IF any proof was needed it has been provided by the way the American invasion of Iraq has worked out in practice. Even President George W. Bush has begun to acknowledge that the use of force is not yielding the results he and his associates had expected. The neo-conservatives who persuaded the American president to order his troops into Iraq did so in the belief that they would be treated not as colonisers but as liberators.

The Iraqis, tired of being ruled for decades by a ruthless dictator, longed for freedom from repression. The Americans would provide them with that. That was the assumption in the spring of 2003 when American tanks and troop carriers rolled into the Iraqi desert en route to Baghdad. They cut through the nominal resistance offered by the Iraqi army and took over Iraq, toppled Saddam Hussein’s statue and his government, and took over the task of administering the conquered country. That was nearly four years ago.

Have the authors of the Iraq strategy learned a lesson from their experience? The answer, alas, is no. They went on to publish The Neocon Reader, a book of 22 essays which laid out the basis of much of the thinking that informed the new policy.

The most revealing of these is the one by Charles Krauthammer who writes a regular column for The Washington Post. “On December 26, 1991, the Soviet Union died and something new was born, something utterly new — a unipolar world dominated by a single superpower unchecked by any rival and with decisive reach in every corner of the globe,” he wrote and then went on to draw an analogy between the Second World War and the fight against terrorism. “Establishing civilised, decent, non-belligerent pro-western polities in Afghanistan and Iraq” would be akin to the foundation of new political orders in the defeated nations of Germany and Japan. “Yes, as in Germany and Japan, the undertaking is enormous, ambitious and arrogant. It may yet fail. But we cannot afford not to try. There is not a single, remotely plausible strategy for attacking the monster behind 9/11”.

Even though the Iraq Study Group that released its report on December 6, 2006, suggested a different approach to what had become the Iraq problem, the neocons were not eclipsed. They prevailed and the American president refused to accept the advice offered by the authors of the ISG report.

For a few days after the publication of the report there was an impression that the foreign policy realists would once again influence policymaking in Washington. But that euphoria did not last for long. The use of force once again was offered as the only way to move forward although the White House dispensed with some of the arrogance which had accompanied many of earlier policy pronouncements.

The normally confident President Bush looked uncertain as he ordered another 21,500 American troops into Iraq. In the speech delivered to his troubled nation on January 10, the American leader dispensed with the “bring ‘emon” rhetoric of the past. His aim was decidedly modest. He wanted to bring a bit of order into the mayhem that prevailed in Baghdad in order to give the political leadership some space within which it could build a new political order.

There were two problems with this approach. What was the real leadership of Iraq, the majority Shias, some of whom seem determined to avenge the wrong that was done to their community by decades of brutal rule by some of the Sunnis who supported Saddam Hussein, the executed leader? Or, should the Americans seek to put together a coalition of moderate leaders of the three communities that made up most of the country’s population in the hope of keeping the state together?

The other problem was that nobody was certain as to the type of political order that could be introduced to begin to bring together the country’s highly fractured citizenry.

The American incursion into Iraq, therefore, is a proof of the proposition that the use of force cannot ensure a new political order. Such an order may be valued by the West but it does not serve the purpose of traditional societies. This is particularly the case in societies that have experienced a great deal of violence as they have attempted to define themselves in a rapidly changing global system.

This is the case with the tribal Pashtuns who reside on both sides of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. As I wrote last week, having used force in Iraq and failed, some policymakers in Washington believe that the Pak-Afghan tribal belts may yet yield to military pressure. They are urging their government not to “surge” in Iraq but to build a greater force in Afghanistan to bolster the forces assembled by Nato. There is also pressure being exerted on Islamabad to show muscle on its side of the border. This strategy will fail as fast as it has failed in Iraq.

The advocates of the use of military muscle to bring about change in the tribal belt believe that ideologies cannot be fought with reason; they have to be confronted with force. Leaders such as America’s George W. Bush and Britain’s Tony Blair have discovered that they are dealing with people who subscribe to an anti-western ideology. It is now called by several names including “Islamofascism”.

Its aim, say those who have given it a name, is to introduce political and social systems that are not only totally different from those the West knows best and is comfortable with. They want to establish a system that is completely hostile to the West. This trend has to be beaten back and reversed or else the West itself would be in great peril.

This diagnosis is wrong. It ignores what really ails this part of the world. At a time when information flows freely, there are a large number of people in the Muslim world who have convinced themselves that the West led by the United States is working against their interests. They read global events from that perspective.

This way of thinking has taken hold in those societies where the level of literacy is low and where integration with the global economic system is poor. It has attracted those people who have been the subject of western intrigue and ambition for centuries. These then are some of the reasons why the tribal belts on the two sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border are now restive. How does one go about addressing the frustrations of these people? This is where economics enters the picture.

Perhaps the best way of illustrating the use of economics for solving the Afghan problem is to look at the way the United States and Nato would like to deal with the growing importance of drugs in the country’s economy. This is the area where economics crosses into politics.

At this time, Afghanistan’s opium exports account for somewhere between one-third and two-thirds of the country’s gross domestic product. The amount of land dedicated to poppy production grew by 60 per cent in 2006. Most of the production is in the southern provinces that border on Pakistan.

The poppy chain is simple. The crop is cultivated on small farms by poor farmers. It is fairly labour-intensive since the product has to be harvested by hand and with considerable care. It is then sent to small factories where some initial processing is done, again by labour intensive means. It is then ready for export and goes out of the country through a number of routes. Ninety per cent of the total output lands on the streets of West Europe.

Pakistan used to supply the main outlet in the pre-Taliban period but that is not the case any more. The preferred route is now through Iran, Turkey and the Central Asian Republics. From there it goes to Europe.

Since the cultivation, purification and trade involving poppy and poppy products are illegal activities there are plenty of opportunities for gathering “rents” by those who participate in them. Economists use the term “rent” to describe illegal payments by users of services to functionaries who dispense them.

Since the state is not sufficiently well organised and is not powerful enough to snuff out the activities associated with the drug trade, there are plenty of opportunities for corruption. It is reported that the jobs that are directly concerned with eliminating the production and processing of poppies are auctioned to the highest bidders by powerful warlords who can influence the appointment of these functionaries.

According to the British government, illicit drug trade poses the “gravest threat to the long term security, development, and effective governance of Afghanistan” since the resurgent Taliban are supposed to benefit from this part of the economy as do the warlords. Consequently, the Nato forces have decided to place a great deal of emphasis in their operations on the control and eventual eradication of poppy cultivation. How will this get done?

Once again the use of force seems to be the preferred option. According to one account, “convinced that this time they are doing the morally right thing, western governments are spending hundreds of million of dollars bulldozing poppy fields, building up counter-narcotics squads …chemical spraying may begin as early as this spring.” How will the affected population react? Given the growing unpopularity of the West in this part of the world, farmers will treat this as one more serious assault on their livelihood. The Taliban will find new recruits.

It doesn’t have to be this way. There is a good example of the way economic considerations were used to eradicate illegal cultivation of poppies in the country that is almost next door to Afghanistan. Not too long ago, drug production and trade also threatened Turkey’s political and economic development.

Like Afghanistan, Turkey then was identified as the main source of the heroin sold in Europe. In 1974, Ankara, with assistance provided by the United Nations and the United States, began licensing the cultivation of poppy for such legal purposes as the production of morphine, codeine and other legal and regulated opiates. Legal factories were built to replace those that operated illegally. Farmers were registered to cultivate the crop. They also paid taxes on their incomes.

The programme was a big success. Illegal production of the crop ceased while the United States required that pharmaceutical companies procure 80 per cent of the output as raw material for their products.

Something similar to the Turkish programme is required in Afghanistan. But economics is the right instrument of reform and modernisation not just for the drug trade but for other sectors of the economy as well.

Only when the realisation dawns that for societies such as the tribal Pashtuns the use of force just does not work, will peace and development come to this part of the world.

I AM one of those lucky individuals who often get to see glimpses of rural life in different parts of Pakistan. This time I was on the road for nearly seven weeks (early November to late December), thanks to the Rural Support Programmes Network and its member rural support programmes.

My travels stretched from Sust (near the Chinese border) in the north to Badin in the south, visiting villages and meeting rural folk in places like Gilgit, Hunza, Nagar and Baltistan in the Northern Areas; Rawalakot and Pallandri in Azad Kashmir; Kohat, Peshawar, Nowshera, Mansehra, Abbottabad, and Haripur in the NWFP; Quetta and Mastung in Balochistan; Lahore, Sahiwal, Multan, Dera Ghazi Khan, Bahawalpur, and Rahim Yar Khan in Punjab; and Sukkur, Gothki, Khairpur, Hyderabad, Mirpurkhas, Tharparkar, Umerkot and Badin in Sindh.

The encounters with people individually and in groups were an experience of a lifetime. I will try to capture some of what I saw and heard.

One should not be romantic about rural life in Pakistan — or else how can one explain the one-way flow of people, much of it on a permanent basis, from villages to towns and cities? This is not to say that village life has not changed. In many ways it has. Some changes are striking: new and improved roads and relatively easy access to means of transport (buses, wagons, trucks, and tractors) and instant sources of information (radio, TV and phones).

This cannot, however, be said about schools, healthcare facilities, potable water supply, sanitation (drainage and sewage disposal) and electricity. Of course, many more villages today have schools, healthcare facilities, potable water supply, and electricity than before (say 20 years ago). The problem is that schools are generally of poor quality and low in density (particularly for girls); the healthcare facilities are sparse, expensive and of dubious quality; the supply of potable water is limited and erratic (women and children have to fetch it from distances ranging from one to three kilometres); most households must depend on nature for sewage disposal; electricity is still a luxury for most households and many villages.

I must add a note caution to these generalisations: village conditions are very uneven between and within provinces, districts and tehsils (talukas).

Add to this diversity the differentiated structure of society on the basis of economic and social position of households. But the basis of differentiation seems to have shifted somewhat by the forces of market, technology, and public sector activities. It should be added that the rural society of today is far less rigid than before: people can acquire a new (better) status because of their achievements. I don’t wish to underestimate the role that tradition and prescription still play in rural life. Economic and social deprivation, though no longer pervasive in most areas, haunts you no matter where you go.

In its severe form it exists in some parts of the Northern Areas and the NWFP, southern Punjab, eastern and south-eastern Balochistan, the desert and southern parts of Sindh. Much of this is associated with people without assets or few assets with low returns, dependent on unskilled family labour. Often they are also the people that suffer from social exclusion because of caste and gender. Economic disparity among households is far more striking than absolute poverty, reflecting the unequal opportunities to participate in and the uneven effects of economic growth.

The links to agriculture are strong in many rural areas judging by the proportion of household labour used in farming. But rural households earn (receive) a high proportion of their income from outside the farm sector: cash nexus is now the dominant force, contrary to the myth of “subsistence” household, no matter where you go. I haven’t seen any exception to this. New and improved means of transport and communication have come to play a major role in the movement of people and goods.

The striking gender “imbalance” in rural areas reflects itself in several ways: in the sharing of work, participation in community life, making decisions in the household and the state of education and health. However, age, education and economic condition make a big difference to the perceptions of gender imbalance: the older, less educated (or uneducated) and poor men and women tend to accept it more than the younger, more educated and not-so-poor men and women.

Younger men and women, however uneducated or poor, have expressed quite unequivocally the need for children to go to school. They are equally certain that girls deserve as much, if not more, schooling as boys: they are willing to “put their money where their mouth is”. That school enrolments are rising slowly, especially for girls, has to do with the severity of poverty and the poor quality of schooling available to them. It is more a problem on the supply than demand side.

I also found that relatively young men, even those with little or no education and low income, would like to have far fewer children than their own parents: this clearly reflects a shift of preference from quantity to quality of children. My understanding is that young women are even more receptive to this idea: the more educated the woman the more certain she is about her preference. What empowers her more than anything else is her educational achievement; it seems that her husband’s education is like the icing on the cake. These are big changes in attitudes.

Much as people want their children to go to school their major concern is about the returns on schooling, given the poor quality of education and low prospects of entry into the job market. Indeed there is widespread evidence of poor quality of education, particularly of those young boys and girls who must depend on government schools.

The mushroom-like growth of private schools even in rural areas — many of them are of questionable quality and no more than profitable enterprises for their owners — are partly a response to the rising demand for quality education and partly a reflection of the sorry state of public sector schools.

But children from most poor households are trapped in government schools. While participation in education beyond high school is rising rapidly, it produces graduates who are ill equipped to offer the kinds of talents and skills that the market demands.

They tend to leave the rural environment — that’s what education does to them — in search of jobs in towns and cities which they either do not get or are not there in the first place. Youth unemployment represents a serious failure of the education system and a betrayal of hopes and aspirations that the parents and their children seem to nurture.

It seems that the experiment of “devolution” has not changed the perceptions of ordinary people in rural areas about the state institutions and functionaries (elected and appointed): they are distant, inefficient and often corrupt. A general impression left on me is that the devolution plan has been a failure in addressing the daily concerns of citizens particularly those who are at the bottom of the totem pole. The structure of governance at the local level is at best confusing because of the overlapping lines of authority in providing security, maintaining order and dispensing public services.

The elected local officials have either too much autonomy or too little, depending on which side of the political fence they stand. The appointed functionaries are equally dependent on the state of politics at the local and provincial levels: their masters are not well defined or identifiable. The police force seems to be independent of almost everyone at the local level: the judicial office to which they are in theory accountable is itself not independent.

The good thing is that the civil society institutions like the mass media and NGOs have become quite active almost everywhere as promoters of rights and suppliers of services. They are seen by the state functionaries generally as meddlers, even contenders, not to be trusted: try to buy them or intimidate them if necessary.

The civil society institutions, given their fragile roots in Pakistan, are quite vulnerable to threats and bribes but they do get attention of and support from the public since they can probably make a difference. They seem to empower ordinary people both in rural and urban areas.

LAST week, Gordon Brown, the presumptive successor to British Prime Minister Tony Blair, gave a speech in which he said globalisation requires “a real, deliverable promise that we can give people the skills for the future by investing in education, science, technology and the creative industries.” He went on to say, “Our aim in Britain … is to continuously innovate in new products and services.”

The odd part is that Brown was giving this speech in Bangalore. The Indian boomtown has become a mandatory stop for western finance ministers eager to demonstrate that they too have read Thomas Friedman’s bestselling book, “The World Is Flat.” (Chapter 1 opens at the first tee of Bangalore’s smartest golf club, where the author is advised to take aim at either the Microsoft building or the IBM building, gleaming symbols of the Indian economic miracle.)

“Over the next five years,” Brown told his hosts, “India will create one in every four of all new jobs in the world…. In less than three decades from now you will be the world’s third-largest economy.” Hailing the “seismic shift in social and economic power brought forward by globalisation,” he gave his backing to his hosts’ long-standing demand that India be made a permanent member of the UN Security Council.

That was supposed to provide the headline. Unfortunately, all this flattery was set at naught by the antics of two participants in the British “reality” show “Celebrity Big Brother,” which chose the eve of Brown’s Asian jaunt to give vent to some distinctly unflattering anti-Indian prejudices. To give you a flavour, one participant referred to her fellow contestant, the Indian actress Shilpa Shetty, as “Shilpa Poppadom,” while the other disingenuously inquired: “They eat with their hands in India, don’t they? Or is that China? … You don’t know where those hands have been.”

To my mind, it’s not just the racism that’s depressing about these utterances; it’s the ignorance. But hang on. One of these odious women left school with nine general certificates of secondary education, the British equivalent of a high school diploma.

This brings us to the great mystery of British education. We spend a great deal on education. According to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, Britain ploughs about 4.6 per cent of its gross domestic product into primary and secondary education, ranking fifth out of 30 developed countries. The average British child can expect to have more formal education (20.7 years) than his or her equivalent in any other OECD member-state.

Unfortunately, the more that has been spent on British high schools, the worse the outcomes have been. Fully a quarter of the British population aged between 25 and 34 are “low skilled” in terms of their educational attainment — five times the proportion in Japan, according to a 2005 OECD study.

Even more damning statistics are produced by the US Institute of Education Sciences, which surveys international standards in mathematics. In its most recent assessment, British 14-year-olds were outperformed by their contemporaries in 17 other countries. The average score in Singapore was 605; in Hong Kong, 586. In England and Scotland, it was 498. Interestingly, many East European countries — Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Russia and Slovakia — did better. Note also that the other English speakers performed at roughly the same level as the Brits: Australians and Americans slightly better, New Zealanders slightly worse.

In the past, educational under-achievement was not very severely punished in the English-speaking world. Agriculture, industry and the military offered relatively well-paying jobs for boys who failed at school. Those who just scraped by in terms of literacy and numeracy could also expect relatively comfortable lives as clerks. And those who inherited wealth and status could be as ignorant as they liked.

But globalisation means those days are gone. It really is a flat world, in the sense that the global labour market is an increasingly level playing field, with fewer and fewer barriers preventing Asian workers from competing across the whole range of tradable activities. That spells disaster for the unskilled in the West. In Britain today, fully 40 per cent of adults who left school at the earliest opportunity are unemployed.

On the other hand, it emphatically isn’t a flat world in terms of the returns on intelligence and education. The smart and the skilled get paid vastly more than the dumb and the dropouts, regardless of whether they come from Birmingham or Bangalore. Remember: The next time you gasp at the difference between executive pay and average wages, which has widened dramatically since about 1980, you are not only gasping at how well the smart and skilled are doing. You are also gasping at how badly the people at the other end of the scale are doing.

This, then, is the single biggest problem that Brown is going to inherit from Blair: an uneducated and unemployable underclass whose only hope of upward mobility is to one day make it onto reality TV.

—Los Angeles Times