Quake: thinking long-term
I HAVE written before on the subject of the earthquake and its economic impact. But the subject covered in some of the earlier articles dealt with the effect of the disaster over the short term. In today’s article and the one next week I will look at the long-term implications.
I do this for the reason that the population that has suffered will need help not only to face the immediate consequences of the loss of loved ones, the injuries suffered, the assets lost, and the challenges the area’s brutal winter will necessarily bring. It will also need a great deal of assistance to prepare for the future.
We are all by now familiar with the numbers that portray the grimness of the tragedy brought by the earthquake of October 8, 2005 — six seconds that shook the earth and permanently altered the landscape of Azad Kashmir, northern and northeastern Pakistan, and a small part of Kashmir occupied by India. It could also permanently change the political, social, and economic landscapes in Kashmir and in Pakistan. This could happen in a way that would reward the people who have suffered mightily or it could further compound their difficulties. The future will be shaped by policy makers in Islamabad.
According to the government’s latest count, 86,000 people died in the earthquake. Among the dead, the number of young — those below the age of 15 — was disproportionately large, perhaps as high as 60,000. A number of cities, towns and villages were totally destroyed, among them Muzaffarabad, the capital of Azad Kashmir. This city of some 100,000 people is now ruined. It is a city of tents with most of its citizens displaced. Also obliterated were 900 towns and villages, some of which were precariously poised on the slopes of majestic mountains.
An enormous amount of damage was done to the region’s infrastructure, both physical and social. Roads and bridges, tunnels were destroyed, as were schools, hospitals, clinics and community centres. About 10,000 schools catering to two million students were levelled and another 8,000 seriously damaged. Thousands of clinics and hospitals were flattened or destroyed beyond repair.
Children have suffered a great deal and will suffer even more if the future is not carefully planned for them. They could become the victims of predators who will abduct those who are wandering in the hills orphaned by the earthquake. In similar situations in other parts of the world children were abducted for organs and other body parts, forced into prostitution, or used for hard labour in factories and homes. In other words, what Pakistan is dealing with is not only an unimaginable human tragedy but also an economic and social catastrophe.
The government, most foreign donors, and non-government organizations have focused understandably on the rescue and relief aspects of the disaster. There is also — once again fully understandable — great nervousness about the onset of winter and what further hardship it will bring to an already devastated population. An effort has been made to translate all this into a dollar amount.
The government went to the donors’ conference in Islamabad last month with a rescue, relief, and rehabilitation bill of more than $5 billion to be disbursed over a period of 10 years. It received pledges of more than $6 billion. This appears to be a generous level of support. Would it be enough to do what needs to be done?
My view is that the destruction that has occurred demands an effort of a much larger magnitude, one that will have to be financed from sources other than foreign aid. Let me work with some numbers. The relief effort alone — not to include in this the enormous amounts that will be needed for rebuilding the economy of Azad Kashmir — will need resources about 50 per cent more than the pledges received at the meeting in Islamabad. The amounts the donors said they will provide would mean an annual expenditure of $600 million or about $180 per head of the affected population.
I estimate a larger need valued at $7.5 billion for providing adequate relief. This will have to be spent over a period of five years at the rate of at least $1.5 billion a year, $450 per capita of the affected population. Even more will need to be done to take care of the future.
The earthquake will have a long-lasting impact on Pakistan’s economy, its social structure, and most definitely its political development. Unattended, those consequences will be negative; properly addressed, they could be turned into a series of positive developments. It is this aspect of the disaster the policymakers need to contend with as they plan for the future.
Deaths and injury of so many people from natural disaster is a traumatic event. It will leave a deep impact on the families and the communities that have suffered. For the long-term, however, what is even of greater consequence is the effect on those who have survived and by surviving have become extremely vulnerable economically and socially.
Pakistan is unique among developing countries to have already absorbed a number of demographic shocks. The earthquake has produced another demographic convulsion. The demographic shocks of the past include the exchange of population in 1947 when 14 million people moved, with eight million Muslims coming to Pakistan and six million Hindus and Sikhs going in the opposite direction.
It also includes the explosion of Karachi’s population. Of the city’s 13-14 million people, 10 million are long-distance migrants. The arrival of almost four million Afghan refugees in the 1980s and 1990s also left a deep impact on Pakistan.
We should also count among these demographic convulsions the migration of unskilled and semi-skilled workers to the UK in the late 1940s and 1950s, and to the Middle East in the 1970s and 1980s, and of highly skilled people to North America in the 1980s and 1990s. These movements have produced three Pakistani diasporas, each of which has begun to influence the mother country’s economic, social and political development. There is hardly a family, a community or an area of Pakistan that has been left untouched by these four different types of movement of people. A fifth movement may be about to begin that could bring millions of people from the earthquake affected areas to many cities and towns of northeastern Pakistan.
What will be the form and impact of the migration that is likely to result from the earthquake? In spite of its magnitude and despite the fact that the movement of people which might result from the disaster, policy-makers in Islamabad have paid little attention to the fact that a significant demographic event is likely to occur. Let me provide some indications of its magnitude.
About 10 million people are affected in one way or the other by the earthquake, of these four million live in Azad Kashmir and the Northern Areas, three million each in eastern NWFP and northeastern Punjab. It is the people in Kashmir that have been affected the most and could become involved in the next wave of migration Pakistan might experience in the next few months.
There are three options available to policymakers to deal with this situation. Two of these will have dire economic, social and political consequences; the third could provide some attractive opportunities to change the economic, social and political landscape in the part of Kashmir administered by Pakistan. What are the three options?
One, let the people remain where they are albeit displaced by the earthquake. In that case, Azad Kashmir will become one of the poorest areas in the world — a kind of Somalia or Liberia in Pakistan. Such a sharp decline in the standard of living of so many people will have a very negative impact on the rest of Pakistan.
Two, allow the displaced people to move to the adjoining areas of Pakistan. The size of the host population of the areas that will be most affected by this movement is about 10 million, of which about four million live in towns and cities. Since most of the migrants will go to the urban areas, the population of towns and cities — in particular Islamabad and Rawalpindi — could easily double. Such a demographic shock will also have enormous social, political and economic consequences.
Three, totally restructure the economy of the area so that it provides jobs to the displaced people. This will not happen in the agriculture sector; given the destruction of forests and other forms of land-cover, agriculture will take a long time to recover, if it can recover at all. Small scale manufacturing (relying on the inherent skills of the displaced people) offers much more attractive alternatives.
Let me briefly mention the main attributes of the economy of Azad Kashmir in order to make the important point that it will have to be restructured in a fundamental way in order to secure the economic and social future of the four million people. If this is not done, these people will migrate to the narrow belt that is contiguous with Azad Kashmir.
Azad Kashmir’s economy is considerably different from that of Pakistan’s; it is, in fact, also different from the adjoining areas of Pakistan. Compared to Pakistan’s economy, that of Azad Kashmir was dependent much more on agriculture (40 per cent of GDP), less on manufacturing (10 per cent), and about the same on services (50 per cent). That was in 2004-05, a year before the earthquake. Agriculture, forestry and horticulture had a much higher proportion.
In industry, small-scale manufacturing was predominant. The economy was also dependent on remittances from the people working in the urban areas of Pakistan. There are perhaps two million Kashmiris employed in Pakistan’s major cities and they send perhaps $500 million a year to their families in the area. This is equivalent to 25 per cent of the GDP. Three fourths of the area’s population depends on agriculture, about 10 per cent on manufacturing and 15 per cent on services.
What is the likely economic impact of the earthquake? I will offer some informed guesses, using numbers for purely illustrative purposes. I expect the size of the economy to decline by one-half, from $2 billion to $1 billion. The greatest loss will be felt by the productive sectors — agriculture and industry. There will be a slight increase in the number of people working in manufacturing. However, the number of people in the service sector will explode almost five times; from about half a million to three million people.
The service sector is a “catch-all” sector for all impoverished economies. People engaged in it eke out a modest living, well below the minimum required to sustain healthy and productive lives. This sector will grow significantly in Azad Kashmir, increasing the share in employment from only one-seventh before the earthquake to about two-thirds in 2005-06. How to deal with this situation? What should be Islamabad’s approach as it begins the enormous task of rehabilitation? How should the government raise the money that will be required for the job to be completed? I will turn to these questions next week.
Time to ban torture
“THERE are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.”
No, that wasn’t secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, half-answering questions in Europe last week about the CIA’s alleged prison camps in Poland and Romania and the “extraordinary rendition” of terrorist suspects to countries where they are likely to be tortured. It was Harold Pinter, explaining the difference between drama and politics in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for literature.
In the lofty realm of dramatic art, Pinter asserted, there can be nothing so clear cut as truth. It is, however, a very different matter when it comes to US foreign policy. There, the distinction between true and false is as clear as that between day and night. It’s simple. Everything the United States says is false, and everything its critics say is true.
Let me say right away that I am not about to mount a defence of the use of torture on suspected terrorists — though if anyone could provoke me into doing so, the insufferably vain Pinter is the man.
First, a few truths about torture. Torture is bad. It’s bad because it’s wrong to inflict pain on defenceless captives. It’s bad because it breaks international conventions. And even if you don’t give a damn about either of those things, it’s bad because the costs outweigh the benefits of any intelligence it may elicit.
Reports that the CIA “waterboards” prisoners make a mockery of the Bush administration’s repeated denunciations of Saddam Hussein as a torturer. They only increase the risk that any Americans or American allies who fall into the hands of Al Qaeda will themselves be tortured. And those reports are wrecking what little is left of the transatlantic alliance — witness Thursday’s ruling by the Law Lords, Britain’s highest judicial authority, that evidence obtained from torture is inadmissible in British courts.
The White House should shut up and back Sen. John McCain’s amendment, which would unequivocally ban torture by American military or intelligence personnel, regardless of their whereabouts.
And even if torture worked really well, the United States would still have to renounce it, because the CIA is so bad at keeping its dirty work secret. And precisely that point brings me back to Pinter’s rant.
Leave aside for today the invasion of Iraq, which he denounced. More intriguing was his extended critique of US policy — and secrecy — during the Cold War. Here are Pinter’s five charges:
Truth and falsehood are indeed hard to distinguish in Pinter’s drama, and his Nobel soliloquy was no exception.
First, the true part. Thousands of people were killed by US-backed dictatorships, especially in Central and South America. What’s demonstrably false is that this violence is comparable in scale with that perpetrated by communist regimes at the same time.
It’s generally agreed that Guatemala was the worst of the US-backed regimes during the Cold War. When the civil war there was finally brought to an end in the 1990s, the death toll may have been as high as 200,000. But not all those deaths can credibly be blamed on the United States.
Nobody pretends that the United States came through the Cold War with clean hands. But to contend that its crimes were equivalent to those of its communist opponents — and that they have been wilfully hushed up — is to blur the distinction between truth and falsehood. —Dawn/Los Angeles Times
Mulberry bush of Kashmir
IT was the sheer audacity of the suggestion that challenged them: Undo the knot that has vexed their elders for over 50 years. Find a solution to the Jammu & Kashmir problem.
For a moment, they baulked and then lapsed into an impotent silence. Gradually, though, they saw the glimmer of an opportunity in the murkiness of the difficulty. They were all students, between 18 to 25 years of age, not much older than Alexander the Great was when he was confronted by the Gordian knot.
They came from a diversity of backgrounds — from the north and south of Pakistan, from all over India, and from both sides of Jammu & Kashmir. And they had gathered in the comparative neutrality of a conference on peace held this autumn in New Delhi under the aegis of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. While they possessed no power or authority, they did feel a sense of responsibility, for they knew they belonged to a generation that will have to face the consequences of continuing failure.
The conference sponsors had formed them into groups. Each segment was required to examine one of nine options or precedents and to test-check their utility as a possible solution. These ranged from the Scandinavian example of the Aland Islands to the mid-European Tyrol model to the on-going Northern Ireland peace process. The others were recommendations made over the years by discussion groups and think tanks such as the Kashmiri American Council. All of them looked over-used and dog-eared.
To stimulate the students into thinking outside the box, as it were, they were asked to sit together as one group — Indians, Pakistanis, East and West Kashmiris alike — and to determine a single formula that should be endorsable by all, one that should be reducible to a single sheet of paper, and one that could be signed by three hypothetical parties. These three fictional signatories were called — for want of any better names — Pervez Musharraf, the other Manmohan Singh, and the third any unknown person who could be regarded as a representative of all Kashmiris.
The students were asked to focus on the following five elements. 1. Territory: What did they understand by Jammu and Kashmir. 2. Sovereignty: If so, when? 3. Autonomy: If so, how much? 4. Governance: The preferred style of representation. 5. Security: Internal as well as external.
Rather like their elders, the various factions knew what they wanted. They could articulate their own specific objectives but did not know how to fit their separate interests into a collage of collectivized demands.
Eventually, after an hour or so of noisy debate and discussion, a consensus began to emerge and they found to their surprise common areas of agreement. Finally, before the deadline, they reduced their conclusions into a single sheet of paper. Their answer to the Kashmir problem was succinct, clearly expressed and startling from such young unjaundiced minds.
On territory, they were all clear: the former state of Jammu & Kashmir, including the Northern Areas, Gilgit, Hunza, Chitral, etc. In effect a reversion to the pre-1947 status. On sovereignty, they thought it should be an ultimate goal, but not yet.
On autonomy, they demanded it now and completely, independent of both India and Pakistan. On governance, they preferred an Indian-style democratic election process. On security, they wanted Internal security to be the responsibility of the Kashmiris themselves, and external security to be guaranteed by three countries — Pakistan, India and China.
Of course, no sooner had their proposal been presented to the conference than every disparate interest present shredded it, dismissing it because of its inherent unworkability, its unjustifiable optimism, its political naivete, etc. What no one could fault was the searing truth that came out of the mouth of babes — Kashmir belonged to the Kashmiris, and anyone else who professed any interest in Kashmir or the plight of the Kashmiris did so at one remove, gratuitously, as an outsider from the outside.
Since that conference in New Delhi, nothing has happened in that sorry state that has altered the ground realities there, not even the devastating earthquake. If anything, it has accentuated the feeling amongst the Kashmiris that, while donors may have flocked to Islamabad to express their gilt-edged grief and to contribute to the cost of their rehabilitation and reconstruction, in the end it is the Kashmiris themselves who will have to pay the price and to bear the burden.
Privately, Kashmiris cannot understand why there was no legal representative of Azad Jammu & Kashmir visible on the main podium at the much-vaunted donors’ conference on November 19 held in Islamabad.
The president of Pakistan was there, the prime minister of Pakistan was there, the Secretary-General of the United Nations was there. Inexplicably missing was any symbol of the victims of the trauma and of the needy in whose name six billion dollars of largesse was being accumulated.
Perhaps it was felt by Islamabad that the Kashmiris, like coy brides during a Muslim nikah, could not be trusted to represent their own interests and therefore needed the services of an agent to receive commitments on their behalf. Some would argue that the sheer quantum of the pledges by donor countries should have been enough to quash any squirming ingratitude, and yet there remains a residual feeling of disappointment that the spotlight of the donors was focused on Musharraf’s Pakistan, instead of being allowed to highlight the real victims.
This noticeable absence was not lost on the Indian contingent to the conference. Having denied any aid for Indian Kashmir, the Indians sent their minister of state for foreign affairs to Islamabad with a hamper of support, having already ferried tents, medicines and other relief supplies across the Wagah border. President Musharraf had hoped for something infinitely more substantial as India’s donation to the relief effort.
He demanded nothing less than a solution to Jammu & Kashmir. Like Salome, he wanted the head of St John the Baptist.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is no Herod. He has declined to oblige. What he has done is to open up five crossings across the Line of Control. His expectation from the Pakistan side was that permission would be given to the citizens of Pakistani-controlled Azad Jammu & Kashmir to cross over without let or hindrance. Instead, when they agitated, they were tear-gassed by the Pakistani authorities.
The problem is not Jammu or Kashmir. It is not even the Kashmiris. It is India and Pakistan. How do the two parties negotiate with one another when neither sees a future in negotiation?
How do the two sides play a game of tug-of-war when one has bound its own end of the rope to the flagpole of defensive nationalism, and the other finds its boots unable to find a grip on the yielding sands of an inconsistent foreign policy?
Will the Indians ever give up Jammu & Kashmir? To paraphrase a children’s rhyme, Indians would if they could, and as they can’t, so they won’t.
Will Pakistan ever give up its claim for a referendum? It already has. All that remains is for both parties to stop trying to drink soup with a fork, and for someone from either side to have the common sense to use a spoon.
Breaking the impasse
THE rescue of the Montreal talks from disaster is bound to raise hopes that the Doha world trade talks will produce a similar rabbit out of a hat when ministers gather in Hong Kong on Tuesday. At the moment it would need a miracle because the talks — supposedly designed to help developing countries — have been completely derailed by the refusal of rich members of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) to make meaningful concessions.
It has got so bad that Doha would be regarded as success if the meeting does not break down completely, an event that could torpedo the trade talks as a multilateral exercise. It could shatter the WTO itself, since Hong Kong would be the third consecutive breakdown after Cancun and Seattle.
This must not be allowed to happen. The immediate cause is the refusal of Europe — and France in particular — to make any fresh reforms in the common agricultural policy (CAP) which, according to The Economist, accounts for 90 per cent of a French farmer’s pre-tax income.
The wider cause is the refusal of rich countries to admit they have benefited from previous rounds that cut manufacturing tariffs while leaving scandalous distortions in agriculture. Rich countries do not view agricultural subsidies as an evil to be eradicated unilaterally but as a chip to be traded for reductions by developing countries in other tariffs. Yet most of the industrialised countries were hugely protectionist while building up their own success.
It is economic as well as moral madness (besides being illegal as a result of a recent WTO ruling) for countries such as the US to pour billions of dollars into growing unprofitable cotton crops. It undermines the ability of African countries — for whom cotton could employ millions more people — to compete fairly. The same applies to sugar in the EU and rice in the US and Japan.
—The Guardian, London