Security state syndrome

THE primary responsibility of a modern state is the promotion of the welfare of its people in a peaceful atmosphere which is free of fear and coercion and in which the citizens can fully realise their God-given potential.

The achievement of this objective certainly necessitates the protection of the state from external aggression. However, excessive focus on external security takes away precious resources from the tasks of the development and welfare of the people to the military sector.

Therefore, when the state leadership becomes obsessed with the objective of safeguarding external security leading to the phenomenon of the security state syndrome, it fails in its primary purpose which is the promotion of the welfare of the people.

Unfortunately, Pakistan, due to a variety of internal and external factors, has been a victim of the security state syndrome during most of its chequered history. The state machinery has been dominated by the military because of repeated military takeovers and the consequent stunted evolution of the political system. Even when the army was not at the helm of affairs, it manipulated the government machinery from behind the scenes. A hostile neighbour in the form of India accentuated the feeling of insecurity among our policymakers.

The security state syndrome from which Pakistan has suffered basically had five main features. Firstly, it resulted in the sacrificing of the objectives of economic development of the country and raising the standard of living of the people at the altar of state security. It is interesting to note that during the 1980s when a military dictator was ruling the country, 6.5 per cent of the GDP was allocated for defence as against only 0.3 per cent of GDP for education on which the future of Pakistan depended. (The international norm for expenditure on education is four per cent of GDP.)

Expenditure on health was only 0.8 per cent of GDP during that period. Expenditure on education improved to 2.3 per cent of GDP during the 1990s when civilian governments were in place but still defence continued to claim a high proportion of national resources amounting to 5.6 per cent of GDP.

The situation worsened again during Musharraf’s military rule with expenditure on education declining to 1.9 per cent of GDP in 2005-06 while 3.2 per cent of GDP was diverted for military purposes. Defence expenditure would have been much higher had military pensions been added to it as was the practice before the military takeover in 1999 and the amount of Rs60bn paid annually by the US directly to our military establishment for anti-terrorism operations.

As for the current financial year, defence has again claimed the lion’s share amounting roughly to Rs430bn if one adds military pensions, contribution by the US for anti-terrorism operations, etc. to the budgetary allocation of Rs275bn.

The neglect of economic development, particularly human resource development, has not allowed the country to realise fully its potential for economic growth. This factor combined with growing inequalities of income and wealth has resulted in the growing incidence of poverty in the country. The frequent cases of young men and women committing suicide because of poverty show the miserable conditions in which the majority of the people live.

Secondly, the military exaggerated the potential threat from India by playing up the Kashmir issue from time to time to justify the massive allocation of resources for defence. In the process, it led the country into a major war in 1965 and a minor one in 1999. In retrospect, both failed to achieve their objectives and the latter unquestionably was a strategic blunder of monumental proportions.

Thirdly, Pakistan also presents the classic case of a country whose leadership, because of the security state syndrome, has failed to adopt a comprehensive approach encompassing political, economic, diplomatic and military elements of state power in right proportion in dealing with external threats to its security. We have traditionally over-emphasised the military at the expense of other elements of state power thereby neglecting the contribution that political stability, economic strength and pro-active diplomacy can make to the strengthening of the state’s security.

Fourthly, in the long run, military power can be sustained only on the basis of economic strength. The over-emphasis on military power at the expense of the building up of economic strength in Pakistan provided for short-term security of the state at the expense of its long-term security. The net result was that Pakistan’s overall security vis-à-vis its potential enemy weakened with the passage of time.

Fifthly, our leadership and policymakers failed to understand that the nature and intensity of the external security threat could be altered by employing the right combination of the means at state disposal. The case of our good friends, the Chinese, is particularly instructive in this regard. After taking a decision at the highest level of their leadership in 1980, China in pursuit of its supreme objectives of development at home and peace around its borders embarked upon a number of initiatives to engage the erstwhile Soviet Union and India in negotiations to defuse tensions in its relations with its two major neighbours.

As a result of these initiatives, China was able to transform the security environment in its neighbourhood and concentrate on economic development achieving amazingly high economic growth rates. Our military, on the other hand, vitiated the improving atmosphere of Pakistan-India relations following the Lahore Declaration by blundering into the Kargil adventure.

The formation of new governments at the federal and provincial levels after the February elections provides a golden opportunity to the new political leadership and the civilian-military elite to get rid of the security state syndrome and transform the country into a welfare state.

Accordingly, economic development and the welfare of the people should become matters of top priority not just in statements but also in terms of the allocation of resources. Our security planners would have to revise their thinking and devise a new strategy for dealing with issues of external security keeping in mind the resources available after meeting the essential requirements for development and public welfare.

Let us hope that our leadership demonstrates the wisdom to choose the right path for the long-term survival and progress of the country.

javid_husain@yahoo.com

Jihad tests a friendship

IF you nurtured a nest of snakes in your backyard, would you be surprised if the snakes slipped through the fence or underneath the doors and bit your neighbours and friends? Apparently, if you were one of this country’s foreign policy mandarins, you would be.

As the resident sponsor of jihad in South Asia for nearly three decades, Pakistan has been reeling from the blowback since 9/11. Relations with the US, India and Afghanistan have altered dramatically, and perhaps permanently, this century, but our policymakers have struggled to comprehend these changes.

China has been a different matter. That the jihadis have anything to do with relations with China will surprise many Pakistanis. But that’s because most Pakistanis have never heard of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, a vast region which shares a border with our own Northern Areas and is home to the Uyghurs (pronounced ‘wEEgers’), a Muslim population which has been the source of occasional friction between Pakistan and China for nearly two decades.

The latest statements by Pakistan’s highest officials praising China and waxing lyrical about our deep relations with it have, at least in part, something to do with renewed nationalist protests in Xinjiang this year.

Pakistanis may not have given much thought to why the Olympic torch ceremony in Islamabad was blanketed in such heavy security. After all, all public events are now assumed to be a potential target of terrorists and Chinese nationals have been victims of terrorism in the past, most notably in Balochistan. But Baloch nationalists are far away from our nation’s capital. In truth, the government was worried that the Lal Masjid brigade and Al Qaeda/Taliban elements would disrupt the Olympic torch ceremony and damage relations with China.

To connect the dots we have to begin in Xinjiang. The autonomous region is home to a sparse Turkic Muslim population of Uyghurs who are ethnically different from the majority Han Chinese and have a long list of grievances against the Chinese state. In the run-up to the Summer Olympics in Beijing, the Uyghurs have once again been protesting and stirring the nationalist pot, calling attention to perceived Han oppression and rekindling China’s fear of militancy in the region. Ethnic nationalism amongst the Uyghurs is a hydra-headed creature, but, you guessed it, one strain is fervently Islamist and has links to Afghan and Kashmiri militants.

China, of course, is far from blameless for the present state of affairs. The Soviet presence in Afghanistan in the 1980s caused alarm in China, a communist rival, and the Chinese government was more than happy to facilitate Uyghurs wanting to join the Afghan jihad. After the war ended, the Uyghurs predictably stuck around in Pakistan’s madressahs and Afghanistan’s militant camps, eventually joining the Taliban and becoming yet another ingredient in Pakistan’s toxic brew of militancy.

The Chinese are also disingenuous about their ‘problem’ with Uyghur ‘splittists’. Not all Uyghurs are Islamists, some are pro-western, and, since a cycle of Uyghur violence and Chinese repression in the 1990s, dissent has been muted. In some ways, the Uyghurs have become yet another victim of the 9/11 stick that many countries have used to suppress legitimate dissent.

Now, on the eve of the Beijing Olympics, China is worried that the global spotlight will encourage all sorts of extremists to crawl out of the woodwork. Chinese concerns about Pakistan’s connections with the Uyghurs would have shot up when two passengers carrying Pakistani passports were arrested for attempting to blow up a plane that had taken off from Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang.

So when the Olympic torch arrived in Pakistan, the government worked overtime to ensure that nothing disrupted the relay ceremony. Similarly, President Musharraf visited Urumqi earlier this month at the Chinese government’s behest, a signal to the Uyghurs that the Pakistani state was firmly behind China.

According to Ziad Haider, a research analyst at the Henry L. Stimson Centre in the US, Pakistan has “maintained a sympathetic, yet never openly friendly, posture towards the Uyghurs from the earliest stages of Pakistan’s relationship with China”. Keen to maintain good relations with China, Pakistan has closed Uyghur settlements, arrested and deported Uyghurs and killed alleged Uyghur militants.

Today, relations with China are undoubtedly strong, but Pakistan’s policymakers cannot have failed to taken note of changes in the region since 9/11. China and India have drawn closer, while Pakistan has been once again been sucked into the US orbit, dependent on the country for vast amounts of military aid. With Pakistan keen to deepen trade and security links with China, the last thing it needs is for jihadis to traipse up and down the Karakoram highway, which terminates on the Chinese side in Xinjiang, and strain relations between the two countries.

In a conversation with one of the country’s top ex-spooks, I used the nest-of-snakes analogy to describe our country’s Taliban policy and, more generally, our support for jihad over the years. It was the quickest, cheapest and most effective way to meet our strategic aims at the time, he told me. If later it has turned out to be a millstone around our neck, then so be it. Besides, wouldn’t the world be a very boring place if humans were always right, he asked. He was only half joking.

Pakistan has been the resident sponsor of jihad in South Asia for nearly three decades because policymakers calculated that it was a resounding success. Defeat of the Soviet empire, protection from American ire while the nuclear bomb was pieced together, tying down the Indian army in Kashmir and keeping Pakistan’s claim to Kashmir alive are just some of those ‘successes’. However, the basic flaw in the strategy was always apparent: what would happen if the monster got out of control and turned on Pakistan? The institutional response was: we will cross that bridge when we come to it.

Well, we are at the bridge now and have few ideas about how to cross it. The sad truth about the Uyghurs is that instead of acting as a force for the good of a Muslim population along our borders, Pakistan’s jihad policy has forced us to line up with China against a Muslim community with genuine economic and social grievances. Yesterday’s national interest has become today’s national shame.

Perhaps Pakistan’s next foreign secretary, fresh from a stint as ambassador to China, will advise caution to the cowboys in his world who, in search of short-term benefits, have never been able to see the wood for the trees.

cyril.a@gmail.com

Is there feudalism in Pakistan?

FOR the MQM leader Altaf Hussain and Ayesha Siddiqa, ‘feudalism’ is alive and kicking in Pakistan. According to the MQM’s 2008 election manifesto “the prevalent feudal system of (sic) Pakistan is the main obstacle in the progress of the country and the prosperity of the people”.

The party would abolish ‘feudalism’ to turn Pakistan into an egalitarian society. Ayesha Siddiqa, writing in these pages on Feb 25, 2008, started on a circumspect note by acknowledging that if we use the classical features of feudalism then present-day Pakistani society cannot be called feudal. Then she asked a question and offered a categorical answer too: “But does this … mean that feudalism is no more? The answer is no.”

Why? Because, agricultural land still remains a potent symbol of power in today’s Pakistan. The urban elite’s penchant for farmhouses is mimicking landlords. Furthermore, the occupants of these farmhouses replicate “the decadent lifestyle of the old nawabs and the feudal elite” by holding “huge parties, mujrahs and … flaunting … money”.

Many members in the national and provincial legislatures have landed backgrounds. Rural Pakistan continues to languish under the yoke of ‘feudalism’. Honour killings occur there, hapless peasants are exploited by the mighty landlord. The electronic media has perpetuated this same image for years. In Punjab, it was Chaudhri Hashmat of the drama serial Waris who reigned supreme. Since land is a symbol of power and these are the kind of social practices we won’t associate with modernity, Pakistan is deemed a predominantly feudal society.

My submission is that there is no feudalism in Pakistan today because there was no feudalism even before British colonialism.

Eqbal Ahmed, also in these pages (‘Feudal culture and violence’, Feb 2, 1998) summarised it well: “Feudalism serves as the whipping boy of Pakistan’s intelligentsia. Yet, to my knowledge not one serious study exists on the nature and extent of feudal power in Pakistan, and none to my knowledge on the hegemony which feudal culture enjoys in this country.”

Observing that feudalism as an economic system was not ascendant, he referred to Karl Marx’s point that the cultural vestiges of dying systems continue long after economic collapse. Ahmed was dead right in mentioning ‘mastery over violence’ as one of the defining features of the feudal order. Rather than rigorously testing whether that was the case in Pakistan, Ahmed wandered off into discussion of various forms of violence in Pakistani society.

We, therefore, need to exercise utmost caution in naming a system on the basis of practices that could well be just the remnants of a pre-capitalist system but not necessarily the defining parameter of the existing political economy.

When the British colonised India, they took on many forms of the local aristocracy. That did not make British rule a feudal form of governance. The urbanites’ mimicry of the landed gentry’s power is neither a uniquely Pakistani trait nor a recent phenomenon. The irony of the ascendant moneyed form of power trying to copy the dying agrarian source of power is vividly portrayed in Satyajit Ray’s film Jalsaghar (‘The Music Room’) where a nouveau-riche merchant tries to adopt some aspects of an indebted landlord’s lifestyle.

The Pakistani privileged class trying to recreate the opulence of an aristocratic era is an expression of what Marx put eloquently: “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” But taking mujrahs in farmhouses for feudalism in Pakistan is mistaking appearances for substance.

Feudalism, according to Simon Bromley and William Brown, can be defined “politically as a personalised and geographically decentralised system of rule, and economically as the local and coercive extraction of surplus from a dependent peasantry, the two dimensions being fused in the institution of lordship and the feudal-vassal pyramid”. By 1999, 88 per cent of cultivated land in Pakistan was in farm sizes below 12.5 acres. Just over half the total farms in 1999 were less than five acres in size. This would hardly be the hallmark of a feudal society.

More important than haggling over whether contemporary Pakistan is a feudal society or not — because it would hardly qualify as a feudal society if judged by the characteristics of the feudal society provided by leading authorities on the issue — I want to share Harbans Mukhia’s argument that there never was feudalism even in medieval India. If this assertion is taken seriously, then it means that if there was no feudalism in medieval India how could we have it in 21st century Pakistan?

Let me paraphrase Mukhia’s reasons for reaching the above conclusion. Mukhia argues that “in Europe, feudalism arose as a result of a crisis of the production relations based on slavery on the one hand and changes resulting from growing stratification among the Germanic tribes on the other”. In India “owing to the natural richness of the soil and the relatively efficient tools and techniques, agricultural productivity was high, the subsistence level of the peasant was very low — thanks to climatic conditions”. Due to the combination of the above features, the production process in India “did not create an acute scarcity of labour”, therefore “enserfment of the peasant … was hardly necessary”.

This does not mean there was no stratification and exploitation in medieval India, just as there is no denying the stratification in contemporary Pakistan’s countryside. But using feudalism as a blanket term for sundry processes in the agrarian sector and evading “critical considerations such as production processes, social organisation of labour and concrete forms of non-economic coercion” will lead to anecdotal observations or politically expedient statements passing as historical analyses.

Pakistani society is part of the world capitalist system where a major share of agricultural produce is meant for selling in the market. Additionally, there is no causal link between land ownership and political power in today’s Pakistan. The land-owning classes, especially absentee landlords, rank high in the pecking order of rural Pakistan. But that ‘rural gentry’, to use Satish Chandra’s appropriate term for the class of people popularly called ‘feudal’ in Pakistan, is a junior partner in the state where those having mastery over violence have much closer ties with metropolitan power centres like Washington and London.

Exchanges in these pages are valuable but we need to rise up to the challenge Eqbal Ahmed threw at us. Let those among us who are serious about understanding issues concerning the exercise of power in our society undertake rigorous studies on these questions. Reputable historians like Mubarak Ali and other social scientists should be invited to share their insights and arguments on whether there is ‘feudalism’ in Pakistan.

The writer teaches at the School of International Studies, Simon Fraser University, Canada

hnizamani@hotmail.com

Oil prices: another prediction

Some forecasts on oil prices for the readers. I predict that the price of oil will soon fall — a bit. So far, the economies of the “Brics” (Brazil, Russia, India and China) are still growing strongly, but the old industrialised economies are definitely heading into a recession, and they still consume most of the oil.

This recession has not actually been caused by the high oil price; the sub-prime mortgage scam is to blame for that. But the recession is likely to drive the demand for oil down far enough to bring the price back down to $100 before long, or even to $85-90. Then in 2009-2010, as the “old rich” economies recover, it will go back up, probably to the $130-$150 range.

The price will rise because demand will recover much faster than supply can grow, if indeed it grows at all. An allegedly giant new oil-field has been found off the coast of Brazil, but even if it lives up to the advertising it is 5-10 years away from large-scale production.

The world’s largest oil producer, Saudi Arabia, admits that there is now not enough spare capacity among the Opec (Organisation of Petroleum-Exporting Countries) producers to make any difference. Russia, the biggest non-Opec producer, will probably see production fall this year. And practically everybody else is already pumping flat-out.

So once the recession ends, the price of oil will probably stay well about $100 for most of the time in 2010-2015. But it won’t hit $200, because there will be a steep rise in the supply of non-conventional oil from tar sands, oil shales, and other sources of “heavy oil.”

Even if the moment of “peak oil” is upon us, that would not mean the end of oil; it just means the end of sweet, light crude. The Alberta tar sands are profitable if the price of oil stays over $40 a barrel; at $60, the far larger Venezuelan tar sands are a viable economic proposition; at $80, even the oil shales of the western US are promising.

In a world with a stable climate, ample unconventional oil supplies would bring the oil price down below $100 again, but that’s not the way it’s likely to play out. By 2015, global tolerance for any process that involves high emissions of greenhouse gases is likely to be very low. Indeed, there is likely to be a good deal of pressure to cut back on the consumption even of conventional oil.

Five years ago, global warming was a distant worry in most of the world, and in North America, where the denial industry had its headquarters, it was widely disbelieved. Now it is a high-priority concern in Europe, in the United States (at every level below the White House, where change is coming shortly), and in China, and a rapidly growing worry everywhere else.

Go seven years down the road, and throw in a few dozen more climate-related catastrophes like Hurricane Katrina or the killer heat-wave in Europe in the summer of 2003. What will popular support for burning fossil fuels be in 2015? Not very high, one suspects.

Cutting back on the use of oil — and coal, and gas — will not be a rapid or smooth process, because the potential substitutes are either technologically immature or too expensive. But rising demand and the passage of time will change that, and gradually the use of fossil fuels will fall. Most serious people everywhere now know that it must, if civilisation is to survive.

Several billion people live in countries that are now growing very fast economically, so demand will probably keep the price for conventional oil near the $100 level well into the 2020s, but the political pressure to shut down extra-high-emission unconventional oil production may become irresistible. (That’s why the Alberta tar sands producers now want to replace natural gas with nuclear power as the energy source for freeing the oil from the sand.)

In the still longer run — the 2030s and beyond — the demand for oil will probably fall even further, and with it the price. How do we know that? Because if it hasn’t fallen due to a deliberate switch away from fossil fuels, then global warming will gain such momentum that entire countries are falling into chaos instead. There is more than one way to cut demand.