Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [21]
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. Well before Pakistan reaches this point, however, it is likely that conflict over access to the shrinking Indus will have raised tensions between Pakistan’s provinces to levels which will be incompatible with the country’s survival.
If anyone thinks that the condition of Pakistan will 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 will still 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, especially in Britain. Islamist radicalism, which has already existed for hundreds of years, will also still be present, even if it has been considerably reduced by the West’s withdrawal from Afghanistan.
All of this will still mean that of all the countries in the world that are acutely threatened by climate change, Pakistan will be one of the most important. Moreover, what happens to Pakistan will have a crucial effect on the rest of South Asia, where around one-fifth of the world’s entire population live and will live. Those Indians who would be tempted to rejoice in Pakistan’s fall 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 rainfall than neighbouring areas of India, and only a fraction of China’s harvest per cubic metre of rainfall. 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 will 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 followed the ‘Asian tigers’ in radically successful modern development, and shows no signs of doing so, but for most of the time since 1947 its rates of growth have been substantially 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 all 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 followers 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