A slide into disaster?

‘FAILURE to elect my supporters will plunge Pakistan into darkness,’ General Pervez Musharraf is reported to have proclaimed the other day. The warning seems to be on a par with one of the best-known French contributions to the world’s political thesaurus — “After us, the deluge.”

The cynics who are likely to observe that a people who have been in darkness for as long as they can remember might not pay any heed to this warning must be ignored because such a statement from the head of an apparently unshakeable regime should not be taken lightly.

The followers about whose election President Musharraf seemed concerned, however, do not appear worried about losing. Indeed they have never sounded so confident as now. They are gloating over the disarray in the opposition ranks. The MMA’s climb-down on the question of quitting the assemblies in protest against the passage of the Protection of Women Act and other matters has caused much visible delight in the official camp.

Reports of disagreement between the People’s Party and the PML-N over relationship with religio-political groups and participation or otherwise in polls if held while General Musharraf continues as both president and the chief of the army staff have also added to the ruling party’s confidence. The strong men occupying the office of chief minister in the two larger provinces of the country are already using the many tricks in their bags to queer the electoral pitch in favour of their courtiers and hangers-on. Why then a note of uncertainty about the outcome of the general election?

It is possible that the reference to the king’s men’s failure to get elected is merely a tactical move, an insurance against post-election clamour about engineered results. A party that goes into an election without denying the possibility of its defeat can attribute its eventual triumph to effective canvassing and its popularity. It will also enable the government to dismiss any post-election allegations of rigging as a matter of opposition’s habit of always citing rigging as the cause of its electoral defeat.

The president’s warning does not make sense in the context of declarations made by the regime’s spokespersons. According to them, nothing can prevent General Musharraf from winning a fresh five-year term in office and retaining his uniform too. If that projection is correct, then the regime has nothing to fear. Even if the president’s followers do not win a majority in parliament, the possibility of a repetition of 2002, when PML-Q won over enough opposition parliamentarians to become a majority party in the National Assembly, cannot be ruled out.

Further, in the scheme of governance developed over the past few years elected representatives are unlikely to present a meaningful challenge to an all-powerful chief executive.

If the opposition parties do succeed in winning a majority or a sizeable number of seats in the Parliament — neither possibility can be ruled out — that will be wholly to the good of the country. Assuming that General Pervez Musharraf would still be keen to stay in the Presidency, a new formula for sharing power will be unavoidable, something that PML-Q has not had the courage so far to attempt. It may then not be possible to resist the pressure, both domestic and international, for open and transparent governance and for moving towards civilian political stewardship of national affairs.

The most dangerous post-election scenario will be a complete success of the PML-Q commandos’ operation to secure a heavy mandate for their party. Such an outcome, howsoever secured, will make the post-election government even more impervious to the opposition point of view than even the present regime. The government will be as handicapped in the matter of offering good governance to the people as was the Ayub regime after the second parliamentary election under the system of so-called basic democracy.

In the earlier election, the followers of Field Marshal Ayub Khan had not been able to prevent the election of a good number of politicians who did not see eye to eye with the president. As a result, the government was obliged to offer accommodation to its critics. Under pressure from a dynamic opposition the constitution was quickly amended and the law on political parties radically changed.

During the second parliamentary election of the Ayub period the ruling party adopted the policy of marginalising the opposition through every conceivable form of electoral manipulation and the regime became totally free of opposition advice. Backed by an overwhelmingly supportive parliament the Ayub government became insensitive to any sane counsel.

Between January 1965, when Field Marshal Ayub Khan managed to win a new term for himself as president, and March 1969, when he abdicated in favour of the army chief, Pakistan suffered one grievous setback after another. The 1965 conflict with India brought disaster to Pakistan on more than one count. On the one hand, Pakistan’s moral standing on the Kashmir issue was compromised and, on the other hand, East Bengal population’s alienation from the state acquired a definite direction. Above all, the government’s incapacity to overcome the consequences of lopsided economic policies and its decision to subject the state to another spell of military rule inexorably led to Pakistan’s disintegration in 1971.

Today’s Pakistan is by no means strong enough to survive a heavy mandate for the present ruling coalition in the coming general election. It may be true that Pakistan faces the danger of entering a darker age, but whether one is moving into darkness or whether one is moving out of darkness depends on the choice of direction.

Politicians who have no use for history often defend their misadventures by claiming to be better or cleverer than their vanquished predecessors, and Islamabad’s present gurus may be similarly comforting themselves. In that case, they will be guilty of ignoring the fact that whenever a majoritarian state has been deprived of effective opposition, it has courted irremediable disaster. Such a regime quickly acquires notions of its infallibility, tends to read in the people’s apathy and their acquiescence with whatever is ordained by the chamber of power is proof of its popularity and correctness both. It also loses its capacity to alter its course.

If the Musharraf government is really interested in preventing Pakistan from a future that will be worse than its present, it should call a halt to the PML (Q) mandarins’ campaign to win more parliamentary seats than they deserve to do in a free, fair and democratically appropriate election.

The requisites of a fair election have been identified. The country must have, sooner rather than later, a new, independent and multi-member election commission, and the controversies over arbitrary changes in constituencies and preparation of electoral lists should be resolved through an all-party consensus. No election will be considered fair if any leader of a political party is not allowed to lead his/her party in the electoral contest, nor will any set-up under the presidentship of General Musharraf will be accepted as a neutral caretaker regime.

Incidentally, barely a couple of decades after Madame de Pompadour talked of the deluge, her prophecy did come true in the form of the French Revolution and the flood of blood that followed it. Sometimes those who try to save themselves by conjuring up before their people the spectre of apocalypse are eventually found to have paved the way to the dreaded denouement.

It’s not China

MENTION globalisation and a curious mist descends that prevents straight thinking. It is now a given on left and right that billions of low-paid workers are going to take away western jobs and make European welfare and taxation levels unaffordable luxuries.

The only options are trade protection or a Darwinian low-tax, low-welfare fight to the finish - equipped with whatever education and training we can get. We must all accept our fate.

The problem is this nexus of givens is wrong. Globalisation and trade have greatly enlarged the world’s economic cake and our economic options, rather than narrowing them. The problem is that too much of the world is an excluded onlooker, because the rules of the game are massively tilted in the West’s favour. It is alarmist, intellectually mistaken and plain counterproductive to blame foreigners for our problems.

Even China, portrayed as the 'Big New Threatening Thing’, has not managed to change the rules. Close to 60 per cent of its exports, nearly all its hi-tech exports and more than half its patents come from foreign companies. In essence, it is a subcontractor to the West, boosting the profits of our multinationals and the real incomes of our consumers.

China has not a single brand in the world’s top hundred, despite the projection that it will become the world’s largest exporter in 2008. Buying Rover, and shipping some of the plant back to China, was viewed as an act of strength; in fact it was an act of economic desperation. By lending $200 billion a year to finance the US trade deficit, China underpins the international dominance of the dollar. In the upper echelons of the Communist party and the state council there is anguished debate about why so many goods are made “in China” and not “by China”, and why indigenous innovation is so disastrous. In 1995 China set a target of having 50 companies in the world’s top 500 multinationals by 2010. It will be lucky to have any.

Subcontractors tend to have a limited impact on contractors’ employment. So it proves with China. The most hawkish, protectionist thinktank in the US is the Economic Policy Institute. It believes Chinese imports have cost the US 2.24 million jobs between 1989 and 2005 — but the overall job churn over the same period exceeded 400 million. The impact of offshoring, which attracts so much venom from the American left, is even smaller. The US bureau of labour’s survey of mass layoffs identified 884,000 job losses in 2005, of which 12,030 went overseas — two-thirds of this to China and Mexico. In Britain it is a similar story. From April 2003 to July 2006 we lost 390,000 jobs - only 19,000 went abroad. A TUC unit set up to monitor offshoring four years ago has closed because there is so little to monitor.

The reason is simple. Manufacturing represents only a small proportion of the value in any good — there is invention, design, financing, marketing, transporting, warehousing, advertising — and even then wage costs are not decisive. A Chinese worker may earn four per cent of the wage of an American or British worker, but is only four per cent as productive. The consultants McKinsey, for example, estimated that only a quarter of Indian engineers and a tenth of Chinese engineers are equipped to work in multinationals. In a McKinsey survey of California, the savings from offshoring to China ranged from 13 per cent in textiles to a tiny 0.6 per cent for hi-tech companies. Cheap labour is not everything.

Western companies can still compete against low-wage Asian businesses, as a study of 500 multinationals by Susan Berger, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has confirmed. They tend to be better organised and embedded in better institutional networks. Nor, finds Peter Lindert, of the University of California, has globalisation hit the industrialised world’s capacity to sustain its welfare states; on the contrary well- targeted high social spending is good for growth. Affluence begets affluence, as new forms of economic activity emerge driven by a combination of more discriminating, better educated and affluent consumers wanting new sophisticated services that western companies are more capable of delivering via new technologies- although they need to be physically close to their markets.

This is the knowledge economy. Both the network of institutions that support it and the need for market proximity make western economies less vulnerable to globalisation. The US is world leader in technology, brands, universities and patents. In Britain the knowledge- economy programme of the Work Foundation (of which I am chief executive) has found that exports of knowledge-based services trebled from 1995 to 2005, while knowledge-based employment has risen from 30 per cent of employment in 1990 to 41 per cent today.

For the less developed countries it seems a magic circle that is ever harder to break into; if even China is no more than a subcontractor to the West’s knowledge economy, what chance has it to break the western armlock in the process? And yet the West is hysterically convinced it is the loser — the reason for both the collapse of the Doha round of trade talks and no less than 20 anti-China trade bills in the US Congress.

The argument is false everywhere you look. Higher inequality is not caused by low-wage competition driving wages to the bottom or ever higher rewards for the skilled. What has changed is the new super-rich. Ian Dew-Becker and Robert Gordon, of Northwestern University, show that in the US, incomes of the 99.99th percentile have grown outlandishly, rising 497% between 1979 and 2002. This is the principal cause of American inequality. It is the same in Britain; 20 years ago the average CEO of a FTSE 100 company earned 25 times the average worker’s wage; today the multiple is close to 120 times.

China is not to blame. In Britain and America a business culture has developed where the share price is the be-all and end-all. Under desperately weak and unreformed corporate governance arrangements, CEOs have in effect written their own pay deals.

To deliver higher share prices, they have embarked on the world’s biggest takeover boom. In hard cash, the cumulative value of deals in the US between 1995 and 2005 was over $9 trillion. In Britain over the past three years there has been a no less astonishing £500bn worth of deals. These are the chief driver of job losses and downsizing - and typically for negligible productivity gains. The “enlightenment” obstacles to this - regulation, a sense of long-term ownership, media scrutiny, competition rules, strong trade unions and a belief in equality - have been progressively weakened. Western capitalism is losing its embedded checks and balances, its morality and, ultimately, its legitimacy.

Instead of demonising China as a threat, we should see it for what it is - both an opportunity and a country in trouble that we need to help make the transition to a more viable economic structure, in its interests and in ours. It needs to develop a soft “enlightenment” infrastructure; and we need to nurture and protect our own rather than throw it to the wolves because, allegedly, globalisation makes it too expensive. In fact, it has never been more important. We need to recapture the argument about globalisation from those who use it to serve their own interests — and fast.

—Dawn/Guardian Service

Bush is fuelling a new cold war

SAY what you like about George Bush, but no one can accuse him of following the crowd. When everyone from the American electorate to the US military brass, along with a rare consensus of world opinion, cries out with one voice to say “enough” of the war in Iraq, Bush heads in the opposite direction — and decides to escalate.

When his army chiefs complain of desperate overstretch in the war on terror, he takes that as his cue to open up another front. And that’s just this week.

On Sunday night the US military launched an air strike — not on Iraq or Afghanistan, but on southern Somalia. Reports say that the bombing has continued ever since. If you didn’t know that Somalia was on the enemies’ list — if you’re finding it hard, what with Syria and Iran and North Korea, to keep track of Washington’s foes — don’t blame yourself. These days the axis of evil is expanding faster than the European Union, with a couple of new members added every January.

Not that we should mock. At first blush, the Somalia raid (or raids) looks like just the kind of action that a global war on terror should entail, had it not been diverted by the unrelated nonsense about WMD and Iraq. After all, the Americans say they aimed their fire on Sunday at Al Qaeda bigwigs, thought to be responsible for the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Zapping bad guys like them is exactly what the war on terror was supposed to be about.

But Sunday’s operation carried serious risks. There is the propaganda coup — with the jihadist enemy represented by the US, once again, bombing a Muslim country. If the Americans have bungled, and civilians have been killed, then the recruiting impact for Al Qaeda and others will be even greater. And the precedents suggest such raids from the sky are horribly inaccurate.

This time last year a US Predator drone thought it had Osama bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in its sights when it hit a Pakistani compound near the Afghan border. The attack killed a reported 17 people, including six women and six children — but not Zawahiri.

Africa hands I spoke to were doubtful the Americans had done any better this time: their chief target, Al Qaeda’s top man in east Africa, is said to be a master of disguise and constantly on the move. (And, if they really did have him in their grasp, wouldn’t it have been better to capture him and find out what he knows?)

It hardly helps appearances that Washington’s partner in this adventure is the government of mainly Christian Ethiopia. For this was not just a simple police operation, but part of a wider US intrusion into a messy, complicated conflict.

A fortnight ago the Ethiopians entered Somalia to topple the Islamist forces who had just taken Mogadishu. Americans dislike that Islamist movement, fearing it has the makings of an African Taliban, so they backed the Ethiopians to take it out. According to Patrick Smith, the editor of Africa Confidential, the war on terror is fast becoming a cold war for the 21st century, with the US finding proxy allies to fight proxy enemies in faraway places.

Of course, Bush himself doesn’t see it that way. He doubtless hoped that a neat, self-contained air strike in Africa could remind Americans of the bit of the war on terror they like — hunting down the baddies — just before they hear some news they don’t.

By the time this article appears, President Bush would have gone on television to tell his fellow Americans that he is preparing to send upwards of 20,000 more troops into the graveyard that is Iraq.

His people are calling it a surge. Anyone on nodding terms with the English language would call it escalation.

It’s a neat twist on democratic accountability. In last November’s midterm elections, Americans sent a message as clearly as they could, short of hiring a plane to spell it out in skywriting above Pennsylvania Avenue: we want this war to end. Bush promised he had heard them — and is promptly doing the very opposite. One New York Times editorial wondered if he had even watched the 2006 election night results or whether he had just curled up in front of a videotaped repeat of the Republican victories of 2002.

The Republicans have form in this area, of course. In 1968, Richard Nixon was elected on a promise to end the war in Vietnam: instead, it intensified until another 55,000 US troops were dead, along with an estimated two million Southeast Asians. But Bush’s showing of his middle finger feels more brazen, if only because it is not only the American public he is ignoring, but people you would think he might respect.

Only weeks have past since the Iraq Study Group, led by his father’s consigliere, James Baker, recommended a face-saving extrication from Iraq. That plan is now binned. So too are the senior military leaders who counselled against sending more troops to fight a losing war. Gen George Casey will no longer be in charge, while Gen John Abizaid has been relieved of his post running Central Command, or Centcom. Both men opposed the “surge”, calling instead for a gradual US withdrawal.

The Arabic-speaking Abizaid had the audacity to say as much publicly: “The Baghdad situation requires more Iraqi troops,” not more Americans, he said.

So now we know what the much-vaunted new Bush strategy for Iraq amounts to: throw more gasoline on the fire. It’s conceivable that Bush is, in fact, planning an eventual withdrawal, but hoping that one last push will give him something he can call victory as a finale. Psychologists spot similar behaviour in compulsive gamblers who, when in trouble, increase their bets, hoping for a win that will allow them to leave the table with dignity. They have a word for such thinking: delusional.

And where do Britons fit into this downward slide from purgatory into hell? Tony Blair is still on the old script. In an essay in the current edition of Foreign Affairs, he says we are not winning the war on terror “because we are not being bold enough ... in fighting for the values we believe in”.

Elsewhere, though, optimists see signs that we are gradually inching away from the calamity: they note Gordon Brown, Britain’s presumptive next prime minister, condemning the execution of Saddam Hussein as “deplorable.”

Perhaps that was a pointer to better things to come. But there is something lame about the current convention which allows our politicians to criticise discrete aspects of this war — the 2003 disbandment of the Iraqi army, the reconstruction effort, the conduct and filming of Saddam’s death (though not the punishment itself) — while requiring them to stay silent on the crime of the invasion itself.

I know, I know, what else could Brown say, given that he voted for the war and sat next to Blair through it all rather than resigning in protest? But once he’s in No 10 he will have to do better than stating the obvious about the barbarism of life in today’s Baghdad. He will have to make a clean break from this most terrible chapter in British and American foreign policy and set out a new, radical strategy for the war against jihadism, one that understands that you don’t catch the terrorist fish by machine-gunning them from the sky, but by draining the sea of grievance in which they swim.

That work will be long and slow and require enormous political brainpower. And it is the polar opposite of everything George Bush stands for. — Dawn/Guardian Service

Bush’s new ‘surge’ strategy

WHAT makes sense in Iraq? The political debate is becoming sharply polarised again, as President Bush campaigns for a new “surge” strategy. But some useful military guideposts can be found in a new field manual of counterinsurgency warfare prepared by the general who is about to take command of U.S. forces in Baghdad.

Lt. Gen. David Petraeus supervised the development of the manual when he ran the Army’s training centre at Fort Leavenworth, before he had any idea he would be heading back to Baghdad as the top commander. In that sense, the document reflects a senior officer’s best judgment about what will work and what won’t — independent of the details of the current “to surge or not to surge” debate. Two themes stood out for me as I read the document. The first is that success in counterinsurgency requires a political strategy as much as a military one. The second is that broad political support back home — which buys time on the battlefield — is the crucial strategic asset in fighting such wars.

The manual doesn’t offer any specific advice for the current debate. But its precepts do raise some basic questions for Bush as he frames his new strategy: Will the new approach build bipartisan support for Iraq policy? And will it open a path toward an Iraqi political solution, as opposed to an American military effort to impose order?

“Counterinsurgency is not just thinking man’s warfare — it is the graduate level of war,” reads a quotation from a Special Forces officer in Iraq that opens the first chapter. And this theme runs throughout the manual: Many of the prescriptions that apply to normal wars don’t apply to counterinsurgencies. Indeed, if they are used, they will backfire. In a summary of “unsuccessful practices,” here’s the No. 1 mistake: “Overemphasise killing and capturing the enemy rather than securing and engaging the populace.”

The field manual summarises some of the lessons that commanders have learned in Iraq: Long-term success “depends on the people taking charge of their own affairs and consenting to the government’s rule.” Killing insurgents “by itself cannot defeat an insurgency.” Local commanders “have the best grasp of their situations” and should have the freedom to adapt and react to local conditions. As many officers ruefully admit, the Army is learning these lessons three years late — but perhaps that’s still in time to make a difference.

My favourite part of the manual, which I suspect Petraeus had a big hand in drafting, is a section titled “Paradoxes of Counterinsurgency Operations.” The headings give the flavour of these unconventional ideas: “Sometimes, the More You Protect Your Force, and the Less Secure You May Be.” (Green Zone residents, please note: “If military forces remain in their compounds, they lose touch with the people, appear to be running scared, and cede the initiative to the insurgents.”) “Sometimes Doing Nothing Is the Best Reaction.” —Dawn/Washington Post Service