Daily Times

In the early 1960s, Pakistan was poised to become an Asian tiger. It was in the “take-off stage.” Why did rocket fizzle out on the launch pad?

The 1965 war with India was one factor. The increasingly unequal distribution of wealth and the rise of the 22 families was another. In the ensuing economic upheaval, one general overthrew another and then proceeded to blunder into the 1971 war with India which saw the breakup of the country less than a quarter century into its existence.

A demoralised Army installed a populist leader at the helm. He engaged in a large-scale program of nationalization that ruined the economy, giving the army the perfect excuse to seize power yet again. Then came the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. On the army’s watch, fundamentalism was declared a virtue and propagated. The extremist movement sought to make the country stronger by imposing a stringent moral code. Alas, it yielded the bitter fruit of terrorism, which messed up the quality of life and scared off foreign investment, international cricket, and tourism.

In the meantime, countries that had lagged behind Pakistan turned into Asian tigers. The first ones were Korea and Taiwan. Then Hong Kong and Singapore and eventually China.

At one stage or another, each of these countries was governed by the military. Some Pakistani analysts thought that military rule was the sine qua non of attaining “tigerhood”. But Pakistan had already gone through four bouts of military rule. The key ingredient that separated Pakistan’s dictators from the Asian dictators was that the latter never fought wars with their neighbours. They had learned early in their evolution that it was best to co-exist with the neighbours and trade with them.

Will Pakistan ever become an Asian tiger? Nadeemul Haque, an economist who worked for many years at the International Monetary Fund and later served as the deputy chairman of the planning commission, proffers his conception of such a blissful state in “Looking Back.” It’s a retrospective set in the year 2050, a century and three years after the country’s birth.

Pakistan is an Asian tiger. The head of its Financial Regulatory Authority came from the Singapore Stock Exchange.

Between 2030 and 2050 growth has taken place at a double-digit growth rate. Unemployment has been eradicated and there is a labour shortage. Remittances from abroad have tripled in size. Foreign tourism is booming. Some 80 percent of the population lives a middle class lifestyle. Education, politeness and professionalism are ubiquitous. Many faculty members at Pakistani universities are foreign nationals. Some 97 percent of high school-aged children are in high school and some 25 percent of university-aged people are in universities. Government officials serve the people and are devoid of pomp and circumstance. They don’t drive around in luxury cars or live in mansions befitting the royals. Public service is a model of efficiency. Regulation has been stripped of bureaucracy and is now a serious business. The economy is open with minimum and uniform tariffs.

How was this ultimate utopia realised? The author says that the radical transformation was not imposed from the top down. No Messiah appeared. The transformation came about through a “home-grown and crowd-sourced phenomenon.”

It was a bottom up movement.

The catalyst was the coming together of professional groups across the country into an umbrella organisation, research for Pakistan. This provided a platform through which networks carried out their research and advanced their intellectual and knowledge base. The result was a country characterised by decentralisation, urbanisation, a high degree of literacy, no budget deficits and a surplus in the balance of payments.

There were checks and balances on the federal government and on the authority of the prime minister. No military dictator ruled the roost. Indeed, the army had no visible presence in the affairs of the country, domestic or international. And the scourge of fundamentalism was erased. For 72 years, Pakistan’s progression was characterized by uneven and checkered development. So what brought about such radical change? Can a vaguely defined “complex self-organising network” be the primary cause?

Was this the main ingredient in the creation of the Asian Tigers? Do such network-driven phenomenon even exist anywhere in the globe? Is this the script for a social sci-fi movie?

The author critiques the mono-disciplinary approach to economic development that has been pursued by the international lending agencies and advocates that the country adopt a broader interdisciplinary approach which combines economics, politics and sociology. Has this been implemented anywhere else? Why has it not taken place in Pakistan?

The book makes a number of strong statements, some of which border on unsupported generalisations.

“Development does not happen from the top, with consultant log frames for sectoral change, nor can it be engineered from without. Development happens when people work together to build systems from the bottom up.”

Networks, never clearly defined in the book, “correctly pointed out that Pakistan’s failure was in its inability to correctly conceptualise the type of development it needed.

Networks argued for a renewed effort to build and maintain systems that are at the heart of the country. In Pakistan’s case, the elite had usurped public policy and the function of the bureaucrats was merely to serve the whims of this influential group.”

Under reform, also unclearly defined, “administrative capacity was developed so that indigenous research informed the framing of good policy and also the process of developing systems for monitoring, thinking and sharing ideas…a modern, public service, and human resource management is vital to development. This reform includes professionals with the fresh, new work ethic necessary to develop a modern state that uses twenty-first century systems.”

In Pakistan’s 72-year history, an odious network of “special interest groups” has looted public wealth and governed the country. Why would the irrent-seeking behaviour disappear without a trace? How would a country with rampant nepotism, corruption, xenophobia, sectarianism, terrorism, fundamentalism and authoritarianism be transformed into a “garden of fine men and women?”

The reader will look in vain for answers to any of these questions in the book. Nor will the reader find any discussion of the toll that defense spending has imposed on Pakistan’s national development.

The book correctly blames the nation’s problems on centralization of policy making but it does not go one step further and blame the militarisation of politics which has destroyed the civil institutions more than any international lending agency. Despite these limitations, the book is a provocative read. It should be of especial interest to the two new cabinet members of the Imran Khan government who have worked with international lending agencies.

The writer can be reached at ahmadfaruqui@gmail.com. He Tweets at @AhmadFaruqui