citizens, and sustained by the rule of law and the protection of minorities. And when the soul of a nation finally speaks, the institutions that arise may reflect the customs and traditions very different from our own." As if to underscore the point that Washington would be very selective in resorting to arms, Vice President Dick Cheney in a radio interview on the morning of the inauguration threw the gauntlet in the direction of Iran.
He said that Tehran would have to take seriously America's concerns about the country's nuclear ambitions. If Iran did not relent he would not be surprised if Israel took the matter into its own hands and used its air force to destroy the country's nuclear installations.
There was a precedence for such an action. In 1981, the Israeli air force had destroyed Iraq's Osirak reactor, setting back the country's nuclear programme from which it was not able to recover.
That the planning for just such an attack was proceeding was suggested by Seymour Hersh in an article contributed to The New Yorker and published in the week of the Bush inauguration.
"The administration has been conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside Iran at least since last summer," wrote Hersh. "Much of the focus is on the accumulation of intelligence and targeting information on Iranian nuclear, chemical and missile sites, both declared and suspected.
The goal is to identify and isolate three dozen, and perhaps more, such targets that could be destroyed by precision strikes and short-term commando raids." What does this latest twist in thinking imply for Pakistan? General Pervez Musharraf and the country he leads figured prominently in the analysis that followed the delivery of the inaugural speech. How did Pakistan fare in this analysis? I will take up this question in this space next week.
Issue of quality of service
The year 2005, according to Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz, is going to be a 'high-growth' year. Speaking to businessmen in Karachi earlier this month, he said that the economy would get a significant boost from growth in agriculture, manufacturing, export-related industries as well as an equally robust performance expected for the country's stock market.
As would be expected of a growing economy, one of the main driving forces fuelling this growth and expansion is an increase in overall demand. In Pakistan's case, this is most evident in the market for consumer durables, especially mobile phones and cars, both of which have seen a surge in demand in the last two to three years.
In fact, the telecom sector, which already saw a near doubling of mobile phone connections during 2004, is expected to experience unprecedented expansion in the next two to three years.
Industry experts estimate that the number of mobile phone connections might reach 50 million in the next five years. Besides, the end of PTCL's monopoly on landline services has facilitated the entry of several private service providers in this field.
Increased competition is good for consumers in that user charges are reduced as firms try and keep on to their market base. This is the example of just the telecom sector; of new state-of-the-art technology, innovations, gadgets and models now arriving in the country offering consumers ever-increasing variety to choose from.
While such growth is welcome, and a sign that the country is moving forward economically, it comes with certain very negative (and often overlooked) consequences. While private firms are offering a variety of goods and services now, it seems that the customer service and product quality are at best marginally better compared to the time when state monopolies dominated the market.
Take the much-heralded and talked about telecom sector. There are dozens of Internet service providers (ISPs) in the market, and while bandwidth rates have been reduced by the government, the fact is that browsing speeds remain excruciatingly slow.
Tariffs charged by ISPs might have come down significantly but have been accompanied by a corresponding increase in the number of connections given. Since this has happened with no appreciable change in capacity, the result is a massive slowing down of the Internet in the country.
So, while computer users might be paying half of what they did, say, three or four years ago, the time that they spend downloading a file is often more than double than what it used to be. The net result is that it is actually costlier and more time-consuming to use the Internet now.
The same is true of the mobile phone industry. Its providers too claim to have invested millions in financing expansions but then go on to give so many new connections that capacity becomes choked.
The result is a deterioration in service and as usual it is the consumers who bear the brunt. In fact, each time a call drops and a number is redialled, the mobile phone companies' billing revenue rises.
True, yes, the average Pakistan consumer does have more goods and services to choose from like 80-plus cable channels, dozens of Internet service providers, hundreds of models of mobile phones, several new models of automobile, credit card and banking services and so on. But all of this comes at a price, and even though prices might be falling generally as competition heats up, there is still the issue of good customer service and reliable product quality.
The reason for this is that increased involvement of the private sector should be accompanied by a corresponding use by the government of regulatory mechanisms so that the private sector firms do not exploit consumers.
Anecdotal evidence and personal experience would seem to suggest that what has happened in Pakistan's unregulated environment is that economic liberalization and its accompanying privatization has led to a situation where state-owned monopolies have now been replaced by ones in the private/multinational sector.
Overbearing government bureaucracies, which one thought would have been killed off by privatization, have been replaced by equally, if not more, overbearing private sector functionaries.
Those who disagree with this view will argue that regulatory agencies are already in place to monitor the fields under discussion, like the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) to oversee the telecom sector or the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority (PEMRA) to monitor the cable providers and electronic media.
However, examination of performance of PEMRA would reveal that the regulator is more interested in becoming the guardian of public morality than in ensuring the provision of efficient, reliable and affordable service to cable subscribers. As far as ensuring that no vulgar shows are shown on television, it swings into action every now and then.
Come to the banking sector, where after every six months charges for account-holders are increased, hitting those with small accounts the hardest. But the process through which this is done is disingenuous and the increase is usually described as a 'revision'.
Then, we have the credit card companies which fall over each other to sell their product. Since most private banks have now out sourced the marketing of their credit cards, what happens is a couple of ill-trained young men turn up at offices with business cards that describe them as sales executives.
Prospective card customers are told that they only need to sign the card application and the rest of the form will be filled (by the sales executives) later in their own offices.
Such a practice is not only unethical but could very well lead to wrong or misleading information supplied by the sales staff about the card applicant. The application is eventually approved and the card is issued, much to the delight of the applicant since he or she can now lead the glamorous lifestyle that the bank's advertisement campaign promises card holders.
However, when any disputes arise - and they often do - faulty or wrong information can prove to be a headache for the customer. Besides, numerous instances have surfaced of customers being served with a monthly bill after cancelling their credit cards.
The State Bank of Pakistan would do bank customers a big service by establishing a complaints cell and publicizing its contact numbers and other relevant information through the print and electronic media. The same should be the case of the PTA as well as PEMRA, both of whom need to get their acts together and play the role of regulatory bodies in the true sense.
Unfortunately, in their bid to achieve a GDP per capita of $1,500 by 2015, the prime minister and his team seem to have forgotten the ordinary individual consumer who, despite the increased choices and far better technology, continues to get a raw deal at the hands of both the government and the private sector.
It will be a long time before our corporate giants get unnerved by a mere individual as some of these American giants have been by Michael Moore.
World getting even more dangerous
A long time ago I saw a film which was about the occupation of Japan by American forces. It was a light-hearted film in which a US commanding officer tells his aide that democracy will be imposed on the Japanese even if it has to be thrust down their throat.
I thought of this as I considered the elections in Iraq and saw television pictures of US troops in full combat gear distributing election leaflets among the Iraqi people. As I write this column a day before the Iraqi elections, there is no doubt in my mind that the elections will be held and yet another mission will be accomplished.
Whether these elections will have any legitimacy or credibility is not what is at stake. The multinational troops will stay in Iraq for as long as is deemed necessary, which could be indefinitely.
There will be many opportunities to write about the Iraqi elections in the near-future. It is given that the insurgency will continue and we will not be able to get a final count of the Iraqi dead, which will be the price that would have been paid for democracy.
George Bush is in his second term now and has four years to pursue his evangelical mission to bring democracy to countries far and near and make the world one happy family.
It is a creditable goal though not everyone seems enthused about it. Some see it as an extension of the present foreign policy, none more so than Iran, which must feel the cold wind that is blowing.
Henry Ford had said that history was more or less bunk, a view that is shared by the present US administration. I have been reading Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States.
Howard Zinn is a distinguished historian and playwright who appear to tilt against conventional wisdom and tells America's story "from the point of view of and in the words of America's women factory workers, African Americans, Native Americans, working poor, and immigrant labourers."
There is one paragraph on the Vietnam War, which is worth quoting in the context of the Iraq War, which shows that history teaches that history teaches nothing. It reads: "From 1964 to 1971, the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the history of the world made a maximum military effort, with everything short of atomic weapons, to defeat a nationalist revolutionary movement in a tiny peasant country - and failed.
When the United States fought in Vietnam, it was organized modern technology versus organized human beings and the human beings won." An additional fact he could have mentioned was that the war was fought by the world's most industrialized country against one of the world's poorest, peasant country.
It was also a war fought without any international approval. The war claimed three million Vietnamese and 58,000 American lives. The casualties in Iraq are nowhere near that scale but the war in Iraq can be said to be young though the casualties have got off to a brisk start.
Clearly, no lessons were learnt even though Vietnam is recent history. The preponderance of military force has its limitations. It can kill people in large numbers, turn cities into ghost towns and ravage a country but it cannot destroy the will of a people.
I don't know whether there is a parallel between the Vietnamese and the insurgents in Iraq. But not all insurgents are criminals and remnants of the Saddam regime. Why is it being assumed that Iraqis have no national pride, no love for their country?
A lot is being made of the fact that Ms Condoleezza Rice is the first Afro-American woman to be made Secretary of State. Before her Colin Powell was Secretary of State and he was Afro-American and before him Madeleine Albright was Secretary of State and a woman. Ms Rice tops them both.
In her stint as National Security Adviser, no mention was made of her race and gender and I cannot recall her ever saying anything about her race. Yet she has spoken about her race and indeed said that Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights movement helped her reach her present eminent position.
She must have been a young, school-going girl in the 1960s and 1970s when the civil rights movement was on the upswing. Howard Zinn writes of this period: "Martin Luther King himself became more and more concerned about problems untouched by civil rights laws - problems coming out of poverty.
In the spring of 1968, he began speaking out, against the advice of some Negro leaders who feared losing friends in Washington, against the war in Vietnam. He connected war and poverty: "...it's inevitable that we've got to bring out the question of the tragic mixup in priorities.
We are spending all of this money for death and destruction, and not nearly enough money for life and constructive development...when the guns of war become a national obsession, social needs inevitably suffer. "
Ms Condoleezza Rice may owe a debt to Martin Luther King but she is clearly not in agreement with when it comes to his views about war. Ms Rice was and is one of the hawks who have been a principal spokesperson for the Bush administration in its case for the war in Iraq.
Even though it is now official that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the overriding reason for justifying its invasion, Ms Rice is quite unbending. She remains a committed hawk.
The world continues to remain a most dangerous place, the danger coming from friends and enemies alike.
Why are we indifferent to poverty?
Why do we need a disaster to provoke generosity? Why is generosity accompanied by PR pictures? It is entirely commendable that the victims of tsunami (now, incidentally, a Hindi word) are being nursed by the rich and the powerful.
But do we need an earthquake under the ocean to bring clean water to the children of the coast? Have the owners of this world and spenders of its wealth ever checked the shoreline to find out what kind of water is drunk by the poor when there is no tsunami?
Pardon my cynicism, but is free bottled water another seed being planted in the vast forest of forward marketing? The rich are already being made to pay for what was once considered a natural gift of nature. The poor will pay for water only after the rich have made it standard practice, because imitation is the best form of profitability.
Governments of course have formally abdicated from any intervention into profitability, so there is no reason to suppose that those who have sold water mixed with sugar and carbon as a health drink will not sell plain water as medicine. (If it's good for pesticide, it can't be bad for human beings, can it?)
The morality of donors who refuse to give a cheque without a clutch of photographers at their side is only one side of the story. But why do prime ministers and destiny-dispensers queue up to accept cheques that are cashing in on publicity? Is it because governments have converted disaster into another instance of taxation? This tax is called "voluntary".
It takes a great deal to make this "voluntary", most of all media hype. I wonder whether governments actually need this money. What happens to the cash that goes into the prime minister's relief fund? Does it fund help or does it fund only disaster-management? Rajiv Gandhi became deeply unpopular with powerful sections of the country when he spoke the truth and said that 85 per cent of development spending went into that curse called the government rather than to the poor.
Since then the situation has changed, but by how much? It was at least partly due to Rajiv Gandhi's honest rhetoric that the climate was created for privatization.
The model is equally valid for disaster-management. What the government can do - send out navies for instance - the private sector cannot, and there is no donors' budget that can pay for navies. What the private sector can do the government should not.
The PM's relief fund has an average balance of about Rs 300 crore. Compare this with what the government spends on itself each year. Rs 4,77829 crore. Put the commas into that number wherever you want because I have lost count of commas.
Extend the analogy. The United States started by offering some twenty million dollars, or some such equally stupid figure. It now wants to save the world by raising that to some hundred million dollars.
How much is the United States spending on the military occupation of Iraq every day? Check out a relevant website; these figures are now posted on the net by the watchful. Let me offer a ballpark figure; even if it is an overestimate, it will not be by much.
Would a figure of one billion dollars a day surprise, perhaps shock you? That is one thousand million dollars a day. This may even be an underestimate, because which accountant has the courage to evaluate what the Pentagon really costs? I am not making value judgements.
I am merely drawing attention to the pitiful fact that Kofi Annan has to appeal for a billion dollars and then add that he wants the money in cash because he does not trust commitments that are made for public consumption in the heat of publicity, and then never honoured.
This is not an underground anarchist making the accusation. It is the most respected and I daresay respectful man in the system doing so. And he is asking for money for what is visibly the worst disaster in memory, a disaster that has set off unease among seaside property developers from Dubai to New York. Appalling? Don't be appalled so easily.
The European Union, more practical, has announced that it will suspend debt repayments from the affected countries for a year. Suspend the debt, not cancel it, just in case you misunderstood.
This gesture alone will save the affected countries some five billion dollars in interest and repayment. You can calculate, if inclined, what the total debt must be. Now to the really bad news.
What do you think the governments of countries like Sri Lanka and Indonesia will do with the money saved? Spend it on the victims? What makes me doubt that? Trust me, most of the money will disappear into that curse called government gluttony.
Now to the real question. Why doesn't the world mobilize on a much larger scale, every day of the year, to tackle a much bigger tragedy than the tsunami, that tragedy called poverty? There are at least three hundred million people in India alone who live below the poverty line.
Does any reader of a newspaper know what that means? Why is hunger - hunger as a permanent reality, day after day, night after night, with gnawing, restless, tired sleep as the only relief from hunger - less of a tragedy than a tsunami?
Why doesn't President George Bush send his brother Jeb (clearly his preferred successor in the White House) to slums so that he can mobilize the overfed to fight the world war against hunger? Is it because hunger isn't as glamorous as a thirty-foot wave chasing you like a beast from some horror movie? Is it because there are no tourists enjoying the sun outside hotels, and therefore have no stories to tell their local newspapers in London and New York and Berlin? Is it because the poor don't rise up to kill the well-fed?
When will that great multinational which controls cricket organise special one-dayers to fund food for children who cannot get one meal a day, for girls who succumb to prostitution as their only hope, for parents who cannot convert their only asset, sweat, into minimum subsistence levels of a few calories a day?
Have you noticed any difference in the pictures emanating from the disaster areas in the last couple of days? The initial images of shock, at the horror, and grief, at the loss of relative, has given way to smiles and even the occasional laugh.
I am looking at a picture distributed by Associated Press of women sitting in a group awaiting rations, one of them being prodded by a police baton to chuckles all around as all of them wait for the wheel of charity to grind in their direction. Why shouldn't they laugh?
Suddenly there is food available without the pressure of unending effort. Suddenly the children of Aceh and Sri Lanka can try on a dress and choose a colour they prefer.
Have you ever thought about this? About the luxury of choice? Do the poor ever have a choice? They wear what they get. The only choice they have is to find something cheaper. Does anyone below the poverty line know what it means to prefer even one vegetable to another?
Disaster then becomes a luxury to the poor. The rich discover that the poor are also alive. Tomorrow - tomorrow, not the day after, for I am in the news business and know how ephemeral is the nature of news - the tsunami will ebb from the headlines. The poor will remain with us. The privileged will return to their indifference.
That is why the poor are chuckling today. They are not cynical. They are simple and practical. They are enjoying the brief luxury of disaster while it lasts. The privileged, in the meanwhile, are wallowing in conscience-management.
Every so often the rich need a tsunami after another glut of Christmas shopping, or Eid wastage, or Puja excess. What on earth would we do if we could not find a tsunami to be sombre about?
Why are we indifferent to poverty? First, since the poor are not one of us, why bother. But I suspect there is more. We also have a politically incorrect and therefore publicly inadmissible contempt for the poor, as if they deserve their poverty because they are lazy, or worthless, or stupid.
This is the theory of the caste system, by which the untouchables are condemned to be where they are because they are considered too stupid to be of any other use to society except the disposal of waste.
One of the five pillars of Islam is charity or zakat. It means purification and is, therefore, a form of great Jihad, the struggle for self-purification, to cleanse oneself from within.
But when the Holy Quran mentions charity (as in Verse 162 of Al Nisa or Verse 55 of Al Maidah) it always adds a qualification - it asks for "regular" charity, not occasional charity, not mere tsunami charity.
It insists on charity as a way of life, not as a balm for death. There is another very real and very realistic instruction from the Holy Book. It says, "If you disclose charity, it is well. But if you conceal it, it is better." If only the Muslims of this world understood at least this much.
The writer is editor-in-chief, Asian Age, New Delhi.