Stop this brinkmanship

PRIME Minister Shaukat Aziz has called for a dialogue and a compromise to resolve the controversy surrounding Iran’s nuclear programme. He has also said that Pakistan is opposed to the use of force as that would exacerbate an already complex regional situation. This is a sane piece of advice which the parties involved would do well to heed. By exercising restraint, Iran and the United States can prevent the crisis brewing in our neighbourhood from spinning out of control. So far only the head of the IAEA, Dr Mohammad ElBaradei, has been issuing sensible statements that qualify him as the most suitable mediator to defuse the tension and resolve the crisis. The problem is that Iran as well as the US have gone overboard in the dangerous game of brinkmanship that they have been playing for the last few months. President Ahmadinejad has rejected off hand the UN Security Council’s demand that his government suspend uranium enrichment immediately. The United States has retaliated by threatening to impose sanctions and has also warned that it would consider military attacks on Iran if need be.

This war of words is unnecessary because it only exacerbates the impasse making a peaceful resolution of the conflict difficult. While Iran has been cooperating with the IAEA by allowing its inspectors to visit and monitor its nuclear plants and many have appreciated this gesture, President Ahmadinejad is not helping matters by brandishing fiery threats of “shedding the last drop of blood” and “giving a very hard slap on the face” of the adversaries. This is no time for rhetorical outbursts which can only provoke the powers that suspect Iran of aspiring for nuclear weapons. This is further destabilising an already turbulent region with the states in the neighbourhood worrying about the outcome of the conflict. Israel has also joined the fray — it is suspected of playing the proxy for America and is known to have nuclear weapons — and one can hardly expect the Gulf states to sit back with equanimity and allow the controversy to go on. Hence the unease in the region, which has sent the former president Akbar Rafsanjani on a tour of the Gulf region and Syria to reassure these countries that they have nothing to fear from Iran’s nuclear programme.

While some self-restraint would certainly help the Iranians, the United States as a superpower with many stakes in the Middle East bears a greater responsibility in the matter. By refusing to enter into a security dialogue along with the EU-3 when the group was negotiating with Tehran, the US ensured the breakdown of the talks that had started in 2003. Now its constant refrain that it has plans to attack Iran if it doesn’t submit to its demand and its repeated threat of imposing sanctions on Tehran has kept the nuclear pot boiling even at a time when there are other options available. For instance, the IAEA has been involved in the inspection of Iran’s nuclear facilities. Russia and China are offering negotiations on the issue and, given their close economic ties with Tehran, they have a better chance of success. It is important that until the IAEA issues the report required by the Security Council, the US should play it cool. Until the IAEA certifies it, one cannot even be certain that Iran is enriching uranium for military purposes. It is therefore important that this game of brinkmanship is halted at once.

Taliban mount offensive

THE day-long clashes between the Taliban and Afghanistan security forces over the weekend seem to mark the beginning of the guerilla group’s spring offensive. Saturday’s fighting, which left 47 dead, including 41 Taliban fighters, was heavy and involved American air support to Afghan troops. As the snow melts and passes and valleys become accessible, the Taliban are likely to step up their activity and continue to harass a government that seems to be tottering. An indication of the kind of system President Hamid Karzai has in place is the sale of top secret CDs in Bagram’s bazaars. Those discs contain secret information about the Taliban and American security forces, including the identity numbers of some American troops. Now investigations are taking place to know how these CDs were stolen and found their way into the bazaar of a city which has a heavy presence of US-led forces.

Having been in power now for more than four years, President Karzai has still not been able to give his people a modicum of administration and ensure peace. One among the many reasons for this is the attitude of the Northern Alliance leaders, who dominate his administration. The focus of their policy and planning seems to be less on fighting terrorism in their country and more on creating trouble for Pakistan. Terrorists from Afghanistan are not only allowed to enter Pakistan, there is evidence that some of the acts of terrorism in Balochistan had the support of Afghan security officials. It is now to be seen whether the removal of the notoriously anti-Pakistan foreign minister, Mr Abdullah Abdullah, will make any change for the better in Afghan policy.

Last week in New Delhi, President Hamid Karzai and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called for the economic integration of South Asia, Afghanistan and Central Asia. For geographical reasons, Afghanistan occupies a key place in this scheme and will serve as a transit route for trade between these two regions. But is Afghanistan really in a position to play this role? Unless the anarchy in Afghanistan gives way to peace and stability, there is little possibility of that country playing a pivotal role in trade between the subcontinent and Central Asia.

Ghost schools galore

GIVEN the deplorable state of education in the country, it should come as no surprise that according to a consumer rights group, there are 30,000 ghost schools in the country. What makes the disclosure all the more shocking is that these ‘schools’ are receiving regular funding from the government. This calls for a prompt and thorough inquiry to ascertain where the money is going. For decades, school buildings have been used as ‘autaqs’ by feudals in rural areas while in other cases they have simply been non-functional because teachers do not show up. Apart from a few drives to deal with the phenomenon, notably Shahbaz Sharif’s effort with army help in the 1990s in Punjab, not much has been done to ensure that the non-functioning schools are made functional. This makes the new statistics a depressing read for it only highlights the government’s inability to take the matter head on. About 17 per cent of schools are without roofs, 39 per cent have no drinking water, 62 per cent have no electricity and 49 per cent have no toilets. In this situation, how can one expect a child to gain any education, especially if one adds to this the non-availability of teachers, widespread corruption in the education department, lack of monitoring and firm action against those who misuse school buildings?

The government has to take stricter punitive action against those who err, be it absent teachers or those who allow irregularities to occur. It is not enough to ensure that school buildings are vacated by illegal occupiers; it must be made certain that the funds earmarked for those schools are properly utilised. The government should conduct its own investigation into ghost schools around the country to ascertain the damage their non-functioning is doing to the future of the country.

On the move: yes, but on a slippery track

THERE are a few lessons to be learnt by the rulers of Punjab as well as their counterparts in other provinces from the way Punjab has been emerging as a hub of industry and commerce in recent years. Development taking place in various sectors points to the position of Punjab and its prospects as an ‘island’ of prosperity vis-a-vis the rest of the country in the years ahead if growth patterns continue on their upward spiral.

As an economically growing Punjab demands more water and power and a higher share in the National Finance Commission award, prospects of integrating this relatively affluent federating unit with the rest of Pakistan are coming under a strain.

This is not to say that Punjab does not face a lack of vital development infrastructure or shortages in the energy sector. Given the expanding scale of the province’s public and private sector economy, Punjab’s per capita consumption needs and wants are far greater than those of any other province. Many also see the largest of the federating units getting more, at the expense of the other three provinces, than it deserves. This is because of the absence of a number of factors which should be assigned appropriate weightages in the national resource-sharing formula, such as the actual revenue receipts of the federal government and the levels of poverty prevailing in smaller provinces.

The difference seen in the upward economic trend in Punjab as compared to elsewhere in the country is that a very aggressive, emerging private sector refuses to be stymied by fine points requiring a political consensus among the provinces. It has taken initiatives on its own in many areas over the years, forcing successive provincial governments to go along and facilitate development. This gung-ho approach on the part of the emerging entrepreneurial and industrial elite may be the only way to extract any concessions out of the government, but it will not help Punjab achieve in the longer term what it wants given the federal scheme of things as it exists now.

In spite of the many civic and social problems which pretty much reflect the national trend in Punjab too, it is not only in and around Lahore that one sees a flurry of economic activity; other industrial centres such as Faisalabad, Sialkot, Gujranwala, Multan and Sheikhupura are also abuzz with growing industrial and economic goings-on. Greater Lahore area has emerged as a story of an expanding ‘ribbons of development’ theory, as the urban planner, Raza Ali, once described the phenomenon of urbanisation taking place along highways in Pakistan.

Highways leading out of Lahore, to the south (Raiwind), south-west (national highway to Karachi) south-east (Kasur), west (Sheikhupura) and north-west (G T Road to Peshawar) have a beeline of big and small industrial units lining them for miles on end. The manufacturing boom is quite diverse in its scope: there are automobile assembly plants, textile, household and consumer goods, electronics, chemical and steel mills, pharmaceutical factories, tanneries, flour and rice mills; in short, you name a sector and it is likely there. Commercial banks, including many foreign ones, are rushing in to collect the windfall generated by hectic economic activity. Multinational banks’ branches equipped with state-of-the-art banking technology are now to be found along these ‘ribbons of development’, up to 30km out of the city centre.

In Sialkot, the local industrialists have taken the initiative on their own to fund the construction of an international airport which is near completion and which will serve as an important cargo destination for PIA and other international carriers for the export of sports goods and surgical instruments. The Punjab government has finally realised the scope of this community-based initiative and announced plans to link the city with Lahore, Gujranwala, Gujrat and Wazirabad, the other industrial bases in the vicinity, through a series of six-lane motorways.

The Punjab government’s Sundar industrial estate project, located 40km from Lahore, has been a success story. Plots there were sold out within weeks of its commissioning, with industrial units there becoming operational in a record time of just over a year or so. Along the Lahore-Islamabad motorway, there are now signs of industrial activity, with smoke billowing out of what was once wilderness, considered a bandits’ territory and the backwaters of central Punjab. A number of Middle East-based consortiums have been allotted land in and around Lahore to build commercial skyscrapers, shopping malls, luxury hotels and apartments, and to set up a modern sport city equipped with international standard facilities.

In the education sector, too, foreign donor agencies are satisfied with the initiatives taken by Punjab in raising adult literacy and improving primary school enrolment. In his recent visit to Lahore, the Sri Lankan prime minister sought help from the provincial government in the public education and health sectors in his country. Although a lot still needs to be done in these two sectors, some strides have been made. The Aga Khan University Examination Board, in a recent assessment, has also declared Punjab as the most willing partner in implementing the board’s examination system, which is on a par with international standards, leading to quality higher education at the university level.

The sea change has come about not as a result of a miracle but sustained economic policies that successive Punjab governments have been made to pursue under pressure from entrepreneurs and industrialists over the last two decades, in spite of political instability. Today, the foreign investment component makes up a good percentage of the emerging industrial and development scene in Punjab, thanks, again, to the emergence of a powerful private sector, which has shown the confidence and the ability to do business with the rest of the world and deliver, notwithstanding political hiccups and uncertainties.

The construction sector and the service industry, too, have seen a phenomenal growth, which is continuing in its third decade now. The hotel industry is particularly a hot seller, with the average room occupation in Lahore’s big and small hotels and over 100 ‘guest houses’ standing at no less than 80 per cent. The last mentioned have proliferated to fill the gap created by a growing demand on regular hotels for accommodation; a number of five-star hotels in collaboration with foreign investors are planned to be built over the next few years to cope with the rising demand.

In the Punjab capital, consumers are spending money on their needs and wants. The sheer number of new, fancy supermarkets, shopping malls and specialty stores selling local and imported foodstuff and luxury consumer items is unprecedented, and arguably the sign of an economy on the move. Also, try getting a seat on an international flight out of Lahore and you’ll realise how overbooked the air carriers are. The travellers and consumers are not just Lahoris, but also their wealthy country cousins, the emerging class of industrialists in the immediate vicinity of the city.

There is euphoria among the business class of reaping more economic benefits from prospects of the easing of trade with neighbouring India. It is estimated that some 14,000 Indians, among them businessmen and traders, either come to Lahore or transit through the city on a monthly basis. Not only an ordinary Indian, but journalists and entrepreneurs, too, marvel at the prosperity they see in and around Lahore. Plans are afoot to further strengthen the existing economic relations between the two Punjabs, both at the trade and the government levels.

All this augurs well for the province’s economy, but there remain serious political questions that have not been taken up by Punjab’s ruling elite with regard to integration of a yet more prosperous Punjab with the rest of Pakistan. It is here that the rulers of this province have shown little inclination to reach out to other provinces.

The Punjab chief minister and other high-ranking officials have the time to hop across the border and cosy up to their Indian counterparts, but they have no time to visit Sindh, Balochistan or the Frontier to promote understanding and to remove the misperception there Punjab’s opposition to what the smaller provinces growing prosperity is at their expense. It is inexplicable how successive Punjab governments have neglected this basic reality, to the detriment of the province.

The Punjab government can strengthen the existing socio-economic links with the other provinces and establish new ones in areas in which Punjab has made significant progress in recent years. While Punjab has successfully reached out to foreign countries and economic and business concerns there, conducting aggressive economic diplomacy without much help from Islamabad, it has been found woefully lacking in adopting a similar approach towards the other federating units. The failure to make Sindh, Balochistan and the Frontier stakeholders in the economic rise of Punjab can significantly slow down Punjab’s own progress by aggravating the already tenuous inter-provincial relations, which may eventually spiral out of control if political apathy on the part of the rulers continues.

There is no non-political interest group, as is the case with industrialists and entrepreneurs driving economic development and pressuring the provincial government to broaden the existing infrastructure in Punjab, who could do the required job. Nor are foreign investors interested at this stage in bringing about a more politically integrated Punjab with the rest of Pakistan; many took their invested capital out of a politically volatile Karachi in the 1990s and reinvested it in Lahore and Islamabad. The job will have to be done by politicians, both from the ruling party and the opposition that have a national vote bank in all the four federating units.