April 13, 2008

A couple of years ago I was approached by two Pakistani journalists who suggested that I let them translate into Urdu the articles I had written over the years for Dawn and publish them as a series of books. By then I had written some 500 articles with close to a million words. I didn’t agree to the suggestion. Why would people be interested in what I had said at a particular time about some particular matter? The flow of time inevitably takes a toll on what columnists write for newspapers. Would I have given the same advice to S.M. Naseem if he had posed the same question to me before deciding to place his newspaper articles within the covers of a book? I will answer that question a little later.

Professor Naseem’s book covers the period between September 11, 2001 when Pakistan, pressed by the United States, changed its foreign policy and the year 2007, when the country was headed towards another general election. The change was dramatic in several respects. A number of Pakistani administrations had provided support to the groups in Afghanistan that were more sympathetic to Islamabad than the central government in Kabul. In fact, ever since Pakistan’s emergence as an independent state, Kabul had been a thorn in its side. It was therefore tempting to create a ruling order in Kabul that would be favourable towards Islamabad. The last group that fitted this description were the Taliban who, with Pakistan’s help, went on to establish their domain over most of Afghanistan. But they also provided a sanctuary to the al Qaeda, then a little-known group, that espoused a religious philosophy that has come to be called ‘militant Islamic radicalism’.

When the al Qaeda launched a devastating attack on the United States on September 11, 2001 — an event that is now commonly known as 9/11 — the administration headed by President George W. Bush issued its famous ‘either you are with us or you are against us’ warning. This was directed in particular at Islamabad that had helped the Taliban to establish themselves in Afghanistan. The alacrity with which Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf responded surprised even the Americans. The Pakistani president executed a complete U-turn by giving up the Taliban as an ally and forming a close relationship with Washington. This turned out to be a defining moment for the country: it affected in particular the direction the country’s economy was to take. What happened after this U-turn is the subject of S.M. Naseem’s book.

The main conclusion he reaches in the book is summarised by him in the Preface, written in late December 2007. ‘The main consequences of the U-turn that Pakistan rulers were forced to take after 9/11 are not difficult to discern. Besides providing the military with an opportunity to proclaim its legitimacy by joining the US-led war on terror, it also provided it the wherewithal to execute its agenda of expanding its control over Pakistan’s economy and polity. Politically it was sold as the regime’s success in preventing the country from becoming a failed state, at least in economic terms. The billions of dollars that Pakistan received in return for the services rendered as frontline state in the war on terror and the liberal concessions accorded to it by withdrawing the sanctions imposed on it earlier, enabled it to pare down external debt and build up a sizeable reserve of foreign exchange. But the ‘economic turn-around’ claimed by the government was both ephemeral and iniquitous.’

A number of themes run through the articles in this collection. Most of them are familiar in part because of the contributions made by Prof Naseem to the on-going discourse in the country. In several articles, he discusses — and deplores — the increasing presence of the military in many fields in which its personnel did not have any inherent advantage. The military came in as result of the reward system instituted by President Musharraf; important jobs were given to both retired and serving military officers to keep them aligned to the president and his associates. This strategy may have worked in terms of keeping the military loyal to the president but it played havoc with institutional development in the country.

The second theme in the articles is that the government also pursued an economic policy that paid little heed to growing incidence of poverty and deteriorating distribution of income. This happened because of an excessive amount of reliance by Islamabad on foreign economic expertise, the third theme that runs through these articles. The author in several places is very critical of the policies initially developed by the Washington-based institutions — the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund — and applied without any regard to the Pakistani situation. The result was an initial slow down in economic growth because of the highly constrained fiscal and monetary policies that were adopted by the regime in response to the pressure from the IMF and then a rapid expansion as these constraints were removed. Naseem would have liked to see the government directly address the problem of poverty rather than leave it to be taken care of by trickle down.