NEW YORK, June 25: Pakistan’s textile and apparel industries, which dominate the country’s economy and account for 60 per cent of its industrial employment, have been battered by a combination of restrictive American trade policies and repeated fears of war, first from the conflict in Afghanistan and more recently during Pakistan’s confrontation with India, says the New York Times.

Several terrorist attacks against Westerners have made clothing buyers even more reluctant to go there. One result has been mass layoffs.

The NYT said that the setbacks for the textile industry, including the temporary laying off of tens of thousands of workers last winter, are breeding resentment towards the United States among many young Pakistanis.

“If the United States had been willing to help us, it would have given people like me the ability to talk, to say that the United States is creating jobs,” Razak Dawood, Pakistan’s minister of commerce, industries and production told the NYT.

During President Musharraf’s Washington visit last February Commerce Minister Dawood had expressed frustration at US inability to increase textile quotas for Pakistan owing largely to the staunch opposition from the US textile industry.

Government officials in Islamabad are especially upset that the United States has not rolled back import duties of more than 25 per cent on cotton clothing from Pakistan, which would help Pakistani producers offer lower prices and avoid losing sales to manufacturers in other countries.

While Pakistan continues to export large quantities of linens to the United States, products for which there are few other suppliers, Pakistani exports of garments like cotton shirts have plunged as buyers have shifted orders elsewhere. Because cotton garments are labour intensive, the loss of sales has had a severe effect on employment, the NYT said.

American trade officials say a few steps have been taken to help Pakistan. The Bush administration raised quotas in February for a dozen categories of apparel, which potentially would allow an extra $143 million worth of Pakistani goods into the United States each year, a 7 per cent increase. However, some of these categories are for goods Pakistan hardly produces, like work gloves, making it unlikely that it would realize that gain in exports.

Under World Trade Organization rules, the textile quotas of Pakistan and many other American trading partners, including India, were automatically raised by an additional 12 per cent at the start of this year, part of a process that is supposed to lead to the global elimination of textile quotas by 2005.

Last fall, Pakistan asked that the United States and European Union waive import duties on textiles and clothing and liberalize quotas on textile and apparel imports as a reward for its help against Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

The paper says that there had been talk in Washington last autumn of a grand gesture toward Pakistan, similar to the 50 per cent increase in textile quotas that the first Bush administration granted to Turkey as a reward for its help in the 1991 Persian Gulf war.

But that idea fizzled in December when the current Bush administration was faced with imminent defeat in the House of its broad package of trade legislation and decided to woo six lawmakers from textile states by promising them it would not do much for Pakistan’s textile industry.

“In developing any proposal for assistance to Pakistan, the administration is committed to working with the Congress to minimize the impact on the US textile and apparel industry,” Commerce Secretary Donald L. Evans wrote in a letter to one of the lawmakers, Representative Robin Hayes, Republican of North Carolina. The trade bill was passed by a single vote after the six legislators voted for it.

Meanwhile, Pakistan’s textile industry has languished. After the fighting calmed in Afghanistan last winter, buyers began drifting back here, especially from Europe, which eliminated its import duties of 8 to 10 per cent for clothing from Pakistan and raised quotas by 15 per cent. But terrorist attacks, including the bombing on May 8 of a busload of French technicians in Karachi, prevented a full recovery in sales.

Then Pakistan and India mobilized their armies for a possible war, prompting the United States and many European nations to call for their citizens to flee both countries immediately. In the factories that line this city’s outskirts, managers now say that they may have to shut down again within weeks once they fill existing orders, because few new orders are being placed the paper said.

A senior American trade official said that the domestic industry’s concerns and constant demands for larger quotas from other developing nations had prevented the United States from doing more for Pakistan. “As we’re phasing out quotas as we approach 2005, it’s hard to give much away to one country without causing a stampede from every other developing nation,” said the official. Indeed, India has already threatened to ask the World Trade Organization to investigate whether the European Union is unfairly helping Pakistan by eliminating import duties.