The iminent breakup of Pakistan?

February 1, 2008

Op-Ed Contributor

Drawn and Quartered

By SELIG S. HARRISON

Washington

WHATEVER the outcome of the Pakistani elections, now scheduled for Feb. 18, the existing multiethnic Pakistani state is not likely to survive for long unless it is radically restructured.

Given enough American pressure, a loosely united, confederated Pakistan could still be preserved by reinstating and liberalizing the defunct 1973 Constitution, which has been shelved by successive military rulers. But as matters stand, the Punjabi-dominated regime of Pervez Musharraf is headed for a bloody confrontation with the country’s Pashtun, Baluch and Sindhi minorities that could well lead to the breakup of Pakistan into three sovereign entities.

In that event, the Pashtuns, concentrated in the northwestern tribal areas, would join with their ethnic brethren across the Afghan border (some 40 million of them combined) to form an independent “Pashtunistan.” The Sindhis in the southeast, numbering 23 million, would unite with the six million Baluch tribesmen in the southwest to establish a federation along the Arabian Sea from India to Iran. “Pakistan” would then be a nuclear-armed Punjabi rump state.

In historical context, such a breakup would not be surprising. There had never been a national entity encompassing the areas now constituting Pakistan, an ethnic mélange thrown together hastily by the British for strategic reasons when they partitioned the subcontinent in 1947.

For those of Pashtun, Sindhi and Baluch ethnicity, independence from colonial rule created a bitter paradox. After resisting Punjabi domination for centuries, they found themselves subjected to Punjabi-dominated military regimes that have appropriated many of the natural resources in the minority provinces — particularly the natural gas deposits in the Baluch areas — and siphoned off much of the Indus River’s waters as they flow through the Punjab.

The resulting Punjabi-Pashtun animosity helps explain why the United States is failing to get effective Pakistani cooperation in fighting terrorists. The Pashtuns living along the Afghan border are happy to give sanctuary from Punjabi forces to the Taliban, which is composed primarily of fellow Pashtuns, and to its Qaeda friends.

Pashtun civilian casualties resulting from Pakistani and American air strikes on both sides of the border are breeding a potent underground Pashtun nationalist movement. Its initial objective is to unite all Pashtuns in Pakistan, now divided among political jurisdictions, into a unified province. In time, however, its leaders envisage full nationhood. After all, before the British came, the Pashtuns had been politically united under the banner of an Afghan empire that stretched eastward into the Punjabi heartland.

The Baluch people, for their part, have been waging intermittent insurgencies since their forced incorporation into Pakistan in 1947. In the current warfare Pakistani forces are widely reported to be deploying American-supplied aircraft and intelligence equipment that was intended for use in Afghan border areas. Their victims are forging military links with Sindhi nationalist groups that have been galvanized into action by the death of Benazir Bhutto, a Sindhi hero as was her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.

The breakup of Pakistan would be a costly and destabilizing development that can still be avoided, but only if the United States and other foreign donors use their enormous aid leverage to convince Islamabad that it should not only put the 1973 Constitution back into effect, but amend it to go beyond the limited degree of autonomy it envisaged. Eventually, the minorities want a central government that would retain control only over defense, foreign affairs, international trade, communications and currency. It would no longer have the power to oust an elected provincial government, and would have to renegotiate royalties on resources with the provinces.

In the shorter term, the Bush administration should scrap plans to send Special Forces into border areas in pursuit of Al Qaeda, which would only strengthen Islamist links with Pashtun nationalists. It should help secular Pashtun forces to compete with the Islamists by pushing for fair representation of Pashtun areas now barred from political participation.

It is often argued that the United States must stand by Mr. Musharraf and a unitary Pakistani state to safeguard Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. But the nuclear safeguards depend on the Pakistani Army as an institution, not on the president. They would not be affected by a break-up, since the nuclear weapons would remain under the control of the Punjabi rump state and its army.

The Army has built up a far-flung empire of economic enterprises in all parts of Pakistan with assets in the tens of billions, and can best protect its interests by defusing the escalating conflict with the minorities. Similarly, the minorities would profit from cooperative economic relations with the Punjab, and for this reason prefer confederal autonomy to secession. All concerned, including the United States, have a profound stake in stopping the present slide to Balkanization.

Selig S. Harrison is the director of the Asia program at the Center for International Policy and the author of “In Afghanistan’s Shadow,” a study of Baluch nationalism.

Hayy ibn Yaqdan

A medieval philosophicla novel written by Ibn Tufail in reponse to al-Ghazali's Tahafut al-Falsafa.This novel was subsequently translated into many European langauges and was widely read during the time whcih later came to be known as 'the Age of Reason' . We will read more about this important novel and discuss it by way of understanding the link between Arab culutre and early Renaissance activities across Europe.

The library is a great labyrithe ....You enter and you do not knwo whether you will come out.
..a character in Umberto Econ's The Name of the Rose

FT.com / Columnists / Martin Wolf - Preserving the open economy at times of stress

FT.com / Columnists / Martin Wolf - Preserving the open economy at times of stress

Some quotes from John Kay

' I cannot tell you how to get rich but i can tell you how to stay poor. Do not become
invovled int the global market place'' John Kay: British economist

Darwin’s wife and war in Iraq: a missing link 14 May 2008 Financial Times The modern world of business and politics is plagued by spurious rationality and bogus quantification. The desire to do what is right is overtaken by the necessity to do what is easy to defend. The University of Cambridge has put online the complete works of Charles Darwin. Not just On The Origin of Species but also his personal papers, his views on matrimony as well as his views on evolution. Darwin, scientific rationalist and child of the Enlightenment, set out in two opposing columns the pros and cons of marriage. A wife would provide “children, companionship, the charms of music and female chit-chat”. She would be “an object to be beloved and played with”, though he did not seem to attach great weight to this, conceding only that a wife was in this respect “better than a dog anyhow”. But Darwin also noted the disadvantages. The absence of the conversation of clever men at clubs, the prospect of “being forced to visit relatives, and to bend in every trifle”. Above all, the loss of time. Most people feel, I suspect, that there is something not quite right about this cold-blooded evaluation. It concerns marriage in general, rather than marriage to any particular woman. Despite his commitment to rationality, Darwin seems to have thought this too. Below his assessment he scrawled: “It is intolerable to think of spending one’s whole life, like a neuter bee, working, working – only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa.” He ends: “Marry – marry – marry QED.” The following year, Darwin wed Emma Wedgwood. They had 10 children. QED stands for quod erat demonstrandum, used by mathematicians to end a proof, which translates as “that which was to have been proved”. With that expression, Darwin gives the game away. His purpose was not to guide himself to the correct decision, but to rationalise a decision he had already made. For a time, I ran a company that sold models to large corporations. Although we urged clients to use these models in their decision-making, we did not actually do so ourselves. When I posed the question why, I realised that our analysis served the same function for our clients as Darwin’s list of pros and cons. People did not use our models to help make decisions, but to justify decisions they had previously taken. The results might be used internally to seek approval for an investment or an acquisition, or externally to persuade investors or regulators to give support. The board, or the main shareholders, would insist on the appearance of the formal process we were hired to provide. The modern world of business and politics is plagued by spurious rationality and bogus quantification. Almost everyone who has been responsible for a big decision in a large organisation will have had the experience of picking the best person for the job – and then sitting down to invent objective-sounding reasons for the choice. And if this process is at best distracting, firing someone involves extensive play-acting that frequently undermines the morale of everyone involved. The desire to do what is right is overtaken by the necessity to do what is easy to defend. In the new economy bubble, analysts devised new valuation metrics. Their use faded as rapidly as the share prices of the companies they were used to assess. The purpose of the calculations was not to inform those who were uncertain whether to buy, but to give reassurance to those who had already decided to buy. That rationalisation helped inflate the bubble: the story influences the outcome. Evidence-based policy is sought by government, but mostly the result is policy-based evidence. Only facts and arguments that support the desired policy are admitted, so the analytic basis of decision-making is eroded not enhanced. In the run-up to the Iraq war, the results were disastrous. In the Middle East, British and US governments, like banks in the credit crunch, enjoyed the most extensive information and analytic capabilities available. Yet they made elementary and catastrophic mistakes. Darwin saw through his own pretence of rationality. But bureaucracies engaged in self-justification frequently mislead themselves – more often, perhaps, than they mislead the public. That is how the organisations that place most emphasis on rationality and transparency in decision-making come to make such bad decisions in practice.

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Science is the pursuit of the truth

SOURCE: FT

The route to knowledge is transparency in disagreement and openness in debate. The route to truth is the pluralist expression of conflicting views in which, often not as quickly as we might like, good ideas drive out bad.

Michael Schrage’s comment on politics and science (FT, 26 Sept 2007) struck a raw nerve: and provoked an extended response from the president of the UK’s Royal Society (FT, 1 Oct 2007). Lord Rees advocates that we should base policy on something called “the scientific consensus”, while acknowledging that such consensus may be provisional.

But this proposal blurs the distinction between politics and science that Lord Rees wants to emphasise. Novelist Michael Crichton may have exaggerated when he wrote that “if it’s consensus, it’s not science, if it’s science, it’s not consensus”, but only a bit. Consensus is a political concept, not a scientific one.

Consensus finds a way through conflicting opinions and interests. Consensus is achieved when the outcome of discussion leaves everyone feeling they have been given enough of what they want. The processes of proper science could hardly be more different. The accomplished politician is a negotiator, a conciliator, finding agreement where none seemed to exist. The accomplished scientist is an original, an extremist, disrupting established patterns of thought. Good science involves perpetual, open debate, in which every objection is aired and dissents are sharpened and clarified, not smoothed over.

Often the argument will continue for ever, and should, because the objective of science is not agreement on a course of action, but the pursuit of truth. Occasionally that pursuit seems to have been successful and the matter is resolved, not by consensus, but by the exhaustion of opposition. We do not say that there is a consensus over the second law of thermodynamics, a consensus that Paris is south of London or that two and two are four. We say that these are the way things are. Nor is there a consensus on evolution since creationists will never be reconciled to that theory. There is no possibility of a compromise, in which Darwinians agree that a few animals went into the ark with Noah and their opponents acknowledge that most species evolved.

Numbers are critical to democracy, but science is not a democracy. If an evangelical Christian converted all members of the Royal Society to creationism, that neither would nor should affect my belief in evolution. Most scientists know no more about climate change, HIV/Aids or the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine than do most lawyers, philosophers or economists, and it is not obvious who is better equipped to assess conflicting claims on these issues. Science is a matter of evidence, not what a majority of scientists think.

It is easy to see why the president of the Royal Society might want to elide that distinction, but in doing so he turns the organisation from a learned society into a trade union. Peer review is a valuable part of the apparatus of scholarship, but carries a danger of establishing self-referential clubs that promote each other’s work.

Statements about the world derive their value from the facts and arguments that support them, not from the status and qualifications of the people who assert them. Evidence versus authority was the issue on which Galileo challenged the church. The modern world exists because Galileo won.

But to use the achievements of science to assert the authority of scientists undermines that very process of science. When consumers believe that genetically modified foods are unsafe, mothers intuit that their children’s autism is caused by the MMR vaccine and politicians assert that HIV/Aids is a first world conspiracy, the answer that the scientific consensus is otherwise does not convince – nor should it. Such claims are mistaken because there is no evidence for them, not because scientists take a different view: scientists should influence policy by explaining facts and arguments, not by parading their doctorates.

The notion of a monolithic “science”, meaning what scientists say, is pernicious and the notion of “scientific consensus” actively so. The route to knowledge is transparency in disagreement and openness in debate. The route to truth is the pluralist expression of conflicting views in which, often not as quickly as we might like, good ideas drive out bad. There is no room in this process for any notion of “scientific consensus”

The market sets high oil prices to tell us what to do

By Martin Wolf

Published: May 13 2008 19:09 | Last updated: May 13 2008 19:09

Oil at $200 a barrel: that was the warning from Goldman Sachs, published last week. The real price is already at an all-time high (see chart). At $200 it would be twice as high as it was in any previous spike. Even so, it would be a mistake to focus in shock only on the short-term jump in prices. The bigger issues are longer term.

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Here are three facts about oil: it is a finite resource; it drives the global transport system; and if emerging economies consumed oil as Europeans do, world consumption would jump by 150 per cent. What is happening today is an early warning of this stark reality. It is tempting to blame the prices on speculators and big bad oil companies. The reality is different.

Demand for oil grows steadily, as the vehicle fleets of the world expand. Today, the US has 250m vehicles and China just 37m. It takes no imagination to see where the Chinese fleet is headed. Other emerging countries will follow China’s example.

Meanwhile, spare capacity in members of the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries is currently at exceptionally low levels, while non-Opec production has equally consistently disappointed expectations. (See charts.)

It looks increasingly hard to expand supply by the annual amount of about 1.4m barrels a day needed to meet demand. This means an extra Saudi Arabia every seven years. According to the International Energy Agency, almost two-thirds of additional capacity needed over the next eight years is required to replace declining output from existing fields. This makes the task even harder than it seems. As the latest World Economic Outlook from the International Monetary Fund adds, the fact that peak production is reached sooner, because of today’s efficient technologies, also means that subsequent declines are steeper.

This is not to argue that speculation has played no role in recent rises in prices. But it is hard to believe it has been a really big one. True, the dollar price has risen sharply, but that is partly the result of the decline in the dollar’s relative value (see chart). As I have argued before, if speculation were raising prices above the warranted level, one would expect to see inventories piling up rapidly, as supply exceeds the rate at which oil is burned. Yet there is no evidence of such a spike in inventories, as Goldman Sachs and the IMF point out.

Similarly, it is not even true that the investment needed to boost the constrained production capacity has been lagging. The WEO shows that nominal investment by national and international oil companies more than doubled between 2000 and 2006. But real investment hardly increased, because of a global scarcity of rigs and associated skilled labour services. Against this background, it seems far more likely that such speculation as there is has been stabilising, rather than destabilising: in other words, it is moving prices in the right direction, in order to reduce demand.

Will the high prices succeed in doing this? Certainly. Demand has to match supply for a simple reason: we cannot burn oil that does not exist.

The price spikes of the 1970s were followed by big absolute falls in demand and output (see chart). This was partly because of the recessions and partly because of rising efficiency. Both forces should work again this time, but to a much smaller extent. The slowdown in the US economy is indeed likely to be significant. Slowdowns will also occur in western Europe and Japan and even in the emerging world. But the latter will still grow rapidly. Overall, the world economy – and so world oil demand – is likely to continue to grow reasonably briskly. Similarly, the improved efficiency of use of petroleum, as people switch to more efficient vehicles, notably in north America (where the room for doing so is so large), will be offset by the rising tide of demand for motorised transport in the world’s fast-growing emerging countries.

On balance, it is quite unlikely that aggregate demand for oil will collapse, as it did after the two previous price spikes, just as it is unlikely that massive net new oil supplies will come on stream in the near future. This does not mean that prices will remain as high as they are today for the indefinite future: such stability is improbable. But it means we should expect a sustained period of relatively high prices even if “peak oil” theorists are proved wrong. If proved right, this would be true in spades.

So what should be the response to these simple realities? Here are some obvious “do nots” and “dos”.

First, do not blame conspiracies by speculators, oil companies or even Opec. These are the messengers. The message is one of fundamental shifts in demand and supply. If speculators push prices up in response, they are helping the adjustment. Even if Opec keeps output back, it is preserving a valuable resource for the future.

Second, do not blame the emerging countries for their growing demand. Citizens of rich countries must adjust to the higher prices of resources that the rise of the emerging countries entails. The only alternative is to attempt to destroy those hopes. That would be a blunder and a crime.

Third, understand that prices at these levels are now playing a big macroeconomic role. At $100 a barrel the annual value of world oil output would be close to $3,000bn. That is 5 per cent of world gross product. The only previous years in which it was higher than that were 1979 to 1982.

Fourth, adjust to high prices, which will play a big part in encouraging more efficient use of this finite resource and ameliorating climate change. The current shock offers a golden opportunity to set a floor on prices, by imposing taxes on oil, fossil fuels or carbon emissions.

Fifth, do try to reach global agreement on a pact on trade in oil based on the fundamental principle that producers will be allowed to sell their oil to the highest bidder. In other words, the global oil market needs to remain integrated. Nobody should use military muscle to secure a privileged position within it.

Finally, do become serious about investing in basic research into alternative technologies. Energy self-sufficiency is an implausible goal. Investing for a post-oil future is not.

We are no longer living in an age of abundant resources. It is possible that huge shifts in supply and demand will reverse this situation, as happened in the 1980s and 1990s. We can certainly hope for that happy outcome. But hope is not a policy.

The great event of our era is the spread of industrialisation to billions of people. The high prices of resources are the market’s response to this transforming event. The market is saying that we must use more wisely resources that have now become more valuable. The market is right.