NOT very long ago, Pakistanis were proud of their hospitality to strangers. No longer. Now, foreigners are killed by terrorists and threatened by politicians; as a result, Pakistan is on the list of no-go areas of overseas travel agents and governments alike.

Over the last two decades, Pakistan has become more and more insular and inward looking as politicians have sought scapegoats abroad to cover up their own inadequacies. Religious leaders have simultaneously endeavoured to convince their respective followers that their woes are the direct result of the anti-Pakistan plots woven by their Western, Zionist and Indian foes. These converging attitudes have fed a growing xenophobia as a substantial majority of Pakistanis is now convinced that the rest of the world is against us.

In this 'Them versus Us' environment, few people are any longer appalled when leading religious leaders like Maulana Fazlur Rahman openly threaten foreigners for the acts of their governments. A number of Iranians and Americans have been killed by terrorists on our soil with a minimal official response. The whole issue of the government's mishandling of the independent power producers (IPPs) is a case in point. Here are major overseas investors who have come in with significant amounts to build or buy power plants under legally binding agreements with the previous government.

Now, in the name of so-called accountability, they are being harassed and their contracts are being flouted. Why anybody would invest in such a climate is a question only Senator Saifur Rehman, head of the Accountability Cell, can answer. The impression is gaining currency that these IPPs are being targeted because the kickbacks they are alleged to have given only went to members of the previous government, and the present lot was ignored.

As the global village shrinks and the world economy becomes more tightly integrated, people everywhere are lowering national frontiers to the free flow of foreign products and ideas. Once trade barriers are effectively abolished in 2005 under the World Trade Organisation agreements we are signatory to, we will be flooded with goods from all over the world that are not only cheaper, but better made than domestic products. As (more) Pakistani businesses go to the wall and unemployment increases, we can expect industrialists and labour unions to join the anti-foreigner chorus.

But the world will not sit still and wait for us to shed our hangovers and phobias. While we fall further and further behind, together with countries like Afghanistan, Somalia and Serbia, the rest of the world will move ahead and develop and grow. Inevitably, there will be pockets of poverty in this brave new world, but they will strive to catch up. We, on the other hand, will have convinced ourselves that as the rest of the world is against us, it is pointless making the effort to progress.

However, Pakistan's self-imposed isolation is not unique: in much of the Muslim world, a similar retreat from reality can be witnessed. Specifically, the fundamentalist agenda calls for turning our backs on modern education, based as it is on reason and rationality, and harking back to the norms and values that prevailed centuries ago in Arabia. For the religious right, this is the panacea for all our ills. But this kind of wishful thinking flies in the face of the logic that underpins the modern, Western culture that now holds sway in much of the world. Even ideological states like China now order their economies along the lines of the Western, capitalist model, and their policies are pragmatic and rational instead of being rigid and socialist.

As the Muslim world falls further and further behind, powerful fundamentalist elements see this failure as the direct outcome of the secular model adopted by many of the ruling elites. Furthermore, since Western nations have based their governments on liberal democracy, these values are all viewed with suspicion and hostility by religious parties and groups, as are any ideas and ideals that are in any way "Western". Politicians in much of the Muslim world now try and avoid being smeared with the secular, liberal brush. Thus, the space available to these ideas is constantly shrinking to be replaced with retrogressive models. In Pakistan, at least, the fundamentalists won the debate by default years ago.

In this prevailing environment of sullen defeatism, it becomes easy to transfer blame for our backwardness to foreigners. If we lose the cricket World Cup, either the umpires were against us or our players sold out to Indian bookies. We cannot accept that somebody else played better than our team. If we were forced to pull out of Kargil, we do not ask why our soldiers were placed in such an untenable position, but we do blame Clinton for pressuring Nawaz Sharif. And so on.

But at the end of the day, we are the only losers: by not accepting reality, we cannot progress. Once we convince ourselves that somebody else is to blame for our troubles, we have no incentive to change things. By forever wallowing in self-pity and dreaming of a long-distant past, we ensure that we will never pull ourselves out of the pit we have dug. And by transferring the fault for our own backwardness to foreigners, we increase the distance between us and the global mainstream.

Another reason for our self-imposed isolation is that even sophisticated, well-travelled Pakistanis are often unaware of how the rest of the world really functions. For instance, during the recent Kosovo crisis, Turkey lost hundreds of thousands of tourists this summer because to many foreigners, the bombing was taking place in the same region, never mind that the two countries are far apart. Given the anti-Western rhetoric our politicians are prone to, as well as the well-publicized attacks on foreigners, how does Information Minister Mushahid Hussain think he will lure tourists to Pakistan in his much-touted 'Visit Pakistan' year in 2001?

These attitudes transfer to foreign policy as well: countries seen in the rest of the world as 'rogue states' will get no sympathy or support for their economy or their territorial claims. So whatever the validity of our legal claim to Kashmir, no amount of government propaganda or junkets by official delegates is going to cut any ice with foreigners as long as we are perceived as the bad guys. And we will continue being seen in this light as long as we remain out of step with the rest of the world.