IT was not supposed to happen that way. When the world’s trade ministers assembled in November 2001 to launch a new round of trade negotiations, they agreed to focus on the demands of the developing world. Meeting in Doha, the gleaming capital of the tiny Gulf state of Qatar, they underscored their intention to aid developing countries by calling the new set of negotiations the “development round”.

They chose that description in spite of the fact that the World Trade Organisation, under whose auspices the new round was to be negotiated, is not a development institution. In the multilateral economic system that task is assigned to the World Bank and a number of regional banks such as the Asian Development Bank.

Nonetheless, the developing world pinned a great deal of hope on the Doha Round. There was an expectation that they would really gain from this dialogue, making up for the previous rounds that focused almost entirely on the trade interests of industrial countries. Economists recognise that trade not only helps in increasing the rate of growth of gross domestic product of all countries, including those that are still developing. It also helps to alleviate poverty and reduce income inequality if the markets of rich countries are opened to receive goods manufactured and commodities produced by the poor workers of the developing world.

Why is the Doha Round close to collapse? The latest setback was caused by the inability on the part of a small group of countries that sent their trade ministers to Geneva in late July to move the round forward by resolving the differences that separated them. Although most of the criticism for the failure at Geneva was directed towards the Americans, other participants cannot be absolved of blame. Agriculture proved to be the stumbling bloc. Washington refused to accommodate the demand for reducing subsides to its farmers valued by some at $20 billion a year.

However, America is not the only country at fault. Rich countries spend nearly $1 billion a day on propping up their framers. That fuels overproduction, drives down prices, and makes it impossible for poor farmers to sell their products abroad or even at home. For instance, an increase in the price of internationally traded cotton would certainly help the poor farmers of Africa. It would also help the poor producers in cotton producing countries such as Pakistan and India.

While Washington balked at the issue of agricultural subsidies, the European Union refused to lower tariffs on farm imports as demanded by the United States. The Americans wanted a reduction of 60 per cent. Tariff reductions by Europe would have helped the farmers in America increase their exports thus compensating the losses that would have resulted from a reduction in subsidies. The EU offered a reduction of 50 per cent in tariffs but wanted to protect five per cent of its products as a part of a “sensitive list”. Some large developing countries, Brazil and India included, were happy to support the European position. However, the wall of protection that would have remained would not have helped the really poor farmers of the developing world.

India was the third country that dug in its heels in Geneva. There were demands on the large and rapidly developing countries such as India to also open their economies, particularly to trade in agriculture.

While Brazil was prepared to be more accommodating, India was not ready to oblige. According to one observer at Geneva, “the Indian government, acutely aware that its predecessor lost an election by ignoring the villages, pandered shamelessly to its protectionist farmers and seemed almost gleeful when the talks broke up.”

International trade negotiations are conducted on the basis of a simple promise; there will be gainers and losers in any final outcome but the gainers’ benefit would outweigh the losses of the losers and the governments would find a way of compensating those who lose. In the Doha discussions, however, those who represented potential losers were able to dominate the agenda while those who would have gained stayed on the sidelines.

For instance, big transnational corporations who had actively supported the previous round of discussions — the Uruguay Round — and have gained the most from the easing of restrictions on global trade were not involved this time around. They were of the view that world trade in products of interest to them would continue to increase even if the Doha Round failed. On the other hand, agricultural producers in all major economies, developed and developing, took an active part in setting the agenda for the talks.

Washington, distracted by the events in the Middle East, did not spend much time on preparing the political ground for reaching a compromise. Some Republican and Democratic senators urged President George W. Bush not to make further concessions on agriculture to the Europeans until they showed flexibility in return. With the mid-term elections due in November in which the president’s party is expected to lose ground to the Democrats, there was pressure on Bush not to be too accommodating on trade.

There was a considerable exchange of accusations following the collapse of the Geneva talks. Europe blamed the United States, the United States held the Europeans and the Indians responsible, and the Brazilians blamed everybody. “Blamesmanship is not going to sell one ton of beef or remove one trade subsidy,” said Susan Schwab after the collapse of the Geneva parleys, “We need to focus now on what is doable.” Peter Mandelson, the European counterpart of Schwab had an answer.

He suggested that the WTO members should take the steps agreed at the ministerial meeting in Hong Kong in December 2005.

One area on which there was agreement concerns “trade facilitation” — the business of setting rules for getting goods through customs cheaply and quickly. There was a consensus among trade economists that the cost of doing business at the borders was now a more important obstacle to trade than tariffs. But, as in most things concerning trade, even this seemingly obvious area for governmental action, was not devoid of controversy.

Many governments were using custom regulations as quasi-protective barriers. India, for instance, has mastered the area. Even though it had reduced tariffs on trade with countries of South Asia, it continued to use a number of non-trade barriers to inhibit imports from its neighbours.

The ministers’ meeting in Hong Kong had resolved to smoothen the flow of goods across international borders by developing a series of trade facilitation measures. However, the United States was not prepared to back the Hong Kong agenda without a comprehensive agreement.

The other area where action was promised at Hong Kong is of direct concern to Pakistan. This concerns the grant of privileged access in rich markets to goods from countries designated by the international community as “least developed”. The group includes Bangladesh which has, over the years, become an important exporter of garments, both to the European Union and the United States. As such it is a significant competitor for Pakistan in these markets. It stands in the way of Pakistan’s efforts to gain better access for its textiles and garments to these countries.

The emergence of Bangladesh as an important garment exporter offers an interesting case study of how concessions granted with the purpose of helping poor countries have introduced or could introduce distortions in the multilateral trading system. These distortions may benefit one group of poor people at the expense of another — a case of poor Peter being taxed to pay a poor Paul.

The development of the garment industry in Bangladesh was the consequence of the decision taken by the United States and the European Union to grant to the new country a significant proportion of the export quota available to Pakistan within the framework of the Multi-Fibre Arrangement, the MFA.

This decision was taken in spite of the fact that the newly independent state of Bangladesh did not have much of a textile industry at the time of its birth. This was done for two reasons.

One was to punish Pakistan which had not won many friends as a result of the way it had conducted itself in the civil war that resulted in the creation of Bangladesh. The other reason was that by dividing Pakistan’s textile export quota into two parts, the United States and Europe were effectively reducing the access of a country — Pakistan — that had a clear comparative advantage in the business of textiles and which had the demonstrated ability to gain access to the markets in rich countries.

The net result of this policy was to encourage a significant amount of foreign investment in Bangladesh by mostly East Asian textile entrepreneurs who, because of the quotas assigned to them, could not increase their own exports. Bangladesh’s quota offered a tempting opportunity which was successfully exploited by them. Over time Pakistan came to face stiff competition from the new garment producers of Bangladesh.

After the end of the quotas following the termination of the MFA regime, competition from countries such as Bangladesh continued. This time around, Pakistan and other non-LDCs faced much higher tariffs in the importing countries. Tariff concessions were granted by all rich counties to the least developed countries in the name of poverty alleviation. This was a convenient posture to take. It satisfied the demands made by many vocal non-government organisations to help poor nations while, at the same time, protecting the domestic textiles and garment industry.

At the meeting in Hong Kong, trade ministers agreed to continue the practice of duty free access for least developed countries. There was pressure on the United States to allow all exports by LDCs into the country free of duties and quotas. This was being done by the European Union. The US resisted the pressure and, with Pakistan endorsing its position, it agreed to permit 97 per cent of LDC imports free of duty. The LDCs had campaigned hard for a 99 per cent quota.

Following the collapse of the talks in Geneva, Europe proposed that this measure should be adopted by all rich countries. But the US refused. It took the position that extracting individual strands from the Doha talks violates the long-standing practice that trade agreements are a “single undertaking in which nothing is agreed until everything is agreed.”

The moment of truth has arrived. There is need to answer a number of important questions and base public policy on these answers. What would be the impact of the failure at Geneva? Within a period of four years, from 2000 to 2004, the value of international commerce increased from $6.45 trillion to $9.12 trillion. Will this kind of expansion continue? Will the poor countries be hurt more by the likely demise of the Doha Round? Will the multilateral trade system, without the benefits promised by the Doha Round materialising, hinder the development of poor countries and delay their efforts to reduce the proportion of poor in their populations? What should Pakistan do in terms of increasing its exports? I will attempt some answers to these questions next week.

NO two men could have pursued more contrasting disciplines; one a redoubtable sage of war and the other a peerless maestro of statecraft. Karl von Clausewitz propounded the first comprehensive treatise on the art of modern warfare while Count Talleyrand gifted to the world his unique brand of diplomacy. As conflict swirls around us it would be instructive to evaluate their respective legacies in the context of present-day realities.

Clausewitz’s most famous quote “war is simply the extension of foreign policy by other means” is generally interpreted as providing justification for the use of force to pursue national objectives. Talleyrand might have looked at it from a different perspective. Embedded in the logic of this postulate he would have detected the fundamental assumption that before resorting to “other means” those already available should be exhausted first, namely, diplomacy. He would have also felt that the conflicts currently raging across the world did not represent so much the failure of diplomacy as the complete absence of it. Let us look at Iraq first.

Where did Iraq stand on the eve of the Anglo-American invasion over three years ago? If the strength of a nation is calculated in terms of the quantum of sovereignty it exercises over its economic and military assets then Iraq, at that time, must be rated as the weakest of states. Its conventional military machine had been decimated in the first Gulf war which was necessitated by Saddam Hussein’s insane adventure into Kuwait.

Ten years of the most intrusive inspections had unearthed whatever chemical weapons capability he possessed and which was destroyed under UN supervision. All missiles above a certain range including their production facilities as well as long range artillery were eliminated. The International Atomic Energy Agency looked at every possible suspected site but did not detect any nuclear material, let alone an explosive device. I served in Vienna as Pakistan’s permanent representative to the IAEA for four years in the 1990s. Not once was it ever hinted, including during informal conversations with IAEA officials, that Iraq possessed nuclear weapons or even a rudimentary infrastructure to manufacture them.

A no-fly zone had been enforced over the entire country. No Iraqi plane could fly over Iraqi territory without the prior permission of the Americans or the British. Iraq did not possess any military aircraft since these were dispatched to Iran during the first Gulf War and never returned.

Iraq had no control whatsoever over its most precious economic asset — oil. It was denied the right to sell oil abroad lest it might use the proceeds to purchase weapons. The humanitarian crisis which this prohibition spawned caused the great powers to relent somewhat in that Iraq was allowed to export a fixed quantity of its oil. However the funds so generated were not given to Iraq but deposited in an escrow account in Geneva. A good part of this money was used to settle the claims of individuals and countries which had sustained economic losses during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait; the remainder was passed on to Iraq strictly for the purchase of food and medicines under UN supervision.

Iraq’s territorial unity had been seriously eroded. The Kurds in the north and the Shias in the south were immune to Baghdad’s central authority. They operated semi-independent enclaves with the sanction and support of the allied powers namely US and Britain.

How could a country so denuded of even the most elementary attributes of sovereignty have posed a threat to the mightiest power on earth? Saddam Hussein had been placed in an iron straitjacket, his room for manoeuvre thoroughly curtailed. True, after ten years of stringent monitoring, he had expelled the UN inspectors but when threatened with military action in the months following September 11 he had agreed to their readmission with a broader mandate. Had that gone ahead, Iraqi sovereignty would have been further reduced without a bullet being fired. Instead, citing a variety of reasons largely devoid of conviction, a massive military assault was launched of which the consequences are there for everyone to see.

Iraq had been rendered toothless by the astute use of American diplomacy. The Security Council was effectively mobilised to provide the legal cover to achieve two core US objectives; the acquisition of almost total influence in the Arab world and thus the means to control the politics of oil, and secondly, to mitigate the threat which Israel faced from within the region.

These remarkable gains, accrued through deft diplomacy, were cancelled by the folly of invasion.

The ability to deploy and use enormous military power had given the United States the sharpest possible diplomatic tool which it could easily have continued to apply to its maximum advantage. Instead, for reasons inexplicable to any practitioner or student of statecraft, it chose to use force in an unconventional battleground which marginalised its strengths and magnified its weaknesses.

Before embarking upon the Iraqi venture American strategists would have done well to read another of Clausewitz’s sayings, “war is very simple, an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will, but in war the simplest things become very complicated”, particularly, he might have added had he been alive today, when war is waged in an urban guerilla context. When occupation is the objective, successful termination of organised military resistance is the first and the simplest step. The real challenge is to manage the fallout of victory or, to put it obversely, the consequences of the adversary’s retreat. Here again diplomacy was set aside.

The United States spends nearly 70 billion dollars a year to finance its Iraqi operation. It could have used a small fraction of this amount to upgrade and strengthen the rank and file of the Iraqi army after purging it of hardcore Saddam loyalists at the top. Sunni dominance could have been counterbalanced by the induction of some Shia commanders. Instead, the entire force was disbanded and an effort made to ensure control through the occupying forces. Iraq had to be thoroughly humiliated. The result was resistance from across the political spectrum.

For a philosopher of war like Clausewitz it would have been baffling to see the interests of a great imperial power being torn to shreds in the daily cavalcade of death on the streets of Baghdad. The origin of these attacks, be they sectarian or otherwise, is no longer relevant. The irrefutable fact is that three years of occupation have not been able to bring stability to the land.

The point is now reached when all acts of violence in Iraq are seen and even celebrated in several parts of the world as heroic deeds of defiance by a nationalist resistance against an oppressive occupier. A strange turn of events indeed. The considerable advantage achieved through diplomatic effort was lost due to an inexplicable act of war. Talleyrand, that virtuoso diplomatist, who at the Congress of Vienna, had regained for France on the negotiating table what she had lost on the battlefield, would be turning in his grave.

We are all familiar with the concept of collateral damage during military conflict. The collateral damage from diplomatic mismanagement is larger in scale and more enduring in impact. Had the United States kept its military assets poised around Iraq without using them and allowed the UN monitors to go in instead of the Marines, what would have been the state of play today? Confirmation, if one was still needed, of the absence of weapons of mass destruction; further depletion of Saddam Hussein’s authority within his country and abroad; the consolidation of American power and influence in the region. More significantly, the diplomatic collateral damage would have been avoided.

In that scenario would Hamas have won the election in Palestine? Would Afghanistan have witnessed the resurgence of the Taliban? Would North Korea have treated the international community with such disdain regarding its nuclear and missile programmes? Would Iran have taken the path of defiance as it currently has? Would Hezbollah have taken on the Israelis in southern Lebanon? Would Russia, in the absence of the phenomenal rise in oil prices, emerged from the shadows of its shrunken status? One does not know the answers but there is this vague feeling that both Talleyrand and Clausewitz would have agreed that had Iraq not been attacked most of these questions might not have been raised.

The writer is a former ambassador.

THERE is a wonderfully sinister poem by Edgar Allan Poe, “The City in the Sea,” which depicts an Atlantis-like metropolis lost beneath the “melancholy waters” of a “lurid sea.” The sea lures us from our cities to its shores at this time of year. This summer, however, I cannot help thinking of Poe’s lines as a kind of prophecy:

Lo! Death has reared himself a throne

In a strange city lying alone

Far down within the dim West,

Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best

Have gone to their eternal rest.

Why am I haunted by this image of a sunken city? I think because it symbolizes the coming revenge of the sea on mankind for nearly a century of mistreatment. It was 99 years ago that Leo Hendrik Baekeland invented the first plastic based on a synthetic polymer — Bakelite — and ushered in the age of plastic. From that moment, a new kind of pollutant entered the sea; one that took a century or more to degrade.

The plastic plague is a global epidemic. According to the United Nations Environment Program, about 46,000 pieces of plastic are floating on every square mile of the world’s oceans.

The problem is more than merely aesthetic. Last week, Los Angeles Times carried a shocking report from Midway Atoll, which is about as isolated a spot as the world has to offer. Hardly anyone lives there, so the number of bottles thrown in the sea can’t be large. And yet birdlife on Midway is being devastated as albatrosses inadvertently feed their chicks lethal fragments of plastic picked up from what’s known as the Eastern Garbage Patch, a virtual island of trash formed by the currents of the North Pacific subtropical gyre.

The patch is not so much a city in the sea as a municipal dump on the sea. Albatrosses are not the only victims. Untold numbers of fish and marine mammals are killed each year by discarded fishing nets, compounding the chronic problem of overfishing. But what to do?

In economic terms, the pollution of the oceans is the ultimate “tragedy of the commons.” As popularised by the ecologist Garrett Hardin, the tragedy is that an area of open pasture will tend to be depleted and eventually destroyed if the benefits of exploitation accrue to individuals, while the costs of exploitation are shared. When people dump rubbish in the sea, they are acting like a medieval farmer who overgrazed the common land.

The rubbish is disposed of at no cost to the polluter, just as the farmer’s cattle get fed for free. But everyone loses if the sea becomes a cesspool, just as everyone lost if the commons became a desert.

There are two classic solutions to this kind of problem. The first is regulation by a higher authority. In the case of the oceans, this solution is already in place, in the form of the 1994 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. The problem, as with so many U.N. documents, is the lack of effective enforcement. So what about the alternative solution, namely privatisation?

In early modern England, common land was progressively “enclosed” — claimed and fenced by individual landowners. In theory, of course, some parts of the sea have already been enclosed, in that countries with coastlines lay claim to coastal waters and fisheries. Yet, even if all such claims were universally respected, vast tracts of the world’s oceans would remain “no man’s water.” In any case, it is far from clear that national governments are effective custodians even of their own coastal waters, because it is precisely there that most pollution of the sea occurs.

This, then, could be the ultimate tragedy of the commons. “The men of the hydrocarbon age,” a future historian may write, “busied themselves with extracting oil from under the land and the seabed. Much of the oil they burned to heat their homes, fuel their vehicles and power their factories. But some of it they used to make plastic, a substance they valued for its durability.

“Perversely, men employed this almost indestructible petroleum product for quite ephemeral purposes. They obsessively wrapped it around everything they ate and drank. The result was that each human meal generated a substantial quantity of waste in the form of soiled plastic containers. Some they burned. Some they buried in huge holes. But a considerable quantity of this plastic ended up in the sea.

“Because plastic tends to float, the rubbish came to cover ever wider areas of the ocean’s surface. Currents and tides deposited a proportion on beaches all over the world, but much of it remained out of sight in ‘Garbage Patches.’ As the principal victims of plastic pollution were birds, fish and sea mammals, men paid little attention. Only a few recalled Edgar Allan Poe’s lines:

The waves have now a redder glow —

The hours are breathing faint and low —

And when, amid no earthly moans,

Down, down that town shall settle hence,

Hell, rising from a thousand thrones,

Shall do it reverence.”

So enjoy the seaside. But beware the coming tsunami of trash.—Dawn/Los Angeles Times Service