Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [22]
From this point of view as so many others, Pakistan has a rather medieval look. The state is very bad at providing modern services such as clean water, medicine, public transport and education, because it is too weak either to force much of the population to pay taxes or to control corruption on the part of its own officials. In part as a result of the lack of education, ordinary people are also very bad at organizing themselves to demand or create such services. Certain groups are outside the system altogether, and have no access to protection, patronage or charity. On the other hand, the system does ensure that the great majority of the population does at least have enough to eat.
And where the state decides that a particular development project is of great national importance, it can in fact partially isolate it from the corruption of the rest of the system and ensure that it is built successfully. This was true of the vast extension of dams and irrigation in the 1950s, and in recent years the construction of the port of Gwadar and the fine motorways linking the great cities of northern Pakistan.
Pakistan’s GDP as of 2009 stood at $167 billion, making it the 48th largest economy in the world (27th if adjusted for purchasing power). Despite the image of Pakistan as an overwhelmingly rural society, and the dominance of political, social and cultural patterns drawn from the countryside, agriculture as of 2009 accounted for only about 20 per cent of GDP. The ‘service sector’ accounted for 53 per cent (most of it in informal, very small-scale businesses and transport), with industry at 26 per cent. However, around 60 per cent of the population continued to live in the countryside, helping to explain the continued power of the rural elites. Most of Pakistani industry is made up of textiles and food processing. In 2007 – 8 Pakistani exports stood at $18 billion, the majority of them textiles.
Pakistan also contains certain islands of high technology – above all the nuclear industry, which (whatever you may think about its strategic implications) is a very remarkable achievement for a country with Pakistan’s economic profile, and shows what the Pakistani state can achieve if it really sets its mind to it, and can mobilize enough educated, honest and committed people.
It is miserably clear, however, that – as with the other South Asian countries – the greater part of the Pakistani economy has not made the breakthrough to modern development and seems nowhere near doing so. As of 2009, GDP per head stood at a mere $1,250 (before adjustment for purchasing parity). Between 1960 and 2005, per capita income as a proportion of that of the USA actually fell from 3.37 to 1.71 per cent. Some 23 per cent of the population live below the poverty line. Underlying this lack of development is a literacy rate which in 2010 stood at only 55.9 per cent, above all because of the complete absence of education for women in much of the countryside.
LIVING IN PAKISTAN
If the West and China want to help improve this picture, they need to develop an approach to Pakistan which recognizes the supreme importance of the country but is based on a real understanding of it, and not on fantasy, whether of the paranoid or optimistic variety. This book is an attempt to strengthen such understanding. It is based on travels to Pakistan dating back to my time there as a journalist for The Times (London) in the late 1980s, and on five research trips in 2007 – 9 lasting a total of six months, during which I visited all Pakistan’s provinces and major cities.
It should be said that, with the exception of my stays in some of the Pathan areas, at no point during my visits did I feel under any direct physical threat, except from the execrable local driving – and if you were going to be too affected by that you’d have to avoid visiting about half the world. Moreover, the Pathan areas are only