The Rice mission

THE American secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, described her discussions with President Musharraf as “excellent” and termed US-Pakistan relationship as “broad and deep”. But the real purpose of Ms Rice’s visit to Islamabad — not pre-planned and more in the nature of a stopover on her way to Kabul — was not to deepen bilateral ties. She was more interested in sorting out the differences between Pakistan and Afghanistan so that they could fight the resurgence of the Taliban more effectively. This is America’s biggest worry, as it is also that of Kabul and Islamabad. But the two neighbours who are most directly affected have not managed to draw up a joint strategy to confront the common danger. At the core of the dispute is the general belief in Afghanistan — and in some quarters in America too — that Pakistan is not working hard enough to root out the Taliban. Some even suspect that it is allowing them to operate from its territory. Allegations such as these have naturally irked the Pakistan government which has repeatedly reiterated its commitment to fight against terrorism. Both Kabul and Islamabad have been trading charges and counter-charges resulting in tensions between them.

Ms Rice’s visit has achieved one important result. She has impressed on her host, and will presumably do the same in Kabul, the need for them to address these problems through the trilateral commission. In this forum which brings Afghanistan, Pakistan and the US together they can coordinate their anti-militant strategies better. As a demonstration of its good faith, Pakistan has agreed to deploy 10,000 more troops along the Afghan border where 80,000 soldiers are already stationed. This will, hopefully, help Islamabad check infiltration from the tribal areas into southern Afghanistan which has lately been the theatre of intense fighting. But at the same time Pakistan must have a free hand in having recourse to political measures to pacify the tribal areas which will have a positive effect on the security situation on the Afghan border. In that context, the American leader’s support for Islamabad’s policy of opening a political dialogue with the tribal chiefs in the territory under its own control is of great significance.

What is needed is a strategy of carrot and stick to counter terrorism in this region. Be it Afghanistan or FATA, economic and social underdevelopment and backwardness are the bane of society and together make them the breeding ground for unrest and terrorism. Even after the infusion of massive funds for the socio-economic uplift in Afghanistan and for the tribal regions to boost their development, they continue to be in a pathetic state. What is more the writ of the Afghan government doesn’t run very far from the main centres of the administration. Until these considerations are removed, law and order will continue to be a major problem and the Taliban will not be easy to tackle. The paradox is that the American military presence in Afghanistan serves as a red flag for the Taliban. Yet without a firm hand that the Americans alone can provide Afghanistan cannot be pacified and made secure. In that context it remains to be seen if the replacement of the American troops by Nato forces next month proves useful in easing the situation somewhat by making the foreign presence less provocative for the Afghans. But until poppy as a source of financial sustenance in the south is brought to an end, the Taliban may continue to be a menace. Their capacity to impose a ruthless peace in areas under their control is enormous.

Amending Hudood laws

THAT the Hudood Ordinances are draconian laws that are not in keeping with the true spirit of Islam is widely understood. This conviction is now borne out by the Council of Islamic Ideology’s recommendation on Tuesday that these laws be amended in accordance with the Quran and Sunnah and incorporated into the Pakistan Penal Code and Criminal Procedure Code. Citing the ordinances as a political tool that were promulgated without any debate or consensus among the ulema, the CII also passed a resolution suggesting that women currently imprisoned under Hudood charges be released on bail. These are welcome initiatives that need to be followed up with positive action that has been long overdue. There have been repeated calls for repeal of the Hudood laws by several of the government-instituted National Commission on the Status of Women, civil society groups and even political parties whose motions on the subject were usually dismissed by parliament. The tragic fact is that the government’s inaction in this regard has meant untold sufferings for many an innocent woman. The CII is right when it says that any amendment to the laws will not clash with Islam since these laws have not been derived from the Quran or Sunnah. What happens under the Hudood laws in their present form is that if a woman is raped, the entire burden of proof is on her and almost always she is arrested for adultery as she is unable to produce four eyewitnesses to prove her rape. The sheer injustice of these laws is apparent from this weird provision.

There are some indications that the government is keen on changing these controversial laws. That it did not oppose a PPP bill in February seeking to repeal the Hudood Ordinances is an indication of a shift in its attitude. Women parliamentarians from the ruling party who were present at the seminar on Tuesday also spoke of bringing about new legislation within two months. These are positive signs and one hopes that the government will not be held back by threats and pressures from religious parties from doings its duty. Armed with the CII’s support and the peoples’ backing it should go ahead and have the unjust laws suitably amended.

‘Kidnapped’ or PoW?

WESTERN wire agencies now seem utterly indifferent to the question of objectivity when it comes to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Last Sunday, Palestinian militants attacked Israel across the Gaza border, killed two Israeli soldiers and took one prisoner. However, Reuters and AFP, two leading western wire agencies, have termed the taking of the prisoner as an act of kidnapping. It is one thing for Israel to call it kidnapping but quite another for the wire agencies to also say so.

The Israeli idea behind calling this as kidnapping is obvious: its propaganda machinery has always portrayed Palestinian freedom fighters as terrorists and criminals. Kidnapping is done by criminals, but soldiers take enemy soldiers as prisoners of war. On Sunday, there was military action. The Palestinians had dug a tunnel, attacked Israeli targets and there was a shootout, two Israeli soldiers were killed, and the Palestinian commandos took one soldier prisoner. Israel called it “kidnapping”. If the wire agencies use kidnappings as quotes coming from Israelis, there would be no objection to it. But, instead, the wire agencies on their own call the taking of prisoners as kidnapping, as is evident from a Reuters story with a June 26 Gaza dateline, about “information on a kidnapped Israeli soldier”. If the taking of enemy soldiers as prisoners is kidnapping, then the Allied and Axis forces “kidnapped” millions of enemy soldiers during the two world wars. Also, western news agencies have dropped the world “occupied” for Palestinian areas still under Israeli occupation. Instead, they call them “disputed territories” or “the territories”. This violates all UN resolutions and the wire agencies’ own previous use of the word “occupied” -— a change since Mr Ariel Sharon became Israeli prime minister and floated the idea of staying on permanently on the West Bank.

Desperation of the poor

A FACTORY worker in Lahore killed his three minor daughters recently as he was convinced he would not be able to give them an “honourable life” with his meager earnings, however hard he may try. He did not spare even his youngest daughter, aged three, who pleaded with him to spare her. A shocked police guard shot him dead in the police lockup saying the beast had no right to live.

Earlier a woman, 50, and her daughter killed themselves in Karachi by drinking pesticide, long after her husband had died and her two sons could not get a job and had taken to drugs.

A report from Rawalpindi says that unemployment and poverty were the principal reasons for the suicide committed by 35 persons last year in the district. Mohammed Riaz committed suicide there on July 14 by hanging himself, the reason being unemployment. Father of five sons, he could not pay rent to the insistent house owner and on May 26 Rasheed Zubair, a master’s degree holder shot himself for having failed to get a job.

The police record in Rawalpindi says that more than 40 per cent of the youth committed suicide in the recent past after they had failed to get a job. Safeer Hussain, son of a deputy director in the Pakistan Telecommunications Limited, Rawalpindi shot himself dead with a pistol due to unemployment. Mohammed Saleem committed suicide by taking poison as he could not meet the school expenses of his children.

Another press report says that 8,845 persons committed suicide in the last five years in 12 central districts of Sindh. Mostly, unemployment and poverty was behind such self-destruction. The suicide rate in urban areas is far higher.

Such deaths do not cause any anxiety in official circles as they are not regarded as crimes, demanding investigation. The officials do not attach much importance to the causes of such happenings, nor do they try to come to grips with the unemployment problem. Instead they derive satisfaction from the official statistics which say that unemployment among the labourers has come down from 7.7 per cent last year to 6.5 per cent this year. The government is very pleased with its poverty figures which say it has come down from 34.46 per cent in 2001 to 23.9 per cent in 2004 and 2005 — a decline of 10.6 per cent in three years. What it means is that absolute poverty has come down from one-third to one-fourth of the population.

But that is not based on the internationally accepted formula of one dollar a day per head or Rs1,800 a month. It is based on 2,350 calories which after adjusting for inflation comes to Rs878.64 per adult per month. Hence, the World Bank and the United Nations Development Programme, which are helping Pakistan in reducing poverty, have disagreed with the Pakistan government. They estimate that poverty in Pakistan ranged between 25.7 per cent and 28.3 per cent as against the official figure of 23.9 per cent and have asked the government to improve its methodology of calculating poverty.

The World Bank has, however, finally endorsed the official figures to work with the Pakistan government in this crucial area. Pakistan’s agriculturists have been slowly replacing their labour through labour-saving mechanisation and that process has been far more and for long practised in the industrial sector. The western countries make machinery to reduce their dependence on labour and increase the productivity of its workforce.

We import that machinery and so need far less labour and reduce the number of workers as the industry expands. And textiles is Pakistan’s principal industry and tries to reduce its labour as much as it can. We have been trying to persuade some of the western countries to shift their labour intensive factories to Pakistan where labour is cheap and plenty, but we have not been successful.

The westerners argue that while our labour force is cheap, its productivity is low; hence eventually it becomes more costly. A Japanese factory owner in Pakistan asked how can a worker handle an assembly line if he can’t read the manual. So they need not only skilled workers, but also educated workers to meet the demands of modern industry.

Pakistan’s poverty dimension springs from the fact of its large population which numbers 160 million. Of that less than a third is employed, including those on part-time basis. And 46.8 million are employed, 3.6 million unemployed or 6.5 per cent of the labour force. We certainly have been coming up with very low unemployment figures compared to European countries. Germany has an unemployment rate of 11 percent, Belgium 12.1 per cent and France 7.3 per cent. In the earlier years, we admitted an unemployment rate of only 1.5 per cent which was partially corrected by Dr. Mahboob ul Haq, then a minister for planning, when he said the figure was closer to 15 per cent.

The population growth rate was earlier higher — 3.1 per cent and the infant mortality rate too was very high — 126.7 per cent per thousand in 1984-85, but that shocking infant mortality rate has come down to 77 per thousand which is still a high figure. The population growth rate is now estimated between 2.2 per cent and 2.4 per cent. Bangladesh and Sri Lanka have done far better in checking population growth.

We have to make far more efforts in that direction. Our family planning department has to work actively and openly instead of in an atmosphere of hush-hush. And our leaders have to avoid unacceptable pronouncements, like “You give birth to the children, God will take care of them” which Zia ul Haq made as a president on prime time TV.

It was an open invitation for a population explosion. It is heartening that some of our religious leaders are coming around to accept and promote family planning instead of letting the families have too many members and too many of them depend on the meager earnings of one or two persons.

That is the crux of our problem. Too few persons earning and too many depending on them. Because of our religious culture, few women are working and they earn far less than what the men get. The proportion of women working in the farms is also decreasing. Overseas Pakistanis do not want their women to work in their farms while they are absent from home.

Shortage of manpower during the great wars made the women take to work in Europe. And manual work there is not regarded as demeaning or less paying. So, they came to take care of their homes as well as their war-torn country which was short of men. Today, many of the unemployed are educated persons. That has been that way for long. When educated women are willing to work, there were transport problems as transport is too costly and irregular.

The other unemployed persons are unskilled persons. Employers now seeking skilled persons find it difficult to get such men. Some of the unemployed are highly educated.

The economy has to expand much faster than it has been. Far more industrial and infrastructural investment is needed than 16 or 17 per cent of the GDP we have been making. Investment this year touched 20 per cent of the GDP, which should soon be raised to atleast 25 per cent.

Self-employment should also be promoted through small and medium enterprises. Micro-credit should be made available in plenty through specialised micro credit institutions instead of the well employed being preferred by the banks for consumer credit. Counselling homes with helping hands should be available to assist the desperate who opt to commit suicide or kill their families.

We should have more orphanages with training homes attached to them like the Edhi homes and the highly ostentatious lifestyle which is becoming popular in our society and is promoted largely by our officials fond of wasting public money and by the corrupt and criminal elements should be discouraged instead of being patronised.

If a fourth of the country is too poor, the other 40 per cent above that is not far better. The top 20 per cent who have more than 60 per cent of the wealth and amenities should not have it all and set the pattern of austere lifestyle.

We should have a pattern of life in which the poor have more and the top rich less and social tensions and crimes far less. Otherwise how can we call ourselves an Islamic society day in and day out and a Muslim country and talk of the lofty principles of Islam when what matters is what we practise and not what we stridently preach through the electronic media?

We certainly need a society with less poverty, less unemployment, less number of persons committing suicide or taking to ghastly crimes and less of the rich wasting the national precious resources with such merry abandon.