Pakistan: A Hard Country (7 page)
At an average of 240 mm of rainfal per year, Pakistan is one of the most natural y arid of the world’s heavily populated states. Without the Indus river system and the canals flowing from it, most, even of Punjab, would be semi-desert and scrub-forest (cal ed ‘jungle’ in Pakistan) – as it was before the British began their great irrigation projects.
This is apparent if you fly over the country. Once the five great rivers of Punjab and the Kabul river flowing from Afghanistan have paid their tribute to the Indus, the vast majority of cultivated land in the southern end of Punjab and the whole of Sindh is only what can be irrigated from the Indus. Beyond these lands, al is brown, yel ow and grey, dotted with the occasional oasis provided by natural springs or more often tube-wel s. Only 24 per cent of Pakistan’s land area is cultivated – the great majority through man-made irrigation systems. The rest is pastoral land, or uninhabited: desert, semi-desert, and mountain.
Chronic over-use, however, means that many of the natural springs have dried up, and the water table is dropping so rapidly in many areas that the tube-wel s wil also eventual y fol ow them into extinction.
That wil leave the Indus once again; and in the furore surrounding the debunking of the exaggerated claim that the glaciers feeding the Indus wil disappear by 2035, it has been forgotten that they are nonetheless melting; and if they disappear a century or two later, the effects on Pakistan wil be equal y dire, if no serious action is taken in the meantime radical y to improve Pakistan’s conservation and efficient use of water.
If the floods of 2010 are a harbinger of a long-term pattern of increased monsoon rains, this on the other hand would potential y be of great benefit to Pakistan – but only potential y, because to harness them for agriculture requires both a vastly improved storage and distribution infrastructure, and radical measures to stop deforestation in the mountains and to replant deforested areas. Otherwise, increased rainfal wil risk more catastrophes like that of 2010, with the water rushing off the deforested hil sides in the north to swamp first the val eys and then the plains. It should be added, though, that an absolutely essential part of existing infrastructure did work during the floods: the great barrages along the Indus and its tributaries. If these had broken, several of Pakistan’s greatest cities would have been inundated, and the death tol would have been vastly higher than the 1,900 who lost their lives.
This dependence on the Indus is the greatest source of long-term danger to Pakistan. Over the next century, the possible long-term combination of climate change, acute water shortages, poor water infrastructure and steep population growth has the potential to wreck Pakistan as an organized state and society. Long-term international aid projects in Pakistan should be devoted above al to reducing this mortal threat, by promoting reforestation, repairing irrigation systems and even more importantly improving the efficiency of water use.
Human beings can survive for centuries without democracy, and even without much security. They cannot live for more than three days without water.
The extent of the water crisis that is already occurring wil be described in the chapters on Sindh and Balochistan. As two of the authors of the World Bank’s very worrying 2004 report on Pakistan’s water situation write:
The facts are stark. Pakistan is already one of the most water-stressed countries in the world, a situation that is going to degrade into outright water scarcity due to high population growth. There is no feasible intervention which would enable Pakistan to mobilize appreciably more water than it now uses ...
There are no additional water resources to be exploited and agricultural water use must decline to enable adequate flows into the degrading Indus River Delta. Pakistan’s dependence on a single river system makes its water economy highly risky ...
Groundwater is now being overexploited in many areas, and its quality is declining ... There is little evidence that government (or donors, including the World Bank) have re-engineered their capacity and funding to deal with this great chal enge. And here delay is fatal, because the longer it takes to develop such actions, the greater wil become the depth [beneath the earth] of the water table.17
According to a 2009 study by the Woodrow Wilson Center drawing on a range of different works, by 2025 population growth is likely to mean that Pakistan’s annual water demand rises to 338 bil ion cubic metres (bcm) – while, unless radical action is taken, Pakistan’s water availability wil be around the same as at present, at 236 bcm. The resulting shortfal of 100 bcm would be two-thirds of the entire present flow of the Indus.18
And this frightening situation would have come about even before the potential effects of climate change begin to kick in. These effects could be to turn stress into catastrophe by the end of the twenty-first century. Wel before Pakistan reaches this point, however, it is likely that conflict over access to the shrinking Indus wil have raised tensions between Pakistan’s provinces to levels which wil be incompatible with the country’s survival.
If anyone thinks that the condition of Pakistan wil be of little consequence to the rest of the world in the long run, they should remember that a hundred years from now, if it survives that long, Pakistan wil stil possess nuclear weapons, one of the biggest armies in the world, one of the biggest populations in the world and one of the biggest diasporas in the world, especial y in Britain. Islamist radicalism, which has already existed for hundreds of years, wil also stil be present, even if it has been considerably reduced by the West’s withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Al of this wil stil mean that of al the countries in the world that are acutely threatened by climate change, Pakistan wil be one of the most important. Moreover, what happens to Pakistan wil have a crucial effect on the rest of South Asia, where around one-fifth of the world’s entire population live and wil live. Those Indians who would be tempted to rejoice in Pakistan’s fal should therefore consider that it would almost certainly drag India down with it.
The World Bank has valuable programmes in place, on which much more could be built. For example, at present, Pakistan harvests a good deal less of its rainfal than neighbouring areas of India, and only a fraction of China’s harvest per cubic metre of rainfal . Intensive effort is needed to improve this performance – something which does not require expensive high-tech solutions, but rather a mixture of spadework and better, more innovative management.
Concentrating development aid on the improvement of Pakistan’s water infrastructure has the added advantage that such improvement is highly labour-intensive, and provides a range of jobs, from masses of ordinary workers with spades to highly trained engineers. This means that benefits from international aid wil flow immediately to many ordinary people and be immediately apparent to them. By contrast, most US aid in recent decades, though often very useful to the economy as a whole, has not been visible to ordinary people and therefore has had no political effects in terms of attitudes to the US.
THE PAKISTANI ECONOMY
There would be no point in talking about any of this if Pakistan were in fact the hopeless economic and administrative basket-case that it is so often made out to be. This is not the situation, however. Pakistan has never fol owed the ‘Asian tigers’ in radical y successful modern development, and shows no signs of doing so, but for most of the time since 1947 its rates of growth have been substantial y higher than India’s. Pakistan would be a far more developed and prosperous state today but for the economic disaster of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s nationalization programmes of the 1970s, which led to a steep drop in growth.
After another period of economic stagnation in the 1990s (worsened by US sanctions imposed as a punishment for Pakistan’s nuclear programme), under the Musharraf administration from 1999 to 2008
economic growth returned to a rate of between 6.6 and 9 per cent a year, before dropping again as a result of the global economic recession.
Certainly, most people in Pakistan are poor; but al the same, as a result of this economic growth, together with the effects of Islamic charity and the circulation of state patronage to the kinfolk and fol owers of successful politicians, Pakistan lacks the huge concentrations of absolute poverty to be found in India’s cities and countryside. In fact, the absolutely poor and defenceless people in Pakistan are often the same as in India – the descendants of the old ‘untouchable’ castes, who – seeing nothing for them in India – remained in Pakistan at partition but have never escaped their traditional poverty and marginalization. There are however far fewer of them in Pakistan.
From this point of view as so many others, Pakistan has a rather medieval look. The state is very bad at providing modern services such as clean water, medicine, public transport and education, because it is too weak either to force much of the population to pay taxes or to control corruption on the part of its own officials. In part as a result of the lack of education, ordinary people are also very bad at organizing themselves to demand or create such services. Certain groups are outside the system altogether, and have no access to protection, patronage or charity. On the other hand, the system does ensure that the great majority of the population does at least have enough to eat.
And where the state decides that a particular development project is of great national importance, it can in fact partial y isolate it from the corruption of the rest of the system and ensure that it is built successful y. This was true of the vast extension of dams and irrigation in the 1950s, and in recent years the construction of the port of Gwadar and the fine motorways linking the great cities of northern Pakistan.
Pakistan’s GDP as of 2009 stood at $167 bil ion, making it the 48th largest economy in the world (27th if adjusted for purchasing power).
Despite the image of Pakistan as an overwhelmingly rural society, and the dominance of political, social and cultural patterns drawn from the countryside, agriculture as of 2009 accounted for only about 20 per cent of GDP. The ‘service sector’ accounted for 53 per cent (most of it in informal, very smal -scale businesses and transport), with industry at 26 per cent. However, around 60 per cent of the population continued to live in the countryside, helping to explain the continued power of the rural elites. Most of Pakistani industry is made up of textiles and food processing. In 2007 – 8 Pakistani exports stood at $18 bil ion, the majority of them textiles.
Pakistan also contains certain islands of high technology – above al the nuclear industry, which (whatever you may think about its strategic implications) is a very remarkable achievement for a country with Pakistan’s economic profile, and shows what the Pakistani state can achieve if it real y sets its mind to it, and can mobilize enough educated, honest and committed people.
It is miserably clear, however, that – as with the other South Asian countries – the greater part of the Pakistani economy has not made the breakthrough to modern development and seems nowhere near doing so. As of 2009, GDP per head stood at a mere $1,250 (before adjustment for purchasing parity). Between 1960 and 2005, per capita income as a proportion of that of the USA actual y fel from 3.37 to 1.71
per cent. Some 23 per cent of the population live below the poverty line. Underlying this lack of development is a literacy rate which in 2010 stood at only 55.9 per cent, above al because of the complete absence of education for women in much of the countryside.
LIVING IN PAKISTAN
If the West and China want to help improve this picture, they need to develop an approach to Pakistan which recognizes the supreme importance of the country but is based on a real understanding of it, and not on fantasy, whether of the paranoid or optimistic variety. This book is an attempt to strengthen such understanding. It is based on travels to Pakistan dating back to my time there as a journalist for The Times (London) in the late 1980s, and on five research trips in 2007 – 9 lasting a total of six months, during which I visited al Pakistan’s provinces and major cities.
It should be said that, with the exception of my stays in some of the Pathan areas, at no point during my visits did I feel under any direct physical threat, except from the execrable local driving – and if you were going to be too affected by that you’d have to avoid visiting about half the world. Moreover, the Pathan areas are only a smal proportion of Pakistan as a whole. It is worth stressing this, because one reason why Pakistan is so little known and so badly misinterpreted in the West is that so many analysts and commentators are too afraid to go there, or, if they go, to travel outside Islamabad. This reluctance to visit Pakistan is true even in Britain, which is organical y linked to Pakistan by the large Pakistani diaspora; and it is largely unjustified – not to use a stronger word for this behaviour.
Of course, an unescorted visit to the tribal areas, or a prolonged stay in Peshawar in unprotected accommodation, might very wel prove fatal; but it is entirely possible to live for months on end in a dozen other different Pakistani cities, and most of the Pakistani countryside, without in my view running any very serious risk. Researchers, analysts and officials dealing with aid to Pakistan need to do this if they are to do their jobs properly.19