Running Out of Everything: How Scarcity Drives Crisis in Pakistan

David Steven | 03 May 2011
Feature

While pessimism is not in short supply in Pakistan, other resources are increasingly scarce. This is driving the country toward a crisis characterized by interlocking economic, political and security dimensions, and has already brought the government close to fiscal collapse.

Yet the dangers are poorly understood. Few of the country's policy elite fully grasp how Pakistan's energy, food and fiscal challenges intersect, nor how quickly problems will spiral as the country's population grows. Meanwhile, the international community is equally fragmented and short-term in its outlook, still working through sector-based silos that leave it unable to see the big picture. With regard to Pakistan, the United States, along with other international actors, still lacks a coherent vision for what it can do to help build a more stable state. On the global stage, Washington has barely begun to address the impact that an era of higher and more volatile resource prices will have on countries such as Pakistan that are both fragile and strategically significant.

In 2011, popular uprisings throughout the Middle East finally made it respectable to admit that resource scarcity will be a major driver of global change in coming decades, as high food prices proved a major irritant for the region's young population already starved of other opportunities. There is more turbulence to come. Over the next 15 years, the world's population will increase from almost 7 to almost 8 billion people. The "next billion" will be Asian or African, and most will live in unplanned, and often chaotic, towns and cities. They will face fierce competition for resources from the rich world, long accustomed to dominating commodity markets, as well as from increasingly assertive middle classes in China, India, Brazil and the other rising powers.

At the same time -- and depending on levels of investment, rates of innovation and political foresight -- the world will bump up against limits to the sustainable consumption of highly strategic commodities such as energy, land, water, food and "atmospheric space" for greenhouse gases and other emissions. The fallout will play a crucial role in the "long crisis" of globalization (.pdf).

In an age of resource constraints, Pakistan is a canary in the coal mine. On any given day, newspaper stories about food prices, energy subsidies and water shortages jostle for space with those on suicide bombings, corruption and the government's failure to deliver basic services to its citizens. When asked what they think is the country's greatest problem (.pdf), 55 percent of Pakistanis single out inflation, which is overwhelmingly driven by food and energy prices. That compares to just 21 percent who pick terrorism -- in a country where a few thousand people are killed by terrorists each year -- and 16 percent who choose unemployment, at a time when only 70 percent of men and 21 percent of women have jobs (.pdf).

The average Pakistani eats less than the average African, while last year's devastating floods pushed rates of acute malnutrition (.pdf) among the country's children to nearly 25 percent in the worst-affected areas. This winter, trees throughout Pakistan's major cities were stripped bare for fuel by people desperate to heat their houses and businesses. And the government is running out of money as it struggles to pay energy subsidies that it lacks the political strength to reduce, while the security implications of resource scarcity are growing in what is already an extremely insecure country.

Going Hungry?

To understand scarcity in Pakistan, one needs to start with the country's demographics. While Pakistan's population growth rate peaked at 3.5 percent in the early 1980s, it is still well more than 2 percent today. There will be 60 million more Pakistanis by 2025, at which time the population will still be growing by 4 million every year. The country is very young, with almost half the population below the age of 20. The scale of its projected population alone presents Pakistan with daunting demographic challenges (.pdf). It must find ways to educate its youngest children (.pdf), who currently make up more than 10 percent of the global population of children not attending primary school. It also needs to build a city the size of Lahore every three years, as population growth begins to peak in rural areas but continues to soar in urban ones.

Most of all, Pakistan needs jobs. A "baby boom" generation is entering the workforce in growing numbers, its members bringing with them a toxic combination of high expectations and extremely meager skills. If improved economic prospects allow them to find work, the country could enjoy a demographic dividend. If they remain unemployed, a demographic disaster beckons.

Unfortunately, Pakistan has few natural resources, and land is also in short supply. The country now has only 0.32 acres of arable land per capita, and this will decline by almost a third by 2025 if new land is not brought into production. Water is similarly scarce. Per capita freshwater availability is less than a third of that of India and will fall to less than 35,000 cubic feet by 2025 (.pdf). Already, groundwater is becoming increasingly expensive to extract and surface water steadily more polluted. These are worrying trends, since competition for water and land, when combined with the demographic stress of a young population, have been shown to increase the risk of conflict (.pdf) within, and perhaps between, countries. That prospect, it should go without saying, is something Pakistan can do without.

A shortage of land and water has an inevitable impact on agriculture. Pakistan has long been a net importer of food, but its agricultural trade deficit (.pdf) has grown considerably over the past decade. Imports have declined somewhat in recent years, but this actually reflects worsening, rather than improving, food security. World food prices saw rapid increases after 2007, with prices spiking a year later, when the FAO Food Price Index reached 200. Prices subsequently eased, but they have recently shot up again and are now well above the previous 2008 peak. Pakistan is importing less food, not because it doesn't need it, but because it is being priced out of the world markets. Domestic agricultural production, meanwhile, remains soft, registering only 2 percent growth in 2010 in spite of booming prices (.pdf). That this can be ascribed in part to the floods is a sobering reflection of how vulnerable the sector is to regular droughts and irregular, but devastating, natural disasters. A good crop is expected this year, as is usually the case after a flood, but this cannot be taken as a sure sign that Pakistan's agricultural sector is on an upward path.

Unsurprisingly, Pakistani consumers have seen rapid increases in the prices they pay for food. The Asian Development Bank Food Price Index for Pakistan, which is set at 100 for 2001, reached 216 in 2009, with prices up by 45 percent on the previous two years (.pdf). More recently, food inflation has been more than 20 percent for the past six months. Prices have also been increasingly volatile, with commodities hit by a series of mini-shocks: including the sugar crisis of 2009, the flour crisis of 2010 and the onion war of 2011, among others. Food inflation in Pakistan is greater than in any of the Middle Eastern countries that experienced civil unrest this year (although Iran has seen its prices rise even faster). At the same time, Pakistan also has lower per capita income and higher rates of poverty than any of these countries.

Worse still, when the food crisis hit, many in Pakistan had little room for maneuver, as nutritional standards, especially among the hardest-hit poor households, were already conspicuously low. Pakistanis eat no more than they did in 1970, although per capita GDP has more than doubled in that period. In 2008, after the first price spike, it was estimated (.pdf) that half the population was eating less than the recommended minimum of 2,100 calories per day, with 28 percent -- or 45 million people -- classed as suffering from severe food insecurity (defined as less than 1,700 calories per day). Children were particularly affected by the recent floods, but have long been at high risk of malnutrition. In 2001, a household survey (.pdf) found that 40 percent of Pakistani children were stunted and 37 percent were underweight for their age, while one-third of all childhood deaths are thought to be due to poor nutrition (.pdf). According to the World Bank, Pakistan's child malnutrition levels are among the highest in the world.

The composition of Pakistan's diet increases its vulnerability. According to FAO data, cereals, sugar, oil and dairy products account for 80 percent of Pakistan's caloric intake. Overdependence on wheat is especially problematic. Only a quarter of Pakistani households produce it, but almost all consume it, usually as their primary staple (.pdf). The market is heavily regulated, with the government struggling to set prices that, while remaining affordable to consumers, incentivize producers and reflect the growing cost of inputs -- especially fertilizer, whose price is linked to oil -- and demand from global commodity markets. In 2007, the government made the disastrous decision to export wheat (.pdf) in the hopes of earning foreign currency as global prices rose, but was soon back in the market to import -- at a $100 per ton loss -- as food shortages began to bite. Vegetable oils, meanwhile, reveal a more direct dependence on international markets, with more than 7 percent of daily caloric intake coming from imported oil. Pakistan's struggle to feed its population will only worsen as its population continues to grow and competition for food intensifies on the global markets on which it depends.

The Energy Roller Coaster?

Pakistan's energy troubles are, if anything, even more complex and deeply entrenched. Energy use in Pakistan while roughly comparable with India, remains low, at just more than a quarter of the global average. But demand is growing fast, as Pakistanis struggle to climb the energy ladder. Wood and other biomass still account for 46 percent of total energy use, with nearly 90 percent of rural households dependent on these fuel sources. But the country's rapidly growing cities have a voracious appetite for more-advanced forms of energy, with natural gas heavily used by households and industry, for both transportation, in the form of compressed natural gas (CNG), and electricity generation. Gas is Pakistan's most important indigenous fuel source, accounting for 42 percent of total energy use. It is cheap, with government policy holding down prices, and is being rapidly used up. Although reserves lie undiscovered, prices are too low to attract investment in further exploration, and supply is expected to decline rapidly over the coming years. As a result, Pakistan is becoming increasingly reliant on imported oil, gas and, to a lesser extent, coal.

Energy scarcity has been intensifying since the middle of the last decade. Demand for electricity outstripped supply in 2005, while the same threshold was passed for gas a year later. The future also looks bleak. According to the Pakistan Energy Outlook for 2025, "with indigenous natural gas supply expected to decline in the near future, 'business-as-usual' policies will be unable to meet Pakistan's energy demand for the next 15 years, even for a 4.5 percent per annum GDP growth rate." Energy demand will almost double by 2025 if the economy grows at 4.5 percent, but indigenous production of gas is projected to decline by a third. According to the same report, energy demand currently outstrips supply by more than 10 percent, biomass excluded. Even under a best-case business-as-usual scenario, this gap will grow to 50 percent by 2025. Clearly, Pakistan's economy will be unable to achieve any significant growth if it continues on its current trajectory.

By 2006, Pakistan was already gripped by what energy analyst Muhammad Asif has described as "the worst energy crisis in the country's history." In 2008, however, things got worse, as the country absorbed the global energy shock, with oil reaching $147 a barrel. Electricity companies had become increasingly reliant on imported fuel oil and found their costs rocketing. At the same time, the government was holding down tariffs, with electricity being sold at 30 percent below cost in 2007. (The sector is still running at a loss despite subsequent efforts to charge consumers more.) The result was an explosive growth of "circular debts" (.pdf), with downstream power producers failing to pay upstream energy suppliers, who have in turn been forced to borrow large sums of money. All players rely on explicit or implicit government guarantees for their debt. The sums at stake are not in the public domain, but one company alone, the state owned Oil and Gas Development Company, is said to be owed $1.4 billion.

For consumers, the results have been no happier: Demand outstripped supply by 50 percent in the peak months of 2008, resulting in the use of regular load-shedding to ration electricity. These scheduled outages are often savage, lasting for up to 18 hours a day. In Lahore, for example, residential users are currently subject to (.pdf) more than eight hours of load-shedding each day, while the situation is worse in rural areas. Gas is also increasingly rationed, with regular and sometimes lengthy interruptions of both supplies to industry and deliveries to CNG stations, which cripples transportation.

Public reaction to the energy crisis has swung from resignation to violent protest and back again. Energy riots have become commonplace since 2008, with Asif dubbing the period "the modern Stone Age." The first day of 2009, for instance, was greeted by "blockade of roads, gunshot injuries, destruction of public and private properties, looting and clashes with the police." The offices of WAPDA, the state-owned utility, were attacked, as were the offices and homes of politicians. Pakistani authorities have lost control of the energy crisis and of the public's response to it.

Undermining Resilience?

Pakistan's struggle with resource scarcity is a reflection of a broader lack of resilience: its vulnerability to more-expensive commodities compounded by chronic underinvestment, calamitous policy decisions and a failure to respond to signs of impending crisis.

But there is also a feedback loop at work, as scarcity further undermines the immune system of a country that has long languished on the critical list. Most obvious is the economic damage scarcity causes, with the government estimating losses from the energy crisis (.pdf) at 2 percent of GDP during 2009-2010 alone. Indeed, according to the International Monetary Fund, high and volatile food and energy prices bear a heavy responsibility for knocking Pakistan's economy off the robust growth path it enjoyed between 2001 and 2007. Strong growth is simply not possible without increased access to energy, while food and fuel inflation have rapidly eroded the living standards of both the poor and the middle class. Moreover, there is no sign of Pakistan's economy breaking free of the shackles that resource scarcity has placed on it any time soon. The State Bank continues to warn of a disproportionately high risk (.pdf) to domestic growth from further increases in global commodity prices. If commodity markets sneeze, Pakistan is likely to catch something much nastier than a cold.

The politics of scarcity have also proved corrosive for a country that has a turbulent political history, and which is being pushed to the brink by multiple domestic security threats. Pakistan's government has been teetering on the edge of bankruptcy since 2008, when it required an IMF rescue. The $11 billion loan package was conditional on rapid cuts to the deficit, to be achieved by cutting energy subsidies and increasing the tax base. Attempts to implement these measures have pushed the government close to collapse. In January 2011, for example, the government tried to cut fuel subsidies but was forced into an embarrassing U-turn in order to maintain its splintering majority. (It still hopes to be the first democratically elected government for decades to serve a full term.) Energy subsidies accounted for more than 7 percent (.pdf) of all government expenditure in the second quarter of the current financial year, not including hidden subsidies to the electricity sector. As a result, the Asian Development Bank warned that the government will overshoot even its revised -- and unsustainable -- target of 5.5 percent for its annual budget deficit.

Finally, there are obvious, but unpalatable, security implications for a state that cannot meet demand for basic commodities. Few commentators see popular unrest as posing a systemic threat in Pakistan, but the examples of Egypt and elsewhere suggest the risks should not be underestimated. The country has already seen energy riots in urban areas, while protests by farmers and fishermen have also become common. Meanwhile, competition for water, and perhaps for energy, has the potential to poison already fragile relationships between Pakistan's provinces as well as to increase ethnic tensions. Water is also already one of many irritants (.pdf) in the country's relationship with India.

Of most immediate concern, however, is the opportunity offered by resource scarcity to Pakistan's vibrant ecosystem of terrorists and militants. In 2005, production from the Sui gas field, which accounts for 45 percent of national production, was halted for more than a week due to sabotage. The main gas pipeline to Lahore was cut at the same time. Attacks on gas pipelines and electricity grids have continued with depressing regularity ever since. Water is also a potential target, with analysts warning (.pdf) of the threat from the Taliban to the Tarbela Dam, Pakistan's largest dam. When a country is already teetering under the weight of resource limits, disruptive action becomes ever more appealing to militants as a means of pushing it over the edge.

Facing Up to Scarcity?

Here then, are five implications for the future.

First, scarcity already has Pakistan in its clutches, and its grip is likely to tighten. In an era of scarce resources, Pakistan brings few cards to the table, and at the same time has a knack for making the worst of its poor hand. Demographic trends mean that pressure on land and water, as well as demand for food and energy, will grow fast and for a long time. Supply constraints, especially for energy, seem very likely to constrain economic growth and may also continue to weaken governments, thereby threatening security. A resource-related collapse cannot be ruled out, especially if the price of oil climbs to unprecedented levels. The effect of climate change is further darkening an already bleak picture, and its impact will intensify. Pakistan is extremely vulnerable to climate impacts and is likely to experience increased monsoon variability, loss of glacier flow, reduced agricultural productivity and more-frequent natural disasters - all of which will threaten food, water and energy security.

Second, efforts to address these problems are very likely to fail, unless policymakers start to treat scarcity as an interrelated challenge, with implications for economics, politics, society and security, as well as a strong international dimension. As energy becomes more expensive, so does food -- due to higher costs of fertilizers and transport, for instance -- and water, due to higher extraction costs. Water scarcity degrades hydroelectric capacity and agricultural productivity. Economic stagnation and an empty public purse reduce or eliminate the country's ability to invest its way out of trouble, and starve young people of the opportunities they need to advance. Political weakness at home will increase the likelihood that the Pakistani government will continue to make a hash of its response. Meanwhile, international decisions have the potential to make things worse for Pakistan, with downstream consequences that will subsequently rebound on the rest of the world. Higher commodity prices are probably a given over the short to medium term, but steps to at least dampen volatility could help Pakistan step back from the brink.

Third, it is important not to lose sight of the potential upside. In the best-case scenario, Pakistan could become a laboratory for increasing resilience, as the intensity of its problems forces innovation at all levels from the national to the local. Already, the country is experimenting -- at scale -- with social protection and some highly original public-private partnerships (.pdf). Perhaps Pakistan could develop the next generation of social protection schemes, by including access to a basic quota of energy with existing cash transfers. It could also use public-private partnerships to expand access to solar water heaters and other proven distributed energy systems. To make the most of its agricultural potential, it could invest in readily available technologies such as drip irrigation, while shifting production from wheat to less-water-dependent crops.

Fourth, in the long term, a great deal will depend on how quickly Pakistan's explosive population growth is brought under control, so that better-educated parents -- especially mothers -- can invest more resources in fewer children. By mid-century, the country is projected to have 335 million citizens under the United Nation's medium variant scenario. That is 150 million more people than today, with no peak in sight. Under the low variant, the population would still see daunting growth, but would be less than 300 million in 2050 and close to stabilizing, offering Pakistan some chance of coping in a resource-constrained world. The relationship between demography and scarcity is a complex one, however. On the one hand, insecurity has the paradoxical effect of slowing the transition toward smaller families. On the other, demographic change is associated with urbanization and the rise of an educated middle class, which will increase competition for resources. Escape from the demographic trap, in other words, will not be easy to achieve.

Finally, we must also confront the fact that failure is likely, and that collapse cannot be ruled out. Pakistan is going to continue to face more than its fair share of disasters, and many of them will have a resource or environmental dimension. The international community still has an extremely poor understanding of what can be done to keep a fragile society functioning, and has far too few resources available to protect citizens when their governments fail them. In the long crisis of globalization, many states will struggle with living in a world where resources are scarce. Pakistan is already on the front line. We should remember that where it leads, others will follow.

David Steven is a fellow at the Center on International Cooperation at New York University.

Clinton Urges Reform at U.S.-Islamic Forum

In Washington, there’s been no shortage of conferences and discussions that have sprung up in response to the so-called Arab spring, but one gathering in particular stands out for its influential take on the revolutions that continue to rock and redefine the Arab world.

The eighth annual U.S.-Islamic World Forum, held at the Mandarin Oriental in Washington from April 12 to 14, was jam-packed with political heavy-hitters and explored a range of timely topics — from Muslim minorities in the West, to off-the-record assessments of the stalled Middle East peace process, to the roles of youth and the media in the recent uprisings.

All of these issues directly touch the forum’s sponsor, Qatar, a small but wealthy Persian Gulf emirate that is crafting a bold foreign policy in response to the turmoil and, many say, punching above its weight on the global stage.

So far there haven’t been any protests in Qtar, which in fact became the first Arab country to formally recognize the rebels in Libya and provided six fighter jets to the NATO campaign to protect civilians against Col. Muammar Qaddafi’s forces.

It’s a delicate balancing act for Qatar, a country of 1.4 million that’s surrounded by much larger and more powerful neighbors such as Saudi Arabia and Iran. But Qatar, flush with natural gas riches, wields its own considerable influence as a regional powerbroker, home of the Al Jazeera media network, and site of the 2022 World Cup, a major coup for the tiny nation.

“For the past decade or so, Qatar has skillfully straddled the competing groups of allies in the region — Egypt and Saudi Arabia versus Iran and Syria — achieving a status of neutrality that has allowed it to broker political deals in Lebanon, Sudan and Yemen,” wrote Clifford Krauss in an April 3 New York Times article. “At the same time, Al Jazeera has given a voice to dissidents, has rankled autocrats across the region, and has been both blamed and praised as a driving force behind the current ‘Arab Spring.’”

Perhaps as testament to Qatar’s growing clout, this year’s U.S.-Islamic World Forum was held for the first time ever outside of Doha, in Washington, D.C. Co-sponsored by the Qatari Ministry of Foreign Affairs along with the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, the forum’s guest list read like a who’s who in U.S. policy circles: Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.), the National Security Council’s Dennis Ross, former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, former Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, Fareed Zakaria of Time magazine and David Brooks of the New York Times, along with scholars and pundits galore.

The star attraction was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who spoke at the gala dinner at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium — echoing many of the views that made headlines the last time she swung through Doha, when she sharply, and presciently, warned that the region’s foundations were “sinking into the sand.”

“While some countries have made great strides in governance, in many others people have grown tired of corrupt institutions and a stagnant political order…. Those who cling to the status quo may be able to hold back the full impact of their countries’ problems for a little while, but not forever,” she bluntly told a group of Arab leaders, many of them U.S. allies, gathered in Doha on Jan. 13, one day before longtime Tunisian President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali was forced from of power and roughly a month before Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak met the same fate.

At the U.S.-Islamic Forum in Washington, Clinton candidly reiterated that the old Arab way of ruling is stifling development and simply no longer tenable. “Uprisings across the region have exposed myths that for too long were used to justify a stagnant status quo,” she said, above all denouncing “the myth that Arabs do not share universal human aspirations for freedom, dignity and opportunity.”

“Today’s new generation of young people rejects these false narratives,” she added. “That is why this January in Doha, just weeks after a desperate young Tunisian street vendor set fire to himself in public protest, I talked with the leaders of the region about the need to move faster to meet their people’s needs and aspirations.”

And as in Doha a few months earlier, Clinton returned to many of the same criticisms, from rampant youth unemployment to corruption-laden cronyism.

“First, can the leaders and citizens of the region reform economies that are now overly dependent on oil exports and stunted by corruption? Overall, Arab countries were less industrialized in 2007 than they were in 1970,” Clinton pointed out. “Unemployment often runs more than double the worldwide average, and even worse for women and young people. While a growing number of Arabs live in poverty, crowded into slums without sanitation, safe water or reliable electricity, a small elite has increasingly concentrated control of the region’s land and wealth in their hands.”

She noted initiatives such as “Partners for a New Beginning” to boost trade and spur foreign investment, along with direct economic assistance, to help the region create jobs and sustainable growth.

Clinton though largely confined her comments to the need for economic reform, veering away from openly advocating for regime change, although she urged Arab governments to stop muzzling dissent. “Citizens have spent decades under martial law or emergency rule. Political parties and civil society groups are subject to repression and restriction. Judicial systems are far from either free or independent. And elections, when they are held, are often rigged,” she lamented.

She also specifically called for greater women’s rights, a central theme of her diplomatic work, noting that “you cannot have a claim to a democracy if half the population is left out.”

“Now, all of these challenges — from deep unemployment to widespread corruption to the lack of respect and opportunities for women — have fueled frustration among the region’s young people. And changing leaders alone will not be enough to satisfy them — not if cronyism and closed economies continue to choke off opportunity and participation, or if citizens can’t rely on police and the courts to protect their rights,” Clinton cautioned, arguing that protesters now need to channel that energy into the hard, tedious work of building political coalitions to put the revolutions’ gains into practice.

Many people though were watching Clinton’s speech for clues on what America’s role in that process might be. So far, the Obama administration has tailored its response to each affected nation, intervening militarily in Libya while offering only tepid criticism of the clampdowns in Bahrain and Yemen, for instance — frustrating pundits looking for some sort of grand democracy-promotion doctrine for the uprisings.

Clinton though said “a one-sized-fits-all approach doesn’t make sense in such a diverse region at such a fluid time. As I have said before, the United States has specific relationships with countries in the region,” citing the decades-long friendship with Bahrain as an example.

Although she added that Bahrain’s ruling monarchy should refrain from violence, Clinton barely mentioned the brutal security crackdown that has drawn widespread condemnation by human rights groups. Likewise, she glossed over the violence targeted at protesters in Yemen, merely saying that Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh should “resolve the political impasse with the opposition so that meaningful political change can take place.”

Rather, Clinton saved her harshest words for Qaddafi, blasting the Libyan leader for turning his guns on his own people and unleashing “a rein of terror against people who had no means to defend themselves.”

The sharp differences in tone are a reflection of the struggle the United States confronts in balancing its strategic and security interests while adhering to its democratic principles (also see “As Arab World Roils in Uncertainty, What’s at Stake for U.S. Interests?” in the current May 2010 issue of The Washington Diplomat).

Yet even in Libya — where the Obama administration seems to have only reluctantly joined the air campaign against Qaddafi, adamantly refusing to put U.S. boots on the ground — an overarching theme has emerged: American power abroad, weighted down by the invasion of two Muslim nations that’s stretched U.S. military and financial resources, has its limits, and the United States can’t be a global policeman.

So unlike George W. Bush’s sweeping efforts to instill democracy in the Middle East, President Obama has made it clear that democracy can’t be dictated or shaped by the outside forces.

The secretary of state confirmed that the onus will be on Arab citizens to devise their own governments because “democracy cannot be transplanted wholesale from one country to another.”

“But there are universal rights that apply to everyone and universal values that undergird vibrant democracies everywhere,” Clinton added, citing freedom of speech and protest, human rights and “core” American values such as countering Iran and the threat of extremism.

On that front, Clinton offered another prescient tidbit, arguing that al-Qaeda’s hold on the region has been eroded — three weeks before Osama bin Laden, the terrorist group’s spiritual leader, was killed by U.S. forces, finally ending the world’s biggest manhunt.

“Al-Qaeda’s propagandists have tried to yoke the region’s peaceful popular movements to their murderous ideology. Their claims to speak for the dispossessed and downtrodden have never rung so hollow. Their arguments that the only way is violent change have never been so fully discredited,” Clinton said.

But whether Arab leaders, or the United States for that matter, get credit for ushering in fundamental change in the Arab world is a whole other question, one for which Clinton had no answer, as she openly wondered whether this forum, like so many others before it, would wind up being just another impotent talk shop.

“Will the people and leaders of the Middle East and North Africa pursue a new, more inclusive approach to solving the region’s persistent political, economic, and social challenges? Will they consolidate the progress of recent weeks and address long-denied aspirations for dignity and opportunity?” she asked. “Or, when we meet again at this forum in one year or five years or 10, will we have seen the prospects for reform fade and remember this moment as just a mirage in the desert?”

The Best Advice for Overcoming the Fear of Public Speaking

By Herb Schaffner | April 27, 2011

As a former speechwriter, publisher, and frequent presenter, I understand what drives many people to buy books about public speaking: Fear. I know because I’ve shared it.

I remember times when I walked up on a podium and took my place at the lectern in front of an audience, and suddenly felt dry mouth, sweaty palms, shaking hands, pounding chest, even my voice ringing in my ears. I’d prepared a slick speech, but not my brain for the inevitable shock of taking the stage.

Anxiety about public speaking is most commonly rooted in our past negative memories and experiences, according to Randolph and Kathleen Verderber’s classic text, The Challenge of Effective Speaking. The authors–emeritus management professors and communications scholars–say that  typically people will relive those times in their past when they were criticized, admonished or deemed in some way as unworthy of the center stage.

My book shelf contains a couple of books on overcoming fear of public speaking, and they all recommend these strategies:

• Practice, practice, practice: You need to desensitize yourself to the panic and fear of failure you associate with public speaking, Practice not only to become more comfortable with your material, but to experience the gamut of emotions that come with speaking.  Rehearse in front of friends and family members who will give you constructive feedback. Steve Jobs reportedly has become a world-class presenter through over-practicing.  ”Few speakers rehearse more than Steve Jobs,” Carmine Gallo writes in his excellent book, The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs (McGraw-Hill 2010). ”His preparation time is legendary among those closest to him.” Gallo’s book recounts how Jobs begins preparing weeks in advance, and typically spends two full days rehearsing, asking for feedback, making adjustments, and tightening his flow.
• Memorize and make eye contact.  Familiarize yourself with the stage or space where you will speak, and commit key points to memory so you can make effective eye contact with your audience. By connecting with your audience when you speak, you will benefit from the feedback of their reactions and you will find your voice.   Experts also advise: don’t practice to the point that you are bored or exhausted with the material.
• Visualize a Positive Outcome: In Small Message, Big Impact, author Terri L. Sjodin recommends visualizing how you will feel when you’re done with the speech, “on the other side” in that “space of completion, invigoration, and accomplishment.”  By visualizing a job well-done, you replace negative self-talk and put the speech in its perspective–as one event among many.
• Connect with the Audience: In Harrison Monarth and Larina Kase’s The Confident Speaker, the authors suggest speakers visualize what they have in common with the audience and collect information about your audience–from their jobs to their likely questions. By doing so, you will replace the anxious self-talk in your own mind with a new externally-focused challenge: what are the people like I will be speaking to?  If you are speaking in front of an audience that is unfamiliar to you, get an attendee list, learn about a few of the people on the list, even call a person or two who will be in attendance. or ask your host about the group.  This process is about easing your preparatory anxiety by presenting your brain with a visual and cognitive challenge–put real people and real faces in those chairs, not executioners.
• Rewrite the Negative Script: Write down the negative or fearful thoughts you have about your abilities as a speaker, including criticism you’ve heard in the past.  Then note how you felt after previous presentations were over, and how you’ve addressed or changed certain behaviors so that you are thinking more positively.  I remember being told that I spent too much time leaning away from the audience during a presentation, and I’ve consciously visualized the satisfaction of correcting that in my next speech.
• Remind Yourself, You’re Communicating, Not Performing.  If you see your speech as a chance to communicate with a group of people about something important to you, rather than a performance, the experience will feel more familiar.  In fact, the audience is far more interested in the substance of what you are presenting, than how theatrical you are in your presentation. Remind yourself of that, jotting down what you consider to be the best aspects of your speeches–in content and style. Monarth and Kase call this creating “positive expectancy”: develop a few words “that exemplify the way you want to feel as you’re talking.”

The experts also agree on these basics, which bear repeating:

• Get enough sleep for a few days ahead
• Thoroughly check out the technology you’ll be using a day ahead
• Lightly exercise a few hours before the presentation

Never, ever drink alcohol before your appearance

Normalising relations with India and America

Najam Sethi Sunday, May 01, 2011

 

Contrary to the earlier promises of the minister for water and power, it is now clear that there is going to be an acute shortage of power this summer. One expert has predicted up to 18 hours of “loadshedding” in parts of the country. This is bound to raise temperatures on the shop floor and on the street. The PML-N and other opposition parties will doubtless extract political mileage from the misery of the people and try to block the government from passing a hard budget. Thus, the absence of an energy policy in one sector of the economy could translate into a lack of economic policy for the country as a whole, and exacerbate the political crisis facing us. But we should not be surprised by this lack of policy-making in Pakistan.

In 1994, the top energy “experts” in Pakistan were bitterly opposed to the policy of the Benazir Bhutto government to commission new IPPs to cater to Pakistan’s future energy needs. Hydroelectric power, they argued, was cheaper and more efficient, while the IPPs were a royal rip-off. True, but no one had any idea how to bridge the yawning trust deficit between upper riparian Punjab and lower riparian Sindh over water sharing that had bedevilled all such project proposals. Nor did anyone know how to persuade the US to lift economic sanctions imposed in 1989 as a consequence of our nuclear programme and raise the billions of dollars needed for big water management projects.

Even the modest Ghazi-Barotha project was shelved for lack of money. Indeed, the first thing that the new government of Nawaz Sharif did in 1997 was to tear up sovereign guarantees and [sic] Senator Saif ur Rehman’s dreaded Ehtesab Bureau on the IPPs. This policy gathered momentum under the regime of General Pervez Musharraf when the higher courts were pressured to tighten the noose around the neck of Hubco, the leading IPP, and send a strong signal that multilateral foreign investment in the energy sector wasn’t welcome.

The tragedy was compounded when the civil-military bureaucracy didn’t allow the new government to export surplus power to India because trading with the enemy on the basis of MFN status was not kosher. Later, Nawaz Sharif’s peace overtures to India during the Lahore Summit in 1999 were sabotaged by the military’s Kargil misadventure, followed by General Musharraf’s misplaced concreteness at the Agra summit in 2001. General Musharraf’s pet project of the IPI pipeline also suffered from similar policy contradictions and shortcomings: on the one hand, the proposed IPI pipeline only banked on an annual rental of about US$50 million for transit to India rather than any Pakistani offer of resource stakes in the project. On the other hand, it completely ignored the US opposition to the project that put a severe constraint on its ability to borrow the big bucks needed for completion. The incredible thing was that the military high command saw no contradiction or roadblock in India’s demand for security guarantees at the end of the pipeline even as Rawalpindi seemed bent on continuing its policy of sponsoring jihad in Kashmir.

The absurdity of policy was demonstrated in 2004 when Shaukat Aziz, then prime minister, embarked on a visit to the SAARC region and tried to persuade New Delhi to buy into the IPI project while simultaneously insisting that trade between Pakistan and India could not be relaxed on the basis of granting reciprocal MFN status to India. By the time that General Musharraf realised the error of his anti-India Kargil-Jihad policy and launched a back channel for peace with India in 2005, New Delhi had made up its mind to opt for closer nuclear cooperation with the West in general and the US in particular, and closed the chapter on the IPI project.

Under the circumstances, it is doubly ironic that Pakistan should be exploring the prospects of importing electricity and fuel from India today and granting it MFN status even as it remains locked in a trust-deficit with the old enemy that has extended the conflict with it over the territory of Kashmir to the waters of Kashmir.

The lack of an energy policy framework is especially troubling in the wake of the recent floods when the issue of dams and reservoirs was raised for the umpteenth time, only to be derailed once again by recurring domestic political conflict. The tragedy is compounded by the fact that even when money is available for non-controversial water management projects under the Kerry-Lugar bill, the Pakistani military is inclined to look at the American gift horse in the mouth by staking the country’s economic policy at the altar of its national security doctrine. This explains why only a fraction of the money earmarked for Pakistan has so far come into our coffers.

Of course, the Zardari government cannot be let off the hook. It has done too little too late to stave off the impending crisis. Its rental power projects stink of kickbacks and commissions. It has dragged its feet over raising fuel prices in line with international rates, over narrowing the price gap between CNG and petrol, over injecting money into the circular debt that is at the core of the energy crisis. Indeed, if its relations with the Supreme Court had been better, it would not have been blocked from going ahead with a big LNG project. Even at this stage, the energy crisis can be partly overcome by coming to grips with the circular debt and enabling the IPPs to function at greater capacity.

The core of the issue is the gap of about Rs1000 billion between revenue and expenditure. This can be closed effectively by many means. Privatisation of the leading loss-making state enterprises can save at least Rs200 billion in annual losses, apart from replenishing the treasury’s coffers. Bringing energy prices at par with the region would help bridge the gap enormously. Freezing defense expenditures for the foreseeable future would be as relevant as the imposition of a tax on agricultural incomes. Bringing the services sector comprehensively into the tax net cannot be postponed any longer. And so on. In other words, everyone would have to sacrifice a slice of the good life for the common good.

Are we ready for a collective effort to put our house in order? Nothing will change until two preconditions are met: the national security state must give way to a social security state built on “normal” relations with India and the rest of the world, including America; and civilian democracy must deliver clean, competent, efficient and stable government. If this is too much to ask for, then we should brace ourselves for some terribly rude shocks in the near future.

The writer is Jang Group/Geo adviser on political affairs.

May/June 2011

COMMENT

The Black Swan of Cairo

How Suppressing Volatility Makes the World Less Predictable and More Dangerous
Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Mark Blyth
NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB is Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at New York University’s Polytechnic Institute [1] and the author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable [2]. MARK BLYTH is Professor of International Political Economy at Brown University [3].Why is surprise the permanent condition of the U.S. political and economic elite? In 2007-8, when the global financial system imploded, the cry that no one could have seen this coming was heard everywhere, despite the existence of numerous analyses showing that a crisis was unavoidable. It is no surprise that one hears precisely the same response today regarding the current turmoil in the Middle East. The critical issue in both cases is the artificial suppression of volatility -- the ups and downs of life -- in the name of stability. It is both misguided and dangerous to push unobserved risks further into the statistical tails of the probability distribution of outcomes and allow these high-impact, low-probability "tail risks" to disappear from policymakers' fields of observation. What the world is witnessing in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya is simply what happens when highly constrained systems explode.
Complex systems that have artificially suppressed volatility tend to become extremely fragile, while at the same time exhibiting no visible risks. In fact, they tend to be too calm and exhibit minimal variability as silent risks accumulate beneath the surface. Although the stated intention of political leaders and economic policymakers is to stabilize the system by inhibiting fluctuations, the result tends to be the opposite. These artificially constrained systems become prone to "Black Swans" -- that is, they become extremely vulnerable to large-scale events that lie far from the statistical norm and were largely unpredictable to a given set of observers.
Such environments eventually experience massive blowups, catching everyone off-guard and undoing years of stability or, in some cases, ending up far worse than they were in their initial volatile state. Indeed, the longer it takes for the blowup to occur, the worse the resulting harm in both economic and political systems.
Seeking to restrict variability seems to be good policy (who does not prefer stability to chaos?), so it is with very good intentions that policymakers unwittingly increase the risk of major blowups. And it is the same misperception of the properties of natural systems that led to both the economic crisis of 2007-8 and the current turmoil in the Arab world. The policy implications are identical: to make systems robust, all risks must be visible and out in the open -- fluctuat nec mergitur (it fluctuates but does not sink) goes the Latin saying....

April 26, 2011

SNAPSHOT

The Post-Islamist Revolutions

What the Revolts in the Arab World Mean
Asef Bayat
ASEF BAYAT is Professor of Sociology and Middle East Studies at the University of Illinois. He is the author, most recently, of Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East.How should we make sense of the revolts that have engulfed the Arab world? Some observers see them as postmodern revolutions, diffused and leaderless, with no fixed ideology. Others view them as the next wave of democratic and liberal revolutions. Most commonly, they are described as youth revolutions, since young people played a key role in initiating them. Still others argue that they may be Islamist revolutions and will turn the region into a theocracy resembling Iran. In the United States, this is the position that many Republicans hold. The Iranian hard-liners concur, insisting that the Arab revolts are inspired by Iran’s 1979 Islamic takeover.
Religious factions have been involved in the Arab protests to an extent -- al-Nahda has in Tunisia, the Muslim Brotherhood has in Egypt and Syria, and the Islamic opposition has in Yemen, for example. But in truth, the revolutions transcend the Islamist politics that reigned in the region just a few years ago. In a 2008 essay [1] on the future of Islamic revolutions, I suggested that the Iranian experience “may well remain the first and the last Islamic Revolution of our time,” for the “growth of democratic sensibilities and movements [in the Middle East] is likely to push Islamism into the ‘post-Islamist’ course, paving the way for a democratic change in which an inclusive Islam may play a significant role. The outcome may be termed ‘post-Islamist refo-lutions’ [a mix of reforms and revolutions].”
Post-Islamism is not anti-Islamic or secular; a post-Islamist movement dearly upholds religion but also highlights citizens’ rights. It aspires to a pious society within a democratic state. Early examples of such movements include the reform movement in Iran in the late 1990s and the country’s Green Movement today, Indonesia’s Prosperous Justice Party, Egypt’s Hizb al-Wasat, Morocco’s Justice and Development Party (PJD), and Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). Each was originally fundamentalist but over time came to critique Islamist excess, its violation of democratic rights, and its use of religion as a tool to sanctify political power. They all eventually opted to work within the democratic state.
The protest movements underlying the current revolutions seem set to follow these earlier post-Islamist experiments. So far, religious rhetoric has been remarkably absent, even though the participants of the Middle East’s many uprisings remain overwhelmingly people of faith. In Tunisia, protesters’ central objective was to establish a democratic government. Rachid al-Ghannouchi, the founder of Tunisia’s main Islamist party -- Islamic Nahda -- has publicly rejected a Khomeini-style state and has declined to run for president in future elections. Similarly, in Egypt the revolution demanded “change, freedom, and social justice” and was broadly secular. In fact, the major religious groups -- Gamaiyya Ansar al-Sunna al-Muhammadiyya, a Salafi movement that controls 500 mosques and scores of schools and associations; al-Azhar, the main establishmentarian Islamic institution; and the Coptic Church did not initially back the revolution. The Muslim Brotherhood’s old guard joined reluctantly and only after being pushed by the group’s younger members.
Libya’s rebel movement and provisional government, the National Council, is composed not of Islamists or al Qaeda members but of a mix of the secular and faithful, including doctors, lawyers, teachers, regime defectors, and activists working to end Muammar al-Gaddafi’s oppression. According to their spokesman, Abdul Hafidh Ghoga, a human rights lawyer, Islamist presence is minimal, since the country’s Islamists were, for the most part, crushed by Qaddafi long ago. And in Yemen and Syria, where protesters are also demanding democracy, there has also been no evidence of a major Islamist presence. In Bahrain, of course, the protests have taken on a sectarian dimension, since the monarchy is Sunni and the population is Shia, but the mainstream opposition still has largely secular demands: an elected government, a free press, the right to establish organizations, and the end to religious discrimination.
Today’s overwhelmingly civil and secular revolts represent a departure from the Arab politics of the mid-1980s and 1990s. Bolstered by Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, in those days the political class was consumed by the idea of establishing an Islamic order, including a religious state and sharia. Their primary goal was to forge an ideological community through which secular concerns would be addressed. For Islamists, the state was seen as the most powerful and efficient institution for spreading “good” and eradicating “evil.” In turn, Islamists viewed citizens as dutiful subjects and placed an emphasis on their obligations to the righteous state, with little concern for their rights.
The means for achieving such an order differed depending on the group. Militant Islamists, such as Egypt’s al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya, took up arms in the 1990s to dislodge the secular states. The moderates, or electoral Islamists, such as the Muslim Brotherhoods in various Arab countries, preferred da’wa (religious outreach) and working within the system to achieve gradual Islamist change. The militants and the moderates were united by their hostility toward the West. But their shared goals and enemies could not completely reconcile their differences on foreign policy. Shia militant groups, such as Iraq’s Hizb al-Dawa and Lebanon’s Hezbollah, allied with Iran, while their Sunni counterparts remained closer to Saudi Arabia.
Arab authoritarian states unintentionally sowed the seeds of their own demise. In the 1980s and 1990s, as populations grew and urbanized, demand for rights -- specifically for paid and secure jobs, decent housing and amenities, and respect -- rose. Of course, the economies of Arab countries could not keep pace with the demands. Throughout the 1980s, massive urban riots shook major Arab cities. Rather than taking on welfare tasks themselves, Arab governments, following the neoliberal economic agendas popular in the 1990s, tasked the growing sector of religious charities and nongovernmental organizations with providing help. Yet these arrangements proved too feeble to ameliorate the deep poverty and inequality that plague Middle Eastern societies. Indeed, the combination of new economic policies and a weak safety net increased the income gap between the rich and poor, made the working middle class more economically vulnerable, and marginalized much of the educated middle class.
The last two decades saw the expansion of a “middle-class poor”. This paradoxical class obtained college degrees, enjoyed contact with the rest of the world, used digital forms of communication, and expected a middle-class lifestyle, only to be forced to live in poverty with few prospects for improvement. Similar to the other disenfranchised groups in the Arab world, such as the marginal poor, women, and youth, the middle-class poor quietly struggled to improve their life chances. Many Muslim women strove to assert their presence in public, go to college, and pursue justice in courts. Youths forged collective identities in colleges, tea shops, and online and they attempted to affirm their autonomy and change politics by engaging in civil society and volunteer work. Yet these efforts mostly fell short. (The youth would only become a real threat to the regime in mid-2010, when social media facilitated their collective mobilization against entrenched regimes.) In the 1990s then, the most serious political challenge to the Arab regimes was the Islamist opposition, which much of the middle-class poor supported.
But recently, Islamism began to lose its appeal considerably, and the Iranian model of revolution lost much of its luster. The regime’s reputation for repression, misogyny, exclusionary attitudes, and unfulfilled promises became widely recognized, alienating its onetime sympathizers. Al Qaeda’s violence, moreover, had caused a backlash against ordinary Muslims, who found al Qaeda’s practices abhorrent to the true spirit of Islam. Much of the faithful in the Arab world decried the Islamists’ disregard for human rights, tolerance, and pluralism. They could no longer accept the exploitation of Islam as a tool for procuring power and privilege. To rescue Islam, they began to abandon the Islamic state. At the same time, the political class realized that its nationalist, anti-imperialist, and pro-Palestinian campaign would falter so long as it was associated with the demagogic rhetoric of the authoritarian regimes. Thus, the next logical step was to focus on a key internal issue: democracy.
The beginnings of a post-Islamist vision were first evident in Egypt in 2000, when a group called the Popular Committee for Solidarity with the Palestinian Intifada managed to bring together youth, civil society, and political activists to stage mass rallies in Tahrir Square against Israeli sieges of Palestinian territories. But it was the 2004 Kefaya (Enough) movement that heralded the coming of post-Islamist democratic politics: it focused more on democracy and human rights at home than on politics abroad, and it bridged ideological divides, especially between religious and secular activists and between leftists and nationalists. In doing so, it transcended exclusivist Islamist politics.
This new way of doing politics in the post 9/11 era eventually influenced the inner circle of Islamism, compelling activists and ideologues, such as the youth in the Muslim Brotherhood, to rethink their political project. Many groups -- including the reformers in Iran and Indonesia’s Prosperous Justice Party -- explicitly departed from their earlier vision of Islamism. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood took piecemeal and pragmatic steps toward recognizing the legitimacy of democracy, the separation of powers, and minority rights -- when the Kefaya movement and former U.S. President George W. Bush’s rhetoric of democratization pushed it to do so in the late 2000s. Post-Islamism emerged as a frame within which religious politics could become more inclusive. Muslims could confidently remain Muslim but also have a democratic state -- as Turkey’s example indicated. And as electronic media expanded, Muslim and secular activists alike had an unprecedented opportunity to communicate, mobilize, and place their democratic demands on the agenda. Thus, by late 2010, an invigorated new public with a novel political vision and means of achieving it had emerged; ready to lead the current revolts.
It remains to be seen whether the post-Islamist vision can be sustained after the revolutionary fervor subsides. There is certainly the possibility of a renewed fundamentalism. Already in Egypt, Salafists who opposed the revolution are regrouping in the mosques and on the street with a message that democracy is haram (forbidden). Salafis may be able to galvanize some support by capitalizing on moral and religious issues. One thing is clear, however: democrats, whether faithful or secular, have a heavy task before them. They must work to bring democratic values from the rule books to mobilize the ordinary people. If Salafis can do grass-roots work, so should democratic forces.

The Undead Chicken

April 26, 2011 · By John Feffer

With Libya, the Obama administration has followed the Chinese adage: kill the chicken to scare the monkeys. But the chicken still rules the roost in Tripoli.

Muammar Gaddafi is the undead chicken. Bashar al-Assad of Syria and King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa of Bahrain are the unscared monkeys.
The United States has shaped its policy toward the evolving situation in the Middle East according to the Chinese proverb of “killing the chicken to scare the monkey.” The Obama administration has intervened in the conflict in Libya with the apparent goal of punishing Gaddafi for cracking down on the emerging protest movement back in February. This intervention was designed to send a message to other autocrats in the region: don’t fire on your unarmed opposition — or else.
But the United States and its allies are having problems with the "or else" part of the equation. Despite going beyond a no-fly zone, they have only struck a glancing blow against Gaddafi. The chicken is bleeding, but it hasn’t yet flown the coop. Rebel forces have regained their edge in the key city of Misurata, but Gaddafi’s air strikes have also knocked out oil production in the rebel-held zone for a month. There are voices inside NATO calling for more: more U.S. involvement, a surge in air strikes, even boots on the ground. The talk of where to send Gaddafi into exile has shifted to how to handle him if he survives the onslaught.
The Obama administration continues to insist that the mission is all about protecting civilians, not instigating regime change. But that position has become ever more difficult to maintain, especially with the recent introduction of unmanned drones and their dubious record of killing large numbers of civilians in Pakistan. In Vietnam, we destroyed villages to save them; in Libya, are we killing civilians to save them? Or is U.S. policy, as in Kosovo, more about protecting U.S. soldiers by dispensing death from a distance? Humanitarian intervention is not a dinner party, as Mao Zedong might have said under the circumstances. It’s not for the squeamish. And monkeys are not scared by chickens that have only been roughed up.
In Syria and Bahrain, the authorities may well be under siege, but the unfolding of the Libya scenario has not prompted them to step down, institute major reforms, or otherwise demonstrate their fear of outside pressure.
In Bahrain, for instance, Washington has given the ruling al-Khalifa family little more than a slap on the wrist. Since the protests began in February, the government has cracked down hard. Government forces killed more than 20 protestors; several have died under suspicious circumstances in custody; more than 30 medical personnel have simply disappeared. “U.S. pressure was crucial in advancing democratic revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia, but Washington has been far from helpful for Gulf protesters,” writes Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF) contributor Richard Javad Heydarian in The Economics of the Arab Spring. “This has reinforced many protesters’ views of the United States as a staunch supporter of oppressive regimes rather than a democracy promoter.”
In addition to hosting the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet — and thereby holding it hostage — Bahrain has spooked Washington by identifying the hand of Iran behind the opposition’s activities. “With reference to Iran’s alleged covert intelligence activities in Bahrain, the leader of the National Unity Gathering party, Shaykh Abd-al-Latif al-Mahmud went so far as to claim that the Iranian charge d’affaires himself was distributing weapons to Shi’a protesters in Manama,” writes FPIF contributor Bernd Kaussler in Gulf of Mistrust.
In Syria, Assad knows that the Obama administration is not going to take on yet another military intervention, particularly in a country that could easily disintegrate into a nasty civil war. Even Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), the Hill's greatest champion of military intervention in Libya, is not calling for something similar in Syria. The Syrian government has already killed several hundred protestors and sealed off the city of Dara’a, where major protests began. As a result, the Obama administration is considering targeted sanctions. But even pulling the ambassador from Damascus is not yet on the table. If the demonstrators eventually dislodge Assad or his family or the Alawite minority that rules the country, it will not likely be because of a no-fly zone or similar military action. The most that the United States has done is fund an anti-government TV station. After all, Washington is not even sure that it wants Assad gone, since the alternatives might be less palatable.
Those who hope that the Arab Spring will turn into an Arab Summer can take some heart from the turn of events in Yemen. Readers of Dexter Filkins’ in-depth piece on Yemen in The New Yorker might come away with the impression that President Ali Abdullah Saleh could retain power forever through a mixture of brutality, pay-offs, and careful manipulation of a variety of après-moi-le-deluge threats including an emboldened al-Qaeda and a Somali-like failed state. And yet, even as Assad was sending in the tanks in Dara’a and Gaddafi was battling the rebels in Misurata, Saleh offered to meet a key opposition demand by stepping down. The catch is that he wants immunity from prosecution. The opposition, however, wants to see Saleh on trial, and who can blame them? Poles had to stomach a transition period with the much-reviled Wojciech Jaruzelski as president in 1989. In contrast, Egyptians have had the distinct pleasure of seeing Mubarak and sons go to prison. The Yemenis were aiming for an Egyptian solution but it now appears that they are settling for a Polish one.
Saleh’s sudden vulnerability stems largely from the courageous efforts of the opposition movement. He certainly didn't learn the lesson of Libya, which was that a tyrant can oppress his people, stand up to the international community, and live to rule another day. Like his fellow authoritarians in Syria and Bahrain, Muammar Gaddafi is not yet taking the golden parachute option. By maintaining his status as an undead chicken, he aims to make a monkey out of the Obama administration.

From Asia to Latin America

Shortly before the earthquake and tsunami hit Japan, a crisis hit the Japan section at the State Department. Kevin Maher, head of the Japan desk, was quoted in the Japanese press saying some very unflattering things about Okinawa and Okinawans. Maher resigned but has recently claimed that the quotes were fabricated. FPIF contributor David Vine was present at the meeting with American University students where Maher made his comments, and he corroborates the reports that Maher called Okinawans “lazy” and “extortionists.”
“Among the many ironies in Maher’s words was his characterization of Okinawans as extortionists when U.S. negotiators like Maher have long pressed the Japanese government for larger and larger contributions to support the U.S. military presence in East Asia,” Vine writes in Smearing Japan.
While the United States tries to mend fences with Japan, China is increasing its influence in Latin America. Chinese trade with the region has skyrocketed, and it has extended considerable aid as well. But China too has met with some of the same accusations of arrogance that the United States has in Asia. “Despite the strides that China has made in the region, countries remain apprehensive,” writes FPIF contributor Sebastian Castaneda in Chinese Take-Over of South America? “The WikiLeaks diplomatic cables highlighted the level of suspicion. One Colombian trade representative based in Beijing noted that his country would not be ‘walked all over’ by China ‘like Africa.’ A Mexican official stated that ‘we don’t want to be China’s next Africa.’”
Mexico, meanwhile, is being rocked by wave after wave of drug-related murders. The Mexican government has long accused the United States of lax gun laws that encourage the flow of weapons south. Now it turns out that the U.S. government itself has been secretly sending guns to drug cartels in Mexico.
“The operation, called ‘Fast and Furious,’ was run out of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) office in Phoenix, Arizona,” explains FPIF columnist Laura Carlsen in Obama’s Mexicogate? “ATF sanctioned the purchase of weapons in U.S. gun shops and tracked the smuggling route to the Mexican border. Reportedly, more than 2,500 firearms were sold to straw buyers who then handed off the weapons to gunrunners under the nose of ATF.”
Finally, in our FPIF Picks this week, FPIF contributor Greg Chaffin looks at The Sixth Crisis by Dana Allin and Steven Simon. The book, writes Chaffin in his review, “successfully provides an historical understanding of how the tensions between Israel and the Arab world have shaped the geopolitical realities of the region and influenced a looming crisis over Iranian nuclearization that will have worldwide repercussions.”

Fear of devolution

By Afiya S. Zia

IT is ironic how the very vocal supporters of a seriously flawed devolution programme under Gen Musharraf, are opposing a more comprehensive devolution initiated by the current government.

These critics accuse the present civilian rule of being a spurious democracy, presumably in comparison to the `true` democratic military rule of Musharraf. Many such allegations have not relied on legal or constitutional definitions of democracy, not even sociological arguments; but almost always on encryptions, such as the personalities of leaders, their academic (fake) qualifications or their naked profiteering from office. These may be important in assessing the quality of government but not necessarily in measuring its democratic worth. Instead, in the cacophony of political opinions, it may be fair to say that there have been two streams of more serious critical arguments concerning the flaws and shortcomings in the democratic credentials of the current government.
The first and most crucial misgiving over the democratic merit of this government has been with regard to its clash with the judiciary and the subsequent inability to resolve the institutional balance of powers. However, several commentators have held that the judiciary itself requires introspection regarding its own role in this impasse.
Second, the lack of resolve to govern when it is crucially required has exposed this government`s role in weakening democracy. By choosing to relinquish its authority, be it on issues of law and order, succumbing to unelected, non-representative religious lobbies, surrendering Fata to the army and US-led operations, reneging on reassurances to Balochistan, this government has been criminally irresponsible. Such rabbit-caught-in-the-headlights responses have amounted to lost opportunities for strengthening serious democratic change afforded in the post-Musharraf period and for which Pakistan will pay a price certainly.
However, any student of democracy will verify that those mechanisms whereby power is thwarted from a centralised system and redistributed, is a necessary component of a fair and representative political system. Even the most vociferous critics of military rule were honest in their assessment of the devolution of 2000 and acknowledged that in principle this was a feature of democracy. Of course, the political motivations behind such fig-leaf moves seeking legitimacy were immediately exposed in the contradictory outcomes. Some appreciable grass-root empowerment went unsupported due to the deliberately unsustainable projects that were launched.
The passing of the 18th Amendment is one of the very few parliamentary initiatives that suggest that this neutered government can actually be effectual if it resolves to be so. All the more reason, that oppositional voices should be muted on this point. Instead, even some pro-democrats are now objecting to the dismantling of federal ministries. Strangely, several `progressives` within civil society, who in theory have been supporting devolution, provincial autonomy and all the usual slogans that liberal democrats carry, are now demonstrating ambiguity over the wisdom of relinquishing authority from some institutions that were `doing good things` in their centralised capacity.
Granted, there has always been historical concern over possible challenges to basic liberties in the name of culture or provincial parochialism. The proposed Hasba bill in what was the NWFP is an example of such apprehension but this was resolved by invoking constitutional pre-eminence. The committee of the 18th Amendment has made it clear that constitutional supremacy and protection of fundamental rights defines the spirit of the devolution of federal authority. All the constitution is meant to do, after all, is to give us cover.
The fear of provincial elite capture, nepotism and ineptness are some of the excuses forwarded by critics. In reality, such criticism stems from a collaborative fear of loss of influence. This is particularly true of those who have made careers by way of establishing networks by pursuing personal relationships with the offices of government, the bureaucracy and donor agencies in Islamabad. It`s no secret that the more savvy and privileged maintain homes and offices in the capital to locate themselves within easy access to the corridors of centralised power. Under the 18th Amendment this may just prove to be a losing investment — not in terms of real estate but by way of power-brokering and procuring projects and contracts.
International agencies would prefer not to wander outside the confines of a city where, traditionally, the mountains have been coming to them. Now, there will have to be more direct interaction with the messy, less familiar, and non-urbane provincial actors and without the interlocution of friendly consultants to advise on the pre-decided fate of projects.
An additional reason to worry is that devolution provides an opportunity for autonomous thinking, planning and development. Under devolution, the Millennium Development Goals and other international guidelines may well be realigned for more contextualised policies that are more relevant to local priorities. So for example, `education for all` may no longer be seen as some measurable tool for increased enrolment. Instead, provincial departments may prioritise their immediate needs as the protection of schools from being bombed or preventing harassment of women on campuses. Yes, we`re told it`s not either/or, yet the fact is that a lot of donor and federal funds prioritise tailor-made projects that lend measurable `outcomes` rather than being led by locally identified, non-quantifiable needs.
Anyone who has been paying attention to the people`s movements at local levels would despair at the sheer distance and lack of responsiveness between federal authorities and the voices of peasants, lady health workers or families of the disappeared.
The devolution process under the 18th Amendment is a tremendous opportunity for us to forge relationships, influence policies and immerse ourselves in our provincial environs. It`s also a responsibility that calls on us to reflect honestly on why we fear what is in principle a fair and democratic process. If we do not embrace opportunities such as this under the pretence of losing `progress so far` then we need to rethink our tools of analysis that have made us such slavish thinkers. If devolution fails this time around we only have ourselves to blame.
The writer is a researcher who writes on socio-political issues.