LAST Monday, I ventured out to the Indian High Commission in Islamabad’s bunkered diplomatic enclave to submit a visa application for a visit to the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.

Anticipating harassment by intelligence sleuths, I was somewhat relieved when I didn’t encounter any hitches.

Yet it all seemed too good to be true. And it was. As soon as I walked out, a car pulled up right behind me. Two intelligence officials jumped out and accosted me. I handed them my ID card as requested. They were curious as to why I had not checked in with them before entering ‘enemy territory’. In my defence, I could only tell them that I had assumed they would approach me if they so desired.

As one of them copiously noted down information from my ID card on a small piece of scrap paper, the second one asked me who I was and why I was there. I told him I was pursuing a PhD in the US and intended to travel to India for a professional engagement. Obviously suspecting my motives, he wondered: “Do the Indians have books or materials you can’t find in America?” Not to be left out, his partner quipped: “This must be the task they have given him.”

So went the insinuations, followed by the expected volley of questions: Where do you live? Who did you meet inside? How many passports did you submit? How long will you stay in India for? Once they had the information they needed from me, the duo got in the car and sped away. I had no idea that while they were doing their good cop, not so bad cop routine on me, a car laden with explosives was on the streets of Islamabad in search of targets. Nor that a few moments later, it would rip through the Danish Embassy in the city’s high security zone a few kilometres away.

Security lapses are not just restricted to Pakistan. Suicide attacks are hard to prevent anywhere. But it is hard to believe that our security agencies don’t have a better use for their resources and manpower than the harassment of Pakistani citizens outside the Indian High Commission. In a world of finite resources, nobody can convincingly make the case that a few officials don’t make a difference. When it comes to counter-terrorism, even one human asset is one too many. Besides the intelligence benefits of the whole exercise remain unclear. Perhaps, they could enlighten the people of Pakistan by disclosing how many spies they have intercepted or co-opted through this channel.

The relative autonomy of intelligence agencies is a feature of the modern state, especially those controlled by authoritarian regimes. For reasons of state, intelligence budgets are often kept secret. But even if a certain amount of operational secrecy is warranted, the main rationale of intelligence is to collect timely information to deter threats to national security. To modify the most well-known proposition of the great Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz, intelligence is a continuation of politics and policy by covert means. In Pakistan, however, intelligence agencies seem more concerned with undermining politics by bribing or blackmailing politicians. Talk about misplaced priorities.

Born amidst acute insecurity, our paranoid national security state continues to inflate the India threat to incredulity. Even the ongoing peace and confidence-building process between the two sides appears to have made little difference on the ground. But India is not the India of yesteryears. Except for a lunatic fringe, its political establishment does not dispute Pakistan’s right to exist as a sovereign state. And even if it does, the global norm of mutual respect of state sovereignty is too deeply entrenched to allow conquest.

Any such attempt by India would mean Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) given that both sides possess nuclear weapons, and thus second-strike capability. In other words, India is neither willing nor capable of invading, occupying and/or absorbing Pakistan into the Indian union. In fact, India seems to be engaging Pakistan as part of its strategy to resolve regional conflicts and break onto the global map as a diplomatic, economic and military powerhouse.

Given that militancy and terrorism emanating from within are emerging as the most serious threats to Pakistan, the security apparatus should be redirecting its operational focus towards counter-terrorism. But it appears that its various elements are still stuck in a time warp. Their India-obsessed lenses appear to be blinding them to a reasoned analysis of the changing threat environment.

This is not to say that India’s security agencies are any more efficient or any less paranoid than Pakistan’s. But there is a difference: Indian agencies are subordinated to the elected government. Policy drives the security apparatus of the state, not the other way around.

It is imperative for both national security and political stability that we also subordinate our security apparatus to the needs of policy. Once the PPP-led government finds its footing, it should quickly reactivate the defence committee of the cabinet so that it can meet regularly to provide overall direction for defence policy. It should also consider a comprehensive overhaul of the intelligence establishment, as well as establishing parliamentary oversight committees on intelligence or making existing defence committees more robust by enhancing their expertise and resources.

Of course, it will not be easy to establish an effective system of intelligence oversight. If the past is an indicator, military-intelligence officials are likely to resist submitting themselves to democratic accountability. But the more routinely they are questioned, scrutinised and made answerable to the elected government and parliament, the more likely it is that their anti-democratic beliefs and attitudes would be eroded. There is a window of opportunity to set our security priorities right. It may or may not be open for long.

The writer, a PhD candidate in political science at Columbia University, is conducting doctoral research in Pakistan.

as2552@columbia.edu

THE Pakistani elite is fond of criticising the political leadership for taking populist measures, and advocates tough measures that are required to put the economy on the path of progress. It is time that economic policymakers listened to this piece of advice and took some tough measures by making the elite pay their fair share of taxes.

The fundamental structure of Pakistan’s fiscal policy is unjust. It under-taxes the elite and does not spend enough on the needs of the poor. Pakistan’s fiscal expenditure with the additional fuel subsidies will probably end close to 20 per cent, which is much lower than most Asian countries’ spending of close to 25 per cent. No surprise that Pakistan has some of the worst social indicators even amongst its peer groups in the emerging markets.

Despite this low level of expenditure, we have a fiscal deficit in excess of seven per cent of GDP this year. The reason is the exceptionally low level of revenue generation. With tax to GDP ratio at around 10 per cent and total revenue at less than 13 per cent, Pakistan is simply under-taxed.

Worse still, the incidence of taxation is disproportionately higher on the lower income groups. The contribution of indirect taxes to total taxes has remained virtually unchanged over the last decade at close to two-thirds of all tax revenue.

We need to make a substantive change in this fiscal structure. We need to get our expenditure up to 25 per cent of GDP of which the current expenses should be at around 15 per cent and development expenditure at 10 per cent of GDP. We should target to have a fiscal deficit of no more than four per cent. This means increasing the revenues up to 21 per cent of GDP. We should aim to achieve this transition in a five-year period starting with this budget.

Within the current expenditure, there needs to be a change in composition. There should be a target to reduce the equivalent of three per cent of GDP in the non-education/health/subsidy part of the budget. This cut should be shared equally between the defence and civilian budgets. These savings should be directed towards the increased current expenditure for health and education. The level of subsidy should be maintained at the level of the current fiscal year but a change in the purpose and mode of subsidy needs to be made.

The fuel subsidy should be phased out. Similarly, the subsidy on fertiliser should be gradually eliminated. In place of these subsidies, a substantive income transfer scheme should be put in place which targets the most vulnerable segments of society. In order to mitigate the impact on farmers of the higher fertiliser cost, they should be allowed to retain a higher price for their

produce.

Cotton and rice prices are linked to international markets and therefore the principal change will have to be in wheat prices. The targeted income transfer schemes to be put in place should provide capacity to the poor to absorb the impact of higher food and fuel prices.

Development expenditure should be raised from the current approximately four per cent to 10 per cent with the bulk of this increase being devoted to improvement in the health and education expenditures. Coupled with the increase in health and education spending in current expenses, this will allow us to increase the total spending on these critical sectors many fold. The improvement in the physical infrastructure should be largely achieved through the private sector using innovative financing structures which are used for this purpose in a number of countries.

On the revenue side, we need to tax large segments of the economy which are grossly under-taxed. During the last few years, tremendous wealth generation took place in the capital and real estate markets but the contribution to taxes was minimal. Similarly, with the increase in agricultural commodity prices the large land owners have more profits than ever before and need to start paying their fair share of taxes. The services sector is now the biggest part of the economy but is not contributing its full share of taxes. The beneficiaries of under-taxation in these identified segments are mostly the relatively high-income segments of society.

An argument against taxing these sectors is that it will discourage investors, particularly foreign ones. This is patently false. Investors, at least the serious corporate entities, don’t simply go shopping for the lowest taxes. They look at the totality of investment opportunity. Low-cost production is not the only aim of investors. The biggest exporter in the world is not a low-cost manufacturing location but Germany which has one of the most expensive workforces in the world and heavy taxes. It is the quality-adjusted cost which determines a nation’s competitiveness not the nominal cost of production.

By under-investing in our people, we have turned our biggest potential source of competitive advantage in the global economy into a liability. A fiscal policy that helps build a skilled, educated, healthy and productive workforce will lay the foundation of an economy which can produce goods and services that are competitive in the global economy.

This will make Pakistan an attractive destination for foreign investment in export-based industries as opposed to the foreign investment we have received so far which is exclusively aimed at exploiting the domestic market.

Reducing the fiscal deficit to four per cent will help contain inflation and allow interest rates to come down. This will reduce current expenditure for debt servicing and create more fiscal space for development expenditure.

Thus the economy would have entered a virtuous cycle of growth and investment and we would have the foundations of sustained non-inflationary growth, the fruits of which would be available to all segments of society.

The development of Pakistan’s economy is not limited by the resources available. Its development potential is limited by the imagination of its policymakers and the lack of its elite’s ability to look beyond its immediate self-interest.

THE British armed forces clung to their cluster bombs like a baby to its rattle, and some suspected that they were trying to sabotage the treaty on behalf of their American friends (who were not there, of course). But Prime Minister Gordon Brown overruled them, in the end, and Britain was among the hundred countries that agreed to a treaty banning cluster bombs in Dublin last week.

Well, it doesn’t actually ban all cluster bombs; just the current designs that leave large areas littered with unexploded bomblets that go on killing civilians for years after they were dropped. Israel dropped some four million bomblets on Lebanon during the last three days of the 2006 war, for example, and more than thirty people have been killed by them since the war ended.

If someone designed a cluster bomb whose bomblets all exploded reliably on impact, or at least within 48 hours of landing, then it would presumably be legal since it mostly killed soldiers. The major producers of cluster bombs — the US, Russia, Israel, China, India and Pakistan — were not even at the Dublin conference, and have no intention of signing the treaty. But it’s a start.

This sort of treaty does not really work by legal compulsion. The countries that sign the treaty are legally bound by it, but even for them there is no enforcement mechanism. For those that don’t sign the treaty, there are no formal constraints of any sort. But by “banning” a particular weapon, the smaller and less militarised countries can exert a real moral pressure on those nations that insist on retaining it.

It wouldn’t work if one of those countries felt that its very survival was threatened, but that hardly ever happens. In lesser emergencies, when a country is choosing which weapons to use from a broad range of options in its arsenal, the fact that cluster bombs are now seen as illegal by a majority of the world’s states could have a major influence on which weapons get chosen.

They won’t admit it, of course. The Pentagon issued a statement saying that “While the United States shares the humanitarian concerns of those in Dublin, cluster munitions have demonstrated military utility, and their elimination from US stockpiles would put the lives of our soldiers...at risk.” But this statement would be even truer of nuclear weapons, which have excellent military utility against troops but also kill everybody else in the vicinity.

Cluster bombs would have been quite useful in the environment they were originally designed for, which was industrial-scale warfare in central Europe or on the Korean peninsula. If they exploded high enough to let the bomblets scatter properly, a few well-placed cluster bombs or shells could destroy dozens of soft-skinned military vehicles and blunt the attack of an entire mechanised infantry battalion. A few hundred could stop an army corps.

But that kind of war never happened, and where cluster bombs have actually been used is in little wars against low-tech opponents: by the US in Cambodia, by Russia in Afghanistan, by the US again in Kosovo and Iraq, and by Israel in Lebanon. They are not particularly effective against the sort of targets that are on offer in that kind of war, but what the hell, we have them, let’s use them.

Unfortunately, whether by accident or by design, the bomblets have this curious propensity not to go off right away. Between 10 per cent and 40 per cent of the hundreds of bomblets released by the average cluster bomb or shell fail to detonate on hitting the ground, and lie there until — weeks or months or years later — a farmer drives over it in his tractor, or a kid comes along and picks it up. It is estimated that 40 per cent of the casualties of cluster bombs are not soldiers but children.

So why do some countries cling to these things, while others are willing to let them go? If you look at the list of the hold-outs, it is mainly the countries that just might, in some remote but dreadful contingency, have to face a mass assault by motorised forces: US forces in Korea, Indian or Pakistani forces in Punjab, the Israelis against Syria (although the Syrians would have to rebuild their forces first), and Russia and China mainly against each other.

None of these contingencies is at all likely to occur, but the rule in military affairs (as in much else) is better safe than sorry. None of these countries signed the 1997 treaty banning anti-personnel land-mines either, and they are not going to give up their cluster bombs. So of what use is the treaty?

More than you might think. Cluster bombs are now stigmatised as immoral and (for most countries) illegal weapons, and governments that do use them will have to pay a high public relations price. That certainly wouldn’t deter those countries if they would make a real difference militarily, but that has not been the case in most instances where they have been used in the past.

What the treaty really does is to shift assumptions so that international public opinion will see a country that uses cluster bombs as being in the wrong. As a result, there will be instances where a country that possesses them decides not to use them. The treaty is not a waste of time.

—Copyright Gwynne Dyer