Anjum Niaz is a freelance journalist with over twenty years of experience in national and international reporting. This post was picked up from Pak Markaz and puts it straight for our “leaders” to understand. We whole-heartedly support this plan instead of an IMF bailout.

After China’s reluctance to bail us out, what next? The Saudis were shy to say they will give us oil on deferred payment; they have since gone silent. The Americans did promise us some millions but are today scurrying like scared rabbits stopping their own economy from collapse. The UAE royal family will cough up cash for old time’s sake but only if we hand over our family silver to them on a platter. We have no cash to keep the IMF wolf away from the door. Pakistan has begged from all, but none has come forth with money, only hollow promises.

Knock, knock. Enter the big bad wolf. With our economy in the emergency ward, the IMF will shove its painful economic drip down our throats to revive us. Do we deserve it? Yes, because our leaders, military and civilian, present and past, have been too busy living like emperors, building their own palaces in Pakistan and abroad, junketing abroad with toadies unlimited, lining their own pockets, hoarding dollars in their own foreign banks and looking the other way while their honchos have done the same. The rape by our leaders continues. The fear of God doesn’t work on our leaders; the fear of IMF does.

If the world’s second richest man Warren Buffet is willing to invest in his country’s future by buying American stocks why can’t Pakistan’s suggested second richest man President Asif Ali Zardari and the fourth richest man Mian Nawaz Sharif invest in energy projects that can save Pakistan from going bankrupt? Just think about it. This is no idle talk but a practical solution to our biggest problem today: lack of energy.

‘Put your mouth where your money is,’ writes Warren Buffet in a column recently. ‘Today my money and my mouth both say equities.’ A simple rule dictates his buying: ‘Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful. And most certainly, fear is now widespread, gripping even seasoned investors. But fears regarding the long-term prosperity of the nation’s many sound companies make no sense. These businesses will indeed suffer earnings hiccups, as they always have. But most major companies will be setting new profit records 5, 10 and 20 years from now.’

Pakistan cannot come close to America and its wealth. Cynics may point out that my citing Warren Buffet is therefore way off the mark. They may point out that Zardari and Sharif are no Warren Buffet. Granted. Darn, it’s time we talked shop. Sharp-suited-smiler has done the international rounds but returned home empty handed. Zardari’s last resort was China. He hoped that the Chinese would deposit $1.5 billion to $3 billion in the State Bank of Pakistan before his plane touched down in Karachi. That did not happen.

Why?

The much-celebrated democracy dividend engineered by the US and UK envoys and seconded by the Saudis and the UAE earlier this year saw the emasculation of Pervez Musharraf. The dictator was forced to issue the NRO which washed away the years of corruption our politicians were accused of and indicted for in courts here and abroad. The death of Benazir Bhutto left in its wake a power vacuum that Zardari and company were not prepared for. The PPP co-chairman overnight became the accidental candidate and in turn got crushed under the welter of his own power. Consequently he bungled not once but many times. He allowed Farooq Naek and Latif Khosa to block the return of the chief justice. He allowed his ego to guide him in his choice of a subservient prime minister. He okayed Rehman Malik’s underhand move to take control of the ISI. He let loose the dogs of war in Punjab all the while schmoozing with the Sharifs; trooping with the Americans (Ambassador Anne Patterson in Islamabad and Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad in New York); cajoling the Saudis for free oil; humouring General Kayani and pampering Altaf Hussain of the MQM giving him what he wants. Read more »

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Take a restive, nuclear-armed nation with an untested new government, an escalating Islamic insurgency, long-standing tensions with its neighbors and an economy in free fall for months.

Then add in a global financial crisis. Some analysts and diplomats fear that Pakistan could come to exemplify a perilous new phenomenon: a strategic but unstable state at risk of being pushed to the breaking point by external economic factors.

Government officials insist that Pakistan’s economic fundamentals, while weakened, are holding steady. But this politically volatile country of 165 million people, a U.S. ally in the fight against the Taliban and al-Qaida, can ill afford more upheaval.

Pakistan’s creditworthiness rating is the second-worst among nations ranked by Standard and Poor’s, superior only to that of the Seychelles. Last week, the country’s president, political novice Asif Ali Zardari, felt compelled to offer public assurances that “Pakistan is not going bankrupt.”

On Monday, armed police surrounded the Karachi stock exchange to prevent a recurrence of stone-throwing rioting by investors that occurred in July.

“The global crisis has really added fuel to the fire,” market analyst Muhammad Suhail said. “There was a time window earlier this year to address all this, and we missed it.”

At the onset of days of current mayhem in worldwide markets, Pakistan — a relative economic success story for much of the past decade — was undergoing a punishing reversal of fortune.

In the past six months, its main stock exchange has lost more than half its value. The national currency, the rupee, stands at historic lows, even with propping up by the state bank, which also intervened to improve market liquidity. Foreign-exchange reserves are dangerously depleted, the budget deficit is at a 10-year high, inflation is running about 25 percent annually and debt obligations are looming large. Read more »

Pakistan’s main problem is not that it has many Muslim extremists or a weak economy. Rather, it is Pakistan’s dependence on the West and especially the U.S. that prevents it from fulfilling its potential.

As a developing country, Pakistan’s main concern should be to modernize. The cause for Pakistan’s lack of progress is the backwards state of the country as a whole: the government, society, customs, education, the economy and so on. A weak economy, having many extremists are not more than symptoms of this larger problem.

Pakistan’s government has historically made the mistake to confuse symptoms for causes.

• The West was richer, so it should be befriended and, to a degree, imitated.
• The West was stronger, so Pakistan’s military had to be reformed and equipped with modern weapons.
• The West had more money, so Pakistan should borrow some and use it to improve its own economy.

The problem with all these grand approaches was and is that they did not deal with the root of the problem.

Unlike what Pakistani (and those of developing countries in general) leaders seem to think the West did not become rich and powerful overnight. Becoming ‘modern’ took centuries, not years. Imitating the West, then, would mean one has to take centuries to modernize. Only such an approach could create the same amount of stability.

Since politicians don’t have centuries they cramp those centuries into years, and somehow expect society as a whole to be able to deal with all the changes. This isn’t more than pure idiocy. What was achieved in centuries, cannot be achieved in years.

At least, not if one tries to copy these systems that took centuries to develop.

Rather, Pakistan’s leaders should look at other countries that were once in a similar position. The best example of such a country is Turkey. In 1920 this country was nearly destroyed, highly dependent on foreign ‘aid’ (which came against a heavy price) and searching for way to close the gap with the West. The men who in the end succeeded in modernizing Turkey and the Turkish people, Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk), understood that he had to come up with a brand new parable of modernization, for those of ‘developed’ countries were not applicable on the Turkish people and situation. Read more »

In the first two parts of the essay, ‘are we ready to eat grass?’ a bird’s eye view of security perspectives arising out of a Pakistani mindset have been discussed. The question that now arises is, ‘do we have the potential to grow the grass we intend to eat?’ In this regard an interesting development on River Chenab could be a measure of events to follow.

A few days ago India decided to first reduce and then block the water of River Chenab, allocated to Pakistan under the Indus Waters Treaty 1960. If India continues this violation of blocking waters, it will have a serious effect on the cotton and rice crops immediately and wheat/ sugar cane in the winter season.  Besides raising military tensions in the region, this will also aggravate the existing grain and power shortages in Pakistan.

Pakistan had moved the case of Baglihar Dam for international arbitration.  The ruling of the arbitration indicated that due to technical incompetence, India had a much better argument and Pakistan could only gain an advantage of 1.5M freeboard and getting the pondage volume reduced from 37.4Mm3 to 32.56Mm3 instead of 6.22 Mm3 that was demanded.  The effects of this arbitration and manipulative capability of India thereof, on Pakistan’s agrarian economy and minimum outlet flow are yet to be ascertained. Metaphorically thus, how will we eat grass if we have no water to grow it? Read more »