| 01 March 2005 | Tuesday | 19 Muharram 1426 |
Slow and hazardous
Highway tragedy
President Pervez Musharraf's call to the people to resist extremism points to a phenomenon that has been with us now for more than two decades. The danger to which he referred at his public meeting in Multan on Saturday has already caused much harm to Pakistan.
Apart from death and destruction caused by acts of terrorism by extremists, religious bigotry and militancy have had wider repercussions for the country. From the point of view of domestic politics, they have given the people, especially the youth, a mind-set that believes in violence as a means for solving problems.
This is reflected in the violence on campuses where youths take to guns even on minor pretexts. At a national level, religious extremism has taken the form of defacing women painted on billboards and of such tragedies as the death of two women in the NWFP because the male doctors were told not to attend to female patients unaccompanied by a mehram.
All this and incidents religious and political terrorism have cast Pakistan in a bad light abroad. There have also been attacks on foreigners: one may recall here the murder of American journalist Daniel Pearl and of four Chinese engineers by religious and ethnic extremists.
The overall result is the virtual absence of foreign tourists and the inhibition of foreign as well as Pakistani capitalists to invest here. In an age where laissez faire is the norm, no country can develop economically unless investment, foreign and local, takes place in a big way.
From this point of view, terrorism has done incalculable harm to Pakistan's economy. Whatever economic turnaround has been achieved has been made possible by the change in Pakistan's fortunes in the wake of 9/11.
Some foreign investment, Arab especially, has started coming in, but it will be quite some time before foreign investors think that Pakistan has been able to crush militant extremism of all sorts.
Nothing served to strengthened religious militancy in Pakistan more than the US-led 'jihad' in Afghanistan. Encouraged by Washington, Islamabad agreed to serve as a conduit for the CIA's overt and covert financial and military aid to the mujahideen, with the ISI acting as the principal conduit.
This made Pakistan a recruitment and training ground for some religious parties. The tragedy, however, was that even after the Soviet withdrawal, successive governments in Pakistan found the religious militias too strong to discipline.
The jihadis became a government within the government, who defied Islamabad's writ and ran their own foreign and security policies, whether in Afghanistan or in Kashmir. The situation worsened when weak political governments were in power (1988-1999).
This government is now trying to come to grips with this phenomenon, but it is making a mistake by going solo. It may indeed be genuinely interested in taming the Frankenstein monster reared by the military itself, but it can succeed only if it does so by a mix of political and repressive means.
It has used force in Wana, and it has also tightened security in Sui, and it has admittedly achieved some improvement in both the situations. But the government does not seem adverse to courting religious elements when it suits its purposes.
One may note here the ease with which the military was able to make the LFO part of the Constitution, and the MMA's role in having the 17th Amendment passed. In the process, the military-led government has sidelined the two mainstream parties, the PPP and the PML-N. This is hardly the way to combat extremism.
Slow and hazardous
According to a government-appointed special task force, over 70 per cent of Pakistan's road network is in a poor state of repair and maintenance. It estimates that Pakistan is losing about Rs320 billion annually, or nine per cent of GNP, because of the poor quality of its transportation system.
This drawback can block Pakistan's plans to become a hub of regional transit trade in the coming years. The main problem areas are the quality of roads, the absence of an efficient trucking system, inadequate facilities at ports and a poor system of rail transport.
A number of measures need to be taken to tackle these problems. An improved transport system will not only benefit importers and exporters but also local businesses as well as countries that wish to use the country as a transit route for trade. These countries include Afghanistan, India, Iran, China as well as countries in Central Asia which are making plans for increasing overland trade.
As a first step, the government has to put into place an efficient network of roads and highways. The National Highway Authority can do this if only it has a system for building roads and also ensuring the quality of the work done as well as proper maintenance of the roads.
One major reason for deterioration in the quality of roads is the overloading of trucks. This can be checked with the help of the Highway Police. At the same time, trucking companies need to be encouraged to ensure quality of service.
At present, most trucking companies are in the informal sector and they have neither the expertise nor the equipment to provide hassle-free, door-step delivery of goods and services for customers.
At the same time, more emphasis has to be placed on quick clearance of cargo at the ports. In this, the paperwork involved in moving cargo has to be minimized. Finally, the most important link in any efficient transport system remains the country's railway system. This needs to be upgraded and improved at the earliest. So far, attempts at doing so have yielded mixed results.
Highway tragedy
The death of seven schoolchildren in a road accident near Kallar Kahar on the Lahore-Islamabad Motorway on Sunday is shocking beyond belief. Out on a study tour, the children, all under 15, were travelling from Rawalpindi to the Khewra salt mines when their speeding bus plunged into a ravine.
Initial police report suggests that the bus was not roadworthy and its driving shaft broke as it negotiated the hilly road at a high speed. The surviving 57 children sustained injuries, some of them termed critical by doctors providing treatment to the injured at Rawalpindi and Islamabad hospitals.
The federal and Punjab governments have announced monetary compensations of Rs100,000 each for the families of deceased children, and 75,000 each for the injured. But for those who have lost their little ones in the tragedy no amount of money can lessen their grief or anger - anger because their children could have lived if sanity had prevailed on our highways.
According to the World Health Organization, road accidents in Pakistan claim nearly 5,000 lives every year, most of them in Punjab. As for the latest tragedy, the motorway police could have prevented it by refusing to allow entry of the unworthy vehicle to operate; the school could have averted it by ensuring the roadworthiness of the vehicle it rented to transport the children; the parents could have checked it by being more vigilant about where and how their children were being transported by the school.
Children are our collective responsibility, and failing to protect them in any way each one of us can - at home, in the street, at amusement parks, at festivities, etc. - amounts to a failure of society as a whole. The need for sensitizing the people on this score is as important as curbing rash driving.