How critical is American assistance?

FORMER State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) Governor Dr Ishrat Hussain has once again asserted, this time at a seminar in London the other day, that under the highly improbable case scenario where the US, along with all multilateral development banks and bilateral donors, withdraws its assistance of all types in one go, Pakistan’s economy was unlikely to face any serious risk. He had expressed the same view earlier in an article he wrote for Dawn (EBR weekly, April 16, 2007). In his opinion the worst-case scenario will have a consequence in the form of an immediate drawdown of Pakistan’s foreign exchange reserves from $13.5 billion to $9.5 billion and the policy-makers will have to make necessary adjustment in the country’s imports and other foreign exchange expenditures, take steps to attract a larger volume of remittances and foreign direct investment and access the international capital markets. In conclusion Dr Hussain claims that during the last seven years Pakistan has successfully withstood the internal and external shocks of severe and prolonged drought, mobilisation of Indian troops on the borders, terrorist attacks on foreign nationals, the war on terror in Afghanistan, and the oil price hike. None of these shocks -- some costlier than the $750 million provided by the US -- has hurt macroeconomic stability or growth. At one level Dr Hussain’s is an uplifting analysis. Who in Pakistan would not feel happy at being told by an economic expert that our dependence on US assistance is not all that crucial for the country’s survival and progress?

As a nation we have yearned since independence to see the day when we would be able to stand our own feet, needing no external economic crutches which have invariably come with conditionalities seriously impinging on our sovereignty. But at a time when the country is confronted with the worst trade, current account and budgetary deficits in 10 years and when no investment is coming to meet even 10 per cent of the expanding power deficit, it is time for introspection and sober thinking. Indeed, when water resources are depleting fast with no hope of a new dam of an adequate capacity being commissioned in the immediate future, it does not make much economic sense in provoking the donor community unless the provocation from the other side is too serious. The Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) which has come into Pakistan so far is no more than negligible. This FDI does not add to the export earnings; instead, it raises the current account deficit as the outflows of profit repatriation since 2000 has gone up by 65 per cent annually from $96 million to $465 million in 2004.

In his eagerness to prove a point, Dr Hussain seems to have ignored the fact that a possible stoppage of aid from bilateral and multilateral agencies led by the US also has the potential to close the door of international financial institutions on Pakistan with Moody’s immediately scoring down our ranking by some decisive points, the FD and remittances drying up fast and margins for L/Cs going up steeply. Whether one likes it or not, the overwhelming financial clout the US wields at present in this globalised world is a fact of life. It would therefore be advisable for our economic policy-makers to think twice before taking a leap in the dark.

‘Disappearance’ cases

JUSTICE Javed Iqbal’s observation that religious groups, by admitting men in their ranks to fight jihad, were contributing to the phenomenon of disappearances in the country echoes the sentiments of both Gen Musharraf and Interior Minister Aftab Sherpao. No one can dispute their claim. Extremist organisations successfully use religious indoctrination to win over hundreds of young recruits. Some go to the extent of abducting young men to train them for carrying out terrorist attacks. But this should not be allowed to gloss over the tragedy of those who have been picked up, kept incommunicado and tortured by the state’s intelligence agencies. Not all of them have religious affiliations and a large number are political activists whose links with nationalist parties makes them suspect in the eyes of the state. Those who are released have terrifying tales to tell of their incarceration. They are warned not to speak of their ordeal, and there have been cases where former detainees who dared do so were taken away again. One can only imagine the fears that haunt their families who are struggling to discover their whereabouts.

While judicial intervention has resulted in the release of a handful of detainees, the fate of hundreds of missing people, including those whose names have not been submitted in the court, remains unknown. Many others continue to be picked up by state agencies. Considering that even the Supreme Court has failed to elicit a satisfactory response from government officials, including the attorney-general who has consistently remained absent from court proceedings, the role of the intelligence agencies can only be seen as being open-ended. The deputy attorney-general has said that he could not be of much help since the interior ministry had not been forthcoming with the required information. The defence ministry had earlier admitted that it did not have operational control of the agencies under it. Quite obviously, unless the role of the intelligence agencies is defined and it is made clear who they report to, there will be no satisfactory answers. The agencies will continue to be a law unto themselves by arbitrarily detaining and torturing people until the question of their accountability is resolved.

Plagiarism by teachers

GIVEN the constantly falling standards of education in the country, it is hardly surprising that the Higher Education Commission should be inundated with complaints by university teachers of plagiarism in research work by their colleagues. After all, most teachers — at the university, college or school levels — are themselves the product of an unenviable educational system that is deficient not only in imparting proper learning skills to students but also when it comes to upholding values such as intellectual honesty. The sight of students cheating in exams is a common one. Many bribe their professors to give them a good grade while others, especially those belonging to student wings of political parties, intimidate their teachers into doing so. School and university administrations have failed to curb this trend and the result is that it has come to be accepted as nothing unusual in academic institutions. When these very students turn to teaching as a profession, they find it difficult to give up the habit of a lifetime of cheating, and resort to plagiarism in their research work.

To be sure, such teachers and professors should be taken to task and given exemplary punishment. With the mounting number of complaints against them, there is no doubt that others like them will start thinking twice before indulging in academic fraud if there is a heavy penalty to pay for doing so. It is equally necessary to inculcate sound ethics in the younger generation so that they refrain from stooping to such irregularities which have become commonplace, especially with the easy accessibility of the Internet. It is important that they learn at an early age that there is no substitute for hard work when doing one’s assignments and that copying the work of others and not attributing their sources is academic dishonesty of the worst kind.

Erosion of Bush’s credibility

IS peace patriotic? That is the nub of the debate consuming America, as it debates the meaning of victory and the implications of defeat in Iraq. War, of course, has always been patriotic. Any leader with a gun in one hand and a bugle in the other takes care to wrap himself in a flag.

As long as you have acquired sole-selling rights to the motherland you can always send young men and women to their graves. Militant patriotism is such a powerful mantle that it cloaks even the most irresponsible clutter of inefficient sins. Protecting the halo of the “commander in chief” becomes a patriotic duty if not a compulsion.

Politicians in search of votes prefer the war ticket to the peace flag. Peace is fuzzy while war is muscular. While common sense suggests that any voter should prefer peace, common experience tells us that he can be milked more easily with the promise of war when war is justified as the answer to that most evocative of emotions, fear. This is the powerful combination of sentiment and logic that has sustained the Bush momentum for five years.

Bush did not inject fear into the American consciousness. That was done by 9/11. But he has been masterful at exploiting this fear for a Bush agenda rather than an American one. In its simplest manifestation, this might be called the difference between his war in Afghanistan and his war in Iraq. There was an explicit legitimacy to his attack on the Taliban state after it refused to hand over Osama bin Laden. But the war against Saddam Hussein had absolutely nothing to do with the “war on terror.” It has been proved over and over again that Bush and his vice-president, Dick Cheney, who has turned a sneer into an art form, used a deliberate maze of distortion, exaggeration and lies to turn Saddam into an ally of Bin Laden.

The phrase, “war on terror”, is a curious one. How do you fight a war against an abstract noun? But it did not emerge by accident. It is consciously elastic, to enable the White House to drag who it will into the target area. The mistake made by the Bush White House was to believe that the target would always remain a static fact, willing to take any punishment. The unexpected insurgency in Iraq has proved that a target can hit back with devastating results.

The daily count in casualties, an overstretched army, a soaring bill and an angry public opinion should suggest that Bush has exhausted the political lode which proved so lucrative for him and the Republicans. It says something about the tenacity of the “war-appeal” that it can be mined even after it has clearly outlived its utility. The debate for Bush and the Democrats now is whether there should be a timetable for the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq. Democrats want the boys back home within 18 months, or just before America elects its next president. Bush accuses them of “losing the war” by setting a deadline.

There is something bogus about Bush’s argument. His current strategy, known as the “surge”, which means an increase in American troop levels in order to bring “peace” to Iraq, has received the support of unconvinced Republicans only because there is an implicit time-line. If the “surge” does not work by October or November, Bush will have to change track, and the only change can now be a form of disengagement. In other words, the Republicans are in reality giving Bush less time to succeed than the Democrats.

But of course the Bush rhetoric is different, despite every sign of military and public exhaustion. The Pentagon admits that the armed forces are hugely overstretched. This week, the rules were changed to extend a normal tour of duty in Iraq to 15 months. Even at the height of Vietnam, a soldier on active duty knew that his nightmare would end in 12 months. The army claims that it has maintained its level at 1.4 million, but this is because it recruited (at very high cost) 80,000 men within last year.

The number is not indicative of normal retirement; it also suggests the high attrition rate in Iraq. Most of the soldiers at war have joined because the armed forces offer much-needed money or incentives that can help them in the future. They come from the poorer families of America. Some Democrat politicians are even urging the return of the draft, which would force rich kids to go into battle. They add that the war would end very quickly if the elite had to send its children to die for George Bush’s policies.

No one knows either which generation will pay for them. The bill for Iraq has crossed $500 billion. The first casualty in war is clearly the accountant. Blood on the battlefield is paid for by red ink on the balance sheet. In September a new generation of flying machines will replace the helicopters in use in Iraq. This is the V-22 Osprey, a chopper with less manoeuvrability but more speed than the helicopter. There is uncertainty about its value against an insurgency, but there is great certainty about its cost: $80 million a piece. Someone in the “offense” industry is becoming very rich.

The American people have begun to realise that money, or rhetoric, cannot purchase victory in a war without horizons. The trick that sustains the Bush rhetoric is a simple one: there is no definition of victory, and hence no talk of objectives achieved. If you think about it, both the declared objectives of the Iraq war have been achieved. It is now definite that there were no weapons of mass destruction with Saddam Hussein, and Iraq is not capable of producing them for a hundred years. And Saddam is now dead, his regime destroyed.

So why are American and British troops still there? To become the policemen of Baghdad? If that is their mission then it is mission impossible. Any day’s newspapers will tell you that every claim of “success” by the White House or the Pentagon is answered by an attack on the heart of the American and British presence. The insurgency will not end as long as foreign troops remain on Iraqi soil.

When an administration begins to crumble, it does not fall on only one pillar. The erosion of credibility affects the whole base. All the high-flyers of this government are on the front pages for the wrong reasons. Karl Rove, mastermind of victory, is trying to explain why millions — yes, millions — of emails have been erased from the White House archives. Paul Wolfowitz, mastermind of Iraq and now head of the World Bank, is trying to explain why he used his influence to get his girlfriend a much bigger salary.

Some of Wolfowitz’s accusers believe that he does not care about the World Bank. That is not true. Paul Wolfowitz, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney and George Bush care very deeply about the World Bank. They just don’t care about the world.

The world is now striking back.

The writer is editor-in-chief of Asian Age, New Delhi.

Free speech

"A speech," Ronald Reagan's brilliant amanuensis Peggy Noonan observed, "reminds us that words, like children, have the power to make dance the dullest beanbag of a heart." Sadly that is not always the case, as any party-conference veteran will know.

Yet, despite so many rival forms of communication, great speeches are still made, and those throughout the last century are today celebrated by the launch of the Guardian series. Speeches define a mood, win hearts and sometimes even minds, and above all shape the future. For a great speech both illuminates a moment in time and defies its passing. The cadences of its delivery are a part of it, yet its power survives away from the platform and endures on the printed page.

It sometimes seems that political communication has been reduced to a matter of technology and marketing techniques. But even now, when the megaphone and the soapbox are theatrical props rather than the stock in trade of every political agent, it is still by their speeches that we judge our politicians' hearts and minds. It takes courage and conviction to woo an audience, to capture its interest, to engage its mind and, perhaps hardest of all, to persuade it of the capacity and duty to act. Barack Obama has set alight the race for the Democratic party nomination with his ability to raise the hearts of the young and numb the scepticism of the old with that mix of charisma and rhetoric that can still set a crowd alight on the coldest winter day. He has reminded Americans that "individual salvation depends on collective salvation ... it's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you will realise your true potential".

Great speeches are not lectures; they are joint enterprises where the speaker's purpose is to persuade the audience of shared ideals that transcend those things that divide it. Great speakers persuade people that they are better than they dreamed they could be. They can realise the dream, they can serve their country, they can rally to the dignity of a man who is prepared to die for his cause.

— The Guardian, London