West Asia: new Great Game

IF the space above a column in a newspaper allowed a longer headline than the one I have given to today’s article it would have read as follows: “West Asia: A cesspool of Islamic fundamentalism or a new and resurgent economic region?” Before I get to the point of these two articles — one today and the next to follow a day later — I would like to recount a personal experience.

Some fifteen years ago — in the fall of 1986 — Barber Conable, who was then the president of the World Bank, invited me to join a group of 21 senior managers assembled to draw up a new organizational make-up for the institution. We worked for three months and came up with an entirely new structure. According to our scheme, the Bank was to be divided into three parts: one responsible for all lending operations, the second for the Bank’s finances and the third for formulating development policy.

Moeen Qureshi was placed in charge of operations; Ernest Stern, an American, was appointed the chief financial officer; Willie Wapenhans, a German, was put at the head of the development policy staff. For operational purposes the Bank was divided into four parts: Asia; Latin America; Africa; Europe, the Middle East and North Africa (EMNA). Each was headed by a vice-president. I was later appointed to head the Latin American region.

One of my contributions to the new structure was to persuade the Bank’s new management to move Pakistan from Asia and to place it in the EMNA region. I was convinced then — and I am convinced now — that that was the right geographic place for Pakistan. That is where Pakistan remained for almost five years. In the middle of 1991, the Bank got a new president who carried out another re-organization. Qureshi left the Bank and Stern moved over from finance to operations.

Stern, well known in the institution for his affection for India, was troubled that in a region as large as Asia, his favourite country did not receive the attention it deserved. He was also of the view that Pakistan’s fortunes lay in South Asia and that it was an anomaly to place it with the Muslim countries of West Asia. Accordingly, Asia was divided into two parts: East and South Asia and Pakistan was moved into the South Asia region. This is where it remains today. But this is not where it belongs. In fact, in the IMF’s geography, Pakistan is in the Middle East department. Lately, economists have begun to put emphasis on geography, in part because of the importance regional trading arrangements are acquiring in the global economy. The European Union evolved from a trading association founded soon after the end of the Second World War. East Asia has a couple of trading arrangements in place. One of them — the APEC — is considered important enough for President George W. Bush to leave Washington while his country was at war to attend the organization’s summit meeting held in Shanghai. Africa also has a number of arrangements in place. It is only South and West Asia in which regional cooperation has not flourished. This is mostly because of inter-country rivalries. That may change as a result of the current war in Afghanistan.

The terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, the ensuing war in Afghanistan, the collapse of the Taliban regime, and the resumption of inter-tribal and inter-ethnic conflict in Afghanistan have brought the spotlight to shine on the Muslim world of West Asia. My purpose in these articles is not to focus a great deal on this conflict but to highlight some of the economic, social and political characteristics of this region. The current war against international terrorism will be a sub-theme that will run through some of what I have in mind.

I will begin by stating my main conclusions. There are three of them. One, there are many reasons why West Asia could make an economic, social and political success of itself provided it takes note of the evolving global situation and provided it carefully assesses its own potential. Two, for that to happen, a great deal must change in the region, including the structure of the economy and the shape of politics. At the same time, the business community in the region will have to play an active role. Three, if the business community gets mobilized and if it is supported by the various states of the region, there could be a quick economic response helped in part by international investors.

To reach these three conclusions, I will present my argument in three parts. I will identify the main economic, political and social characteristics of the region. I will then focus on what I consider to be the region’s main problems. Finally, I will indicate what I consider to be the region’s main economic assets, suggest how these assets could be developed to benefit the area, and speculate on how the community of international investors may respond once the region begins to work on the realization of its considerable but yet to be fully tapped potential.

My West Asia includes 25 countries. The region begins with Morocco and includes all countries of the Maghreb, Turkey, the nations of Central Asia, Afghanistan, Iran, the Saudi Arabian Peninsula and Pakistan. It is a sizable region in terms of both area and population. Nearly 600 million people live in the region. Other than its size, what are the main characteristics of the region?

Islam is the predominant religion of the region. Nearly 90 per cent of the population — 500 million people — are Muslims. In other words, nearly one-half of the world’s total Muslim population lives in this area. But with the exception of Saudi Arabia, Iran and a few small countries in the Gulf, Islam has not influenced the region’s political structure.

The region has a very young population — in fact, the youngest in the world. Some 52 per cent of the people in the region are below the age of 18. America, with 282 million people, has 72 million young people — those under the age of 18. West Asia has more than four times as many young people as America — more than 300 million.

In terms of population, Pakistan, with 140 million people, is the region’s largest country. Although several countries in the region have seen fairly significant declines in fertility — for instance, Saudi Arabia’s population growth declined from 5.2 to 3.4 per cent a year within one decade — the region continues to have the most rapidly growing population in the world. Today, there are only two countries in the world with population growth rates of more than 4 percent. Both of them — Jordan and Yemen — are in this region. This is the reason why the region has such a young population. By 2050, the region will more than double its population to 1.25 billion, with Pakistan at 350 million people still the largest country.

West Asia is a relatively well-to-do region with a combined gross domestic product of $864 billion. The regional per capita income is close to $1,500 which places it in the World Bank’s category of middle-income countries. But there is considerable difference in the levels of income. The UAE, with income per head of $18,000, is the region’s richest country. Afghanistan, with per capita income of $150, is the poorest. In addition to the UAE, there are four relatively prosperous countries: Saudi Arabia ($6900), Oman ($6070), Lebanon ($3,750), and Turkey ($3,050).

West Asia is a male-dominated region with one of the lowest participation rates for women in the workforce. In middle-income countries, it is normal for over 40 per cent of all women to be working. In West Asia, the average is only 28 per cent with Saudi Arabia registering the lowest level — only 5 per cent — of any country in the world. By keeping such a large number of women out of the workforce, the region is constraining its economic development.

The region has some of the most unevenly distributed incomes in the world. When income distribution is measured as the ratio between the shares of the top 10 per cent of the population to the bottom 10 per cent, anything more than six to seven connotes a less than satisfactory situation. In other words, we should worry if the rich — the top 10 per cent of the population — earn more than six to seven times the incomes of the poor — the bottom 10 per cent. However, the regional average is more than 10. In Turkey, which has the worst income distribution of all countries for which we have data, the rich receive more than fourteen times the share of the poor.

Turkey is the only country in the region which has a functioning democracy. All other countries have political systems that are considerably less than fully representative. A recent analysis in The New York Times places the political systems in the region’s countries into nine categories ranging from the democratic (Turkey) to the totally dysfunctional (Afghanistan). Most of the countries in the region are either monarchies or “limited” democracies.

What are the region’s main problems? I would like to focus on three. To begin with, a word on politics. Much of the region is politically unsettled. When we combine the following five features — a very young population, a population that is rapidly urbanizing, a population which discriminates against women, a population in which the distribution of income is highly skewed, and a population that has to endure highly repressive political systems — it is not surprising that we find so much turmoil in the region.

That this is indeed the case has come to be appreciated following the terrorist attacks of September 11. “Why do they hate us so much?” is a question that has been repeatedly asked. The “they” in this question are the young people of West Asia some of whom were responsible for the terrorist attacks. The “us” in the question refers to the country, America, and the people, the Americans. The common perception in many of these countries is that somehow the Americans are responsible for the glaring income inequality and poorly representative political systems.

The region’s economy has a very narrow base and is excessively dependent on one natural resource, oil. I don’t have to dwell too much on the importance of oil for the region. The oil exporting countries of the Middle East sit on the largest remaining global oil reserves in the world. Saudi Arabia does not only have the largest reserve, it is also the largest producer and exporter of oil. Iran, Iraq, Kuwait are all major oil-dependent economies. Qatar has a lot of gas. And, now the states around the Caspian Sea are becoming major oil producers. Depending on how the world — the world of politics as well as the global economy — reshapes itself, the Central Asian states could also become major exporters of oil and gas.

History a la Joshi: LETTER FROM NEW DELHI

IT all began with a question on the ‘Policy for Writing Textbooks’ in the Rajya Sabha. Human Resource Development Minister Murli Manohar Joshi was not even present in the House to give reply. He had left it to his minister of state.

Leader of the House Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh was equally indifferent. He did not even come to the House during the uproar which lasted more than an hour after a senior MP characterized the policy as the Talibanization of education.

Talibanization may be a strong word to use for the deletion of certain portions from school history textbooks. But what the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) and the Central Board of Secondary Education(CBSE) have jointly done to mutilate history is in no way less than what the Taliban have done to disfigure human heritage.

Since the ruling National Democratic Alliance and the opposition are so apart and politically so tense, particularly owing to the coming UP election, that a sharp expression by either side throws parliament out of gear. It is not what is said is unbearable; it is the attitude which has become overbearing.

The Taliban have come a cropper because of their fundamentalist outlook. It is only a matter of time when Joshi, under whose orders history has been communalized, will become a relic of the past and relegated to a footnote in history books. A person who refuses to accept anything which conflicts with the interpretation of his beliefs is too rigid to fit into the modern society. The tragedy is that the harm Joshi is doing to the country’s ethos of pluralism may be difficult to erase.

Joshi initiated the debate that some ‘distortions’ had crept into history books because the communist-minded teachers had authored them. But he never spelled out the distortions. Without any debate on what he found objectionable, he ordered the deletions.

Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee has said that they are willing to have a debate on what he has described as ‘one-sided history’. But should there have been deletions before the debate? It is of little consequence now when Joshi has presented the country with a fait accompli. His fiat goes to the extent of saying that no class can even discuss the portions his ministry has found to be twisted.

The deletions suggest that Joshi is annoyed mainly over the references to the killing of cows and the eating of beef. For example, one expunged portions is that cattle wealth was decimated because cows and bullocks were killed in numerous vedic sacrifices. Another is that “beef was served as a mark of honour to special guests in the vedic times” and that “in later centuries the Brahmins were forbidden to eat beef”. Yet another is about the feeling of ‘antipathy’ among the Brahmins towards Asoka and Buddhism because of ‘their anti-sacrifice attitude’.

Such deletions smack of religious bias, not of concern over the accuracy of history. That the Hindus do not eat beef (even the Kashmiri Muslims do not) is a well-known fact. There have been demonstrations by the sadhus in the past to demand a ban on cow-slaughter. They were once able to surround the Parliament House.

Some of those who are currently at the helm of affairs were behind the agitation at that time. Still Mrs Indira Gandhi’s government was able to resist the pressure and endorse the views of the Nehru-appointed committee that a total ban on slaughter of all cattle would not be in the best interest of the country as it was merely a negative approach.

Joshi has also expunged one reference to the caste system as if the deletion will absolve Hinduism of the man-made differences. Why should he fight shy of students knowing that the caste is the worst kind of slavery that the upper castes have been sustaining for centuries? The portion deleted states a fact which cannot be wiped out even if its reference is dropped from history books.

The expunged text is:The rigid bind of the caste system which started out as division of labour but was then ‘made hereditary by law and religion’. The lower castes worked and toiled in the belief that they “would deserve a better life in the next world or birth — What was done by slaves and other producing sections in Greece and Rome under the threat of whip was done by vaishyas and shudras out of conviction formed through Brahminical indoctrination and the varna system.”

Whom are we trying to fool when we shut our eyes to the reality? The caste into which one is born is the result of one’s past life, Hindus believe. One will be reborn in a future life in accordance with one’s behaviour in this life. This record of behaviour through former lives is a man’s karma. A man rises in caste through life after life — or through incarnation after incarnationas his karma shows a record of increasing virtue.

True, the constitution of India today outlaws ‘untouchability’, and makes it a criminal offence to discriminate against anyone because of his caste, colour or creed. But the caste system is still very strong because of its basis in religion. Joshi or his party, the BJP, does not want to effect reforms in Hinduism and prefers to stay content with the rewriting of history.

In fact, this is befooling oneself. Proposals are afoot to abolish history books and replace them with a treatise on culture. One can imagine the hacking job Joshi will do. He is too biased and too fundamentalist to take any objective stand. He does not even understand what our composite culture means, let alone appreciate it.

I do not agree with those who attribute more importance to archaeological evidence than to traditions and writings connected with the Ramayana, the Mahabharata and saints like Guru Teg Bahadur. Whether they are myths, mere mythology or something else, they are part and parcel of Hinduism. They cannot be rejected — historian Vincent Smith tried to do that — just because there is no monument to support their veracity. If Joshi had allowed a discussion on that, students would have themselves rejected the thesis. Hinduism is more a way of life than the rituals which are increasingly entangling it. Openness is its strength, not weakness. Let it stay that way.

The government’s attitude to parochialize history is, however, only one example. For the first time in the last 40 years, when the International Trade Fair at Delhi became an annual event, handicrafts by Muslims and Sikhs have been displayed separately at a section called, ‘Minority Handicrafts’. Handicrafts are either good or bad, they are not tagged as minority or majority. During the British rule, earthen pitchers were categorized as Hindu water and Muslim water.

Joshi’s exercise reminds me of the mess that Pakistan has made of history. It has started history with the arrival of Muslims in the subcontinent, nearly 1400 years ago. The Moenjedaro and the Taxila relics in Pakistan testify to the culture of thousands of years back. But their mention has been deleted because that was the Hindu period and the days of togetherness. What a way to close eyes to facts!History is history, you cannot choose certain events and reject the rest.

Akbar tried to fight against orthodoxy. Pakistan Studies, a compulsory text book for the intermediate class in Pakistan, says: As a result of Akbar’s liberal policies the very existence of true Islam in South Asia was threatened. Those who opposed these policies were either martyred or exiled. All of this contributed immensely to the resolution of the Hindu nationalists. Imagine their pleasure at the Muslim adoption of Hindu dress and customs. Did Joshi take his cue from here?

My Lai revisited: ALL OVER THE PLACE

AN eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth may be rough justice but has the virtue of proportionality. In the practice of capital punishment, some moderation is shown. Only the alleged killer is executed, not his family, friends and neighbours.

The punishment is individual, not collective. This does not make capital punishment a less barbaric practice but it does not make it a carnage or a festival of murder. The rules of war, of which the Geneva Convention deals with the humanity of war, if this is not a cruel irony and a contradiction in terms, has been cited on a number of occasions in the present war in Afghanistan particularly in regard to what transpired at Qala-i-Jangi where a mini-massacre occurred.

Adding to the muscle of the Northern Alliance was the help given by US Air Force. A clear case of collusion is established but then the official response is that this is war. When the Nazis were sending Jews to gas chambers by the thousands, and which is known as the Holocaust, the Nazis too could have claimed that that was war. Not only was this outlandish claim rejected, but the Nazis were tried as war criminals.

This newspaper wrote an editorial and likened Qala-i-Jangi to My Lai and this brought a self-righteous response from the spokesman for the Coalition Information Service in Islamabad. The gist of which was that this was war and there was no independent confirmation. How can there be independent confirmation when all calls for an investigation have to be rebuffed?

My Lai happened a long time ago and it is possible that most people may have only a vague memory of it. Let me refresh the memories of those who have forgotten. I can do no better than to quote from Neil Sheehan’s Pulitzer Prize winning book A Bright Shining Lie. “On the morning of March 16, 1968, a massacre occurred in the village of Son My on the south China Sea about seven miles northeast of Quang Ngai town. The largest killing took place at a hamlet called My Lai and was directed by a second lieutenant named William Calley Jr., a platoon leader in the 23rd Infantry Division (Americal), which Task Force Oregon had been designated.

“Some troops refused to participate in the massacre; their refusal did not restrain their fellows. The American soldiers and junior officers shot old men, women, boys, girls and babies. One soldier missed a baby lying on the ground twice with a .45 pistol and his comrades laughed at his marksmanship. He stood over the child and fired a third time. The soldiers beat women with rifle butts and raped some and sodomized others before shooting them.

“They shot the water buffaloes, the pigs and the chickens. They threw the dead animals into the wells to poison the water. They tossed satchel charges into the bomb shelters under the houses. A lot of the inhabitants had fled into the shelters. Those who leaped out to escape the explosives were gunned down. All of the houses were put to the torch.

“Lieutenant Calley, who herded many of his victims into an irrigation ditch and filled it with corpses, was the only officer or soldier to be convicted of a crime. He was accused of personally killing 109 Vietnamese. A court-martial convicted him of premeditated murder of at least twenty-two, including babies, and sentenced him to life in prison at hard labour. President Nixon intervened for him. Calley was confined for three years, most of the time, under house arrest in his apartment at Fort Benning with visitation rights for a girlfriend”.

There is no doubt that Calley was a sadist but what of the other officers and men? Sheehan makes the point that the men had been so brutalized by the cycle of meaningless violence and they had themselves seen their comrades and friends killed by the mines and booby-traps set by the local guerillas that they came to see all Vietnamese of the country side as vermin to be exterminated.

We live in a strange world. The taking of a single human life is considered murder and is punishable in most countries by death, be it the gallows, the electric chair, the gas chamber, the guillotine, lethal injections or the sword. But the killing of hundreds comes in the category of collateral damage, as something unavoidable in the pursuit of some honourable goal.

When I look at television pictures of women and children sitting by the side of their dead husband or parent, I often wonder whether those who send armies into battle feel the same as I do — a sense of shame at the human condition. And do such images haunt them when they are sleeping in their beds?

An interim coalition government in Afghanistan offset by the dangerous escalation of violence in the Middle East and when that fire is doused, something else will happen. War has become a way of life, a permanent condition. Peace is a period for the world to catch its breath before the killings start all over again. Only the villains keep changing.

Light from the south

HERE’S a sign of the times that is at once sobering and comforting: At a moment when the U.S. government is pulling down the shades on its inner workings — arguing, for instance, that the public should be shut out if terrorism suspects are put on trial — America’s once secretive southern neighbour is boldly shedding light on its actions.

Never in Mexico’s troubled history had one of its presidents acknowledged that government agencies and officials participated in the torture, disappearance or execution of citizens. President Vicente Fox has just changed that.

The National Human Rights Commission has documented 275 cases of Mexican security forces illegally detaining, torturing and, in several cases, executing citizens during the government’s clandestine war against leftist insurgents in the 1970s and ’80s.

Bucking Mexican leaders’ tradition of pretending that such abuses didn’t happen, Fox accepted the report at a solemn ceremony in an infamous old prison that has been turned into a national archive.

After formally accepting the report, Fox announced he will name a special prosecutor to follow up in the investigation and to try suspects in the atrocities. That’s good but not enough. Past special prosecutors in Mexico have failed miserably. One even planted a body in the yard of the home of the accused.

Fox must make sure that the prosecutor’s office is honest, independent, fully staffed and funded. If he is to build trust, the results must appear soon, while he’s still in office. Then Fox must make sure that the process he has begun. —Los Angeles Times

Time to give up false notions: Muslims and the West

[The following is the remaining part of the article “Muslims and the West”. First part of the article appeared in Monday’s issue.]

DESPITE widespread resistance from the orthodox, the logic of modernity found 19th century Muslim adherents. Modernizers such as Mohammed Abduh and Rashid Rida of Egypt, Sayyed Ahmad Khan of India, and Jamaluddin Afghani (who belonged everywhere), wished to adapt Islam to the times, interpret the Quran in ways consistent with modern science, and discard the Hadith (ways of the Prophet) in favour of the Qur’an. Others seized on the modern idea of the nation-state.

It is crucial to note that not a single Muslim nationalist leader of the 20th century was a fundamentalist. Turkey’s Kemal Ataturk, Algeria’s Ahmed Ben Bella, Indonesia’s Sukarno, Pakistan’s Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, and Iran’s Mohammed Mosaddeq all sought to organize their societies on the basis of secular values.

However, Muslim and Arab nationalism, part of a larger anti-colonial nationalist current across the Third World, included the desire to control and use national resources for domestic benefit. The conflict with Western greed was inevitable. The imperial interests of Britain, and later the United States, feared independent nationalism. Anyone willing to collaborate was preferred, even the ultra-conservative Islamic regime of Saudi Arabia. In time, as the cold war pressed in, nationalism became intolerable. In 1953, Mosaddeq of Iran was overthrown in a CIA coup, replaced by Reza Shah Pahlavi. Britain targeted Nasser. Indonesia’s Sukarno was replaced by Suharto after a bloody coup that left a million dead.

Pressed from outside, corrupt and incompetent from within, secular governments proved unable to defend national interests or deliver social justice. They began to frustrate democracy. These failures left a vacuum which Islamic religious movements grew to fill. After the fall of the Shah, Iran underwent a bloody revolution under Ayatollah Khomeini. General Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq ruled Pakistan for eleven hideous years and strove to Islamize both state and society. In Sudan an Islamic state arose under Jaafar al-Nimeiry; amputation of hands and limbs became common. Decades ago the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) was the most powerful Palestinian organization, and largely secular. After its defeat in 1982 in Beirut, it was largely eclipsed by Hamas, a fundamentalist Muslim movement.

The lack of scruple and the pursuit of power by the United States combined fatally with this tide in the Muslim world in 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. With Pakistan’s Zia-ul-Haq as America’s foremost ally, the CIA advertised for, and openly recruited, Islamic holy warriors from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Algeria. Radical Islam went into overdrive as its superpower ally and mentor funnelled support to the mujahideen, and Ronald Reagan feted them on the lawn of White House, lavishing praise on “brave freedom fighters challenging the Evil Empire”.

After the Soviet Union collapsed the United States walked away from an Afghanistan in shambles, its own mission accomplished. The Taliban emerged; Osama bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda made Afghanistan their base. Other groups of holy warriors learned from the Afghan example and took up arms in their own countries.

At least until September 11, US policy makers were unrepentant. A few years ago, Carter’s U.S. national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski was asked by the Paris weekly Nouvel Observateur whether in retrospect, given that “Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace today”, US policy might have been a mistake. Brzezinski retorted: “What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?”

But Brzezinski’s “stirred up Moslems” wanted to change the world; and in this they were destined to succeed. With this, we conclude our history primer for the 700 years uptil September 11, 2001.

What should thoughtful people infer from this whole narrative? I think the inferences are several — and different for different protagonists.

For Muslims, it is time to stop wallowing in self-pity: Muslims are not helpless victims of conspiracies hatched by an all-powerful, malicious West. The fact is that the decline of Islamic greatness took place long before the age of mercantile imperialism. The causes were essentially internal. Therefore Muslims must introspect, and ask what went wrong.

Muslims must recognize that their societies are far larger, more diverse and complex than the small homogeneous tribal society in Arabia 1400 hundred years ago. It is therefore time to renounce the idea that Islam can survive and prosper only in an Islamic state run according to Islamic “sharia” law. Muslims need a secular and democratic state that respects religious freedom, human dignity, and is founded on the principle that power belongs to the people. This means confronting and rejecting the claim by orthodox Islamic scholars that in an Islamic state sovereignty does not belong to the people but, instead, to the viceregents of Allah (Khilafat-al-Arz) or Islamic jurists (Vilayat-e-Faqih).

Muslims must not look towards the likes of Osama bin Laden; such people have no real answer and can offer no real positive alternative. To glorify their terrorism is a hideous mistake — the unremitting slaughter of Shias, Christians, and Ahmadis in their places of worship in Pakistan, and of other minorities in other Muslim countries, is proof that all terrorism is not about the revolt of the dispossessed.

The United States too must confront bitter truths. It is a fact that the messages of George W. Bush and Tony Blair fall flat while those of Osama bin Laden, whether he lives or dies, resonate strongly across the Muslim world. Osama’s religious extremism turns off many Muslims, but they find his political message easy to relate to — stop the dispossession of the Palestinians, stop propping up corrupt and despotic regimes across the world just because they serve US interests.

Americans will also have to accept that the United States is past the peak of its imperial power; the ‘50s and ‘60s are gone for good. Its triumphalism and disdain for international law is creating enemies everywhere, not just among Muslims. Therefore they must become less arrogant, and more like other peoples of this world. While the US will remain a superpower for some time to come, it is inevitably going to become less and less “super”.

There are compelling economic and military reasons for this. For example, China’s economy is growing at 7 per cent per year while the US economy is in recession. India, too, is coming up very rapidly. In military terms, superiority in the air or in space is no longer enough to ensure security. In how many countries can US citizens safely walk the streets today?

Our collective survival lies in recognizing that religion is not the solution; neither is nationalism. Both are divisive, embedding within us false notions of superiority and arrogant pride that are difficult to erase. We have but one choice: the path of secular humanism, based upon the principles of logic and reason. This alone offers the hope of providing everybody on this globe with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.

Return of cheap oil

THE decline of the world economy has one bright spot. Cheap oil has returned, making a recovery more likely. The price affects not just motorists but every business. Economists say that the $12-per-barrel drop since Sept. 11 is as big a stimulus as a $250-billion tax cut.

The price slide is being accelerated by Russia’s increased production. Over the past two years Russia has dramatically increased its oil exports, now expected to rise to 5.34 million barrels a day. The Russian economy has profited greatly from increased oil revenues. Moreover, President Vladimir V. Putin has promised to try to make up any difference should there be a crisis in the Middle East as the United States battles terrorism.

The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, which is mostly made up of big Middle East producers, is desperate to prop up prices and has threatened a price war. The Mideast states that form OPEC’s core can ill afford to lose revenue.

The last time prices crashed, three years ago, Saudi Arabia had to borrow money from abroad and attempted to institute austerity measures, which were later abandoned.

Now, Saudi Arabia is threatening to flood the world with oil to make it ruinously costly for Russia to keep producing; Saudi Arabia has at least 3 million more barrels a day that it can pump. The three biggest oil producers who are not members of OPEC _ Russia, Mexico and Norway _ will probably reconsider their current refusal to cut back production. —Los Angeles Times