Policy making problems

ON September 20, an international broadcasting service brought former president, Farooq Leghari, foreign minister Khurshid Kasuri, Agha Shahi, Jamaat-i-Islami’s Munawar Hasan and myself into an hour-long radio discussion on Pakistan’s policy towards Israel. The one discordant note struck during an informed exchange of views pertained to the role of parliament in crafting major foreign policy initiatives.

The venerable leader of the JI was a trifle indignant that the elected representatives of the people had not been given an opportunity to discuss the new Israel policy. The foreign minister had no conceptual problem with consulting them but, in his opinion, there had been no change of policy on Israel and, therefore, no urgent need for a parliamentary debate. He reaffirmed the linkage between recognition of Israel by Pakistan and the acceptance of a two-state solution in the Middle East. He also pointed out that international diplomacy often needed phases of deliberate secrecy.

Only a few weeks earlier, an Indian TV journalist had asked me the reason why a vibrant, if small, civil society in Pakistan failed all the time to influence decision-making by the government. Even outsiders perceive an inherent lack of national consensus in our policies.

There cannot be any doubt about the prerogative of the parliament to consider all national issues, including the foreign affairs of the state. In fact, foreign policy warrants the exercise of this prerogative even more pointedly as it has to find the right balance between national interest as perceived by realists and the larger dynamics like peoples’ perception of their ideology, mission in history, social objectives, and, in the case of a state like Pakistan, its very raison d’etre. For a holistic view of our international relations, there cannot be a better forum than the two houses of parliament which reflect the diversity of public opinion as well the specific preferences and insights of the federating units.

Pakistan has a long history of major foreign policy decisions being taken outside the sovereign precincts of parliament. It must also be conceded that many of these decisions brought the people of Pakistan much sorrow. There was hope circa 1988 that henceforth, the elected representatives would play a more crucial role in shaping policy.

This hope has not been fulfilled partly because the executive is reluctant to relent on the post-colonial exclusivity of decision-making by the civil and military bureaucracy and partly, because successive parliaments have failed to make a substantive contribution to policy discourse.

With some honourable exceptions, elected representatives have been unable to move away from poorly focused rhetoric. The political parties have done very little to provide knowledge-based services such as background papers and factual data to members of parliament. At a fraction of the cost of maintaining elected institutions, there could have been by now our equivalent of the US Congressional Service with at least the minimum database required for debating major national issues.

Political institutions take a long time to mature but, in this day and age, it is not much of a task to reduce the information deficit. Our parliament does not lack men and women of exceptionally high calibre who, within their own political locus, can provide the cutting edge of awareness in domestic and external issues. It is pathetic that we look to foreign foundations to organize workshops on democracy, representative government and governance for our legislators. Primarily, this task should be addressed within the structure of the political parties and the parliament.

In a changing, dynamic and complex world, the foreign policy establishment of a nation needs a vast hinterland dotted with centres of knowledge such as universities and special institutes engaged in a continuous and scientific study of history, contemporary issues and future choices. Even where you have experts who can measure up to this daunting challenge, our institutions are crippled by serious under-funding. Financial allocations barely meet expenses on rents and salaries, leaving little for research and publication.

In academic institutions there is an alarming disconnect between professional excellence and career advancement. There is no significant tradition of research; the infrastructure required to sustain it is still fragile. Fifty-eight years after independence, not a single university can claim to have a first class library. Social sciences are studied mostly as derivatives of work done abroad and usually with inadequate reference to our social, economic and cultural realities.

In the leading nations of the world, the gap between abstract knowledge and state policy is bridged by the work done by specialized think tanks. They present a wide spectrum reflecting diversity of political systems, cultural attributes, available human resources and, above all, sources of funding. In Germany, they often take the form of foundations linked with political parties. In many cases, as for instance, in the United States and Japan, the corporate world and large philanthropic endowments provide substantial finances for them. Governments and intelligence services prop them up in numerous cases.

In countries like India, China, Iran and Egypt, one finds a deep involvement of the defence and intelligence community. The degree to which government money influences their freedom varies according to the degree of enlightened interest taken by the financing sources. The truly developed nations tolerate a large measure of academic freedom as, in the final analysis, it serves the collective interest of the state better. Elsewhere, more so in the developing world, the focus is not on honest inquiry but on a product that is grist to the propaganda mills of a particular regime. There is an intermediate stage too, as in Russia, where a transition from an authoritarian control of otherwise well-developed intellectual assets to a far more creative attitude is gradually taking place.

Malaysia is one of the few Muslim countries where think-tanks have come into their own. As in many other sectors of national life, the source of inspiration was Mahathir who realized that his agenda of promoting an alliance between the political and corporate realms would require going beyond the conservative bureaucracy. The Institute of Strategic and International Studies pioneered the establishment of think tanks with emphasis on Asian, Malaysian and Islamic values as an alternative to globally dominant western, neo-liberal, discourse. Under the rubric of “Caring Society” and “Vision 2020”, this institute provided ideas and research personnel that helped in the creation of several other think tanks, including the Institute of Economic Research and the Institute for Islamic Understanding.

In Pakistan, the major impetus for establishing think tanks came from the Afghan jihad and strained relations with India. While these factors were instrumental in their creation, they also became constraints on their intellectual development. Mahathir ensured a large measure of freedom within the broadly defined parameters. In our case, the real levers of control were in the hands of forces which distrust academic freedom and objective research. With occasional exceptions, the product of our expensive establishments was of a mediocre quality. No wonder that it gained little salience in the work of policymaking echelons.

The Pakistani media has endeavoured hard to provide the dialectical tension — the cut and thrust of ideas necessary for a meaningful discourse on national issues. The relative freedom it enjoys at present was not easily won. A highly respected journalist associated with this newspaper traces the courage of his fraternity to the combative role played by the print media in our independence struggle. It may well be that resistance to a colonial power left a tradition of anti-authoritarian reporting and analysis in all the countries of South Asia. The advent of privately-owned TV channels has further widened the space for a multi-dimensional debate on matters of national concern.

Media development outside the state-controlled apparatus is taking place in Pakistan in an information age that is both ubiquitous and instant. All over the world, governmental spin on what has a core of truth may endure; propaganda based on lies and more lies is a sandcastle that will be swept away by the first tide of independent news and commentary.

The classic example for years to come is the utter demolition of the thesis of weapons of mass destruction on which the invasion of Iraq was originally propped. Compared to the data and reference base that media establishments abroad have acquired over the years, newspapers and electronic broadcast channels in Pakistan work with most inadequate resources and only the best of them consistently ensure accuracy of facts, particularly when dealing with international affairs.

One does not, however, need to possess all the facts to arrive at sound judgments and, therefore, editorial assessments in the major newspapers are as good as anywhere else. They are also a factor in locating Pakistani opinion in the larger matrix of Third World and Arab-Islamic attitudes. Governments often try to induce collective amnesia but we saw in the recent debate on relations with Israel that the Pakistani media had once again provided the historical memory relevant to the issue.

Pakistan needs a symbiotic relationship between decision-makers on the one hand and, on the other, parliamentarians, the free and unfettered analysts in the think-tanks, civil society and independent reporters and commentators in the media.

One specific area where they almost always do better than government bureaucracy is the anticipation and evaluation of the risk factor in policy choices. A string of disasters suffered by Pakistan would have been averted if there was an effective tradition of factoring public debate into the decision-making process. “The more complex the problems which governments face, the more developed their societies and economies,” writes William Wallace, “the greater their need for advice and for intelligent criticism”.

In this age of information overload, it is neither possible nor desirable to take decisions that have momentous ramifications on the impulse of an individual or a cabal. Our people have not forgotten how their country was once committed to Seato, an alliance against China, a nation that has made the largest contribution to the defence of our freedom. They do not want that dark age of clandestine negotiations and secret pacts to come back. This inherent fear conditions the tenor of our public debate.

The writer is a former foreign secretary.

Defacing heritage of Karachi

EVERY now and then one hears charming accounts embellished by personal asides of Indian visitors from Delhi crossing the great divide and praising the beauty and cleanliness of Lahore and saying how wonderful it is to be back in the land of their birth.

This is understandable, for in spite of the great influx of settlers from the hinterland and the chaotic traffic, the garden city has managed to retain much of the charm, ambience and character of the early years. Faletti’s might have been knocked down, but the race course and the fountains in the Shalimar gardens are still there, and so is Anarkali bazaar.

But when one hears tales of wayfarers from Mumbai paying a similar tribute to the city of their birth, Karachi, one can only assume that the guests must have imbibed a little too much of the local distilled brew, or that old Bombay, after the month-long monsoon downpour , has been turned into a huge inhospitable bog and is beyond redemption.

Surely these visitors must have noticed the disappearance of some of those majestic, imperial, turn-of-the-century red sandstone buildings which they used to admire as children. These sturdy stately structures are the legacy of the Raj and are part of the city’s rich cultural heritage. They are on the hit list of a number of builders who are bent on demolishing them so that they can erect high rise apartments to accommodate the city’s swelling population. In a civilized country this would have been considered a capital crime and the builder, even if he had managed a purchase, would have been prosecuted.

The rot set in over 30 years ago, before the need was felt to pass laws to preserve the city’s architectural heritage. A mansion constructed in the grand tradition of the Raj, with high ceilings, spacious rooms and jalousies was spotted by an investor who saw considerable profit in its purchase. It housed the British Council and was located next to the Central Hotel.

Fortunately the building survived. Other classical landmarks which were also well stocked with memories were not quite as lucky and came under the relentless thrust of the bulldozers. Philistine developers obviously have no interest in either culture or history and would even bid for the Leaning Tower if they got half the chance. The latest victim is the Beaufort building whose status is shrouded in mystery.

In spite of the fact that it has all the makings of a heritage building and has been sealed, the structure is being methodically dismantled. If a South Indian film maker was to produce a documentary of what present-day Karachi looks like, his script would probably contain a montage of style disasters and faux pas for the chic. He would probably begin with the spectacular difference in the lifestyles and living standards of the rich and the poor; the proliferation of rubbish dumps at street corners through which pariahs and stray cats rummage for a meal; the complete absence of women and girls riding scooters and motor-cycles carrying a passenger behind them; the complete absence of public urinals and proper bus stops; massive traffic jams and roads which are beginning to resemble Beirut during the Lebanese civil war.

After spending a couple of weeks, he would be struck by the chronic shortage of water, a substantial portion of which is unfit for human consumption; badly lit streets and the all too frequent power breakdowns plunging vast sections of the metropolis in darkness; broken sewage pipes turning sections of streets into smelly ponds; and the absence of a proper rail system forcing commuters to work 12-hour shifts because they spend a hundred and eighty minutes every day getting to and from their place of work.

The condition of most of the city roads is absolutely appalling. In fact, there appears to be a subliminal connection between the commencement of the controversial Clifton underpass and the rest of the city. As soon as the first drill struck the concrete around Schon Circle the process of mass uprooting started to take place, as if on cue.

Within a week, roads in various parts of the city which for 10 years had braved the worst suddenly seemed to give up the ghost. They became pock marked and were marginalized by dusty parapets of broken stones, old pipes and bits of discarded metal.

It was as if the proverbial hidden hand had made a sudden appearance and was orchestrating the demolition. Even thoroughfares like the one in front of the Aga Khan hospital and Karsaz, which a few months ago could have staged a mini grand prix, looked as if Jack’s giant had crept down the beanstalk one night and deliberately scraped off the tar and cement.

Enough has been written about the water shortage in the city and sewerage problems, of rampant corruption in the former and gross inefficiency in the latter. But what is inexplicable is why nothing seems to have been done about improving the transmission of electricity in Pakistan’s largest city and commercial capital where denizens dread the beginning of the 10-month summer. In fact, whenever one speaks of the subject, one is reminded of the time when Lee Kwan Yew, a former prime minister of Singapore and one of the greatest statesmen of the century, made a brief stopover at Karachi airport en route to Europe.

A clutch of photographers and reporters descended on him in the VVIP lounge and one of the bright-eyed newspapermen, a little breathless after the customary mishandling by the police, asked the visitor to give him tips on how Pakistan could become an Asian tiger. Lee Kwan Yew looked at him wistfully and said, “Make sure you have twenty-four hours uninterrupted electricity. The rest will follow...”

In the past, the KESC was seen as an anachronistic organization whose supply phases appeared to function with infinite reluctance and that too in direct relation to a householder’s status. When an irate consumer finally got through to the complaint centre after trying for an hour he was told in the tart tones of repressed rage that a feeder had tripped, or that a truck had knocked down a pole, or that the transmitter in Bin Qasim was playing up again.

In recent years, there has been a marked improvement in the performance of the utility, especially in the department that responds to complaints. The staff are actually polite and invariably ring back to check if the fault has been removed. Jibes about the organization being renamed KIESC (where the additional letter stands for ‘intermittent,’ or KOESC (where the O stands for ‘occasional’) are not heard quite as frequently as they used to be. But the performance is still far from satisfactory.

Residents of the Bermuda Triangle in Phase 5, which encompasses the Khayabans of Shamsheer, Shaheen and Janbaz experience the largest number of breakdowns in Defence Housing Society, which on really bad days could number five or six. Though the duration of the blackouts has been shortened, they always seem to occur when the householders are in the process of cleansing themselves, when the telephone rings or when they are watching a cricket match on television.

The consumer has come to accept the breakdowns and bouts of load shedding as inevitable, the occupational hazards of life in the Third World and as something that will never change.

Occasionally, when the frustration becomes unbearable he collects a few fellow sufferers, blows his bugle and attacks the staff in the nearest KESC service station. What is tragic, however, is that there is no accountability and that nobody seems to care about the fact that the consumer who is paying for a utility apparently has no rights or privileges.

Who is the consumer supposed to point an accusing finger at — the president, the prime minister, the governor, the chief minister, the functionary who looks after water and power? These are upright gentlemen who with two exceptions have come up through the political process. They project themselves as honest poseurs and make grandiose promises which, of course, they never keep.

They have no knowledge of how much it is costing the motorist to take alternative routes to drop their children to school, or how many children are dying by drinking contaminated water, or how long the rest of the city is without electricity , because, like the ministers of the realm, they have huge automatic generators installed in their residences. The public has become enlightened. How long will it remain moderate?

Water is no more our friend

“WATER is your friend” was the advice regularly given to a truly good friend of mine in the Middle East. The speaker was a member of the One-Thousand-Litres-a-Day-Keeps-Dehydration-at-Bay Brigade, although I have to say that the Arabs take a different view.

After generations of sword-like desert heat, they take tea in the morning, endure an oven-like day without sustenance, and then sip another scalding tea at dusk. The less you drink, the less you perspire, the less you need to drink. In a land with few oases, it’s a craft worth learning.

The problem is that today, water is not our “friend”. It comes smashing into New Orleans; it drowns the nursing home elderly in their baths; it assaults Galveston and Houston; it kills millions in Bangladesh, dozens in Andhra Pradesh; it floods south from the great ice-cold green bays of the Arctic; it carries 19th-century houses through the centre of Prague, and it bubbles into the bars of English pubs from the ancient, overflowing river-banks of Kent. Water has become our enemy.

There is a beautiful, delicate, inevitably cruel irony at the way in which nature and man conspire to uncover the lies of the rich and powerful. Just as President Bush’s disastrous environmental policies are now destroying the southern coast of the United States — yes, it is global warming that causes this massacre of the innocent — America is preparing to receive its 2,000th dead soldier back from Iraq. No bodies, please — let’s not dishonour the dead of New Orleans by taking photographs of them. Nor the American dead of Iraq by taking pictures of their coffins en route home. Death, as usual, is what happens to other people.

But the photographs of British soldiers, cowled in fire, hurling themselves from the top of their Warrior fighting vehicle in Basra this week, were the final iconic images of our uniquely British folly in Iraq. Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara’s henchmen have concocted another monstrous lie about all this, of course. The Iraqi policemen who protested at Britain’s destruction of their prison — and the crowds who set fire to the Warrior (and its crew) — were only a few hundred people.

Who were we to suggest they represented the millions of Shia Muslim voters who solemnly went to the polls last January? And who were we to suggest that the “few hundred” Saddam “remnants” identified as troublemakers in mid-2003 represented a Sunni insurgency? And who were we, back in 1971, to suggest that a few hundred stone-throwers in the Falls Road and Short Strand in Belfast represented “the vast majority of ordinary peace-loving Catholics” in Northern Ireland?

When will the bubble burst? With the insurgent capture (and massacre) of a US base in Iraq? With the overrunning of the Green Zone in Baghdad? Every day now brings Vietnam-style evidence of our collapse. The Americans batter their way into Tal Afar and kill, so they say, “142 insurgents”. Get that? US forces manage to kill 142 of their enemies, not a single innocent man, woman or child among them! But let’s go back to the Brits.

Remember how we were told that our immense experience of “peace-keeping” in Northern Ireland had allowed us to get on better with the Iraqis in the south than our American cousins further north? I don’t actually remember us doing much “peacekeeping” in Belfast after about 1969 — the rest, I recall, was about biffing the IRA - but in any case the myth was burned out on the uniforms of British troops this week.

Indeed, much of the war in Northern Ireland appeared to revolve around the use of covert killings and SAS undercover operatives who blew away IRA men in ambushes. Which does raise the question, doesn’t it, as to just what our two SAS lads were doing cruising around Basra in Arab dress with itsy-bitsy moustaches and guns? Why did no one ask? How many SAS men are in southern Iraq? Why are they there? What are their duties? What weapons do they carry? Whoops! No one asked.

What we were actually doing to “keep the peace” in Basra was to turn a Nelsonian “blind eye” on the abuse, murder and anarchy of Basra since 2003 (including, it turns out, quite a bit of abuse by our very own squaddies). When Christian alcohol sellers were murdered, we remained silent. When ex-Baathists were slaughtered in the streets — including women and their children, a civil war if ever there was one — our British officers somehow forgot to tell the press. Anything to keep our boys out of harm’s way.

But this is what has been happening in Basra. As the locally recruited police force (paid by the occupation authorities) sucked into its ranks the riff-raff of every local militia — as it did in Sunni areas to the north — we ignored this. Even when an American reporter investigating this extraordinary phenomenon was murdered — almost certainly by these same policemen — the British remained silent.

We were “controlling” the streets. In Amara — by awful coincidence, the very same Kut al-Amara with whose name, I’m sure, my favourite prime minister will soon be ennobled — British soldiers now operate just one heavily armed convoy patrol a day. That is the extent of our “control” over Amara. Now we are reducing our patrols in Basra. You bet we are.

And a familiar bleat is rising from the sheep pen. “Outside powers” are interfering in southern Iraq. Thirty-five years ago, it was the Irish Republic that was assisting Britain’s IRA enemies. Now it is Iran that is supposedly urging the Shia of Basra to revolt. In other words, it’s not our fault — yet again, it’s the bloody foreigners who are to blame.

Alas, it is not. Iraqis do not need Iranian weapons or military expertise. Their country is afloat with weapons and they learned how to make bombs — in their millions — during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. Half the Iraqi cabinet is linked to Iran — have the British forgotten that their honourable Dawa party government officials in Baghdad worked for the very same Dawa party that blew up the US and French embassies in Kuwait, and tried to kill the emir in the late 1980s? That these same gentlemen belong to a party which was effectively controlling the western hostages in Beirut during this same period?

No. All this is forgotten. Blame Iran. Later, no doubt, we’ll blame those ungrateful Iraqis and then we’ll declare victory and do what Defence Secretary John Reid claims we won’t do: cut and run. And there again, we’re in danger of forgetting the origin of such things. Faced with the imminent destruction of his vessel, a sailing ship captain would cut his anchor or sail ropes to allow his ship to move away from rocks or from being overwhelmed by the waves. Cutting and running was often an eminently sensible thing to do. But not for John Reid. We’re not going to cut and run. We’re going to be blown on to the rocks.

—(c) The Independent