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EDITORIAL: 03 April 2025
AS unrest in Sindh increases over the Cholistan canal plan, the PPP seems unclear on how to cool public sentiments. There are strong concerns that the project will further disturb the ecological balance in the province and deprive it of its mandated water share, putting at risk the livelihoods of tens of thousands of people and displacing communities. Many in Sindh believe that the PPP, especially President Asif Zardari, has tacitly lent its support to the controversial scheme to please the powers that be. This is in spite of the party’s efforts to raise the issue in parliament and demand a meeting of the Council of Common Interests before the execution of the scheme.
Sindh Chief Minister Murad Ali Shah’s recent media briefing was also an attempt to put at rest public concerns over the planned canal as he claimed that work on the scheme had yet not commenced. He seems to have drawn this conclusion on the basis of his information that Punjab has still not spent the funds it had allocated for the disputed canal in the budget for the present fiscal year.
In the same breath, he sought to dispel the impression that the PPP or President Zardari were implicitly favouring the plan. “The PPP has the strength and capability to halt the scheme,” he said, implying that Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif depended on the party’s support to stay in power. “This power will be exercised only if necessary. We are prepared to go to any lengths to protect the rights of Sindh. If our concerns are acknowledged, there will be no need for extreme measures,” he concluded. However, such reassurances from the party leadership are unlikely to dispel suspicions regarding the PPP’s alleged complicity in the project unless President Zardari himself clarifies his stance.
The growing opposition to the project calls for pausing its execution till a detailed data-based study is prepared by experts on its potential impact on Sindh’s shrinking delta due to sea intrusion driven by reduced ecological flows below Kotri. Besides, the claims that the canal would be fed by floodwaters from Jhelum or Punjab’s own share should be supported with data. Boosting agricultural productivity for food security and exports is crucial for the country. But it should not come at the cost of interprovincial harmony and the federation or the displacement of communities and tenants.
With rising water scarcity in the Indus system, it is crucial to move towards a consensus-driven policymaking process. Or the canal project may turn into yet another highly divisive project like the Kalabagh dam, something that can neither be accepted nor discarded. So far those backing the project have not shown any inclination of taking all the stakeholders on board.
Published in Dawn, April 3rd, 2025
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EDITORIAL: 03 April 2025
THE Trump administration’s threats aimed at Iran do not bode well for global peace, and unless Washington changes its harsh tone, a new and destructive confrontation in the Middle East is very likely. Donald Trump had written to the Iranian leadership early last month, asking Tehran to resume talks on the nuclear issue. However, he also threatened to attack Iran if it failed to comply. Over the weekend, the US president again ratcheted up the threats, saying that if Iran did not return to the table, “there will be bombing ... the likes of which they have never seen before”. The threat did not go down well in Tehran, with Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei stating in his Eid sermon that an American attack would receive “a strong reciprocal blow”. These developments could simply be viewed as posturing under Trump’s ‘maximum pressure’ campaign designed to bring the Iranians to heel. However, the accompanying military moves spell trouble. For example, the American bombing campaign against the pro-Iran Houthis in Yemen is being seen as a message to Tehran, while the US is dispatching another aircraft carrier to the region, along with assembling more bombers on Iran’s periphery. Even a slight miscalculation in such combustible conditions could lead to immense devastation.
While militarily there is no parallel between the American war machine and Iran’s defensive capabilities, any armed engagement would be catastrophic, hammering the global economy. After all, the US has several bases and tens of thousands of troops in the region; all of this would be within the reach of Iranian missiles in case of an attack. This is why the Gulf states have reportedly warned the US against involving them in any hostile action against Iran, while Russia has also raised the alarm. Any instability in the wider region would also have negative consequences for Pakistan, bringing another war to its borders. Therefore, the US needs to back down and engage Iran with respect. While America wants a complete rollback of the Iranian nuclear programme, this is unlikely. The Iranians are willing to negotiate, but not with a gun to their head. The following weeks will be critical; either the US can address the crisis with wisdom (which seems to be in short supply in Washington) or risk a conflagration with global consequences.
Published in Dawn, April 3rd, 2025
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Sakib Sherani // Dawn: 3 April 2025
‘There is no use of running on the wrong road’ — Turkish proverb
ELITE misrule in Pakistan has scarred the nation and left a legacy of socioeconomic underdevelopment and political disenfranchisement. Beyond the enclaves of affluence and prosperity in a handful of gated urban communities, the overwhelming majority of citizens live grinding, harsh lives of misery.
Without basic public services or economic opportunity, sans rule of law, recourse to independent courts, executive accountability and absent political voice, generations of Pakistanis have essentially led progressively hard lives in a progressively soft state. The past few years have unleashed an even harsher reality of state repression, stolen election mandates, and widespread miscarriage of justice. Instead of introspection, and an acknowledgement of a collective failure of governance, the ruling elite have now decidedthat the state needs to be even ‘harder’ in its approach to its disaffected citizens.
Consider the poisoned fruits of our collective mis-governance. In terms of human development, Pakistan has sunk to 164 out of 193 countries. More than its ranking, the true measure of its arrested development comes from its peer group in the Human Development Index. The three countries Pakistan, with a per capita income of $1,669, is just better than in the HDI are Lesotho ($878), Tanzania ($1,211), and Cote d’Ivoire ($2,729), with their respective per capita incomes in parentheses.
The three countries that are ranked just above Pakistan are Rwanda ($1,000), Togo ($1,013) and Mauritania ($2,149). In other words, in terms of human development, Pakistan is languishing among the cohort of some of the poorest sub-Saharan African countries.
It doesn’t end here. Assuming we are not fully entertained yet, here are some more sorry statistics.
The average life expectancy of a Pakistani, a basic measure of well-being, is the lowest in South Asia, just above Afghanistan. According to the World Bank, “Pakistan faces a silent, deep human capital crisis” with the country’s human capital outcomes “comparable to those in Sub-Saharan Africa”.
It has the highest number of out-of-school children in the world (over 20 million), the highest rate of stunting for children under five years (40 per cent), and the highest ‘learning poverty’ rate in South Asia as well as the entire cohort of lower middle-income countries. The latter means, according to the World Bank, that 79pc of Pakistani children are unable to read and understand a simple text by age 10.
Only 39pc of the population has access to safe drinking water, with ‘alarmingly high’ levels of arsenic in much of the country’s groundwater. Pollution levels are among the highest in the world, and up to 24pc of the analysed population in parts of Balochistan, Sindh, and KP were facing high levels of acute food insecurity when surveyed, according to The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification.
Within South Asia, Pakistan has the lowest exports to GDP ratio, the slowest structural as well as demographic transformation, the lowest savings and investments rates, and the lowest productivity growth. It is the longest user of IMF resources, has had recourse to the largest number of IMF programmes, and is the fourth largest borrower from the Fund in terms of absolute amount.
In the World Bank’s Worldwide Governance Indicators, Pakistan’s percentile rank for control of corruption is 23rd (ie, it is worse off than 77pc of the countries in the world); for rule of law, 25th; for government effectiveness, 29th; and for voice and accountability, 25th.
In short, this is the dystopian Pakistan its extractive, self-absorbed and insouciant elite have constructed. And after having brought us here, they now have pretensions of being able to fix it. In other words, the civilian and non-civilian elites that have shepherded Pakistan to this sorry state over the past decades, the very source of our malady, want to be our healing physicians.
While the recent Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences has focused attention on the framework presented by Acemoglu and Robinson, American economist Mancur Olson presented insights on elite malfeasance two decades earlier.
In his 1993 paper, Dictatorship, Democracy, and Development, Olson examines the evolution of states by contrasting the behaviour of two types of ‘bandits’:
Roving bandit: A bandit who pillages indiscriminately, taking all available resources without regard for future plunder opportunities. This behavior leads to economic devastation, as there is no incentive for the populace to produce or accumulate wealth.
Stationary bandit: A bandit who settles in a specific territory, monopolising theft through regular taxation. Recognising that the prosperity of the populace directly affects his own wealth extraction, the stationary bandit provides public goods such as order and infrastructure to encourage economic productivity. This symbiotic relationship lays the groundwork for the development of stable governance structures.
(Separately, Olson also talks about special interest groups and “institutional sclerosis”, which is also particularly apt in the case of Pakistan).
Unfortunately, the collusion and support of the international establishment has turned Pakistan’s ruling elites from stationary bandits to internationally mobile roving bandits, with little or no accountability to domestic electoral constituencies, or having to face the consequences of their acts of omission and commission. After a lifetime career of being lawless rulers in Pakistan, they are granted retirement as law-abiding citizens in the West.
Pakistan is a soft state when fighting elite corruption and misrule, but a hard state when fighting political freedoms and democratic rights of its citizens. Instead of making Pakistan an even harder state for its hapless citizens, the mis-ruling elite needs to reconfigure the state to fight poverty, illiteracy, malnourishment, disenfranchisement, the absence of rule of law, political representation, voice and accountability. This requires the elites to think beyond personal enrichment and in terms of inclusive development. A precondition is committing to constitutional participatory democracy and rule of law.
Instead of a ‘hard state’ turning even harder, Pakistanis deserve a state that finally goes soft on its own citizens in terms of delivering on their long denied democratic and development aspirations.
The writer has been a member of several past economic advisory councils under different prime ministers.
Published in Dawn, April 3rd, 2025
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Greater Qandahar, Loya Paktia and the US
Inam Ul Haque // TRIBUNE: April 03, 2025
Winston Churchill famously described Soviet Russia as "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma". This characterisation also fits modern Afghanistan, as amply demonstrated by repeated failures of the modern world in dealing with Afghans and Afghanistan. My research indicates that the root cause is lack of socio-anthropological understanding on the part of the relevant policymakers and most of the Afghanologists in dealing with Afghan affairs.
The present-day political dispensation in the IEA runs along Qandahar (I prefer Qandahar to Kandahar) – Paktia fault lines. Qandahar, or the Greater Qandahar, is where the Taliban Tehreek (movement) under Mulla Umer was born. A seminary student who was unable to finish his formal education, since he took up armed resistance against warlords and strongmen in the early 1990s, the venerable Umer would refer decisions as critical as handing over Osama Bin Laden to the US forces for alleged complicity in the 9/11 attacks, to the ulema. That strand persists in the Movement under the venerable Moulvi Haibatullah Akhundzada (the lineage of holy men, the Akhund) to this day. The fact that Qandahar, the mover and shaker of the Taliban movement, sees everything including foreign presence and girls' education strictly through a religious lens is important; hence my persistent advice to conduct 'religious diplomacy' with Qandahar.
The recent media interview of the IEA Foreign Ministry spokesperson, the suave English-speaking Abdul Qahar Balkhi substantiates this assertion. Eager to engage with the US (there were repeated requests previously to Pakistan/ISI to facilitate this engagement), Balkhi was categorical about…presence of intelligence-sharing cooperation with the US; ISIK threat as overblown; and the non-handing over of the abandoned US military equipment, as demanded by the Trump Administration. Balkhi was evasive about human especially the women rights to education and work, citing this as Afghanistan's domestic affair. The puritanical Qandahar takes a long religious view, guided by the early days of Islam, conveniently sidestepping Islam's revolutionary credentials in the Arab universe. IEA has an unsettling conviction about its invincibility, citing the humiliating retreat of two contemporary superpowers from Afghanistan. That hardline is not changing anytime soon.
Loya Paktia (greater Paktia, roughly comprising the provinces of Paktia, Paktika, Khowst and Nangarhar), in the Zadran tribe dominated northern Afghanistan bordering our KP, is the fief of Haqqanis, the students of Darul Uloom Haqqania in Akora Khattak, hence the Haqqani nom-de-guerre. Jalaluddin Haqqani and presently Sirajuddin Haqqani, the venerable Khalifa, are also inextricably linked to North Waziristan District in KP through marital ties, military linkages and logistic basing. Haqqanis are, therefore, natural host to the TTP, who fought alongside Haqqani forces in the Afghan war of liberation, supported by Pakistan and its ISI. The West Plus still accuses Pakistan of playing the double game.
Loya Paktia under Haqqani suzerainty was never incorporated through the force of arms into the Ahmadzai/Mohammadzai tribes' Qandahar-dominated IEA. Haqqanis instead partnered with and were coopted into the IEA, maintaining their status and relative independence within the Movement. Their worldview is diametrically different. From the days of US Congressman Charlie Wilson, during the war against the former USSR when Chalie was made to fire on a Soviet base inside Afghan territory by Haqqanis, Khalifas have a soft corner for Pakistan, ISI and the US. Therefore, TTP hosting is now an enigma for them, as it is becoming too costly for them, is a legacy issue, a logistic burden and a PR liability.
Qandahar sees things differently. Sensitive to TTP's destructive potential in spoiling Kabul's relations with Muslim Pakistan, it remains unable and unwilling to prevail over TTP due to Haqqanis. Haqqanis, on the other hand, have started treating TTP as a 'force-in-being', if and when another round of internecine fighting erupts within IEA. They differ with Qandahar over a host of issues including denial of female education, relations with Pakistan and domestic policies. Sirajuddin Haqqani's recent absence from the scene and his overseas engagements indicate relative uneasiness with Qandahar. So, while eager to resolve the legacy TTP issue with Pakistan, Haqqanis do not want to give up TTP's potential military advantage. Therefore, TTP in my formulation is a bone stuck in the IEA's neck. So, my advice is to give the issue time to resolve itself, while responding decisively and unreservedly to any terrorist challenges. Khalifa et al would look the other way after some noise.
For both Qandahar and Paktia, the existential challenge is unity among the IEA ranks, as without unity internecine squabbling is likely to unravel Afghanistan's clerical enterprise. Qandahar, during Khalifa's recent angry absence, asserted its authority by posting Qandahari troops in the Haqqani enclave along border with Pakistan. Khalifa also prefers independent validation by the West Plus, hence his UAE and Saudi junkets, perhaps at the cost of Qandahar.
The above complexity of Greater Qandahar versus Loya Paktia, TTP versus IEA, TTP versus Haqqanis, IEA versus Pakistan, Haqqanis versus Islamabad, and IEA/Haqqani versus the US need wise handling by Pakistan. Our response should entail continued religious diplomacy with Qandahar, conduct of internation diplomacy under the remits of Doha Agreement, calibrated and relentless military response cis and trans-frontier without making noise, ruthless and resolute fight against terrorism at home, and giving a way out to Haqqanis from their self-created predicament. Patient pursuit of this policy without knee-jerk reactions like border closures should be the hallmark.
Afghanistan's stability is in Pakistan's best and selfish national interest. But the TTP variable can tilt the fragile balance, if not restrained and resolved, as Pakistan's patience, understandably, can wear thin. Without TTP solution, Afghanistan despite its mineral/other resources stays embroiled, notwithstanding Mr Balkhi's claim that Afghanistan is open for business. Resource exploitation would continue to face impediments and delays. And one distant day, when the collective opposition of Northern Alliance, in cahoots with pragmatist Khalifas, bolstered by disenfranchised Pashtuns, and the vestiges of First Republic under the US/NATO-Combine, is strong enough, the tables can be turned against IEA. And Kabul may see another change of hands. And that unfortunate possibility, God forbid, may result into the resurgence of civil strife, or the unfortunate division of Afghanistan.
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