Inflation drops, prices rise

INFLATION has come down below eight per cent, says Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz. That is some relief from the 9.3 per cent inflation rate reached last year against the budgetary projection of five per cent. Early this year, it was projected at seven per cent and then at eight per cent. Now we are told it is below eight per cent.

The fact is that the higher the economic growth the higher the inflation rate, usually because of excess money in circulation. Contracting the money supply and constraining its circulation could mean a lower growth rate.

The prime minister admits that major economic problems are inflation and the balance of payments deficit which is increasing. How to reduce inflation without disturbing economic growth. That demands a tough and complex solution, more so in a country where the informal economic sector is very large and unrestrained. But while the old inflation rate has come down, many find the prices of essential goods and services rising, thus neutralizing the drop in the inflation rate.

Inflation in Pakistan is due to internal shortages like food items, a highly manipulated market and external factors like the high world price of oil. There has been a rise in domestic gas prices by 15.87 per cent which is a substantial rise meant to appease the foreign companies exploring oil and finding gas in the country. Along with that, the Sui Northern has disconnected gas supply to thousands of industries and most of them will lose heavily because of that. The gas supply to the captive power production units which consume only four per cent of the gas supplied to power units, has also been cut.

Nepra is to come up with variegated power rate increases. The uniform power rate is being given up and different distribution companies are to introduce different rates which will reflect the extent of their loss and theft of power.

Wapda has earlier claimed a 26 per cent loss against KESC’s 40 per cent and at one stage even 60 per cent. So, different power rates reflecting the performance of each distribution unit is a good thing. Their consumers will criticize distribution companies, which lose power heavily due to theft or mismanagement. Even otherwise when the distribution units are being privatized such as the KESC, different power rates are logical.

The sugar price has risen to Rs.33 per kilo following the closure of the sugar mills in Sindh. The mills find they cannot afford to pay the high new sugar cane price that was earlier Rs 48 for 40 kilos and now it is Rs 60. Meanwhile, the government has bought 2,300 tons of Sugar from India and directed the Trading Corporation of Pakistan to release its stocks at the rate of Rs 25 a kilo.

The cane growers are a powerful lobby with a great deal of political clout so the Sindh government is bound to support them. Chief Minister Dr Arbab Rahim has told the mill owners to either resume crushing within three days or the cane will be sold to the Punjab sugar mills. Whether the Punjab mills can afford to buy the cane at this price and make a profit is a debatable issue. Anyhow the tussle between the growers and the mill owners seems to be endemic and recurs year after year.

The Railway fare has been increased to reduce the loss on account of high price of oil by Rs 1.3 billion, yet the railways incur a loss of 370 million rupees. The private sector has increased its bus and taxi fares and freight rates which will raise the price of food items as a whole. The POL prices continue unchanged at the level they were several months ago although world oil prices have come down by at least 20 per cent from their peak.

The trade deficit has risen to 1.8 billion dollars even after the exports have increased by 23 per cent in the last five months. There is however some relief from the higher home remittances which has increased by four per cent.

The foreign exchange reserves now stand at 11.320 billion dollars instead of the earlier target of 15 billion dollars. But the dollar is much stronger than it was earlier which gave rise to a great deal of concern. The official policy is to move more and more towards gas instead of costly imported oil and use the coal from Thar to produce liquid energy.

The government has been warned by economic experts not to rely too much on cotton economics as the crop is shrinking in relation to the real need. And its industry has instead been urged to develop knowledge-based skills. The cotton production is also small compared to the needs of the post-quota world and even the cotton we produce is flawed as our efforts to get bullet-free, dirt-free and pest-free cotton has been far from a success.

If the rate of inflation is down that doesn’t mean that the prices have dropped. In fact, the increase in prices is lower than last year and if the price of one item has gone down the price of another has gone up.

Retail prices are down in some parts of the country, thanks to the import of five vegetables and live meat from India. But the gain is more to the consumers of Punjab as the goods arrive there from India. Most of the traders do not want to pass on the benefit of such imports to the consumers. They argue that the more of the goods arrive, more the prices will come down. And that is happening in Punjab.

We have a long history of accumulating inflation since the 1970s the new rise in prices is in addition to that. The best example are the prices of POL which keep fluctuating with very little of the benefits passed on to the consumers. The government is now making determined efforts to increase the production of oil and gas. As a result there has been a gas discovery in Khost in Baluchistan.

The government has also given offshore drilling permits to some of the foreign companies operating in Pakistan. They will look for oil in the vicinity of Karachi. The effort to make oil out of coal in Thar have also been stepped up. The Chinese company has been given new terms for operation three years after the agreement was originally signed .

The government might have opted for further price rise if it was not embroiled in the Kalabagh dam controversy. It doesn’t want to add more heat to the debate at the moment. The urgency to step up efforts to find more oil and gas has arisen following the US prediction of a $100 per barrel oil price before it goes down. By when it happens, the world will have more oil or gas and develop far more refining capacity.

Pakistan needs 300,000 barrels of oil a day but produces only 64,000 barrels a day and imports 236,000 barrels at a cost of $3.5 billion a year. The offshore oil drilling is to be promoted and Pakistani companies are to be encouraged to participate in it. The new move is to obtain gas/oil from abroad such as from Yemen, Qatar or other Gulf states. India is doing the same and Iran is looking for oil/gas within the Russian Federation. Pakistan wants to do the same, get gas wells and convert the gas into liquid petroleum and bring it to Pakistan.

Russia has shown interest in the petroleum sector in Pakistan particularly in the seven billion dollar Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline. While Pakistan is showing keen interest in the pipeline from Iran it has not abandoned the earlier move to get gas through a pipeline from Qatar as well as Turkmenistan. The government will provide money for acquiring gas wells abroad and the OGDC of Pakistan will play a major role in developing the wells abroad.

Technology and imperialism

THE tragic irony of the 21st century is that just as faith in technology collapsed on the world’s stock markets in 2000, it came to power in the White House and Pentagon. For the Project for a New American Century’s ambition of “full-spectrum dominance” — in which its country could “fight and win multiple, simultaneous major-theatre wars” — was a monster borne up by the high tide of techno euphoria of the 1990s.

Ex-hippies talked of a wired age of Aquarius. The fall of the Berlin wall and the rise of the internet, we were told, had ushered in Adam Smith’s dream of overflowing abundance, expanding liberty and perpetual peace. Fukuyama speculated that history was over, leaving us just to hoard and spend. Technology meant a new paradigm of constant growth without inflation or recession.

But darker dreams surfaced in America’s military universities. The theorists of the “revolution in military affairs” predicted that technology would lead to easy and perpetual US dominance of the world. Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters advised on “future warfare” at the Army War College — prophesying in 1997 a coming “age of constant conflict”.

Thomas Barnett at the Naval War College assisted Vice-Admiral Cebrowski in developing “network-centric warfare”. General John Jumper of the air force predicted a planet easily mastered from air and space. American forces would win everywhere because they enjoyed what was unashamedly called the “God’s-eye” view of satellites and GPS: the “global information grid”. This hegemony would be welcomed as the cutting edge of human progress. Or at worst, the military geeks candidly explained, US power would simply terrify others into submitting to the stars and stripes.

Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance — a key strategic document published in 1996 - aimed to understand how to destroy the “will to resist before, during and after battle”. For Harlan Ullman of the National Defence University, its main author, the perfect example was the atom bomb at Hiroshima. But with or without such a weapon, one could create an illusion of unending strength and ruthlessness.

Or one could deprive an enemy of the ability to communicate, observe and interact — a macro version of the sensory deprivation used on individuals — so as to create a “feeling of impotence”. And one must always inflict brutal reprisals against those who resist. An alternative was the “decay and default” model, whereby a nation’s will to resist collapsed through the “imposition of social breakdown”.

All of this came to be applied in Iraq in 2003, and not merely in the March bombardment called “shock and awe”. It has been usual to explain the chaos and looting in Baghdad, the destruction of infrastructure, ministries, museums and the national library and archives, as caused by a failure of Rumsfeld’s planning.

But the evidence is this was at least in part a mask for the destruction of the collective memory and modern state of a key Arab nation, and the manufacture of disorder to create a hunger for the occupier’s supervision. As the Siddeutsche Zeitung reported in May 2003, US troops broke the locks of museums, ministries and universities and told looters: “Go in Ali Baba, it’s all yours!”

For the American imperial strategists invested deeply in the belief that through spreading terror they could take power. Neoconservatives such as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and the recently indicted Lewis “Scooter” Libby, learned from Leo Strauss that a strong and wise minority of humans had to rule over the weak majority through deception and fear, rather than persuasion or compromise.

They read Le Bon and Freud on the relationship of crowds to authority. But most of all they loved Hobbes’s Leviathan. While Hobbes saw authority as free men’s chosen solution to the imperfections of anarchy, his 21st century heirs seek to create the fear that led to submission. And technology would make it possible and beautiful.

On the logo of the Pentagon’s Information Awareness Office, the motto is Scientia est potentia — knowledge is power . The IAO promised “total information awareness”, an all-seeing eye spilling out a death-ray gaze over Eurasia. Congressional pressure led the IAO to close, but technospeak, half-digested political theory and megalomania still riddle US thinking. Barnett, in The Pentagon’s New Map and Blueprint for Action, calls for a “systems administrator” force to be dispatched with the military, to “process” conquered countries.

The G-8 and a few others are the “Kantian core”, writes Barnett, warming over the former Blair adviser Robert Cooper’s poisonous guff from 2002; their job is to export their economy and politics by force to the unlucky “Hobbesian gap”. Imperialism is imagined as an industrial technique to remake societies and cultures, with technology giving sanction to those who intervene.

The Afghanistan war of 2001 taught the wrong lessons. The US assumed this was the model of how a small, special forces-dominated campaign, using local proxies and calling in gunships or airstrikes, would sweep away opposition. But all Afghanistan showed was how an outside power could intervene in a finely balanced civil war.

The problem for the US today is that Leviathan has shot his wad. Iraq revealed the hubris of the imperial geostrategy. One small nation can tie down a superpower. Air and space supremacy do not give command on the ground. People can’t be terrorised into identification with America. The US has proved able to destroy massively — but not create, or even control. Afghanistan and Iraq lie in ruins, yet the occupiers cower behind concrete mountains.

The spin machine is on full tilt to represent Iraq as a success. Peters, in New Glory: Expanding America’s Supremacy, asserts: “Our country is a force for good without precedent”; and Barnett, in Blueprint, says: “The US military is a force for global good that ... has no equal.” Both offer ambitious plans for how the US is going to remake the third world in its image. There is a violent hysteria to the boasts. The narcissism of a decade earlier has given way to an extrovert rage at those who have resisted America’s will since 2001. Both urge utter ruthlessness in crushing resistance. In November 2004, Peters told Fox News that in Fallujah “the best outcome, frankly, is if they’re all killed”.

But he directs his real fury at France and Germany: “A haggard Circe, Europe dulled our senses and fooled us into believing in her attractions. But the dugs are dry in Germany and France. They deluded us into prolonging the affair long after our attentions should have turned to ... India, South Africa, Brazil.”

While a good Kleinian therapist may be able to help Peters work through his weaning trauma, only America can cure its post 9/11 mixture of paranoia and megalomania. But Britain - and other allied states - can help. The US needs to discover, like a child that does not know its limits, that there is a world outside its body and desires, beyond even the reach of its toys, that suffers too. —Dawn/Guardian Service

The writer is a senior lecturer in history at Cambridge University, UK.

No dirty tricks

NOW that the November elections are over, everyone is ready for 2006. Last month’s election results gave the political gurus an opportunity to examine their mistakes and see where they went wrong.

Phil Esterbrook, who managed Ed Boom Boom’s campaign, was desolate.

“We lost in a landslide,” he said.

“That is what elections are all about,” I told him.

“But we didn’t have to lose. We just made too many mistakes.”

“What was your biggest one?”

“We stuck with the issues instead of getting personal. The people could have cared less about where Thumbsucker stood on taxes, education and potholes. They wanted to know about what he did when he wasn’t campaigning.”

“Everyone wants to know about a candidate’s character.”

“We had a commercial with Thumbsucker’s ex-wife — the one who accused him of committing adultery with a baby-sitter. But we didn’t have enough money to put it on the air.”

I said, “What you are saying is, you should never have taken the high road. You should have used your television money to get into the mud with him.”

“When you’re in an election campaign, you use every dirty weapon you can,” he said. “We had stuff on Thumbsucker that could hang him.”

“Like what?”

“He was kicked out of high school when they found marijuana in his lunchbox.”

“You should have used it,” I said. “If he took pot to school when he was a kid, heaven knows what he carries in his lunchbox now.”

“I found Thumbsucker’s last mistress and was going to put her picture on a billboard on the Jersey Turnpike, but Boom Boom wouldn’t let me. He said if we brought Thumbsucker’s mistress into the campaign, Thumbsucker’s people would bring Boom Boom’s own mistress into it.”

“That’s good thinking,” I said. “What else should you have done?”

“I wanted to show Thumbsucker kicking a kid in a schoolyard.”

“How were you going to do that?”

“You can do anything with digital photography these days.”

“What else?”

“My big idea was to put out the word that he didn’t believe in God or the Ten Commandments.”

“What does he believe in?”

“I would have said all the people who were thinking of voting for him came from apes.”

“Even if only 50 per cent of the people believed it, you might have won the election.”

Esterbrook said, “I learned my lesson. When I manage someone in the 2006 elections, they are going to have to do it my way. I don’t want to handle any more good guys.”

I said, “I don’t blame you. Everybody in public office, from the top on down, has used dirty tricks. It’s what democratic elections are all about. And if someone doesn’t accept this, he shouldn’t be running for office.”

Esterbrook said, “I’m in a little trouble right now. Boom Boom’s current wife found out about his mistress, and now she’s demanding all his campaign money for alimony.”—Dawn/Tribune Media Services

Improving access to justice

OUR obsession with beggary has taught us the skills needed to put forward compelling reasons, dressed in nebulous grammar, in order to procure a few hundred million dollars from international institutions. On one such occasion in December 2001, we managed to extract a loan of $350 million from the Asian Development Bank. The jargon experts came out with a brilliant buzzword — “access to justice” — that was equally appealing to every shade of opinion.

As a citizen, one would like to ask a few basic questions. Why did we borrow this amount? Could we not have improved our own justice system with our own resources and our own thinking? How was this amount spent? Has it made justice any more accessible, easier or quicker for ordinary citizens? If justice is still as elusive, prolonged and painful, then how do we account for this $350 million disaster?

To quote directly from the ADB website, the project was intended to “assist the government to improve access to justice so as to (i) provide security and ensure equal protection under the law to citizens, in particular the poor; (ii) secure and sustain entitlements and thereby reduce the poor’s vulnerability; (iii) strengthen the legitimacy of state institutions; and (iv) create conditions conducive to pro-poor growth, especially by fostering investor’s confidence.

The programme will contribute to this aim by supporting five interrelated governance objectives: (i) providing a legal basis for judicial, policy, and administrative reforms; (ii) improving the efficiency, timeliness, and effectiveness in judicial and police services; (iii) supporting greater equity and accessibility in justice services for the vulnerable poor; (iv) improving predictability and consistency between fiscal and human resource allocation and the mandates of reformed judicial and police institutions at the federal, provincial and local government levels; and (v) ensuring greater transparency and accountability in the performance of the judiciary, the police and administrative justice institutions.”

A careful look at this fuzzy phraseology indicates that everything could have been said in one sentence: “improving the efficiency and effectiveness of providing judicial services to the ordinary people of Pakistan.” No further qualification is needed of the “ordinary people”. They are the poor, the vulnerable, the discriminated and the voiceless, deprived of justice and basic necessities. A project hinging on such obscure specifications cannot deliver any specific results.

Four years down the road, the amount seems to have evaporated and access to justice for the common man remains an elusive goal. If anything, the programme has only worsened the existing imbalance. The dice is clearly loaded in favour of the rich and powerful. The verdict on the issue of a retired general’s Matric certificate can be pronounced within three days. But even after 1,000 days, gang-rape victim Mukhtaran Mai still awaits final justice.

Of the 43 cases taken up by the Karachi-based NGO, War Against Rape, in the last three years, none is close to a final conclusion. Each day of judicial delay only helps the culprits while the victim suffers. The famous Fauzia Bhutto murder case finally resulted in the release of the rich and powerful suspect, as the witnesses grew tired of visiting the courts which they had been doing for 15 long years. That is the essence of the extent to which an ordinary citizen has “access to justice” in Pakistan.

Has the programme done anything to simplify or improve our laws? The Hudood Ordinances are still firmly in place, requiring the testimony of four people who actually witnessed the rape in order to secure a conviction for the rapist. Not being able to produce such witnesses makes the victim eligible for punishment for the offence of adultery or fornication. It surely does not require a foreign loan to change our own laws. (The bill to amend the Hudood Ordinance was rejected once again by the National Assembly recently).

Do we need to beg for foreign loans to stop jirgas that continue to operate despite having been declared illegal by the Sindh High Court? The government topped the list of law violators as its own ministers and chief ministers presided over 197 jirgas in the past five years. The Sindh province topped the list of provinces with a score of 1,796 “honour” killings in the same period. We surely do not need a foreign loan to amend the Qisas and Diyat Ordinance that makes murder a pardonable offence for the ‘honour’ killers of Pakistan.

It is time that we understood that while the loans can add to the consultants’ bank balances, they can do nothing to bring justice any closer to the common man. This is not to say that it cannot be done. There is no dearth of high calibre judges, managers, lawyers and sociologists who can collectively propose efficient solutions. The entire judicial system needs to be “process mapped” and its delays (unnecessary and long gaps between hearings) removed by making it necessary to complete a case within a certain period of time. Each case needs to be computerized with its exact status made available on websites with specific data on the number of court visits, types of cases, hearings, postponements, decisions, delays etc.

It is necessary to adopt the concept of preventive justice if we are to make the existing judicial system more efficient. Major categories of cases that appear before our judiciary need to be identified. Each category could then be addressed in detail to determine its root cause. Take for example rape cases. They could be decided much faster if the victims have access to early and efficient FIR facilities, medical examinations and medical reports of these examinations. Setting up exclusive support centres in each city that provide these facilities based on a ‘one window’ concept could greatly help expedite and improve the subsequent justice delivery process.

Similarly, there is hardly a family not involved in an unending complicated case of land or property. These cases can be significantly reduced if we were to discontinue the archaic ‘patwari’ system and make all land demarcation and ownership records transparent and available on the net. Any buyer, seller or citizen should be able to know precisely (without going to any office) what piece of land belongs to whom. It could save people from entering into wrong agreements or clandestinely taking over each other’s property.

Again, most traffic-related cases could be eliminated if we were to remove hundreds of policemen standing at every nook and corner ready to extort money and replace them by non-partisan cameras. Each violation would recorded and fines automatically added to an individual’s motor vehicle tax, without any regard for his rank, wealth or status.

These are just a few examples of how we could build preventive justice mechanisms so that a large number of crimes are either never committed or are easier to solve.

Finally, we need to ask the question: where precisely did we spend this $350 million loan? Everyone knows what this loan has not been able to achieve the objective it was taken for. We would now like to know what it was able to accomplish. Who were the beneficiaries, the consultants and the report writers? What vehicles were purchased, offices rented, people employed, hotels utilized, seminars organized, bills paid, trips made and expenses written off?

In the interest of transparency, the government should inform the public how this money was spent and whether “access to justice” is any better today since receiving the $350 million.