EVERY so often when someone calls to sell me a service or a product, or to get donation for a noble cause, I hear an Indian accent in the caller’s enunciation, and it transpires that the person at the other end is an Indian woman in Bangalore. She has been hired by an American agency to make these calls. It is paying her two dollars an hour for her time instead of 20 that it would have to pay a local American person to do it. The practice is called “outsourcing.”

It is not something entirely new. We know that automobile manufacturers do not make in their own factories all of the components that go into their vehicles. Quite a few of them are built by local tradesmen to whom jobs have been sub-contracted. It is the same in the construction industry. This happens because it is cheaper for the principal company to parcel out jobs to craftsmen outside than to maintain its own establishments in all of the collateral skills.

Outsourcing has caught on in a big way as “globalisation” and privatisation have become the preferred approaches to issues of economic policy. American garment merchants are getting all kinds of wearing apparel stitched in Latin America and South and Southeast Asia, because here they can get away with paying workers one tenth of the wages they would have to pay in the United States.

The practice, being irksome to American workers who have been losing jobs as a result, has become the object of sarcasm. Not along ago, I heard a jokester relate the following “episode”: The United States, he said, could no longer afford the enormous cost of maintaining the White House, and Congress had therefore proceeded to outsource the presidency. It had given the job to Chandra, a part-time grocery store clerk in Delhi, with a paltry salary of $2,000 a month (fabulous in her reckoning). Being coy, she said she didn’t know how to be president. Congressional leaders assured her that there was nothing to it, and that she need not do more than sign the bills Congress had passed. They cautioned that if she tried to do much more, she would simply put herself and the country in trouble.

This was, of course, a joke, which President Bush’s admirers, and perhaps even some others, will dismiss not only as unamusing but also as being in poor taste.

But let us now hear a true account. A report in the San Francisco Chronicle (September 24, 2006) tells us that the CIA, which has a regular staff of some 17,500 men and women, employs even a larger number of private contractors, more notably in its counter-terrorism units, to do much of its “research,” investigation, analysis, and espionage work, including that which may be extremely sensitive. As many as three quarters of the operatives working for its station in Islamabad are said to have been outsiders hired on contract basis. Demand for secret agents, and budgets for espionage, have increased enormously since 9/11, and the regular agency employees simply cannot handle the resulting volume of work.

One does not get hired simply by appearing at the CIA headquarters in Langley (Virginia) and offering his/her services. It takes several years of strenuous apprenticeship to become a competent agent. It is not surprising then that many of the contractors are former CIA “case officers” and analysts, who receive pensions from the government and, still being relatively young, have come back to do specific assignments and generate a second income. While the CIA has the largest contingent of spies, the United States government maintains 15 other intelligence agencies, which also outsource work.

In the case of intelligence agencies, saving money may not be the primary consideration behind outsourcing. They, as well as many other government agencies, pay outside contractors compensation that may be higher than what their own regular employees get. But they don’t have to pay them retirement benefits, health insurance, and paid leaves of absence. They don’t have to provide the contracting company work space, furniture, and utilities. They reduce their personnel management costs. But we hear also that contracting corporations make soaring profits. It is then hard to say whether, on balance, outsourcing is costing the government more or less than it would if its own people did all of the work.

It may well be that outsourcing on the part of public agencies is primarily an exercise in privatisation that has seized the minds of ruling classes in capitalist countries as a passion, if not like high fever.

Capitalism is still in its early stages of development in Pakistan, but its successive governments during the last 10 to 15 years have been going with the tide of privatisation. In fact, they seem to think that the more of the public domain they give away to private entrepreneurs the greater the applause they merit. If they have not placed all of education, health care, transportation systems, communications, banking, and public enterprises in the private sector, it is mainly because the latter have not come forward. One gets the impression that the government of Pakistan wants to take the country back to the mediaeval ages when the state, as we know it, did not exist, and princes and feudal lords did not entertain the notion that they owed services and amenities to the people they ruled (or, if you will, oppressed).

I have received a good deal of mail from readers concerning the outsourcing of teaching responsibilities and the misery of teachers hired on contract basis. I am told they are paid poorly and, unlike regular employees, they are not given periodic increments, dearness allowance, housing, and other customary benefits. They are exploited and made downright poor.

I find that the circumstances of contract teachers are varied, and that there is a lot more to this matter than meets the eye. First, there are highly accomplished professionals — jurists, management consultants, accountants, engineers, and architects among others — doing their respective jobs or private practice, who may want to teach a course in their field at a university. They may be able to do so in return for a specific consideration. Their relationship with the university is limited to this arrangement, and neither side owes the other anything further. This happens in Pakistan as well as in many other countries.

Then, there are universities and colleges, even high and middle schools, which are well endowed, exceptionally competent, and prestigious. They demand a high level of performance from both students and faculty. They charge tuition and pay salaries that are much higher than the going rate in corresponding public institutions. Much of their hiring is done on contract basis. Mutual obligations are negotiated and made part of the contract.

The contract may include, on the prospective employee’s part, the subjects and the number of hours per week he will teach, the level and instructional mode (graduate and/ or undergraduate; lecture, lecture-discussion, seminar, tutorials), advising, service on committees, and participation in governance.

The employer will stipulate the salary, allowances, and other benefits that may have been negotiated such as housing, life insurance, health care, pension and/or provident fund contributions, entitlement to leaves of absence, and anything else that the contracting parties may have agreed upon. These arrangements can be highly lucrative for teachers. Some of my own friends have taken early retirement, or resigned their professorial positions at public universities, and taken much more attractive positions at prosperous private institutions.

From time to time I see letters to the editor of this newspaper, protesting against the hiring of foreign faculty to teach and guide research in Pakistani institutions on terms that locally hired professors consider exorbitant. This is being done mainly under the auspices of the Higher Education Commission. It may be taken for granted that when high class private institutions hire foreign faculty they make sure they will get their money’s worth. But the programme needs to be planned with care when public funding is involved.

It is one thing to bring in a retired professor from abroad for a semester or two and pay him at a level that is not substantially higher than the compensation paid to the locally hired professors. But if he is to be paid a great deal more, the object should be intensive interaction between him and the local faculty so that he leaves an enduring impact, instead of having him teach a course, supervise a couple of student dissertations for a semester or two, and then go away. An even better utilisation of public funds would be to send Pakistani faculty abroad for post-doctoral research and writing.

These are evidently not the situations about which those who have been writing to me complain. They are groaning about cases in which run of the mill type of public and private schools and colleges are hiring men and women of moderate abilities on contract instead of hiring them as regular employees and placing them in standard scales and grades of pay with all of the usual benefits. They resort to this practice primarily to save money.

They may offer the candidate nothing beyond a fixed salary, which may be lower than that they pay their regular staff members carrying comparable responsibilities. The candidate accepts these terms because he has not been able to find a better situation.

This is a bad deal from more than one perspective. I gather that in many instances the compensation package being offered to the prospective teacher falls short of even a living wage. It leaves him feeling cheated, exploited, and deprived. It does nothing to motivate him to give his best to his students. By the same token students are not getting quality instruction to which they are entitled. This mode of hiring teachers should be discontinued. Society and state should take measures to get around the “market forces,” which force educated young people to offer their services on such miserable terms and enable employers to get away with this lecherous practice.

The writer is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, US. Email: anwarsyed@cox.net

NORTH KOREA has never been in full compliance of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) it had acceded to in 1985. It was also reluctant to sign a safeguards agreement that would permit the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to inspect its nuclear programme that had begun in the mid 1950s.

However, under immense pressure North Korea ultimately signed this agreement but announced its withdrawal from the NPT in 2003 when the IAEA discovered that it was hiding nuclear material.

Article X.1 of the NPT stipulates that a state party, in exercising its national sovereignty, has the right to withdraw from the treaty if it decides that extraordinary events, related to the subject matter of the treaty, have jeopardised the supreme interests of the country. The article in question also stipulates that the party concerned shall give notice of such withdrawal to all other parties to the treaty and to the UN Security Council three months in advance. Such notice would include a statement of the extraordinary events it regards as having jeopardised its supreme interests.

North Korea announced its withdrawal from the NPT effective as of January 11, 2003. However, no agreed statement on the matter had been issued by the NPT state parties, or by the NPT depository states or by the UN Security Council. It follows from this that the withdrawal of North Korea from the NPT had been flawed and a big question mark still hangs over its validity. It is worth mentioning that several UN Security Council resolutions adopted after its proclaimed withdrawal from the NPT have asked North Korea to retract the same and abandon its nuclear programme. The UN Security Council would not have made this demand if North Korea’s withdrawal had been in order.

In any case, North Korea’s withdrawal from the NPT, even if it is accepted to be valid, cannot come to its rescue as under Article 43 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, the withdrawal of a party from a treaty, does not in any way absolve it from fulfilling any obligation embodied in the treaty to which it would be subject under international law independently of the treaty. Needless to say, North Korea by conducting its nuclear test has, beyond any doubt, violated the universally accepted normative foundation and rationale of the NPT, that it remained a party to for about 18 years, and announced its withdrawal from the same without stating cogent reasons that it was required to do under the provisions of the treaty. Regrettably, however, the United States that claims to be one of the leading exponents of nuclear non-proliferation and has always voiced its unalterable opposition to North Korea’s nuclear ambition, also failed to resolve the issue through negotiations owing to its latent hostile attitude towards that country. As a matter of fact, Washington’s continued emphasis on the pursuance of a nuclear strategy to deal with Pyongyang is responsible for the exercise of the nuclear option by the latter.

In the absence of a positive response from the United States, North Korea was apparently left with no other option. There are no sensible reasons for evading a dialogue with North Korea to resolve this important issue, and though belated, the United States should do so now without any further loss of time.

It may be recalled that in 1954, the United States had declared that it was prepared to use specifically designed nuclear weapons to resolve regional conflicts and the then chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, Admiral Arthur W. Radford, even disclosed that the US ground forces in the Far East had received atomic artillery, including cannons and rockets, that could be used against North Korea. In 1975, while reiterating its readiness to defend South Korea, the then US defence secretary, James R.Schlesinger, also confirmed the presence of nuclear weapons in the south. In the latest development, the United States, on October 20, 2006, has publicly reaffirmed its commitment to protect South Korea with nuclear weapons.

Some quarters have expressed apprehension that the Dr A.Q Khan network may have provided the technology to North Korea that enabled it to conduct its nuclear test on October 9. These elements, however, tend to overlook the fact that the nuclear test carried out by Pyongyang was plutonium-based whereas Pakistan uses uranium for producing nuclear fuel. The US intelligence reports have also confirmed this assertion. Moreover, owing to the peculiar nature of its nuclear infrastructure, North Korea does not seek external nuclear assistance. The assumption about Pakistan’s collaboration with North Korea in the nuclear field was, therefore, based on false premises and does not make much sense.

The emergence of North Korea as a nuclear weapons state would be a serious blow to the efforts being made to curb the proliferation of nuclear arms and the missiles that deliver them. The nuclearisation of North Korea will give South Korea a sense of insecurity that may act as a trigger for it to develop nuclear capability that it had forsworn owing to continuing US security guarantees under the Mutual Defence Treaty providing for the stationing of US troops in that country.

There are also fears that the acquisition of nuclear arms by Pyongyang could prompt Tokyo to re-evaluate its nuclear options. As a result, the nuclear race in the Far East may become dangerously unpredictable. The creation of a nuclear free zone in the Korean peninsula could be a significant contribution in averting a crisis that is threatening the entire region.

The world is now faced with the difficult question of how to prevent nuclear non-proliferation. The main responsibility for attaining this lofty goal, however, rests with the five recognised nuclear weapons states which are also permanent members of the UN Security Council. These states must realise the enormity of the nuclear danger that is looming large over mankind. Instead of indulging in rhetoric and professing commitment to nuclear non-proliferation they must give meaningful expression to their words by fulfilling their obligation towards the total elimination of their own nuclear arsenal, as required under Article VI of the NPT.

In its landmark declaration, in July 1996, the International Court of Justice has asked the nuclear weapons states to fulfil their obligation towards a comprehensive nuclear disarmament under strict and effective international control. It would be only fair if the United States, having the largest number of nuclear weapons, took the first decisive step to eliminate them, to be followed by other nuclear states. Needless to say, the world will only be safe when it is free of all nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction which is the sole purpose of the NPT and one that must be pursued by all nations, and without any discrimination.

The notion that the possession of nuclear weapons by a country can address its security concerns is at odds with reality and, therefore, all nations, especially those possessing nuclear weapons must shed this feeling. As a matter of fact, security concerns of nuclear weapons states may be further enhanced, exacerbating their worries on this account in a changing international security environment and the diffusion of nuclear technology.

It is also important to note that lacklustre disarmament by nuclear weapons states weakens the diplomatic and moral force of the non-proliferation regime and thus its ability to constrain proliferation. Therefore, a programme of ridding mankind of barbaric nuclear weapons must be undertaken in earnest. The energy of the atoms must not be allowed for mankind’s self-annihilation. It should be used only for peaceful purposes to ensure its bright future.

The writer is a former ambassador.