Role for Pashtun intelligentsia
DIVERSE and usually contradictory approaches have been adopted by different actors, both national and international, in their response to the radicalisation, isolation and Talibanisation that is taking place in the Pashtun belt.
There are some who believe that Pashtun culture is inherently militant, violent and aggressive and that Talibanisation and radicalisation in the region is the expression of Pashtun nationalist sentiment.
This approach assumes that all Pashtuns have a Taliban mindset ideologically and that the Taliban are a violent bunch of Al Qaeda-affiliated terrorists who need to be carpet-bombed without any consideration for the lives of the millions affected by this kind of attack.
There are others, such as individuals and political parties like Qazi Hussain Ahmad of the Jamaat-i-Islami, Maulana Fazlur Rahman of the JUI, Imran Khan of the Tehrik-i-Insaaf and Mian Nawaz Sharif of the PML-N, who are of the opinion that radicalisation and Talibanisation are essentially foreign phenomena that need to be analysed in the context of US intervention in the region.
This approach assumes that as long as what is perceived as the US occupation of the region continues, radicalisation and Talibanisation will persist and vitiate the socio-political and economic fabric of the Pashtun belt.
There are yet others, mainly in the corridors of power in Islamabad, who presume that the Taliban of Pakistan and the Taliban of Afghanistan are completely distinct ideological, strategic and functional entities that must be dealt with separately. The Taliban of Pakistan are to be manipulated to fight the military’s war in Kashmir and the Taliban of Afghanistan are to be covertly and strategically supported to minimise the perceived Indian influence in the region.
There are people who understand the causes of radicalisation in terms of chronic poverty, penetration of the modern Wahhabi jihadist ideology through madressahs, crumbling institutions of governance, lack of access to formal and informal justice systems, hegemonic intervention of the international powers, destabilisation of elected governments, and marginalisation and ‘otherisation’ of a whole community, i.e. the Pashtuns.
They also point to the lack of infrastructural development, the strategic-depth policy of the Pakistan army and lack of economic opportunities in the region as factors promoting radicalisation. This approach emphasises the need for development of responsive governance and justice systems, investment in the region and helping Pakistan and Afghanistan to repair their broken security, law and order and socio-political institutions.
The complex dynamics of the present violence in the Pashtun belt in particular and the rest of Pakistan and Afghanistan in general has confused Pakistani and western intellectuals. In the absence of fieldwork data and authentic evidence due perhaps to the inaccessibility of the region, analysts usually find themselves at a loss in identifying diverse factors that contribute to terrorism and religious militancy in the Pashtun belt.
Consequently they usually adopt a one-dimensional approach to address the complexity of the picture by analysing half-baked and incomplete data. It is this lack of clarity that usually leads analysts in Pakistan and elsewhere to term the present insurgency in the Pashtun belt of Pakistan and Afghanistan as a class war, a war of liberation, an expression of nationalistic sentiments, culture and identity of the Pashtuns, and a war against US imperialism.
As a result, the core issues are usually ignored. They are: (i) this is an economically, politically and socially unstable region which is fast turning into a never-ending war zone; (ii) the interplay of different forces in the region has led to continuous tension; (iii) the conflict is resulting in the mass killing of the non-combatants caught in the crossfire between the state and non-state forces in the area; (iv) the disintegration and deterioration of the social structures of the Pashtun belt is taking place; (v) there is an increased trend towards violence and terrorism around the globe that sends threat waves to the adjacent regions; (vi) an unnecessary engagement of resources is taking place which could have been otherwise a source of progress and prosperity for people in the Pashtun belt as well as those from other societies of the world; and (vii) no competing force in the region is able to decimate competing forces, and so there is a need to find and identify the overlapping and common interests of these forces in the region.
The Pashtun intelligentsia has yet to rise to the occasion and start scrutinising the threat to the survival of their nation and community on the basis of a people-centered analytical framework to find a way out of the present turbulence in their region. The Pashtun intelligentsia in Pakistan, Afghanistan and the diaspora may play a pivotal role in bringing peace and prosperity to the region and save their brethren in Pakistan and Afghanistan from total annihilation.
The Pashtun intelligentsia in Pakistan, Afghanistan and the diaspora may include university teachers, researchers and analysts in the regional and area study centres, media outlets and political parties. They may focus on three major and core issues to begin with.
First, there is need to develop indigenous and people-centred analytical frameworks to understand the complexity of the present turmoil in the region. Second, they should identify overlapping and shared interests of various competing forces in the region. Third, they may start networking with area study centres and regional study centres besides security, defence and rights organisations around the globe. There is a dire need that the Pashtun intelligentsia starts establishing think tanks and networks with the think tanks working on the region outside Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The Pashtun intelligentsia may facilitate progressive nationalist political parties both in Pakistan and Afghanistan to adopt policies which are based on solid research and analysis of the present situation. The political parties in turn may facilitate the intelligentsia to establish forums for dialogue at all levels, both vertically and horizontally. The dialogue forums may include local, national and international stakeholders in the region on the one hand and various ideological factions on the other.
In addition to it the Pashtun intelligentsia should make an effort to reactivate the already available forums like the grand Pak-Afghan jirga, the Saarc platform, the ECO platform and other initiatives by UN agencies like Unesco and the UNDP. In the present gloomy environment in the region, activism by the intelligentsia is one of the beacons of hope for peace and prosperity in the region.
The writer is coordinator for Aryana Institute for Regional Research and Advocacy.
kahdim.2005@gmail.com
Revisiting the NFC award
IT’S quite perplexing that in the current deluge of public discourse about structural reforms one finds almost no mention of the issues related to the distribution of fiscal resources between the federal and provincial governments in Pakistan. Where is the National Finance Commission (NFC) with its award in all this?
In the context of the next NFC award two questions stand out. First, what should be the share of the federal and provincial governments and how should the shares be determined? Second, what should be the share of each province and what criteria should be used for the division of resources among provinces?
In addressing the first question we have to examine the roles (functions) of the federal and provincial governments. The federal government has used the argument that certain (essential) services and investments must be made at the national level for reasons of national security (defence), development of infrastructure (power, transport and communications) and repayment of the public debt used for development and non-development purposes.
The federal government has two major commitments that claim a large part of the state revenue, namely expenditure on the armed forces and servicing public debt. Does Pakistan still need a large military establishment that competes against the much-needed social and economic services for scarce national resources? This question needs to be debated in the light of: (i) the development of and access to atomic weapons; and (ii) the peace initiatives with India since the two countries have been locked into a very expensive zero-sum game.
In addition, the federal government maintains responsibility for a wide range of services and activities, many of which should be with the provinces for reasons of efficiency and equity. Obviously the rhetoric of devolution has not translated into a smaller size of the federal government. A large federal government — reflected by the civil and military establishment — also plays a divisive role in that a disproportionately large share of the spending benefits the residents of one province.
The shares of the federal and provincial governments in the divisible pool should be changed in favour of the provincial governments as more of the responsibilities are shifted to them and the size of the federal government, including its military establishment, is reduced. The share of provincial governments should rise to at least 50 per cent in the next three to five years. The real problem is that the federal government and the National Assembly are unwilling to redefine the highly centralised structure of the federation.
Increasing the share of provincial governments in the public resources is only one part of the NFC award for the next five years. The second question is equally if not more important since it brings into play the principle of fairness (equity) and determines the relative distribution of resources between the provinces. There seems to be a consensus that the formula based entirely on population size is patently unfair; in a multi-ethnic and unequal society it is a recipe for political and social instability if not disaster.
There are at least three good reasons for which the current formula must be rejected. First, the federal government still claims nearly two-thirds of the public revenue and a large part of the federal government’s spending on its civil and military establishment benefits one province disproportionately relative to its share in the population. Second, there are serious inter-provincial disparities in the level of per capita income, incidence of absolute poverty, and the state of development of industries, infrastructure and services.
Third, there are disparities of revenue contribution by provinces on account of the private sector activities (products and services) located and managed in each province. Admittedly it is not easy to identify the corporate ownership and management of industries and services. But it is also a fact that the province provides resources and services that contribute to the personal and corporate incomes no matter where the individual entrepreneur or the corporate body resides or brings capital from.
The next NFC should make a start by reducing the weight of population size from 100 per cent to 50 per cent, with the rest given to the other two factors — level of development and revenue generation — in the ratio of 35 and 15 per cent respectively. The federal government should stop the practice of providing arbitrary — implying political considerations — grants-in-aid to provinces, except in severe emergencies.
Since the suggested transfer formula puts onerous demands on good-quality data about each province’s population size (whatever has happened to this year’s scheduled headcount?), level of development and revenue contribution, it is absolutely essential that the federal and provincial governments with other autonomous public agencies and private sector institutions produce credible data and evidence on these indicators.
The arguments used here for the distribution of resources between the federal and provincial governments and the share of each province should also be applied to the new fiscal arrangements between the provincial and district governments. The federal government can create incentives for the provincial governments to increase their revenue and reduce their spending to be transferred to the district governments since in the devolution plan the district government has been assigned significantly increased responsibility for providing services and infrastructure.
The federal government should also give to the district government a constitutional cover for the necessary administrative and fiscal (revenue) authority. In fact, this will allow the district government to access a large part of the revenue raised from property taxes now available only to the provincial government and possibly generate financial resources by other means, e.g. bonds, as well.
Many writers and analysts have repeatedly, and I might add rightly, noted the extreme adhocracy, opacity and dissension associated with the past NFC awards in Pakistan. The next NFC, properly constituted with representation of the major stakeholders, should assure transparency, and hence its accountability, by conducting its deliberations in the public eye and using the best resources and expertise available to the country.
Truant teachers, students and schools
THE voice at the other end was unfamiliar, crisp and not interested in inanities or introductions. It came straight to the point: “This is a message from school. A student in your household in grade 11 … was absent on Jan 12 in period three. Please call the school or send a note to provide an explanation.”
“While I had heard and known that the schools did operate automated systems to inform the parents if a student was to skip a class for any reason, I could not believe how efficient and amazing this system was,” said a taken-aback parent, describing his experience when his child skipped a class in a small-town high school in Canada.
Originally introduced by Mark Miller of SynreVoice Technologies, the truancy-tracking system allows schools to phone or email parents when students decide they would rather be elsewhere. It is now used by more than 8,000 schools in Canada and the US. This early warning system has played a major role in reducing chronic absenteeism and the schools have reported a 30-50 per cent drop in students skipping classes within two weeks of its installation. In many schools 90 per cent of the kids stopped skipping almost instantaneously.
The system is simple to understand and operate. Attendance is taken by the teacher on a standardised form, which is then scanned into the school’s computer, which in turn activates the automatic phone calls/emails. The school computer keeps a record of calls made for each kid and can generate helpful statistics such as the most-skipped student, teacher, subject or school during any selected period of time.
The education bureaucracy of Pakistan for all these years has neither learned a lesson from how other nations run their schools nor shown any indigenous initiatives of its own for improving the management of public schools. There are some 30,000 schools reported by the Consumer Rights Commission of Pakistan that exist on paper only but continue to draw regular funding from the state exchequer.
There is no evidence of any other country in the world that comes even close to this benchmark of incompetence and absurdity. Truancy is rampant amongst underpaid and ill-motivated teachers. Only a week back a minister of the NWFP government acknowledged that only in one district (Mansehra) 8,000 of the 14,000 teachers have remained absent from their duties for the past several years, and have also been receiving their salaries every month.
Even if the teachers in other districts are twice as conscientious as the missing links of Mansehra, one can estimate that about 25 per cent of all Pakistani teachers do not appear in schools on any working day. The students’ attendance is yet more abysmal. According to a Unesco report, Pakistan is second to Nigeria in the number of children not at school (6.5 million) and 80 per cent of them have never been enrolled in a school.
Pakistan could make major improvements in school management if it was to attend to at least one basic issue. It should introduce some basic concepts of monitoring and tracking how the schools are run. Currently the government has outdated machinery that does not even pretend to be serious about finding missing schools, absent teachers and truant students.
It is ironic that while there are countries that can track a student missing for even one day, we do not even know that the 30,000 schools that draw regular monthly funds in fact do not exist. Pakistan could easily develop and install computer-based school, teacher and student truancy-tracking systems, to monitor and control the first prerequisite of education — a school that is open, a teacher who is available and a student who is present in the class.