Constitutional package

NOW that a constitutional package is reportedly under consideration, we should note that the need for amendments to the 1973 Constitution is independent of the ongoing controversy over the powers enjoyed by President Pervez Musharraf. There is a whole range of articles that needs revision. They range from the powers the president derives from Article 58-2(b) and the appointment of the judges and the services chiefs to a sensitive issue like provincial autonomy. Article 58-2(b) is perhaps the most obnoxious article in the basic law. Three presidents used it four times to dismiss elected governments and dissolve the National Assembly. Each time the three violated a condition laid down in the article — that is, the president must exercise this power only when he is convinced that “a situation has arisen in which the government of the federation cannot be carried on in accordance with the provisions of the constitution and an appeal to the electorate is necessary”. The dismissals served no purpose, for the government that followed was in turn sacked before it could complete its term.

The 1973 Constitution, adopted unanimously by a duly elected assembly, was parliamentary in character. If the people had so willed, their representatives could have framed a presidential type of basic law. Subsequent changes by dictators disfigured the constitution. Nawaz Sharif undid the amendments made by his mentor, Ziaul Haq, but Musharraf reintroduced some of them, including 58-2(b). Today, the constitution that we have is a mix of presidential and parliamentary forms. The president is overly powerful, while the directly elected prime minister has to function within the constraints wrought by the Legal Framework Order. Now the leaders of the PML-Q lament that the economic policies followed by the former prime minister have led to disaster because parliament was virtually bypassed.

Today, Herculean efforts are needed to tackle such issues as terrorism, food inflation and the acute power deficit. No government can deal with these issues and come up to the people’s expectations if it is to operate within the constraints of the hybrid constitution we have. Issues like sorting out the working of the Council of Common Interests, a re-study of the question of the concurrent list, and the position of the National Security Council are overshadowed by one paramount question — the Provisional Constitution Order, which became part of the basic law by decree. It needs to be deleted. The dichotomy of powers between the president and the prime minister must end, and the sovereignty of parliament be restored. The question of the restoration of the pre-Nov 3 judiciary has generated some unnecessary speculation. The PPP and the PML-N are committed to a solution of the problem through a parliamentary resolution, and neither side has given any indication that it could renege on the Bhurban declaration. Differences, if any, among the lawmakers should not cloud the basic issue, and the basic issue is that the nation wants a return to parliamentary democracy in an unadulterated form.

All the right moves

HAVING been roundly condemned for toeing the American line on almost all conceivable issues — domestic, regional and international — the state machinery in Pakistan does deserve to be acclaimed for withstanding serious pressure on the IPI gas pipeline project. In the spirit of giving the devil his proverbial due, appreciation has to be dished out because the Americans have never shied away from using either the carrot or the stick in their dealings with stakeholders. While Pakistan has been steadfast in determining the most practical way out of its crippling energy crisis, India, apparently under foreign influence, has been dragging its feet over the project under one pretext or the other. It has abstained from crucial trilateral meetings in the last several months, taking the plea that it was interested in first sorting out bilateral issues with Pakistan. Against this backdrop, the recent announcement by Indian Petroleum Minister Murli Deora that he would visit Pakistan later this month to try to expedite the stalled talks needs to be welcomed for what it is — a potential opportunity that may lead to the elusive tripartite talks involving the two countries and Iran.

That the Indian announcement came as it signed a bilateral protocol on petroleum cooperation with Turkmenistan and held discussions on an alternative gas pipeline project, which also involves Afghanistan and Pakistan, tells its own tale about the Indian preference for TAPI over IPI. It certainly looks like something more than mere coincidence that similar vibes have been emanating from the US over the two projects. The emerging geopolitical as well as bilateral interests of the two countries may affect the outcome of the Indian minister’s talks with his counterpart in Islamabad. The two countries have already sorted out the issue of transportation fee and the focus now would be on transit fee that is to be levied for gas transported from Iran to India through the proposed 705-km Pakistani component of the 2,670-km pipeline. With Pakistan demanding 50 cents per MBTU and India sticking to 15 cents, the chances of an immediate breakthrough are not particularly bright. There is sufficient weight in independent proposals that even if India fails to come aboard or stops procrastinating, Pakistan and Iran shall not allow themselves to be taken hostage. Pakistan, in fact, has already made its intentions clear in this regard and one hopes that, pressure or no pressure, there will be no backtracking on this vital issue.

Nowhere to hide

THERE is little to refute that Dr Arbab Ghulam Rahim, former chief minister of Sindh, has always lived by venom. He has clocked in an array of unsavoury incidents, which range from spouting highly derogatory remarks against female members of the assembly, violent behaviour towards journalists, and reportedly against his office staff, to allegations of massive rigging in the recent polls. Rahim’s infamous pursuit of the politics of vengeance against the opposition was blamed for keeping the Sindh Assembly from adopting a single law that tackled the growing menace of unemployment. The PPP also claims that during his tenure in the province’s top slot, the party submitted close to 6,000 queries which went unanswered. However, regardless of his in-your-face dogma of revenge, the extent of violence perpetrated against the PML-Q leader by maddened PPP loyalists at the oath-taking session of the Sindh Assembly can hardly be condoned. He was jeered upon entrance, the door of the lobby was torn down, security was summoned from Governor House and he eventually left without taking oath. Monday too saw a near replay of the same ruckus when irate party workers manhandled the former chief minister in an assembly gallery just as he was leaving the premises after taking oath.

Although the MQM expressed its displeasure by staging a walkout, unfortunately it took the PPP leadership a long while to realise the ramifications of the incident and Speaker Nisar Khuhro condemned it much later. While the new speaker said he wouldn’t allow such incidents in future, an attempt was made by some in the party to shift the blame elsewhere. But the fact is that it is the responsibility of the party leadership to inculcate decorum and reverence for the sanctity of the house. It must also devise a policy that slams violent behaviour and decrees more civilised forms of protest — armbands, placards, sit-ins, vigils and written statements of disapproval. After all, there is much to be said for the powers of tacit manoeuvres. They achieve far more than the strike of a baton.

Some more concerns

THE new administration, if it gets around to addressing the economic problems the country faces at this critical time in its history, will have to begin the task by identifying them.

In my contribution to this space last week, I wrote that there were at least six areas of immediate concern. I discussed two of those — the growing income inequalities and the serious shortages of a number of goods and services vital for everyday existence. Today, I will complete the list by discussing the remaining four.

The third serious economic problem that surfaced in 2007 was that of the emergence of various macro-economic imbalances. This was surprising since the government had taken so much credit for stabilising the economy in the 1999-2002 period. After the lapse of the IMF-directed programme, Islamabad felt free to loosen the purse strings in the belief that a comfortable fiscal space had appeared. That proved to be only a temporary development; soon the government was spending much more than it was collecting by way of taxes and other revenues. It had, once again, begun to finance its deficits by bank borrowings which crowded out the private sector from the credit markets.

The other worrying imbalance that appeared during this period of extravagance was in the external accounts. The economy was importing much more than it was exporting which widened the trade gap. The gap was financed by external capital flows which came in either in the form of receipts from privatisation or from sources much more mindful about short-term perceptions about the situation in the country. There was, of course, a limit to the amount that could be realised from privatisation. In so far as the flows from the private sector were concerned, including those that came from the members of the Pakistani diasporas, these were volatile, depending on the way the people sending in the money read the Pakistani situation. Pakistan, in other words, had reverted in the winter of 2007-08 to the volatility that had marked the performance of the economy in the 1990s.

The fourth problem was the result of the choice made by the previous regime to rely on Arab capital for augmenting low levels of domestic savings. As the oil-exporting countries in the Middle East built up large surpluses — a significant proportion of which was made available to the various sovereign funds managed by the government entities in the area — many of them found good investment opportunities in Pakistan.

Most of these investments had two associated problems. They went into the sectors and activities that did not create many jobs for the poorer segments of the population. And, since the returns from them were in rupees, they created contingent liabilities for the government. Pakistan’s relatively open capital regime allows the repatriation of profits made by foreign investors in foreign currency. For a country that had growing trade and balance of payments deficits, this constituted an additional and increasing burden.

If the Musharraf government followed an economic strategy to push growth, it was to put the private sector in command of the economy. That was the right approach to adopt but the emphasis on private enterprise should have been tempered by the use of regulatory authority to control the move towards the development of monopolies.

That was not done and the result was that Pakistan saw the emergence of a class of robber barons who used control of some large businesses or the ability to gain access to scarce urban land to build large personal fortunes. These fortunes were often made at the expense of the poor, the not-so-poor, and the middle classes. These three income groups saw an erosion in their real incomes because of the rising prices they had to pay for the products controlled by the monopolies.

The growth in the economic power of the monopolies and the development of housing on the lands acquired from the less well-to-do have created enormous tensions within society. This then is the fifth in my list of problems that the new administrations will have to deal with in the first few months of their tenures.

The sixth problem is the outcome of the rapid urbanisation of Pakistan. Pakistan has urbanised much more rapidly than official statistics suggest. Politics is one reason why the proportion of urban people in the total population continues to be underestimated.

A correct count of the urban population would increase the number of urban seats in the national and provincial assemblies at the expense of rural representation. This would shift the centre of gravity of politics from the rural to the urban areas.

To take one example of the way seat allocation favours the countryside over cities is to compare the number of seats allocated to Lahore in the National Assembly with a number of predominantly rural districts. Lahore was given 13 seats while 10 districts with a combined population equal to that of Lahore were allotted 35 seats. This tremendously skewed distribution of political power will have to change or else the political infrastructure will not support the formulation of urban public policy that the country needs to address at this difficult time.

In sum, there is a rich agenda for action to be incorporated in the plan of action for the first 100 days of the new administrations in Islamabad and the provincial capitals. The question is whether the new administrations will move quickly along all these fronts or just fritter away the time working on political problems that have occupied so much of the leadership’s time during the election campaign.

There was one interesting disconnect I noticed during my stay in the country at the height of the election campaign. The political elite were totally preoccupied with the structure of the political system erected during the Musharraf period. How to dismantle this system and put in place one more to the liking of the political establishment was the question that was being repeatedly asked.

The citizenry, on the other hand — the poorer segments of the population in particular — was primarily concerned with economic issues. Now that the elections are over, this disconnect must disappear and economic issues must become the centre of attention for the policymakers.

Resource geopolitics & security

ISLAMABAD needs to reorient its strategic vision by correctly assessing the goals of significant actors in the region. For Washington, Afghanistan and Pakistan are an important transit route for Central Asian energy resources and one that circumvents Russia, China, and Iran.

Washington’s objective is the stabilisation of this ‘route’. Washington’s long-term objectives in Afghanistan and Pakistan should be discerned from its acts of omission and commission in the region since 1989 instead of its verbal proclamations.

In 1989, Afghanistan was a nation triumphant with the pride of having vanquished a superpower. Ahmad Shah Massoud, an acclaimed national hero and pro-West politician, could become its leader. Instead of facilitating the formation of a nationalist government and investing in Afghanistan’s reconstruction, the CIA chose to continue gun-running for different warring factions.

The claim that US intelligence disengaged itself from the region after l989 is false. While the formation of the Taliban is squarely blamed on Pakistan, a study of how the organisation suddenly rose from oblivion in 1993 and possessed staggering amounts of dollars is yet to emerge. Secondly, with the rise of the Taliban, the Uzbeks and the Tajiks were formally separated from the Pashtuns.

Zahir Shah, or a member of his family, would have been better for rallying post-9/11 disparate Afghans than an expatriate Pashtun with CIA affiliations. Thirdly, while Afghanistan is declared central to the war on terror, Washington’s financial commitment to its reconstruction is paltry and lacks a coherent plan.

The Bush administration did not request any reconstruction aid for Afghanistan in its 2003 budget proposal. It slashed reconstruction aid to Afghanistan from one billion dollars in 2005 to $623m in 2006, just when reconstructive effort cried for more funding and better implementation.

Similarly, Washington did not commit its resources to long-term de-radicalisation in Pakistan, akin to its policy in Egypt after the Camp David Accords. Washington’s policy in Egypt sustains Cairo’s peace with Israel and prevents the resurgence of Nasserite pan-Arabism. The systematic religious radicalisation of the NWFP and Balochistan during the 1979-1989 Soviet-Afghan war was carried out under the auspices of the US intelligence agencies.

When Washington’s preoccupations were replaced by energy security concerns owing to the prediction that the world’s oil was depleting and demand for it rising, Pakistan and Afghanistan’s key location for Central Asian energy pipelines and Pakistan’s nuclear weapons rendered these states too important for the neglect each seemingly suffered in 1989-2001.

As Washington’s spheres of influence strategy gave way to the strategy of global power projection for a new world order, it is reasonable to assume that the US made a post-9/11 plan for Pakistan and Afghanistan. Washington seems to want to reconstruct the region not as it is structurally but as Washington deems it should be.

Pakistan needs to apply extreme caution to its role in what is presented to it as the ‘war on terror’. The US cannot continue to occupy Afghanistan for long. The Afghan insurgency, if supported by Russia and China, could make the US bleed à la the Soviet Union and could even break up Nato. Neither can it abandon Afghanistan due to the latter’s strategic location. In order to guarantee the safety of transiting pipelines, the US would go to the extent of breaking Afghanistan into separate, ethnically harmonious states.

Poverty aggravates ethnic differences which can explode into armed conflict. Pipelines have been blown up during such conflicts. Afghanistan’s break-up is therefore entirely plausible. The imperatives of global power projection require the existence of smaller states in strategic areas because these can be controlled militarily with comparative ease.

Should a Pashtun state emerge, the NWFP would become its political ligament if Islamabad continues with the war on terror. While Pakistan is building a wall along Sistan/Balochistan, it is overtaken by the events on its northwestern front. This political inertia could cost Pakistan dearly and may give further futuristic relevance to Jinnah’s expression ‘a truncated, mutilated, moth-eaten Pakistan’.

If Afghanistan is balkanised, Pakistan stands to lose on another count. The new Pashtun state will be hostile to Islamabad, given the latter’s treatment of the Taliban. Vendetta is ingrained in the Pashtun culture. Cordial inter-state relations are important to ensure the safety of transiting pipelines that are governed by multilateral, instead of corporate to a single government, treaties.

While Islamabad is driven to killing Pashtun Afghan insurgents and their local sympathisers, India is being invited to join in the reconstruction efforts of the Karzai government. Its soft power in Afghanistan is rising. In addition to its mission in Kabul, India’s consulates are functioning in Mazar-i-Sharif, Herat, Kandahar and Jalalabad.

Pakistan’s soft power is being washed away in the blood that the US is compelling Islamabad to spill in its Pashtun lands. In July 2003, Pakistan’s embassy was attacked by hundreds of Afghans in Kabul. In February 2008, its Afghan envoy was kidnapped from Fata.

Pakistan’s territory is of vital strategic importance to India. India is the second fastest growing economy in the world, dependent entirely on imported fuel. All of India’s supply from the Persian Gulf and Central Asia conveniently transits through Pakistan. India’s energy supply is greatly facilitated if Pakistan reunifies with it.

A hostile state sitting on the jugular vein of the Indian economy is not in India’s interest. The tying of unresolved bilateral issues to supplies can adversely complicate resource diplomacy. India has already learned its lesson with Bangladesh that obstructed the Indian-Myanmar Shwe gas pipeline deal long enough for China to jump in and clench it from under India’s nose.

India is foot-dragging on the Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline deal which it previously pursued with interest. Besides anticipating Iran’s economic isolation, New Delhi seems to anticipate some development regarding Pakistan.

The state in Pakistan is being de-legitimised. Its ability to provide security and basic amenities to its people seems fettered. The severe shortage of key supplies has reached alarming proportions. The military is forced to defend the western front, leaving the eastern with less security. Its institutional integrity has come under strain over the NWFP operation which has made the Pashtuns restive.

They are the second largest ethnic contingent within Pakistan’s military. All this is happening against the backdrop of the convergence of Indo-US strategic interests vis-à-vis Pakistan.

During the Cold War, Washington built the elite military institution within Pakistan as an ally and ensured Pakistan’s survival at crucial junctures such as the 1971 India-Pakistan war. The US no longer wants a strong military, much less a nuclear military, in Pakistan. If Pakistan fails to devise a security policy that addresses the new imperatives of resource geopolitics, its inertia could lead to its undoing.

The writer is an energy consultant and analyst of energy geopolitics based in Washington DC.

zeenia.satti@yahoo.com

OTHER VOICES - Sindhi Press

The MQM’s responsibility

Ibrat

RAPPROCHEMENT between the MQM and the PPP is heading towards the formation of a government, and the visit of Asif Zardari to the MQM headquarters has given a new dimension to this reconciliation. The MQM reciprocated by sending a delegation to Garhi Khuda Bux to attend the death anniversary of Z.A. Bhutto. In fact, this rapprochement will be tested after the formation of the government. It is hoped that the two partners will not repeat past mistakes and have a tension-free relationship.

This reconciliation with the MQM is historic in many ways. If it succeeds it will change Pakistan forever.

One finds few precedents where a victorious party goes to the loser or those who are not in a majority and offers them a place in government. (The PPP) wants to take the MQM along to ensure peace in Sindh and create new economic opportunities. It is hoped that this will work and give results. This is not the first time … after the 1988 elections the PPP entered into an accord with the MQM but that did not last long. As the establishment in Pakistan plays a very important role in politics and its management … maybe those connected with the establishment were unhappy over this accord and wanted a bad situation in Sindh and helped break the PPP-MQM understanding at that time.

This is for the first time that rival political parties have joined hands and agreed to form a coalition government. An additional feature of the present scenario is that those non-political forces that had been intervening in politics are being sidelined.

The three major parties, the PPP, the PML-N and the ANP, are forming a coalition government, with only two other parties left in the opposition i.e. the PML-Q and the MQM. The MQM has been offered a role along with the major political parties. Some may differ with the agenda of the MQM and at the same time the people of the country, particularly in Sindh, are not in favour of this new accord. It is the democratic right of everyone to differ, and some political circles have objections to this accord.…

Saner elements know that when there is a need to defeat dictators, to close the door on fascism and to stop the intervention of unwanted non-political elements, rapprochement and such types of accords are essential. World history is witness to the fact that political forces have made such types of accord.

Now it is time for the MQM to forget the past as the PPP has done, though it has been difficult for the PPP to forget the May 12 incident. The MQM should not repeat past mistakes as all parties have committed themselves to forgetting the past. There are some anarchist elements in the MQM. They should by controlled by the party. It is the MQM’s responsibility … not to side with autocratic forces again, and to become part of the democratic family. — (April 6)

— Selected and translated by Sohail Sangi