Safta needs a patron

I NEED to revisit the subject of Safta. My last article on the subject appeared on January 24, less than a month ago. I write on it again for the simple reason that Pakistan has ratified the Safta agreement after considerable delay and with some hesitation. I maintain, as I did in the earlier article, that Pakistan would benefit a great deal by taking an active part in the launch and development of the South Asia Free Trade Area.

The decision to create the area was initially taken at Islamabad at the 12th summit of the members of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (Saarc). That was in January 2004.

It was decided at Islamabad that the Saarc countries would launch a free trade area on January 1, 2006. This would have happened had the experts entrusted with the preparatory work completed their task by the appointed date. Also, two countries for reasons not easy to fathom, did not ratify the agreement in time for the launch of the process that would, over a period of a decade, create a free trade area in South Asia. Pakistan and Sri Lanka withheld ratification for a long time.

Not only should Pakistan have ratified the agreement in time, it should have provided leadership to the countries that for various reasons have lost enthusiasm for working towards regional cooperation in South Asia. Pakistan could be the patron that Safta desperately needs. It is in its economic and political advantage to get actively involved in Safta.

I return to the subject after completing an 18-day visit to Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. The planned visit to Nepal could not take place because the political problems in that country had affected the working of the government and most businesses in Kathmandu while I was in South Asia. Along with two colleagues, I visited the capitals of the four countries as well as Mumbai and Karachi, the financial centres of India and Pakistan respectively. The meetings we held with the officials and the seminars we addressed provided us with useful insights into the way various countries in the region view Safta.

The impact of politics on progress with respect to Safta is most profound in Pakistan. There is a body of opinion in the country according to which India badly wants the establishment of the free trade area. Many people feel — and some of them carry influence in Islamabad — that given India’s strong interest in Safta, Pakistan could leverage its entry by getting concessions from New Delhi on Kashmir. Nothing could be further from reality. India is interested in various trading arrangements with the countries in its neighbourhood. It is working on many fronts, not just on establishing Safta. It is labouring hard to get some working arrangement with the Asean, the Association of East Asian Nations. It has a trade agreement in place with China that has resulted in increasing trade between the two countries four-fold in a period of less than a decade.

India is also working hard to establish other regional arrangements that do not include Pakistan. It is pushing for an agreement known by its acronym — the BIMSTEC — which includes all counties of Saarc with the exception of Pakistan and the Maldives but includes Myanmar and Thailand. The BIMSTEC is much more ambitious in scope and is being prepared for launch with a much more ambitious time table than Safta. India has established bilateral free trade areas with Nepal and Sri Lanka. The Sri Lankans are anxious to negotiate the Cepa — the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement — with India. The Cepa will include the sector on services and also encompass cross-border investment.

India would be happy to see Pakistan come into Safta but would not deeply regret if it stayed out. There is a strong Indian lobby that would be pleased to isolate Pakistan in South and South East Asia while New Delhi continues to build strong economic relations with other countries of Asia. By being tardy with the ratification of Safta, Pakistan is providing this Indian lobby with the opportunity it is looking for.

Some of the other countries in South Asia are not particularly interested in Safta. As already mentioned, the Sri Lankans have strong formal relations with India and they are working on strengthening them. They have also negotiated a free trade agreement with Pakistan. They have very little trade with other South Asian countries. Colombo is also not happy with the idea of compensating less developed countries for revenue loss to their governments as a result of free trade. The original Safta draft has the provision for this; it was forced upon the signatories by Bangladesh and the Maldives. Safta would be the only regional trading arrangement that would include such a provision.

Bangladesh, on its part, is much more interested in gaining market access for its garment industry in the United States than cultivating a closer relationship with its neighbours. It is lobbying hard for the approval of two laws by the US Congress that would give it duty free entry into the American market for its garments. One of these laws is aimed at providing relief to the countries affected by the tsunami in 2004. India would like to negotiate a bilateral free trade with Bangladesh but Dhaka is not keen to oblige. Instead, during the recent visit of Prime Minister Khaleda Zia to Islamabad, it indicated interest in an FTA with Pakistan.

Two other Saarc countries — Bhutan and Nepal — are entirely dependent on India for their trade. Bhutan has developed a comfortable relationship with India; its hydro-electric potential is being successfully exploited by India for buying power for the energy deficit states of Bengal and Uttar Pradesh. The same is not the case for India’s relations with Nepal; these have always been uneasy. Kathmandu resents what the Nepalese leaders often describe as India’s imperious behaviour.

There is, in other words, not much small country interest in pursuing Safta. The push for the establishment and success of the regional arrangement will have to come from South Asia’s large economies — India and Pakistan. Given the complex policy of trade in South Asia, what should be Pakistan’s stance? It is my belief that it is in Pakistan’s economic and political interest to actively participate in Safta and, as suggested above, become the arrangement’s patron.

It is always helpful for smaller countries to create multilateral frameworks for organizing their relations with large neighbours. Safta would help Pakistan deal with India. For nearly a quarter of a century when Bangladesh was part of Pakistan, Islamabad attempted to achieve equality with India. For most of that time, the Pakistani economy was performing better than what was then the sclerotic Indian economy. Up until the early 1970s, the size of the Pakistani economy was about one-fourth that of India’s, it was also much better integrated with the global economic system than was the case with India; it traded a significantly larger share of its gross domestic product. By following the non-aligned approach in international affairs, India had distanced itself from the West, in particular from the United States. Islamabad was a close American ally for most of this period. Pakistan, in short, could afford to go alone and ignore India.

The situation for Pakistan is considerably different three decades later. Had it not fought two wars with India, one in 1965 and the other in 1971; had it not so thoroughly messed up its economy as it did in the 1990; had it not veered so much towards Islamic extremism; and had it managed to develop a representative political system and built strong institutions of governance, Pakistan may have been able to ignore the looming presence of India across its long southern border. That unfortunately was not to be the case. Pakistan today has fewer degrees of freedom for manoeuvre.

The Indian economy is growing more much more rapidly than Pakistan’s, the good performance of the Pakistani economy in 2004-05 notwithstanding. India has a much better chance of sustaining a seven to eight per cent growth rate for many years to come while the Pakistani economy, the government’s pronouncement notwithstanding, is not likely to better a rate of growth of five to six per cent a year. This can only happen if it develops a strategy that would bring about fundamental structural changes. And, the prominent role Islamic extremism has begun to play in the social and political life of the country will not bring the foreign capital that Pakistan desperately needs.

Watching crowds go wild on the streets of Islamabad, Lahore, Karachi and Peshawar on television screens these days cannot bring comfort to potential investors. There was reason to be upset with the appearance of the Danish cartoons but there was little sense in destroying the properties of Pakistani owned foreign franchises. While India is able to attract billions of dollars of foreign investment and millions of tourists to visit the country, Pakistan continues to be shunned.

It will take a long time for Pakistan to improve its economic prospects, to develop a viable political system and to win the respect of the international community. One element of the strategy to achieve these three objectives is to enlarge the economic and geographic context within which the country can operate. This is what Safta promises. Pakistan needs such a regional arrangement more than its neighbours.

By participating in it, policymakers in Islamabad must take a long view and not be deflected by old thinking. Islamabad needs to think outside the box. It needs to replace rivalry with India with accommodation with the much larger neighbour which has succeeded in carving out a place for itself in the new world order. Instead of resenting India’s prominence and seeming promise, intelligent diplomacy for Islamabad would be to turn both in its own favour.

To use the levers it does not hold to obtain concessions from India makes little sense and is also not practical politics. To use India’s great desire for transit rights through Pakistan to Afghanistan and Central Asia for leverage to obtain concessions on Kashmir is equally shortsighted. Will Pakistan be able to separate one type of transit rights — for merchandise trade between India and Afghanistan — from another type of transit rights — for Iranian and Turkmenistani gas to flow to India through Pakistan? Such an approach does not seem logical.

There are other developments that Pakistan should turn in its favour. The fact that Afghanistan has been invited to join the Saarc means that it will eventually acquire membership in Safta. This will help to place the rapidly growing Pakistan-Afghanistan trade in a multilateral framework, protected from the tensions that occur now and then between the two countries.

In sum, not only does membership in Safta make a great deal of sense for Pakistan, the latter should use its presence in that organization to rally around itself the smaller countries of South Asia. It could get India to work not just to promote its narrow interests but to promote the development of the entire region. South Asia in terms of population is the world’s second largest region, East Asia being the largest. However, it is performing much below its potential. Safta should help and Pakistan could be the moving force in this organization.

Not the president, but close

EVERY comedian in America has been having a gag-fest at the expense of Vice-President Dick Cheney, who accidentally shot his 78-year-old “acquaintance,” Harry Whittington, while hunting quail in Texas, in the face.

“Thank you, Jesus,” whispered Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show.” I have no doubt that in the course of his long and successful life as an attorney and businessman in Austin, Texas, Whittington has brought happiness to many people. But never can he have brought as much happiness as he did last week by getting shot by the vice president.

Hunting trips occasionally change the course of history. Trotsky’s decision to go duck shooting instead of attending Lenin’s funeral gave Stalin the perfect opportunity to begin his political marginalization. Cheney’s trip to the Armstrong Ranch has had the opposite effect. Far from marginalizing the vice-president, it has brought him centre stage — his least-favourite location.

At some point, when the history books get written, the question will have to be asked: Was George W. Bush the 43rd president of the United States, or was it actually Dick Cheney? The official line — conveyed in Bob Woodward’s books “Bush at War” and “Plan of Attack” — is that Cheney is no more than the president’s self-effacing, loyal and trusty servant. Even in private, he deferentially calls Bush “Mr President.” Yet you have to wonder if this is not the veep’s idea of irony.

Consider for a moment the vice-president’s vastly greater experience with Washington politics. Since being promoted by President Ford from deputy secretary of defence to White House chief of staff at the tender age of 34, Cheney has lived and breathed the stale air of the corridors of power. He was already secretary of defence when President Bush’s father went to war against Iraq in 1991. It’s no wonder he’s Bush’s No. 1 consigliere. “I see Dick all the time,” Bush has said.

Now consider the key events of the Bush presidency. Each one of them bears Cheney’s unmistakable imprint. For a start, it was Cheney who, as president of the Senate, used all his Beltway savvy to push through Bush’s first big tax cut in 2001. And no one pressed harder than Cheney for widening the war on terror to include Saddam Hussein.

Sure, on one occasion Bush rejected his advice. That was when Cheney argued against trying to get a second UN Security Council resolution before invading. But this is the exception that proves the rule.

It was Cheney who, on Aug. 26, 2002, started the drumroll for war with a speech dismissing the effectiveness of UN weapons inspectors and flatly stating: “There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction [and] ... that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies and against us.” This, he insisted, was “as great a threat as can be imagined” - note that word “imagined.”

It also was Cheney who asserted that there were links between Iraq and Al Qaeda, insisting: “We’ve got to do it because it’s the convergence of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.” It was Cheney who flew to the Middle East to square the other Arab states on the eve of the war; Cheney who made sure the Saudis were on the inside track; Cheney who invited the Iraqi opposition leaders to the White House.

“Cheney was beyond hellbent for action against Saddam,” writes Woodward, almost certainly paraphrasing Colin Powell. “It was as if nothing else existed.” If anyone had war “fever” in 2003, according to Powell, it was Cheney.

Yet it also was Cheney who argued that “we need to have a light hand [in Iraq] in the postwar phase.” It was Cheney who reassured senators: “I think we’ll be greeted as liberators.” And no prizes for guessing which member of the administration has been most intransigent in the face of demands that the United States renounce torture.

Man was born free, wrote Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but he is everywhere in chains. George W. Bush was born freer than most. But he is everywhere in Cheney.

Finally, and perhaps crucially, it is Cheney’s former chief of staff, “Scooter” Libby, who is facing charges of perjury, making false statements and obstruction of justice in the case arising from the exposure of Valerie Plame as a CIA agent. The leak apparently was designed to discredit her husband after he publicly rubbished claims that Hussein had tried to acquire uranium from Niger. Now I wonder whose idea that might have been?

At the end of the interview he gave Wednesday, Cheney was asked if, as vice-president, he had the authority to declassify information. Cheney: “There is an executive order to that effect.” Interviewer: “There is?” Cheney: “Yes.” Interviewer: “Have you done it?” Cheney: “Well, I’ve certainly advocated declassification and participated in declassification decisions.” Interviewer: “You ever done it unilaterally?” Cheney: “I don’t want to get into that.”

This exchange raises the question: What’s the difference between “Scooter” Libby and Harry Whittington? Answer: Cheney shot Whittington in the face, not the back.

—Dawn/Los Angeles Times Service

Bitter harvests of Zionism

THE chief rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sacks, is right. His reaction to the Anglican synod’s call for sanctions against Israel is understandable. Hatred of Judaism — now commonly called anti-Semitism — is a virus that has infected Christendom for two millennia.

It continues to stalk the world despite its most virulent outbreak in Nazi Germany. It should not be left untreated. For too many it remains the unlearned lesson of the Holocaust. It should haunt decent Christians for generations to come.

The German pope knows that particularly well and is on the battle lines against it. On this issue, nothing divides him from the Archbishop of Canterbury and most other church leaders. If, as some now think, today’s Jews are the Muslims — hatred transferred — that simply means there is a battle to maintain our common humanity on more than one front. All collective hatreds poison the body politic.

I say this as the child of a German Jewish-born father who escaped in time. His mother did not. I say it as a half-Jewish German child chased around a British playground in the Second World War and taunted with “he’s not just a German, he’s a Jew”. A double insult. But I say this too as a Christian priest who shares the historic guilt of all the churches. All Christians share a bloody inheritance.

If I feel all that in my guts and know it in my head, I cannot stand by and watch the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — one of the world’s most dangerous outbreaks of collective hatred — as a dispassionate onlooker. I cannot listen calmly when an Iranian president talks of wiping out Israel. Jewish fears go deep. They are not irrational. But I cannot listen calmly either when a great many citizens of Israel think and speak of Palestinians in the way a great many Germans thought and spoke about Jews when I was one of them and had to flee.

If the Christian in me has good reason to be ashamed, so now does the Jew in me. I passionately believe that Israel has the right, and its people have the right, to live in peace and in secure borders. But I know too that modern Israel was born in terror and made possible in its present Zionist form by killing and a measure of ethnic cleansing. That is history. Tell me of a nation with an innocent history. But the Zionism at the heart of Israeli politics is about the present and the future. It makes me fear for the soul of Israel today and the survival of its children tomorrow.

The Israel characterized by the words of Golda Meir that “there was no such thing as Palestinians ... they did not exist” is an Israel that is inevitably surrounded by enemies and that can only survive militarily and economically as a client state of the world’s only superpower, for now. Nor can its nuclear monopoly in the Middle East last for ever. Peace cannot be made by building a wall on Palestinian land that makes the life of the miserably conquered more miserable still. A Palestinian bantustan will be a source of unrest and violence for ever.

I say all this despairing of the Israel I love. Its people are my people. The Palestinians are my neighbours. I wish they had stronger and better leaders. I wish their despairing young people had not been driven to violence. Just as I understand Jewish fears, I understand their despair. Only an Israel that understands that too can change it. And there are Jews in Israel and in the diaspora who know it.

Most of them, out of a fear of being thought disloyal, are afraid to say what they know to be true. The state of Israel has become a cruel occupying power. Occupations, when they are resisted, are never benevolent. They morally corrupt the occupier. The brave body of Israeli conscientious objectors are the true inheritors of the prophets of Israel. They are the true patriots.

But the main objective of my writing today, is to nail the lie that to reject Zionism as it practised today is in effect to be anti-Semitic, to be an inheritor of Hitler’s racism. That argument, with the Holocaust in the background, is nothing other than moral blackmail. It is highly effective. It condemns many to silence who fear to be thought anti-Semitic. They are often the very opposite. They are often people whose heart bleeds at Israel’s betrayal of its true heritage.

I began with the recognition that the cancer of anti-Semitism has not been cured. Tragically, Israel’s policies feed it — and when world Jewry defends Israeli policies right or wrong, then anger turns not only against Israel, but against all Jews. I wish it were mere rhetoric to say that Israeli politics today make a holocaust the day after tomorrow credible. If the whole Muslim world hates Israel, that is no idle speculation. To count on Arab disunity and Muslim sectarian conflict and a permanent American shield is no recipe for long-term security.

There are Israelis who know all that, and there are Jews around the world who know it. In Britain, Jews for Justice for Palestinians organizes to give Jewishness a human face. Tell them they are anti-Semites and they will laugh bitterly, for the charge hurts deeply and is a lie. People such as Uri Avnery give all this eloquent expression, but are heard by only a few. The media are afraid of a lobby that is quite prepared to do them serious damage.

Yes, of course, there are many who express their solidarity with the Palestinian people. Some are Christians. They deserve respect. If, whether wisely or not, they call for sanctions, that does not make them Jew-haters — not in theory and not in practice. My concern, however, is to express solidarity with the Israel that is not represented by its leaders or popular opinion.

Once, in the days of Hitler, there was another Germany represented by those in concentration camps alongside Jews and Gypsies, the martyrs who are celebrated today. There is such an Israel too. Its voices are still free to speak, though often reviled and misunderstood. That Israel has my solidarity, as all Jews have my love and prayers.

— Dawn/Guardian Service

The writer was a member of the Church of England’s general synod and director of the Centre for International Reconciliation, Coventry Cathedral; he is now a chaplain at the University of Sussex.

Pandemic preparedness

THE arrival of avian flu in Africa means that the bird epidemic is officially out of control. None of the methods used against it so far — mass vaccination of poultry flocks in China, mass bird slaughter across Southeast Asia — has prevented wild birds from spreading the H5N1 virus across the globe, to Italy, Greece, Bulgaria and Azerbaijan, as well as Siberia and Indonesia.

The flu has probably been killing birds in Africa for many months and will probably not be stopped: In poor countries with weak or nonexistent veterinary controls, where chickens are the only source of protein and no compensation for farmers for loss of their livestock is likely, it will be impossible to enforce either mass vaccinations or mass slaughter.

Knowing the flight path of migratory birds, many predicted the disease would arrive in Africa. But predicting a disaster and being prepared for a disaster — as America learned during Hurricane Katrina — are not the same thing. Despite high-level attention paid to this issue, by President Bush as well as the United Nations, neither Africa nor the international community is even remotely prepared for an epidemic of avian flu or for a human disease that could develop if the virus mutates.

Congress has allocated $280 million for flu surveillance and preparedness abroad, but none of that money has been spent yet. The United Nations has appointed David Nabarro, a senior flu expert, to coordinate international efforts — but many donors’ projects still duplicate one another. The international health system, such as it is, remains totally inadequate. The World Health Organization cannot send more than a handful of officials to any one country.

The Food and Agriculture Organization, which theoretically deals with the animal side of the problem, employs fewer veterinarians than the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. So strapped is the world for health personnel that after conducting a flu pandemic simulation exercise at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Mr. Nabarro stated that the maintenance of water and power systems in a real pandemic might prove key, since it may become “more important to concentrate on the essentials of life for those who are living than it is to focus on the treatment of those who are sick.”

Progress has been made in the realm of antivirals, drugs such as Tamiflu and Relenza that can relieve flu symptoms. Roche, the maker of Tamiflu, is negotiating licensing agreements with companies in China, India and Vietnam so that they can produce generic versions. The WHO has a stockpile of Tamiflu, enough to be used in a concentrated manner should one or two outbreaks begin in a country with no stockpile of its own (as is the case in most of Africa).

But it is no closer to mass capability than the United States, which has a stockpile of 4.3 million courses of Tamiflu. The administration’s goal is 81 million courses, but no one knows when it will be reached. Of course, there is no guarantee that antivirals work: The virus may mutate and become resistant to Tamiflu anyway.

Given the overwhelming challenges of preparation as well as the uncertainties surrounding antivirals, it would make the most sense to focus on a vaccine. And vaccine research is being carried out, in Vietnam, China, Russia and Hungary, as well as the United States.

But although meetings among international scientists will be held this summer, in the hopes that they will exchange information and speed up research, officials at the Department of Health and Human Services agree that they still “don’t have visibility” about what everyone is doing. Furthermore, some U.S. companies say that they remain confused about this country’s vaccine development programme, which lacks a timeline, leadership and clear incentives for the private sector.

In other words, cross your fingers. Maybe the pandemic will never come.

— The Washington Post