Seeking trade, not aid

THE success of the forthcoming official visit of Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz to the US will be measured more in terms of its achievements on the economic front than on anything else. Indeed, it would be a big gain for Pakistan if the prime minister manages to persuade the US to give us greater market access, agree to sign a bilateral investment treaty and work out free trade arrangements between the two countries. The US has been fairly generous with economic and military aid to Pakistan since 9/11. But that is nothing new. It was almost the same during the extended reign of Pakistan’s first military ruler, General Ayub Khan. Again during the regime of our third military ruler, General Ziaul Haq, the pattern was continued. Pushed on by these generous flows of aid and loans, the economy during these two periods grew at an annual average of about six per cent as it is doing currently. But on both occasions the economy lost its steam as soon as the flows stopped. The current inflows are also not likely to last forever. Past experience has taught Pakistan to expect the worst once the immediate concerns of the US, like terrorism, disappear which they surely will in due course of time.

To sustain the economic gains of the current US assistance-led phase, Pakistan desperately needs to establish closer links with the US economy. And the best way to begin doing so is to gain greater access to the US market for Pakistani exports, attract US private sector investment in the country’s key export industries and finally enter into free trade arrangements with that country. This is the way the East Asian tigers had achieved their fast-paced growth between the 1970s and 1990s. It was an updated version of the Marshall Plan that Washington had designed for East Asia. The US private sector went to the region with its capital and technology and offered its markets for the goods produced there using the region’s relatively cheap labour. This was a mutually beneficial economic arrangement. In the process, the East Asian miracle happened and it is doing wonders there.

Pakistan should have asked for the same treatment in the 1960s when it was in the global interest of the US to strengthen Pakistan’s economic sinews. It missed the opportunity once again in the 1980s when it was again playing the role of a front-line state of the so-called free world. This time around, however, it had kept its focus on the right target from the start. It is the US which has been dragging its feet on these matters by coming up with one excuse or another. Pakistan has complied with all the conditionalities that Washington had put forward for entering into a bilateral investment treaty. An anti-money laundering law is also on the anvil. What we find almost impossible to concede is the unrealistic demand by the US to allow its businessmen a highly tilted arbitration law. This is where the negotiating skills of the prime minister will be put to a severe test during his visit to Washington. It will be in the fitness of things, therefore, if he takes along with him some top-flight legal exports to sort out this thorny issue.

A strange demand

LESS than a month after the Alliance for the Restoration of Democracy asked “western democratic forces” to restrain the federal government on the Balochistan issue, Sardar Akhtar Mengal has called for “international mediation” to resolve the crisis. Speaking at a press conference in Karachi on Friday, the chief of the Balochistan National Party also ruled out talks with the government, except in the presence of an international mediator, and appealed to “all those countries” which claim to stand for humanity and peace to intervene “immediately”. The same day in Quetta, the Jamhoori Watan Party asked the international community and human rights organizations to take notice of the purported extra-judicial killings in the province. Talking to newsmen, JWP Secretary-General Agha Shahid Hasan Bugti and Mir Humayun Marri, a former caretaker chief minister, denied that there was involvement of any foreign power in Balochistan. But, mercifully, both emphasized the need for a political solution to the crisis. This is something nobody would disagree with. However, seeking foreign intervention in what is Pakistan’s internal affair sounds bizarre.

Lack of industrialization, a poor infrastructure and a low level of literacy have militated against the growth of a politically-conscious middle class in Balochistan. The result is that the leadership of the Baloch people has been monopolized by powerful sardars who themselves have no interest in the welfare of their people, most of whom they have kept as their serfs. What the Baloch leadership should know is that if they make common cause with parties and political elements in other parts of the country, they will find a swell of sympathy for their grievances. A hyperbolic approach and looking to powers outside Pakistan — powers that may have their own axe to grind — can cost the Baloch leaders the sympathy and understanding that exist in the other three provinces for their cause and undermine their just struggle for rights and for the economic uplift of Balochistan. As for the alleged judicial killings, one hopes the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan will investigate the matter, as must the government itself, so as to ascertain the truth and punish the guilty.

Torture in Jamshoro

THERE is nothing new to last week’s report that a woman is claiming to have been tortured at the behest of a landlord in Sindh and that the police initially turned a deaf ear to her plight. Over the years one has become so accustomed to stories of brutalities committed by feudals that nothing seems to shock anyone any more. It is, however, heartening that despite the apathy, the woman has boldly chosen to take on her oppressors and seek recourse to justice. A seemingly small step can pave the way for change provided she is supported by members of her community as well as the police. In this case, the woman, along with her husband and mother, staged a protest outside the DPO office in Jamshoro against what she described was her torture at the hands of the landlord’s armed men who had kidnapped her, painted her face black and cut her hair. It is unclear what had prompted the landlord’s men to take such drastic action against the hapless woman, but nothing can justify this kind of humiliating punishment. It is tragic that more often than not, a landlord needs no justification for his action; his word is regarded as law. It is precisely this attitude that needs to be changed.

For a start, the police need to pursue the case vigorously. In what could prove to be a promising move, police high-ups have suspended an SHO for not including the names of the accused in the woman’s FIR. They should also ensure that she is accorded some security for her life is bound to be at risk as she has decided to tread a path which scores of other victims dare not venture on. It is for the enlightened sections of society to reach out and offer her their support and help.

Urgency of Kalabagh dam project

AS the debate on the Kalabagh dam, essentially a technical issue, starts assuming emotional, political and subjective character far out of proportion to its core technicalities, one wonders where all this will lead us. Is it helping clear confusion surrounding the project and building a political consensus or is it just adding to the emotive controversies that have bedevilled the project for the last five decades?

Looking at the manner and direction of the debate so far, it seems that emotional, political and subjects views are being projected at the cost of legal and fiscal realities of the KBD. The debate has resulted in hardening of positions taken by most of the supporters and opponents of the project rather than help de-emotionalize and depoliticize the issue. In the heat of arguments, only a few debaters are ready to concede that the federal government is under intense pressure to act on the water-sharing front on two counts: domestic and international, the last in the form of legal demands made by the Indus Basin Water Treaty as well as food self-sufficiency and the financial sovereignty of the country.

The Indus Basin Water Treaty of 1960, which the then federal government had signed as a sovereign entity, created two storages in order to compensate for the loss of three eastern rivers. Since Punjab was the largest beneficiary of the three rivers, it was given exclusive rights on the 9.4 million acre feet water (MAF) out of a total storage capacity of about 15MAF. The country has already lost three MAF of this because of the silting up of the dams. As silt eats up the storage capacity, and that of water-holding depletes every day, the federation is faced with a potentially disastrous threat: what will happen when the total storage drops to around 9.4MAF in the next decade or so?

According to the Indus Basin Water Treaty, Punjab had legally exclusive rights over those 9.4MAF, leaving the other three federating units on the run-of-the-river supplies. Punjab should then be approaching the federal government, equipped as it is with legal rights under the treaty which has international guarantees. This scenario is threatening enough for the rulers to claim that keeping a craven silence on the water issue will be a “national harakiri.”

The second, and equally ominous, scenario that generates more pressure on the federal government to act is perpetual water shortages, especially in the Rabi season, again because of the silting up of up to 30 per cent of the existing capacity of the dams. At present, if both the dams are filled up, Pakistan will suffer from over 20 per cent of water shortage in the Rabi season. These shortages will only grow if new storage is not created.

The Tarbela dam’s storage at the time of its construction used to last up to the end of May when the new filling season had already started, thus meeting the country’s water needs round the year. With silt moving into the lake every year, the storage now lasts only up to the month of February. The rate of the Tarbela dam’s silting up process costs ten days of supplies every year, which means that it has been hitting the dead level 10 days earlier every year. Within the next five years, the Tarbela dam would be empty by early January, and the country would have no water for a second and third watering of the wheat crop and for the beginning of the cotton sowing.

Within the next five years, Pakistan’s food and cash crops would slowly but progressively be exposed to a potent danger of being ultimately wiped out. The federal government now feels that the country not only needs additional water storage, but it needs it critically, that is, within the next five years if it is to stave off the impending danger.

If these two points are made the mainstay of the on-going debate on water resources, one can easily see the urgency of weighing the available options. This is precisely what was pointed out by the members of the Technical Committee on Water Resources. In their report they have indicated that new storages could only be built on the Indus and there were three potential sites for these: Kalabagh, Bhasha and Skardu. Fortunately or unfortunately, Kalabagh is the only site that could be readied within the next five to six years, and help the country and its agriculture sector win the race against time.

The construction requirements for a dam at Kalabagh have been under consideration over the last three decades. Bhasha dam would take another three to four years to come at the stage of the Kalabagh dam because its design, drawings and tender documents are yet to be finalized.

The truth is that the Bhasha dam is a ten-year-hence project. It also has some other question marks that need to be evaluated and addressed. These include the widening and reconstruction of the portions of the Karakoram Highway. The first would be necessary for taking the earth-moving equipment to the dam site and the second in the face of the submerging of 120 kilometres of the KKH in the lake which necessasitates the building of a detour. This is not to say that the required engineering solutions are not possible but only to underline the phenomenal cost that doing so would entail.

As for Skardu, it is still more at a conceptual stage where even the basic work is still to be done. These are the simple facts about building new water storages on which most of the water experts, both the committees on water resources — the parliamentary and the technical — agree.

Apart from the compelling realities of the required storage capacity and the need to prioritize the process of its implementation, it seems that critics of the Kalabagh dam have been unable, or unwilling, to de-link the urgency of the project from the supposed lack of credibility of those in favour of the dam. To be fair to everyone, the government has not helped matters by not undertaking any such de-linking exercise. Rather, its action has kept the debate as subjective as possible.

President Pervez Musharraf also did no good by to project when he offered “personal guarantees” to the critics of the dam. By linking the credibility of the project with his own, the president only provided further fuel to the critics. In this way, he has personalized a national project and the debate over it. It would be unfair if the project itself ends up paying the cost of bad politics on the part of the president and his supporters.

The so-called political team of the president seems more eager to prove personal loyalties to the president. This they are doing by projecting the entire issue as a personal initiative of the president, and by trying to remind the nation that it is his sagacity that lies behind the critical urgency of the timing of the project.

Instead of focussing on the technical merits of the project and its urgency for the country’s agriculture sector and its financial and legal compulsion, the president’s handpicked politicians have busied themselves with eulogizing the general. To be fair to them too, the president’s political team has its own limitations. A virtually non-political set-up created by Gen Musharraf has been asked to build a political consensus on a highly contentious issue, and that too while keeping the political heavyweights, with roots among the people, out of the fray. This is an untenable position, and the sooner the president realizes this the better it would be for the project as well as the country.

Unchecked abuse

US CONGRESS voted by an overwhelming margin last month to ban all US personnel from inflicting “cruel, inhuman or degrading” treatment on any prisoner held anywhere by the United States. President Bush, who had threatened to veto the legislation, instead invited its prime sponsor, Sen. John McCain, to the White House for a public reconciliation and declared they had a common objective: “to make it clear to the world that this government does not torture and that we adhere to the international convention of torture.”

His national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, said that “the legislative agreement that we’ve worked out with Senator Mc Cain” makes the ban on cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment “a matter of law that applies worldwide, at home and abroad.”

From all that, it might be concluded that the Bush administration has committed itself to ending the use of practices falling just short of torture that it has used on foreign detainees since 2002. But it has not. Instead, it is explicitly reserving the right to abuse prisoners, while denying them any opportunity to seek redress in court.

Having publicly accepted the ban on cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, Mr. Bush is planning to ignore it whenever he chooses. As a practical matter, there may be no change in the operations of the CIA’s secret prisons, where detainees have been subjected to such practices as painful shackling, mock execution, induced hypothermia and “waterboarding,” or simulated drowning.

The president made his intentions clear in signing the defence bill containing the McCain amendment last month. Mr. Bush issued a presidential signing statement saying his administration would interpret the new law “in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President to supervise the unitary executive branch and as Commander in Chief and consistent with the constitutional limitations on the judicial power.”

The language refers to the assertion by the president’s lawyers that his powers allow him, in wartime, to ignore statutes passed by Congress. The White House has intimated that it has similar authority in justifying Mr. Bush’s authorization of surveillance of Americans without court approval, in violation of another law. Even before the statement was issued, administration lawyers had taken the position that the McCain amendment would not necessarily end the use of waterboarding.

—The Washington Post