CaptainJackSparrow
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Robert Fulford: The Pakistan mess is worse than we thought
The President of Pakistan, Asif Ali Zardari, the widower of Benazir Bhutto, wants us to know that hes deeply disappointed because the world refuses to provide the help his country needs. He thinks Pakistan may drop to the status of a failed state if the world doesnt send much more cash, and damn soon. We have no money to arm the police or fund development, give jobs or revive the economy, he says. What are we supposed to do?
Nothing, apparently. The implication is that theres nothing Pakistan can do except wait for rich foreigners to save them. Thats the only thing that occurs to him. Its clear that Zardari, though he apparently has a personal fortune of $1.4-billion, suffers from a chronic case of welfare dependency. Thomas Sowell and other Western theorists believe foreign aid does more harm than good. It paralyzes the recipients and makes them helpless. Like Zardari. Like Pakistan.
Zardaris impassioned whine appears in Ahmed Rashids excellent new book, Pakistan on the Brink: The Future of America, Pakistan and Afghanistan, a melancholy report on Pakistan and its relations with its allies and sometime friends.
Rashid, a Pakistan-born, Cambridge-educated journalist, now living in Lahore, has bad news for all of us. Anyone who follows events in the region knows that Pakistan faces a mountain of problems. But Rashids account makes it sound far worse than most of us have ever dreamt.
What makes this especially painful is that the world knows Pakistan cannot be ignored. It has the bomb. Geographically, it occupies a pivotal position in the region.
In rich, persuasive detail, Rashid describes corrupt leaders and a despairing population, an army that obeys orders only when it wants to, a stagnant economy, disastrous relations with neighbouring countries and above all, a persistent national tendency, exemplified by Zardari, to blame others when anything goes wrong. Americans are often seen to be at fault, and sometimes Israelis. India is considered permanently blameworthy.
Half of school-age Pakistanis dont attend school. At the states founding in 1947, 52% of the citizens were literate; in 65 years that number has been raised to 57%. In the last 20 years, Rashid notes, Pakistan has not developed a single new industry or cultivated a new crop. On the level of imagination, it has died or lapsed into a coma.
Politicians and military officers take turns forcing each other out of power; thats the only system of regime change that operates, and it does nothing to eliminate corruption.
Rashid makes it clear that Pakistans core problem is as much a moral as a political failure, a matter of shirked duties, profound dishonesty and rancid hatreds that encourage murder. Reforms dont happen, he believes, because neither political, nor military leaders have the courage, will and intelligence to carry them out.
Since the founding of Pakistan, the elites have never inspired a sense of national identity in the citizens. Separatist elements in Balochistan, the largest of Pakistans four provinces, remain un-reconciled to being governed from Islamabad. Their recent uprising is their fifth.
Their discontent rarely makes the world news, which is dominated by Taliban fighters who hide in Pakistani safe havens (with help from Pakistans security agencies) and the somewhat separate Pakistan Taliban, which wants to establish a severe Islamist regime across Pakistan itself.
The killing of Osama bin Laden last May was only the latest of many embarrassments the military has endured. The government dealt with it in the usual way, by blaming the United States. To the intense confusion of the public, no official explained what bin Laden was doing there in Abbottabad; instead, the government concentrated on the American crime of intruding on Pakistans soil. Then they began spreading anti-American conspiracy stories, blaming Washington for engineering the 9/11 atrocity.
Apparently, President Zardari remains bitter because the United States hasnt given him as many billions as it gave his predecessor. He thinks hes owed much more. But, as Rashid says, the government rejects economic reform and taxes on the Pakistani rich, suggestions made by the international community.
A couple of years ago, Zardari presented his grievances to an unnamed Western ambassador possibly the late Richard Holbrooke, Washingtons outspoken special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, a Rashid source.
The ambassador replied: Why should our taxpayers pay for you, when neither you nor your elite pay taxes?
Zardari, hiding behind an army of bodyguards in his presidential palace in Islamabad, apparently didnt answer. He knows that change of almost any kind could threaten his own survival.
The Pakistan mess is worse than we thought | Full Comment | National Post
