Daily Times

Nations have been fighting ridiculous wars for ages. Some have been so absurd they have bordered on pure hilarity. One such conflict was the War of Jenkin’s Ear, caused by a display of a rotting piece of British mariner’s ear in British Parliament. The sailor had claimed that the Spanish coast guards had sliced off his ear on trumped up smuggling charges. In vengeful passion, the British declared war on the Kingdom of Spain. Another comical war was the famous Pig War between USA and Great Britain over the disputed San Juan Island. The war was initiated upon the killing of a British pig by an American farmer. Another bizarre war was fought between Greece and Bulgaria in 1925, when a Greek soldier was killed while chasing his runaway dog! That wars have been fought over pigs, dogs and disembodied ears helps show the fickleness of human nature.

According to the famous Prussian military strategist and philosopher Carl Von Clausewitz, strategy is about choosing the right battles while tactics are about executing those battles. He also stated that war should be compared to commerce and not art; as commerce is the right arena for the conflict between human interests and activities. In this age of geo-economics, commerce should logically trump wars and probably with prescience uncommon for a eighteenth century military theorist Clausewitz could also see the future of warfare in the arenas of commerce and economics. As per Israeli military historian Martin Van Creveld, future wars between nuclear states would be in the arenas of low intensity conflicts, economy, and commerce. He opines in one of his articles that wars between Pakistan and India have been avoided only due to their nuclear deterrence, and that there is no possibility of a conventional war between the two estranged neighbours in the future.

But we must ask ourselves that if there is no possibility of another Indo-Pak war due to nuclear deterrence, then in which arenas will the future wars be fought? The answer is not too difficult, as all pointers indicate wars of commerce, low intensity non-state actor based interventions, diplomatic standoffs, and coalition politics. If the Indians are not burying the hatchet and coming to terms with a small neighbour — then their naiveté is only damaging their big power pretensions; a fact they better come to terms with sooner rather than later. The cost of this perennial phony war imposed on the people of the subcontinent by the leadership of both India and Pakistan is simply too high from an opportunity cost angle. But why has nobody stopped the senselessness of it all?

The time for placebo solutions and anodyne election time gimmicks is over. Urban development is now a national security imperative

The answer to the above question is not difficult if one views the panoply of threats facing both countries in the spheres of environment, food insecurity, water scarcity, and economic insolvency. Amongst the two, Pakistan is most vulnerable to these threats. We also have to understand that if any conventional war were to occur in the future, a nuclear escalation is almost inevitable.

Taking this into account, the role of the Pakistan armed forces is to act as trip wires to stop shallow border adventurism by a big neighbour that may be drunk on power. But is this it? And is this the only war we should be preparing for?

The wars to be fought today are the wars against poverty, injustice, environmental degradation, desertification of fertile land, energy shortages, industrial backwardness, the health and education deficit, population explosion, runaway corruption, bad governance, religious extremism, and ethnic polarization. Our wars are staring us in the face and putting our national survival at stake. We have to devote every ounce of national energy towards stopping these existential threats. In the absence of proper planning and governance, our cities are becoming urban sprawls. With over 50 percent of Pakistan’s population living in cities by 2030, our unplanned cities will be chaotic and gridlocked. Pakistan is the only country in the world where the cost of property is vested in land and not the housing units constructed above. The reason is the lack of national planning to create middle and low income housing zones with restriction on the size of land plots for construction of big houses. Our limited land resources in and around urban areas are being consumed by the rich and mighty while excluding the poor.

It is a common yet surreal spectacle in a city like Islamabad to see acres of precious land being consumed by the rich to build their farm houses while the poor are pushed to the margins without any planned zones for them to purchase land at reasonable cost. While the covetous development mafia encroaches implacably on cultivable but cheap rural land in connivance with the corrupt state functionaries and politicians, the rural population migrates to cites only to find shelter in slums. On one end, the practice threatens our food security because of reduction in cultivable land while on another it threatens the health and security of poor slum dwellers. That the state and polity is complicit in this loot is a sad reality. Due to the lack of urban planning and check on the size of plots for the rich and powerful the land is getting scarce and costly while our cities are getting swamped by a sea of humanity. What our visionless elite fails to realise is that the multitudes of poor and needy congregating in the cities will make their gated islands of affluence unliveable.

Already, our major cities have started resembling urban sprawls with piles of refuse littered everywhere and rows of bumper to bumper traffic plying on insufficient roads. With a galloping population and a steady stream of vehicles on the roads our transportation infrastructure is getting choked. With Lahore and Karachi’s populations standing at 11 and 20 million respectively the absence of a mass transit system has started taking a significant toll on the residents. Our infrastructure planners should realise that one swallow does not make a summer. One or two metros and a couple of ring roads will not suffice for our mega polis cities. These cities need an underground mass transit system to make them liveable. The time for placebo solutions and anodyne election time gimmicks is over. Urban development is now a national security imperative, along with combating water scarcity and environmental degradation.

Would any other country in the world beset with serious water shortages for drinking, agriculture, and power generation wait for big dams like Kalabagh to be constructed? If we do not build more dams, our water and food security will be seriously imperilled. Our environmental degradation in the shape of sea pollution and removal of forest cover is costing us dear in terms of diseases and floods. Nothing short of a war against the ubiquitous plastic bags and timber mafia will do the trick. And the war against disease and illiteracy can only be waged by marshalling the best national resources and generous allocation of required funds. A uniform national curriculum and wresting the proprietorship of religious education from ignorant mullahs is the need of the hour. What right does a mullah have to use a poor man’s son as his foot soldier in ideological battles through antiquated methods of mind control; all in the name of a religion that sets great store in education?

In order to fight, and more importantly win, the wars against all existential threats to our national survival we require a reorientation of our threat assessment in order to transit from a national security state to a development state. If we still fail to choose our wars wisely, we might not be left with enough strength to fight any kind of war in the future.

The writer is a PhD scholar at NUST; e mail rwjanj@hotmail.com

Published in Daily Times, May 14^th 2018.