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| November 01, 2006 | Wednesday | Shawwal 8, 1427 |
Just military security is not national security
ISLAMABAD, Oct 31: President Pervez Musharraf said on Tuesday that national security depended on pursuing defence, foreign and domestic policies framed after correctly understanding and assessing the environment.
Military security only buys time to a nation to determine the direction it should take, he said inaugurating an international seminar on Security in South Asia in the Non- Traditional Spheres and Human Security.
His administration had made defence strong, been pursuing a pro-active foreign policy and based its domestic policy on reviving the economy, he told diplomats and scholars attending the two-day seminar organised by the Institute of Regional Studies and the National Commission for Human Development jointly.
President Musharraf said the economy had revived to the extent that steps could be taken to transmit economic gains and social services to the people at large.
In this connection he mentioned that Rs7.6 billion have been allocated for installing filtration plants all over the country as some 60 per cent of the diseases afflicting our people were water borne.
In the working session that followed his speech, two delegates highlighted the issue of water security in the region.
Russian Academy of Sciences’ scholar Natalia Zamaraeva said arranging potable water supply was among the key targets of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) in increasing the living standards of the people in the region.
“Water problem was and is a crucial point of firestorms between neighbouring countries in South Asia,” she said.
Nepal’s Dipak Gyawali noted that “recent research on local water management, especially village-level adaptation to floods and droughts, indicates that water security has to be approached in a non-traditional way”.
“Increased intensities of droughts and floods induced by climate change - wrought by people and industrial North - are not the only drivers of water insecurity,” he said.
Capitalist economies, after sufficiently taming the national bureaucracies on the Third World of their nationalism, have been pushing for privatisation led by multinational water and power companies and contributing to water insecurity, he said.
Other speakers stressed the need for South Asia to focus on the non-traditional security aspects by tackling problems like water insecurity, energy deficit, environmental degradation and economic ills.
Qua Yonghui of the Institute of World Religions of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences suggested that “the interdependence of the economic, societal, environmental and political components of non-traditional with traditional military security is the key to national security in the 21st century”.
Qua said South Asian countries should adopt a new model and work for raising water security, land productivity and reducing carbon emissions to protect the environment.
Dr Rodney W. Jones of the US-based Policy Architects International, analysed the energy profiles of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh and the challenges they face in meeting their growing energy and human security needs.
His assessment was that probably half of the primary energy consumption of the population of the three countries was not commercial but came from traditional fuels such as wood, charcoal, or dried dung chips, for cooking and heating.
Lt-Gen (retired) V.R. Raghavan, Director of Delhi Policy Group and head of Centre for Security Analysis, identified “the institutional inability of the South Asian countries” to make the best use of their resources as a major problem in their individual and collective advancement.
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