Water: the coming crisis

PRESIDENT Pervez Musharraf was unable to sell the Kalabagh dam project to Pakistan’s smaller provinces. While not giving up the construction of the project altogether, the dam was included in a programme of construction that would involve the building of several reservoirs on the Indus and some of its tributaries over a period of 10 to 12 years.

In his recent address to the nation in January, the president said that there was absence of consensus among the provinces on the need for a large dam on the Indus at Kalabagh. Given that, he settled for the immediate construction of a dam on the Indus upstream of Kalabagh at Bhasha.

This must have been a painful decision to make for the general. For several years since assuming power, the president had said that the building of Kalabagh dam and other major reservoirs on the Indus and its tributaries would be one of his most important legacies. He also emphasized on several occasions that the failure to undertake these important works would bring about a crisis in Pakistan. He was right on both scores. Had he succeeded in getting work on Kalabagh started, his contribution to the economic and social development of Pakistan would have matched that of President Ayub Khan.

In the 1960s, the then military president did not feel the need for broad political consensus to undertake the construction of the mega-projects that were included in the massive and ambitious Indus Water Replacement works. All that was required was competent economic analysis of the projects by the powerful Planning Commission. President Ayub was convinced that by working with the technocrats he could better determine what was good for society over the long run rather than leave those decisions to political forces.

He believed that the few people that dominated the political arena were unable to think beyond their immediate and narrow interests. The Kalabagh dam issue raises the question once again whether the current political structure in Pakistan is equipped to initiate major development works whose implementation can be blocked by vested interests that pursue short-term and narrow objectives.

As to the precarious situation Pakistan currently faces, it should be mentioned that the country stands at the edge of an economic abyss. To understand why that is the case, it will be useful to go back a little to the history of irrigation development in the Indus Valley and indicate how it has contributed to the development of the areas that are now parts of Pakistan. And why, by neglecting further development of the water system, Pakistan is inching towards an economic disaster.

Serious work on taming the Indus and its many tributaries began after the arrival of the British in the subcontinent. Before the advent of the British Raj in the 19th century, India’s rulers had little knowledge of water management. The Afghan rulers of India and their successors, the Mughals, came from the highlands of Central Asia. There were few large rivers in those areas and the agriculture that was practised there depended either on rainfall or on snow melt. The economy relied much less on settled agriculture than on horticulture and animal husbandry. Irrigation was used on a very limited scale, mostly for bringing water to the gardens enjoyed by the rich.

The British came to India with much greater knowledge of water management, most of it gathered from some of the colonies they had built around the globe. Their first major overseas achievements were in Canada. They improved the St. Lawrence/Great Lakes seaway system in that country. According to historian David Fieldhouse who has chronicled the achievements of the British empire, “the British could claim to have been among the great improvers of rivers and builders of canals.”

This expertise notwithstanding, it is unlikely that the British would have invested in the development of the Indus river system had they not begun to worry about the political consequences of famines that began to take a heavy human toll in the eastern provinces of the new Indian empire in the second half of the 19th century.

As tens of thousands of people died of hunger in Bengal, Bihar, Orissa and eastern UP, the British administration began to worry about the political consequences of these tragedies. A number of Royal Famine Commissions appointed by London investigated the problem and reached the conclusion that the government had to invest in the relatively less populated areas of the colony in order to generate foodgrain surpluses. Once produced, these surpluses could be transported by road and rail to the food deficit provinces.

Punjab and Sindh were the obvious choice for generating exportable surpluses. The two provinces had large tracts of potentially fertile virgin land if water could be brought to them. Although there was little rainfall in these areas and most of it came in a few weeks during the summer monsoons, water was available in great abundance in the Indus and its many tributaries. The solution to the famine problem was to develop surface irrigation in these two provinces by constructing barrages and canals throughout the Indus river system.

The strategy worked and by the end of the 19th century, 50 years after the British had consolidated their hold over Punjab and Sindh, more than a 100,000 tons of wheat and rice were being transported to the British Raj’s eastern provinces. Not only had the British built a large network of canals and secondary channels that brought water to a million hectares of new land, they also built the Northwestern Railways that carried the surplus of foodgrains to Bengal and Bihar.

The British administration also improved the port of Karachi that could carry wheat and rice to Calcutta, and improved the famed Grand Trunk Road on which trucks could ply for transporting food. There was only one major famine after these investments were made, and that was in 1943 in Bengal. As the economist Amartya Sen famously argued in the brook that won him the Nobel Prize, this famine was not caused by food shortages but by the collapse of incomes in the rural areas. Food was available but people did not have the money to purchase it.

Economic historians have argued that while the British contributed enormously to the economic development of the areas that now make up Pakistan, they could have done much more. They invested only the amounts that were needed to produce the required surplus. Why did the British hold back when they had the technology and there was a lot of water available in the Indus river system? There are three answers to this question.

First, the British were not prepared to spend the money that would have been required. Their primary objective was security not economic development. Apart from a short period in the 1850s and 1860s when private companies were allowed to build canals, this kind of investment was considered to be the responsibility of the state. But the British government in India was not allowed to raise loans for canal building in London’s capital market. London was not prepared to accumulate debt which it would have to pay to finance development works in India. The money needed had to come out of the limited budget of the public works department.

The second problem was limited knowledge about the construction and management of complex irrigation works. Although, as indicated, the British had developed some expertise in the area, particularly from their work in Canada, they did not feel comfortable with the needed technical knowhow. According to one assessment, “most of those who surveyed and planned the canals, dams, and bridges were army officers with little or no specialized training, though some travelled extensively to learn how Italians and others tackled specific problems. But although many expensive mistakes were made, it has been said that the fundamentals of hydraulic science and practices of irrigation engineering came out of the great irrigation works of India itself.”

The third constraint was more important than the two already mentioned. Large irrigation works needed large amounts of earth to be moved and all that had to be done by hand and draught animals. Heavy earthmoving machinery that became ubiquitous in later years had not yet been invented. After the conquest of Punjab in 1849, work on the Upper Bari Doab Canal was done mostly by former soldiers from the vanquished Sikh army.

Some of those who worked on the canal earned freedom once the job was done; a few were given plots of irrigated land to cultivate. To quote from Fieldhouse again, “thus the Indian canal system could technically have been built at almost any period of known history. What the British added was above all the power of a unified and authoritarian state, which had acted because it saw the danger of drought and famine to its rule. Limited though it might be, irrigation in India was one of the greatest achievements of the British empire.”

For a decade and a half after gaining independence, Pakistan undertook the construction of only one major irrigation work, a canal that flows south of Lahore and served to blunt the Indian attack on the city on September 6, 1965. Successive governments that held office in the period before the arrival of the first military regime were either too preoccupied with other expensive projects such as the settlement of eight million refugees who had arrived from India in 1947, or did not have enough funds to commit to irrigation. It was only under Ayub Khan that the budgetary constraints were eased by the arrival of large amounts of American aid.

From about 1960 to 1976, water availability for canals withdrawals increased by an impressive 58 per cent, from 67 million to 106 million acre feet (MAF). The increase occurred because of the construction of a barrage at Chashma and dams at Mangla and Tarbela. These works were completed in 1976. Since then — a period of 30 years — no major water storage project was undertaken while the gross storage capacity at the Chashma, Mangla and Tarbela reservoirs was depleted by 4.9 MAF by 2004. This happened because of the deposit of silt in the beds of the reservoirs, a process that will continue. Wapda estimates that by 2013, the three reservoirs will lose storage capacity of 6.4 MAF.

This decline in the availability of water will occur while the country’s population will continue to increase. Pakistan is now heading towards a serious shortage of water. In 1951, per capita surface water availability for irrigation was estimated at 5,650 cubic metres; this declined sharply to only 1,350 cubic metres per head in 2002. The minimum amount that should be available is 1,000 cubic metres. Pakistan is clearly heading towards becoming what experts describe as a “water short country.” By 2012, Pakistan will have reached the stage of “acute water shortage.” One immediate consequence of this will be on the availability of food for an increasingly large population. But there is a solution to the problem. I will discuss its pros and cons next week.

Wave of protests over cartoons

AFTER Syria, the fires have spread to Lebanon with sectarian intensity. As 2,000 Lebanese troops battled Islamist demonstrators in the heart of Christian Beirut on Sunday, the Danish consulate was set on fire and a large church attacked by a mob as other demonstrators protesting at Denmark’s cartoons of Prophet Mohammed (PBUH) headed for the Lebanese foreign ministry.

Sunday’s violence may have been inspired by the previous day’s assaults on the Danish and Norwegian embassies in Damascus — or perhaps encouraged by the same Baath party that must have originally permitted the Syrian demonstrations to take place.

More likely, the crowds in both cities were allowed by the authorities to stage protests, but the demonstrators quickly became overwhelmed as Sunni extremists — in Lebanon, perhaps from the Salafist Hezb al-Tahrir party in Tripoli, and equally Wahabi-minded Palestinians from the Ein el-Helweh refugee camp — arrived with sticks and stones to assault and burn the Danish property and then to attack the St Maroun Church and march on the Lebanese foreign ministry.

If this is true, it shows how quickly two nationalist Arab governments can be challenged by Islamists within their own countries. The 2,000-strong Lebanese security forces had to be deployed in east Beirut to fire tear gas and live rounds into the air to hold back the rioters.

For Lebanon, divided along sectarian lines since its creation by the French in the 1920s, it was a grim and bitter day — perhaps the worst since ex-Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri was assassinated on February 14 last year. It brought Muslim demonstrators into the centre of Christian east Beirut where the Danish consulate was located.

Burning fire engines and smashing cars parked in the streets, however, brought back ugly memories of the 15-year Lebanese civil war. Little wonder, then, that Charles Rizk, the justice minister, asked angrily: “What is the guilt of the people of Ashrafieh for cartoons published in Denmark?” Ashrafieh, needless to say, is an almost entirely Christian sector of Beirut.

Fouad Siniora, the Lebanese prime minister — who, under the country’s unwritten constitution, must be a Sunni — insisted that this was not the way for Muslims to express their anger. One Sunni prelate who appeared on the streets in a vain attempt to calm the demonstrators remarked that “they have done more damage to the name of the Prophet today than the cartoons in Denmark.”

At least 30 people were arrested, and the Lebanese authorities later announced, predictably, that most were “foreigners”. Whenever any civil unrest occurs in Lebanon, foreigners are always blamed, just as they were throughout the civil war, although on this occasion it will be interesting to see if there are any Syrians among their number. Christian politicians complain that the Lebanese government, which knew that there would be demonstrations, should have dealt more “firmly” with the demonstrators: for “firmly”, read “fatally”.

But in fact the Lebanese troops managed to avoid shooting any of the protesters dead; “martyrs” would only have provided room for more violent demonstrations, and Sunday battle in east Beirut was in marked contrast to the way Israeli soldiers deal with Arab demonstrators. The Lebanese, far from firing bullets into the surging crowds, pushed them back with the spray of water cannons.

The Danish foreign ministry urged all its nationals to leave Lebanon — somewhat exaggerated advice, given the generally warm feelings of most Lebanese towards Scandinavians - and the Norwegians more sensibly advised their citizens to stay indoors. But there is no doubting that those preposterous cartoons originally published in Copenhagen last September have lit a small inferno across the Middle East.

In Nablus, Palestinian gunmen stormed the French cultural centre on Sunday. In Qatar, the government announced that it would no longer accept trade delegations from Denmark. Iran recalled its ambassador from Copenhagen.

It was predictable that the United States and Britain, who have the biggest economic stake in the Arab world, were much more forthright in condemning the cartoons than the European nations who spent more time talking about the demands of secularism than the Muslim demand not to be insulted. In Copenhagen, unfortunately, the smell of double standards is beginning to reek rather high.

For only 10 days ago Dutch authorities blocked the transmission of two satellite television channels — one from Lebanon, the other from Iran — for allegedly spreading hate. Al-Manar, owned by the Lebanese Hezbollah, and Iranian Sahar TV1 were cut because they broadcast “anti-Semitic and radical (sic) comments”, according to the Dutch justice ministry. It said the channels “glorified terrorist attacks”. Whether or not this is true — and even if the Dutch were quite right to ban the channels on grounds of race hatred — such swift action against Muslim television stations sits uneasily with the offhand comments of Dutch ministers faced with cartoons which Arabs see as suggesting that all Muslims are murderers or suicide bombers.

Thus on the streets of Beirut, Muslim demonstrators could be seen with green banners bearing the legend: “Oh Nation of Mohammad, Wake Up!” The danger for the West, as well as the dictatorships and semi-democracies of the Middle East, is that rather a lot of members of this nation will do just that. Already in supposedly secular Lebanon, for example, the national Saturday-Sunday weekend has been replaced in the largely Sunni cities of Tripoli and Sidon with Friday ‘sabbath’ on which all commercial life closes for the day. In Beirut, it continues to operate but closes on Sunday.

Syria itself is a largely Sunni nation ruled by Alawites — a branch of Shiism — and it is not difficult to see how even minimum Baathist encouragement of Saturday’s demonstrators quickly turned into a Sunni protest.

The Norwegian embassy had earlier demanded extra protection from the Syrian authorities, but were not provided with the Syrian security forces they asked for. There will be many questions asked about this among Europeans in Damascus, for it’s the same old problem: who runs Syria? —(c) The Independent

Bush’s choice on Iran

THE debate on Iran is drifting toward the ugly question that the Bush administration would most like to avoid. That is: Is it preferable for the United States to live with the consequences of a nuclear-armed Iran, or with those of a unilateral American military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities?

President Bush has never answered that question; instead, he and his state department have repeatedly called an Iranian bomb “intolerable” while building a diplomatic coalition that won’t tolerate a military solution. But two of America’s more principled senators, Republican John McCain and Democrat Joe Lieberman, have this month faced the Iranian choice — and both endorsed military action. McCain was most direct: “There is only one thing worse than the United States exercising a military option,” he said on “Face the Nation.” “That is a nuclear-armed Iran.”

It’s easy to see why the Bush administration prefers ambiguity to McCain’s decisive judgment. After all, both options are terrible, and everyone can agree that diplomacy is worth a try. Yet Bush and both parties in Congress ought to be thinking through their own answers to the Iranian Choice, for two reasons. First, it looks more likely than not that the United States will, in the end, have to make that decision; and, second, the answer to the question ought to shape how the coming diplomatic phase is managed.

One driver of the choice is the ranting of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad about Israel and the Holocaust — which, contrary to what a Western secular sensibility might suggest, is not necessarily a bluff. As Lieberman put it in his “Face the Nation” appearance recently, “if we should have learned one thing from 9/11 . . . it is that when somebody says over and over again, as Osama bin Laden did during the ‘90s, ‘I hate you and give me the chance, I will kill you,’ they may mean it and try to do it.” If the West is going to gamble that it can contain a religious fanatic who possesses nuclear weapons and vows to wipe Israel from the map, it should do so knowingly, and not because it failed to provide for the possibility that an extremist would not respond to conventional diplomacy.

Another decision forcer is that, for all the talk among Iran watchers about opposition within the regime to Ahmadinejad, there is no evidence that anyone in Tehran disagrees with his judgment about negotiations with the West — which is that Iran has no need to make a deal. Iranian leaders were universally dismissive of the offer made last summer by the European Union. There is no indication that any senior leader or faction favours giving up uranium enrichment, under any circumstances. Not even the democratic opposition wants it.

So the United States must approach the coming manoeuvring in and outside the United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency board, and any last-minute negotiations in Vienna, Moscow or Tehran, the way the Iranians probably do: not as an end in itself but as a prelude to more meaningful action.

If the ultimate intent is to contain, rather than attack, the Iranian nuclear programme, then dilatory and fruitless negotiations — like those of the past two years — are worthy and even desirable. Not only do they slow Iran’s bomb-building but they help to cement a global coalition that might be able to deter the regime from actually using an eventual weapon over a long twilight era, Cold War-style.

If this is the choice, then aggressive efforts to support the Iranian democratic opposition also make sense, since over time the regime might be undermined from within. Russia and China should be courted. Brinkmanship — like interrupting Iranian oil exports, or prompting Tehran to do so — is to be avoided, since there is no military option to fall back on if the mullahs don’t blink.

On the other hand, if McCain is right, then the current diplomatic campaign should be compressed. As in the case of Iraq, the United Nations and sanctions should be explored just long enough to show that the United States has tried them. That’s because the timeline for military action is much shorter than that of containment: While it might not complete work on a weapon for five or even 10 years, according to most intelligence estimates, Iran will probably pass what Israel calls the “point of no return” far sooner.

After that point, when Tehran will have acquired all the means it needs to manufacture a bomb, it would be considerably more difficult to stop the Iranian programme by force. So, if military action is preferable to containment, then brinkmanship is called for, while promotion of Iranian democracy, or painstaking cultivation of Russia and China, is a waste of time.

So what is the Bush administration doing? It is allowing talks to drag on, and slowly courting Russia and China, but doing next to nothing to help Iranian democrats; it is drawing up lists of sanctions that, if imposed, might trigger a crisis, but it is also laying the groundwork for long-term containment. Perhaps the president has decided what course he will choose if Iranian uranium enrichment proceeds in spite of negotiations, U.N. resolutions or even sanctions. If so, his administration’s current tactics show no sign of it. —Dawn/Washington Post

When Alan meets Gordon

THEY really are the odd couple of economic policy. On one side of the Atlantic is Alan Greenspan, who last week stepped down as chairman of the Federal Reserve after nearly two decades of mastering the financial universe.

On the other is Gordon Brown, Britain’s chancellor of the Exchequer, who last week was still chancellor of the exchequer after nearly one decade of wishing he were prime minister.

Greenspan is revered today but, before he went to the Fed, he was regarded as something of a right-wing maverick. He was a disciple of Ayn Rand, whose theory of objectivism might best be summed up as the veneration of unfettered capitalism.

Brown had a rather different mentor in his formative years. He wrote his doctoral dissertation about that Red Clyde firebrand, James Maxton, who dedicated his life to the denigration of unfettered capitalism.

So there was something distinctly bizarre about the report last week that Greenspan is to become an unpaid “honorary” advisor to Britain’s treasury.

One can only hope that when Greenspan arrives at No. 11 Downing St. he will not — as has been his wont for the last 19 years — mince his words.

AG: “Gordon, I have to level with you. The British economy is in a mess. And it’s your fault. You inherited an economy that had been saved from ruin by Margaret Thatcher. You did one thing right, which was to make the Bank of England independent. But to call the rest of your time as chancellor a success would be - to coin a phrase - irrational exuberance.

“Nearly a third of the new jobs created in Britain since 1997 have been in the public sector. You’ve thrown billions at an inefficient, state-run health service. Meanwhile, British productivity lags behind not just the U.S. but even Italy.”

GB: “Thanks, Alan old boy, but actually those aren’t the things I wanted you to advise me about. There’s another set of problems that are worrying me more. First, I’m a little nervous about the growth of public-sector borrowing. Second, there’s been a housing bubble here, and I’m worried that as it deflates we’re going to slide into recession. Our pension system seems to be heading for a meltdown, and our current account deficit refuses to go away. Sound familiar to you?”

AG: “OK, OK, so I’m not quite as big a genius as everyone was saying last Tuesday. Sure, I got the big things right. Inflation is lower and growth steadier than it was when I took over the Fed in 1987. I’ve got the American economy through not one, but two stock market crashes, to say nothing of a direct terrorist hit on downtown Manhattan.

“But my real legacy to my successor is a conundrum. I’ve spent the better part of the last two years raising interest rates but — I have to admit it — no one seems to have noticed. The dollar has weakened only a little, and long-term rates haven’t budged at all. So our housing bubble is still going strong. And Americans aren’t saving a cent. In fact, they just keep borrowing more and more against their homes, and then heading off to the shopping malls to spend it.

“I just don’t get it. If quadrupling the cost of borrowing can’t cool things down in the U.S., I don’t know what can. Are long-term rates being artificially depressed by Asian central banks’ purchases, or is everybody out there just dreaming that inflation is no longer something they need to worry about because of globalization?

“One thing’s for sure, I breathed a sigh of relief when I walked out of my office for the last time. Come to think of it, I guess that’s the way you’ll feel when you finally get to move next door into No. 10.” —Dawn/Los Angeles Times Service