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THE New Year brings old thoughts to mind. This time, our dear country, that we have grown to love and hate in the same breath, that has given us so much and asked for nothing in return, is presented with an opportunity that comes very rarely.
The year 2014 sees the arrival of a new leadership team into power in all countries in our region. A great cycle that began in Pakistan in March 2013 will complete itself by March of 2014 when elections in India and Afghanistan will bring a new leadership with a fresh mandate into power.
In between, Pakistan and Iran have seen new leadership teams come into power.
By March — barely into the first quarter — new faces will be holding power in the capitals of all four of our neighbours. And in June, the drawdown of American forces in Afghanistan gets under way. By end 2014, new leadership in all four contiguous neighbours of Pakistan will be staring at each other without superpower presence. In short, the new leaderships will be left to their own devices to find their way forward.
This is not a minor thing. Never before has there been a 12-month period that has seen new leaderships emerge in all our contiguous neighbours, with the international environment turning at the same time.The importance of the moment that will open up in 2014 should not be underestimated. For decades now, Pakistan has been trapped inside a low growth equilibrium, and the biggest reason for our dismal economic performance is our isolation from our own neighbours.
It’s important to understand this, because distractions are available in generous quantities. A school of thought says that only “corruption” is responsible for our economic condition. Another school says lack of institutions or governance weaknesses are holding the country back.
Each of these schools has their evidence to present. The corruption crew typically parades quantities, about how much money can be said to be stashed abroad or how low the tax-to-GDP ratio is in Pakistan.
Of course, none of these are minor points. Corruption and poor governance have indeed plagued our country for long, and perhaps it’s important to point out that civil as well as military governments have been equally guilty on both counts.
But it’s also important to understand that countries around the world have managed to experience high rates of growth with levels of corruption and misgovernance higher than in Pakistan. Indonesia is one example, Mexico another.
In fact, examples of countries with high levels of corruption and misgovernance coupled with high growth rates are numerous — Russia, China and, yes, India. Nobody wants to argue that these are unimportant factors in any country’s development, but they are not determinative.
It’s important to understand this for one simple reason. A section of Pakistan’s polity has been pursuing ambitions of dominating the region by force with the use of proxy forces. This ambition has been calling the shots in our policy world for well over a quarter century now. And now, more than ever, this ambition needs to be restrained.
The reason why Pakistan had to largely sit out the growth phenomenon of the 1990s, and become addicted to a malign form of growth in the 2000s, is because the country has become isolated from its neighbours, and therefore has had to travel the world in search of aid to keep itself afloat.
Corruption and misgovernance have played their part in retarding the potential of growth here, for sure, but they’ve not been the root cause, which is quite simply the enormous isolation that Pakistan has suffered from all along. Isolation from its own neighbours.
And now, quite possibly for the first time in history, a window of opportunity is opening up that has the potential to deliver us from this isolation. A new government has come into power in Pakistan that sees normalisation of ties with neighbours as its most important priority. Next door, Iran has a leadership that wants to reverse the macho and turbo-charged march towards increasing isolation that the previous leadership had brought. And we wait to see what happens in Afghanistan and India as 2014 rolls ahead.
Once the new teams are in place, it’ll be important to start down the path of regional integration. Currently the US is pushing its own vision of regional integration for South and Central Asia, what they call the ‘Silk Route’ plan.
This plan’s foundations are in energy: Central Asia is an energy surplus region whereas South Asia is in an energy deficit. A pipeline to carry natural gas from the fields of Turkmenistan and an electricity transmission line from the region can potentially generate enough revenue to feed the Afghan National Army, and heat a lot of homes along the way. No wonder there’s strong buy-in from the Americans.
But geopolitics and superpower interests aside, there is a strong national interest on Pakistan’s side to pursue greater regional integration. That interest is entirely economic, because through growing regional ties our economy can find the next growth frontier that it desperately needs.
The problem with the American vision is that it excludes Iran. The sentiment against Iran is so strong in Washington D.C., you’d think it was the Iranians who had overthrown American democracy and imposed a brutal dictatorship on these people for half a century.
Pakistan is key to a making regional integration happen in South and Central Asia. The year ahead presents a unique opportunity to make this happen. Let’s see how things work out.
The writer is a business journalist and 2013-2014 Pakistan Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Centre, Washington D.C.
Twitter: @khurramhusain
