What I’ve learned

NEARLY 50 years ago, when I arrived in Minnesota as a student fresh from Africa, I had much to learn — starting with the fact that there is nothing wimpish about wearing earmuffs when it is 15 degrees below zero. All my life since has been a learning experience.

Now I want to pass on five lessons I have learned during 10 years as secretary-general of the United Nations that I believe the community of nations needs to learn as it confronts the challenges of the 21st century.

First, in today’s world we are all responsible for each other’s security. Against such threats as nuclear proliferation, climate change, global pandemics or terrorists operating from safe havens in failed states, no nation can make itself secure by seeking supremacy over all others. Only by working to make each other secure can we hope to achieve lasting security for ourselves.

This responsibility includes our shared responsibility to protect people from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. That was accepted by all nations at last year’s UN summit.

But when we look at the murder, rape and starvation still being inflicted on the people of Darfur, we realize that such doctrines remain pure rhetoric unless those with the power to intervene effectively — by exerting political, economic or, in the last resort, military muscle — are prepared to take the lead. It also includes a responsibility to future generations to preserve resources that belong to them as well as to us. Every day that we do nothing, or too little, to prevent climate change imposes higher costs on our children.

Second, we are also responsible for each other’s welfare. Without a measure of solidarity, no society can be truly stable.

It is not realistic to think that some people can go on deriving great benefits from globalisation while billions of others are left in, or thrown into, abject poverty. We have to give all our fellow human beings at least a chance to share in our prosperity.

Third, both security and prosperity depend on respect for human rights and the rule of law.

Throughout history human life has been enriched by diversity, and different communities have learned from each other. But if our communities are to live in peace we must stress also what unites us: our common humanity and the need for our human dignity and rights to be protected by law.

That is vital for development, too. Both foreigners and a country’s own citizens are more likely to invest when their basic rights are protected and they know they will be fairly treated under the law. Policies that genuinely favour development are more likely to be adopted if the people most in need of development can make their voice heard. States need to play by the rules toward each other, as well. No community suffers from too much rule of law; many suffer from too little — and the international community is among them.

My fourth lesson, therefore, is that governments must be accountable for their actions, in the international as well as the domestic arena. Every state owes some account to other states on which its actions have a decisive impact. As things stand, poor and weak states are easily held to account, because they need foreign aid. But large and powerful states, whose actions have the greatest impact on others, can be constrained only by their own people.

That gives the people and institutions of powerful states a special responsibility to take account of global views and interests. And today they need to take into account also what we call “non-state actors.” States can no longer — if they ever could — confront global challenges alone. Increasingly, they need help from the myriad types of association in which people come together voluntarily, to profit or to think about, and change, the world.

How can states hold each other to account? Only through multilateral institutions. So my final lesson is that those institutions must be organized in a fair and democratic way, giving the poor and the weak some influence over the actions of the rich and the strong.

Developing countries should have a stronger voice in international financial institutions, whose decisions can mean life or death for their people. New permanent or long-term members should be added to the UN Security Council, whose current membership reflects the reality of 1945, not of today.

No less important, all the Security Council’s members must accept the responsibility that comes with their privilege. The council is not a stage for acting out national interests. It is the management committee of our fledgling global security system.

More than ever, Americans, like the rest of humanity, need a functioning global system. Experience has shown, time and again, that the system works poorly when the United States remains aloof but it functions much better when there is farsighted US leadership. That gives American leaders of today and tomorrow a great responsibility. The American people must see that they live up to it.

— Dawn/Washington Post Service

The writer, secretary-general of the United Nations, will leave office on December 31.

Inequality and conflict

I LEFT the readers of this column last week with the thought that it is useful for the purpose of public policymaking to segment the Pakistani population into a number of socio-economic groups, divided according to their share in national income. I said that it was useful to look at the population in terms of five broad categories: the very poor, the not so poor, the middle class, the well-to-do, and the very rich.

How many people would I put in these classes and what are the levels of their incomes? How do the people in these broad categories relate to one another and how do they view the economy’s and society’s change and development over the last few years? Change is always very disruptive and there has been great deal of it in the last few years. How will it influence the country’s future?

We can begin to answer these questions by disaggregating further the income distribution data to which I referred last week. For 2006, the country’s population is estimated at 160 million and the size of the national income at $136 billion. This gives income per head at $850. In using these numbers we should understand that they are based on a new series of national income accounts that the government began to use a couple of years ago which resulted in a significant increase in both the national income and per head income estimates.

These were not real increases but increases because of the new way of accounting. Rebasing national income accounts is something that is done on a regular basis to reflect the changes in the structure of the economy. The results accounting change produce should not be confused with real increases in income.

The increase in income per head of the population has been significant since 2003 when the economy began to grow rapidly but has not been as large as sometimes claimed by the country’s senior leaders. That those claims are being made can have serious political and social consequences since the perceived benefits on the part of sizable segments of the population may not be as large as those suggested by the government.

As I wrote in last week’s column, it was the gap between the government’s claim and the people’s perception that resulted in the BJP’s loss in the elections in India in 2004. There are enough problems in the tensions being created in society by the very uneven distribution of benefits from recent growth not to make the matter more complicated by making claims not founded on facts.

Using the estimates provided by the World Bank for the shares of income for each 20 per cent of the population, we can estimate the sizes of these socio-economic groups, their share in national income and their overall economic well-being.

I estimate that some 40 million people, or one-fourth of the population, are very poor with a total income of $14 billion and income per capita of $350. Since these people have an income per day of less than $1, the World Bank would classify them as “absolute poor”. These people earn only about 40 per cent of the national average. For my purpose, I have labelled them as the very poor. It should be interesting to note that the number of people living in absolute poverty today is more than the entire population of the country in 1947. At that time, what is Pakistan today, had a population of 32 million and the number of people who were absolute poor was estimated at about 20 million.

In other words, while the size of the population since independence has increased five-fold, the number of people living in poverty has only doubled. Viewed over the long-term, therefore, Pakistan has made considerable progress since it achieved independence almost 60 years ago.

I define the next category as the not-so-poor. This category of people numbers some 50 million with a total income of $21 billion and income per head of $425. Their income is 50 per cent of the national average. Their number is larger than that of the very poor but of the same size as the category that comes after them. The third group — the people I call the middle class — also number 50 million. Their total income is $50 billion and per capita income of $1,000, which is about 18 per cent above the national average. The average income of the middle class, therefore, is more than twice as high as that of the not-so-poor.

The upper 10 per cent of the population make up the remaining two socio-economic groups; I describe them as the well-to-do and the rich. This group of 19 million has a combined income of $51 billion which gives it an income per head of $2,700, or slightly more than three times the national average. But lumping the two categories — the well-to-do and the very rich — together would not serve our analytical purpose; they need to be separated with estimates made for their incomes and size.

I call the 0.13 per cent top people in the income distribution scale the very rich. They number some 200,000 people and have a combined income of slightly more than four billion dollars or $20,000 per head which is 24 times the national average and 57 times the average income of the very poor. Simple arithmetic then puts the number of the well-to-do at 18.8 million, with a total income of $47 billion and income per head at $2,500. The well-to-do have per capita incomes two and half times as large as that of the middle class. Having provided some rough estimates for the number of people in the five socio-economic categories with which I have been working in this analysis, it would be useful to say a word about their principal characteristics and how they interact with one another. Most of the 40 million very poor — the bottom 25 per cent of the population — live their lives at some distance from the rich. A large proportion of them are either in the country’s more backward areas (almost the entire province of Balochistan, large parts of the NWFP, northern Punjab, all of rural Sindh) or in the katchi abadis of the major cities.

The rich don’t visit these areas and do not have an appreciation of the circumstances in which the absolute poor live. Some of the very well-to-do may have some contact with the absolute poor and may know their real situation through association with charitable organisations but for most there is not much knowledge about their conditions.

Not only do the very poor live in isolation; they have benefited very little from the recent burst of growth in the country. This growth, propelled by increase in demand which in turn was helped by the boom in real estate and increase in consumer finance, was not pro-poor. It is unusual for benefits not to flow to the poorer segments of the population when the rate of growth is three times the rate of increase in population.

This relationship between high rates of growth and reduction in the level of poverty has been established by the World Bank’s empirical work. Nonetheless, because the sources of growth in Pakistan were not those that would provide much relief to the poor, the reduction in their number was small.

While the very poor live their lives out of sight of the very rich, that is not the case with the not-so-poor; there is much greater social and economic interaction between them and the very rich. A significant proportion of the 50 million not-so-poor live in the country’s major cities and large numbers of them work in the houses of the rich or in the businesses they own and run. They — the not-so-poor — therefore see for themselves the extravagant lifestyles of the very rich and how the economic opportunities offered to them by public policy have made it possible for them to live the way they do.

Growth in the economy has a profound impact on the not-so-poor. If it is brisk it pulls them out of poverty; if it falters, they can plunge back into poverty. There is an interesting example of this from Pakistan’s own history. While little serious analytical work has been done in Pakistan on the social consequences of the socialist policies followed by the administration of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. It seems that a large number of the not-so-poor fell back into poverty during this period. Since the rate of economic growth declined significantly during this time, it is ironic that what was done in the name of the poor resulted in further impoverishment for them.

The middle class is the third category in the income distribution scale with a combined income of more than two and a half times of the not-so-poor. The people in this category have benefited from growth in recent years; it is this group that has seen a significant change in their lifestyles. To take one example: they have graduated from using bicycles as the main means of transport to motorcycles. They have also seen enough increase in their disposable incomes to be able to send their children to private schools thus laying the basis for their future economic and social advance.

The well-to-do have also done well in the current economic boom. This class of nearly 19 million is behind the consumption boom that is sustaining the Pakistani economy at this time. A significant number in this income group have benefited from the structural changes that have occurred in the economy over the last two to three decades. It is this group that has created the large affluent diasporas in North America — in Canada and the United States — and, as a consequence, is drawing benefits from the capital that is flowing back into Pakistan from those residing outside the country.

The 50,000 or so families that fit in the income category of the very rich owe their wealth and income either to land they have owned for decades, perhaps for centuries, or to the industries they established since the birth of Pakistan, or to dealings in properties that are now valued very highly at the peripheries of the major cities. In all these cases the state has either helped in protecting the source of income or assisted in creating the wealth that produces it.

Those who populate the upper echelons of the economic society of Pakistan were not always in that position. This is one of the unique features of Pakistani society; a lot of the wealth that produces these incomes is of recent origin which is not the case in most of the developing world. Even those who owe their position in this group to the ownership of land can not be said to have had it brought to them through many inter-generational transfers. Some of the agricultural wealth and incomes associated with it is of relatively recent origin; some of it is the product of the extraordinary productivity increases that resulted from the green revolutions of the late 1960s and the early 1990s. The first saw very large increases in productivity in the wheat and rice-growing areas in central Punjab in the late 1960s; the second because of the productivity increases in the cotton-growing areas of southern Punjab and Sindh.

The differences in the circumstances of these five socio-economic groups could become the source of conflict if the right set of policies is not adopted. I will take up this subject next week.

Religious militancy and freedom

IN the 1960s and 1970s, the increasing support extended by the western powers to Israel and its anti-Palestinian stance gave rise to militant and assertive Islamic movements in a number of Muslim countries, particularly in the Middle East.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 led to a proliferation of such movements. More recently, the US-led aggression against Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11 has caused the situation to exacerbate.

A number of western writers, either out of sheer ignorance or driven by ulterior motives, have sparked fears that Islam is emerging as an ideological rival of the West and could become a major threat to the West-dominated international political and economic order. They argue that the acts of terrorism taking place in the world have their origin in one or the other Islamic country. They, therefore, seek to crush Islamic resurgence before it becomes so strong as to play a dominant and decisive role in the international arena.

Several misperceptions about Islam have been formed by the international community as a result of persistently negative propaganda unleashed by sections of the influential western media that has largely gone unchallenged by the Islamic world.

Unfortunately, the United States and other members of the international community, including Israel, aim to control Middle Eastern resources located primarily in Muslim countries. The goal is to establish their political and military hegemony in the region and beyond with a view to promoting other strategic interests. Muslim-dominated countries are within their rights to resist these designs and people living in occupied territories believe they are entitled to use all possible means at their disposal against the alien occupiers of their land to gain their political independence. Targeting Islam and movements for Islamic revival under the pretext of crushing terrorism are wholly unjustified.

The fact that has to be recognised is that politics and not religion has been at the root of anti-West feelings among Muslim nations from Morocco to Indonesia. These nations cannot be held morally responsible for a situation that was created by the West itself. It may be recalled that President George W. Bush had referred to the aggression of the coalition forces against Afghanistan and Iraq as a crusade. Such terminology reveals much about the beliefs of one of the main architects of the war on terror.

All religions teach love and fraternity. However, there are radical elements in all religions. These indulge in irrational behaviour that runs counter to the basic principles of their religion. Islam is a religion of peace, justice and moderation, and lays great emphasis on tolerance, friendship and compassion among human beings in all their diversity of religion, culture and language. Nevertheless, there is a section on the fringes of Muslim societies that has strayed from this path and is militant in thoughts and actions. But its status as a minority should not make adherents of other faiths prejudiced against Islam. In many instances of history, Muslims have demonstrated a greater sense of tolerance and accommodation towards the followers of other faiths than have other religious communities.

In the contemporary world, religion has become an energetic and dynamic force. Islamic resurgence has, in particular, caught the imagination of unemployed youth and the deprived sections of Muslim societies who look to their religious roots for a solution to their moral and material degradation. It is regrettable that certain myopic elements among them, instead of making religion compatible with day-to-day realities, tend to create theocratic states harking back to the Middle Ages. Needless to say, in the age of accepted liberal standards, such thinking shows a lack of insight and pragmatism on the part of over-zealous elements whose actions and thoughts have negative implications for Islam’s political future.

It is, therefore, necessary that these elements give up their inflexible and extreme positions if they are indeed serious about transforming Muslim societies for the better. The world is becoming increasingly interdependent and Muslim countries cannot find a place in the new global order unless they shun religious extremism, show tolerance towards other faiths and begin to work closely with the world’s powerful nations.

The West should also not take an unsavoury stance against Islam as the religion is not incompatible with its interests. Many Islamic countries like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan have close ties with the West.

Islamic religious extremists, who are without the needed popular support in many Muslim countries to be a viable electoral force, have often been involved in violent activities, including assassination attempts and suicide bombings, in their attempt to remove possible hurdles to the furtherance of their objectives through unconstitutional means. They, however, tend to ignore the fact that their actions not only result in chaos and violence, they also draw a wedge between them and moderate elements who are in a majority in all Muslim countries and against the criminalisation of the demand for the enforcement of Islamic law. This goal should only be considered in the light of winning political power in free, fair and peaceful elections.

The writer is a former ambassador.

A critique of hubris

MOST of what has been written about last week’s Iraq Study Group report has concentrated on Jim Baker and Lee Hamilton’s big policy critique of America’s historic humiliation. And quite right too. It was a shatteringly critical verdict and it left George Bush looking more than ever out of his depth at his White House press conference on Thursday.

Less attention has been focused on an important subtext of the report. Consider this example: “The US military has a long tradition of strong partnership between the civilian leadership of the department of defence and the uniformed services. Both have long benefited from a relationship in which the civilian leadership exercises control with the advantage of fully candid professional advice, and the military serves loyally with the understanding that its advice has been heard and valued. That tradition has frayed, and civil-military relations need to be repaired.”

Or take — and reflect on the full implication of — this one-sentence observation a little further on: “Good policy is difficult to make when information is systematically collected in a way that minimises its discrepancy with policy goals.” Or this: “A lack of coordination by senior management in Washington still hampers US contributions to Iraq’s reconstruction.”

The ISG report is a repudiation of the Bush administration’s foreign policy. But it also repudiates the way the Bush administration works internally. Nowhere is this more resonant than in what it says about the Pentagon. For it was the Pentagon that ran the administration’s Iraq policy, and the senior civilian officials — Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith — who did things their own way and marginalised any service chiefs who disagreed with them.

But the Pentagon ran the policy because the president allowed and encouraged them to do so. This was a huge disfigurement of the traditional inter-agency way of doing things, in which the president, as commander-in-chief, was supposed to make the decisions after taking advice from the inter-agency policy-making apparatus coordinated by the national security adviser. It was institutional failure on the epic scale.

As a number of recent books describe, notably Bob Woodward’s State of Denial and Ron Suskind’s The One-Percent Doctrine, this has been a recipe for bad decisions. As Suskind puts it: “Sober due diligence, with an eye to the way previous administrations have thought through a standard array of challenges facing the United States, creates, in fact, a kind of check on executive power and prerogative.”

But Bush has never wanted that kind of check or balance. He is suspicious of officials, bureaucrats and departments. He is impatient with policy intellectuals. He doesn’t want information. He prides himself on his certainties. As Woodward says, Bush has a “distrust of the inter-agency”. That instinct became even more pronounced after 9/11. And as the challenges of Iraq grew more daunting, he wanted a process even less.

The important American commentator Mark Danner sums it up this way in the current New York Review of Books: “What is striking is the way that the most momentous of decisions were taken in the most shockingly haphazard ways, with the power in the hands of a few Pentagon civilians who knew little of Iraq or the region, the expertise of the rest of the government almost wholly excluded, and the president and his highest officials looking on.”

It is a terrible indictment of the way the Iraq policy was generated and maintained. Baker-Hamilton is in part a revolt against this broken form of government. In its recommendation 46, the ISG calls on the new defence secretary, Robert Gates (who just happens to have been a member of the group), to do what he can to rebuild the old pre-Bush/Rumsfeld system, so that the senior military “feel free to offer independent advice not only to the civilian leadership in the Pentagon but also to the president and the national security council”.

The sound of stable doors banging shut after the horses have bolted is deafening. Nevertheless it is hard not to hear also, in the distance, echoes of our own local difficulties. For broken processes have helped to produce broken policies towards Iraq in Britain too.

—Dawn/Guardian Service