More poverty or less?

NOT surprisingly, the figures cited by the government for people living below the poverty line have come to be widely questioned. With poverty alleviation being the buzzword these days in our economic and social development and a key criterion for aid givers, it is understandable that the policymakers are desperately trying to prove the success of their strategy in terms of falling poverty levels. But unfortunately wishes are not horses and the government will have to do better to achieve its goals. It now appears that the government’s claim of poverty being 23.9 per cent is being challenged not just by economists in the country but also the World Bank and the UNDP. Both these agencies have come up with different figures — 25.7 per cent by the UNDP and 28.3 per cent by the World Bank. This is no doubt embarrassing for the government which has repeatedly claimed that its estimates have been endorsed by the donor agencies. But it is still not too late to rectify the error so that our economic planning is not based on illusionary statistics.

The fact is that accuracy of facts and figures is not Pakistan’s forte. Worse still, exactitude is at a discount. This can create colossal distortions given the size of our population. The difference between the government’s figure and the World Bank’s estimate amounts to over seven million people who remain unaccounted for. Hence it is important that these calculations are carefully and honestly done. A simple shift in the yardsticks adopted can distort results beyond belief. For instance, a new methodology has led the government to change the poverty line figure for 2001. Moreover, some assumptions appear to be quite unrealistic. Thus an income of Rs878 per month per capita has been taken as the poverty line. Inflation has been calculated at seven per cent per annum. Both these amount to stretching the truth too far.

The most worrisome aspect of the poverty situation is the growing economic inequality in the country. The Pakistan Economic Survey 2006-07 acknowledges that the gap between the rich and the poor in the country widened in the period 2001 and 2005 (when the two surveys that have provided the data were held). The ratio of the income of the richest 20 per cent and the poorest 20 per cent went up from 3.76 to 4.15. The Gini Coefficient, which is universally regarded as an efficient measure of income equality, changed from 0.2752 to 0.2976 (that is for the worse). The thrust towards privatisation of facilities in the social sectors, especially education and health, has made these services more costly and less affordable for the common man. People are now compelled to spend more on some basic necessities. The government’s own figures say that the poor are now spending 14.6 per cent more (as compared to 2001) on health. Ironically, the rich are spending six per cent less — thanks to the better food, environment and living conditions they can afford. The poor are spending 50 per cent more on transport and 11 per cent more on food. It is time the government attended earnestly to the problems of poverty rather than gloss them over by juggling around with figures. Without real progress in this field, the millennium development goal of halving poverty by 2015 will never be achieved.

Turkey’s EU prospects

GIVEN the tough way in which Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan talked the other day on the Cyprus question, the prospects of Turkey’s membership of the European Union do not seem very bright. In a speech to the Istanbul chamber of industry on Friday, Mr Erdogan said that he would not open Turkish ports to the Greek Cypriot republic even if this meant the end of the entry negotiations. As an EU member, Cyprus has the right to veto Turkey’s membership, but this threat was brushed aside recently by Brussels which said negotiations could nevertheless proceed. However, Cyprus is not the only sticking point; the EU feels concerned about a whole range of issues, including the slowing down of the reforms process, human rights, the Kurdish question, the general rise in violence and the reassertion of the role of the military in politics, as seen in the army chief’s reaction to the murder of a judge. With an election due next year, most observers feel that the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) is slowing down the reforms process and taking a tough line on the membership question to counter the growing strength of the nationalists and secularist elements who accuse the Erdogan government of kowtowing to Europe.

It is true that large sections of opinion in Europe are opposed to the membership of a Muslim country with a large population, but the matter is essentially in Turkey’s hands, for it is the Turks who must decide where their future lies. More than 80 years after the Kemalist revolution, large sections in Turkey still remain opposed to secularism. The AKP came to power through a landslide victory in the 2003 election, and it remains to be seen whether the secularist elements will be able to mount a successful challenge to the AKP at the 2007 polls. There is hope that Turkey will finally settle down one way or the other so long as the battle between secularism and its opponents is fought through the ballot. It would be a tragedy for Turkey if the confrontation between the two opposite forces were to take the form of anarchy of the kind that took place in the seventies and led to a military coup.

Are girls commodities?

WHILE it is reassuring that the Sindh High Court has overruled a jirga verdict which would have forced the marriage of two young girls to settle a dispute, it is despicable that such atrocious acts can occur at all. Had the jirga verdict been followed, two girls, aged 6 and 8, would have become the latest victims of vani, a custom that allows the exchange of girls to settle disputes. In this case, the dispute centred on the non-payment of prices of buffaloes bought by the girls’ family, which is why the jirga ordered the exchange of the girls as a compensation. That girls can literally be treated like exchangeable commodities is horrifying. Credit needs to be given to the girls’ grandmother’s tenacity as she narrated her family’s ordeal to the press, which flashed the story. The court took notice of the incident and stepped in to prevent the jirga decision from being implemented. But for each family the court saves, many more are victimised by antiquated practices like vani and swara all over the country — despite strict laws that consider such customs as illegal. Those involved in this case must be held answerable for their crime as they are in clear violation of a 2004 Sindh High Court ruling banning jirgas.

The participation of elected persons in such jirgas, which the government often turns a blind eye to, is equally palpable. The Sindh chief minister has recently taken note of a jirga decision in which four girls, aged between two and six, were given away as a compensation to settle a karo-kari dispute. Although he himself has participated in jirgas in the past, one hopes that he will come down with a heavy hand on those who work against the laws of the land by practising vani, swara, karo-kari and such other primitive customs.

Iraq: some damning statistics

WITHIN a couple of days of George W. Bush’s return from his extraordinarily surreptitious foray into Baghdad’s green zone, his nation’s self-proclaimed newspaper of record, The New York Times, had a bit of bad news for the president. After citing Bush’s comment about how “you can measure progress ... in megawatts of electricity delivered ... in oil sold on the market” and so on, it noted: “We agree. Unfortunately, according to our latest set of metrics” — a reference to its periodic sets of “State of Iraq” statistics — “Iraq has a long way to go.”

It went on: “Violence on the whole is as bad as ever. Sectarian strife is worse than ever. The economy has slowly come back to pre-war levels for the most part” — pre-war levels, incidentally, means the state of affairs after 12 years of debilitating sanctions — “but is now treading water. As a result, optimism has waned. According to an International Republican Institute Poll conducted in late March, more than 75 per cent of Iraqis consider the security environment to be poor and the economy poor or mediocre.”

The statistics themselves are more recent: they cover the month of May, and a useful chart offers comparisons with the situation one, two and three years ago. The figures offer little consolation to those inclined towards rhetoric of the “we must stay the course” variety, because they highlight disastrous trends in some of the most crucial categories. For instance, the number of Iraqi civilian deaths stands at 1,500: that’s 1,250 more than in May 2003, and 500 more than in May 2004 and 2005. That contrasts with 68 fatalities among US troops (a gradually declining trend) and 10 deaths among other foreign troops (a rising trend).

Perhaps the most damning figures are those that tell us the estimated number of insurgents has steadily been rising, growing from 3,000 in May 2003 to 20,000 in May 2006. The estimated number of foreign fighters has expanded from 100 to 1,500 in the same period. Back in May 2003, there were five attacks a day by insurgents and five incidents of sectarian violence a month; the figures for last month are 90 and 250 respectively. At the same time, power generation has actually declined since May 2004, and remains below the pre-war level. Oil production has remained steady at 2.1 million barrels since May 2005, which again is below the pre-war level.

So, are there no positive indicators at all? Well, “eligible Iraqis voting freely in the last election” sounds positive enough, and has risen from 58 per cent to 77 per cent between May 2005 and May 2006 (the figure was zilch in May 2003 and 2004). But doesn’t “voting freely” deserve some sort of qualification in view of two overwhelming factors: the vitiated security environment and the foreign military occupation that created it? Large numbers of Iraqis were, naturally enough, eager to exercise their franchise, but when it came to forming a government, Zalmay Khalilzad’s opinions carried more weight than those of all the voters put together.

The abysmal level of Iraq’s sovereignty was exposed once more last week when prime minister Nuri Al Maliki turned up at the American embassy in the green zone for a videoconference with Bush, only to discover that the US president was waiting for him in person. There can’t be very many countries where Bush could spring this sort of surprise on unsuspecting hosts. He greeted Maliki with a jovial “Thank you for having me,” presumably without a trace of irony.

In this particular instance, it wasn’t just the Iraqi cabinet that was kept out of the loop: much of the US cabinet (barring the usual suspects — Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice) was equally unaware of their leader’s thrill-seeking adventure. According to the official explanation, the elaborate deception wasn’t intended to dupe anyone, it was merely a means of maintaining the necessary security. Which, of course, does not reflect too well on the state of the occupation.

Taking no responsibility, naturally, for the havoc wreaked by his pursuit of full-spectrum dominance, Bush told Maliki that the future of Iraq is “in your hands.” At the same time, he had no hesitation in presenting the Iraqi prime minister with a virtual wish list of the decisions his cabinet is expected to take. Among the pearls of wisdom dispensed by Bush in the context of his Baghdad visit was this piece of profundity: “If the Iraqis don’t have the will to succeed, they’re not going to succeed .... [If] they choose not to ... make the hard decisions and to implement a plan, they’re not going to make it.”

Some might see in such remarks a belated recognition of the inevitability of failure. But there’s more to it than that. It’s also a stark warning: if you succeed (however one may define “success”), we’ll be right there by your side to take most of the credit; but if you fail, you fail alone.

Back in the USA, on the day after the 2,500th American was killed in Iraq, the House of Representatives voted 256 to 153 in favour of maintaining the occupation of Iraq. That’s not a bad result by congressional standards, and it was preceded by a debate in which the case against the war was vociferously made by Democrats such as John Murtha and minority leader Nancy Pelosi. Only three Republicans voted against the war, while 42 Democrats voted in favour of it.

The stats seem unimpressive until one remembers that a similar vote would have been considerably more lopsided a couple of years ago. The Iraqi miasma has contributed to the turnaround, but so have the American people: the Democrats who have changed their minds about blindly following their commander-in-chief are essentially followers, rather than leaders, of public opinion. Even Republican support for the occupation is a lot less solid than the vote suggests.

Does Bush care? “Don’t bet on American politics forcing my hand,” he says, “because it’s not going to happen.” A possible interpretation: I don’t care what anyone else thinks, I’ll do whatever I like — or, rather, whatever Dick Cheney likes.

And if Bush is unconcerned about what his compatriots think, he is unlikely to worry too much about opinions in the rest of the world. Other Americans, however, may wish to pay some attention to the findings of the Washington-based Pew Research Centre’s Global Attitudes project, which registered the opinions of 17,000 people in 15 countries (including Pakistan) between March and May. “A year ago,” say the pollsters, “anti-Americanism had shown some signs of abating, in part because of the positive feelings generated by US aid for tsunami victims in Indonesia and elsewhere. But favourable opinions of the United States have fallen in most of the 15 countries surveyed.”

The centre says that “the US-led war on terror draws majority support in just two countries — India and Russia ... in most other countries, support for the war on terror is either flat or has declined.” Among the least supportive nations is Spain, where “four times as many people oppose the war on terror as support it (76 per cent vs 19 per cent)”. Spaniards, who have experienced terror first-hand, are evidently sufficiently savvy to have recognised that the Bush war has proved counterproductive.

Another interesting finding is that with the exception of the US, Germany and Japan, majorities in all the countries surveyed (including Britain and France) believe that the American presence in Iraq poses a bigger threat to world peace than Iran’s apparent nuclear ambitions. Confidence in Bush’s leadership, meanwhile, is highest in India and Nigeria, and lowest in Turkey, Jordan and Spain. India and Nigeria are also the only countries, apart from the US, where most people believe the war in Iraq has made the world a safer place.

The Bushites can also claw some consolation out of the fact that support for the Palestinian cause has dipped in Europe in the wake of the Hamas victory, just as Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric has caused considerable consternation in the West. Not surprisingly, there appears to be little alarm across the Muslim world over either of these developments.

The neocons can also take heart from what appear as some of the most appalling statistics: namely that only 21 per cent of respondents in Pakistan, 23 per cent in India and 28 per cent in Indonesia had any inkling of the abuses perpetrated by the Pentagon and the CIA in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay — in contrast with 98 per cent awareness in Germany, 80 per cent in Egypt and 76 per cent in the US. What’s more, 88 per cent of Pakistanis — in a poll restricted to urban areas — had never heard of global warming. I guess the media deserves primary responsibility for this monumental level of ignorance.

Bush has the luxury, of course, of paying attention to only those polls that reinforce his prejudices. But there are some statistics he can ignore only at his peril. In Baghdad, he was cheered to the rafters by a contingent of soldiers he addressed in the embassy cafeteria. However, a Zogby poll conducted last February among American troops serving in Iraq found that 72 per cent of them thought the US should leave the country within the next year, while more than 25 per cent felt it should pull out right away.

In most cases, their primary concern is presumably their own safety. Fair enough. But some of them at least are likely to share the concerns of First Lieutenant Ehren Watada, who this month became the US army’s first commissioned officer to publicly defy orders to serve in Iraq because, as he told a press conference, “my participation would make me a party to war crimes.”

Email: mahirali1@gmail.com