Dawn Editorials (with Summary and Vocabulary)

 

DAWN EDITORIALS

January 18, 2024 (Thursday)

Day’s Vocabulary

• Stoke.           add coal or other solid fuel to (a fire, furnace, boiler, etc.)
• Resentment.         bitter indignation at having been treated unfairly
• Undercurrents.   an underlying feeling or influence, especially one that is contrary to the prevailing atmosphere and is not expressed openly
• Clergymen.           a male priest, minister, or religious leader, especially a Christian one
• Decadal.      a period of ten years
• Proponents.          a person who advocates a theory, proposal, or project
• Squirm.       a wriggling movement
• Consigned.            deliver (something) to a person's custody, typically in order for it to be sold
• Pyre. a heap of combustible material, especially one for burning a corpse as part of a funeral ceremony.
• Sporadic.    occurring at irregular intervals or only in a few places; scattered or isolated
• Accessions.            the attainment or acquisition of a position of rank or power, typically that of monarch or president; a new item added to an existing collection of books, paintings, or artifacts
• Germane.   relevant to a subject under consideration
• Hermits.     a person living in solitude as a religious discipline
• Burrow.       (of an animal) make a hole or tunnel, typically for use as a dwelling
• Caverns.      a cave, or a chamber in a cave, typically a large one
• Lamented. a conventional way of describing someone who has died or something that has been lost or that has ceased to exist
• Candour.    the quality of being open and honest in expression; frankness
• Adjuncts.    a thing added to something else as a supplementary rather than an essential part
• Reared.        bring up and care for (a child) until they are fully grown, especially in a particular manner or place
• Lackeys.      a servant, especially a liveried footman or manservant
• Balkanise.  divide (a region or body) into smaller mutually hostile states or groups
• Ravenous.  extremely hungry
• Delve.           reach inside a receptacle and search for something
• Uncurl.        straighten or cause to straighten from a curled position
• Incised.       mark or decorate (an object or surface) with a cut or a series of cuts
• Grinding.   (of a difficult situation) oppressive and seemingly without end
• Perilously. in a way that is full of danger or risk
• Prudently. in a way that shows care and thought for the future
• Mired.          cause to become stuck in mud
• Quibble.      a slight objection or criticism about a trivial matter
• Ramifications.    a consequence of an action or event, especially when complex or unwelcome
• Pared.           trim (something) by cutting away its outer edges
• Wherewithal.       the money or other means needed for a particular purpose
• Snagging.  catch or tear (something) on a projection

Climate-conflict nexus

Summary

• Climate change is intensifying conflicts in Pakistan.
• Climate disasters, such as floods, droughts, and heatwaves, are leading to resource scarcity and competition, which is fueling social tensions and violence.
• The climate-conflict nexus is complex and requires fresh approaches.
• Traditional conflict resolution mechanisms are not equipped to deal with climate-related disputes.
• New, climate-smart and participatory approaches are needed to address these challenges.
• Pakistan's government is failing to address the climate-conflict nexus.
• The government has not prioritized climate change in its policies and has not developed the institutions needed to manage climate-related conflicts.
• There is a need for robust local institutions to address climate change.
• Local governments and community-based organizations are best placed to understand and respond to the needs of their communities in the face of climate change.
• Pakistan's climate security policies need to adapt to the changing realities.
• The country needs to develop the capacity to absorb climate shocks and risks in order to avoid conflict and instability.

Article

Disasters triggered by climate change leave deep scars. The impact is not just about the loss of lives and damage to properties; disasters also threaten social cohesion and exacerbate local economic, sociopolitical, religious, sectarian, and ethnic divides.

In Pakistan, these are now being compounded by frequent and severe climate disasters. Emergent climate-triggered conflicts at the community level are complex and of long duration. Addressing them requires fresh approaches, governance systems, and climate-smart and participatory conflict resolution processes.

Climate threats have not spared any region in Pakistan. They manifest themselves in floods, droughts, heatwaves, glacial outbursts, seawater intrusion, and tropical storms. The list is long — and growing. In fact, some areas now face what climate scientists call compound impact disasters; that is, one extreme weather event (EWE) triggering another.

The climate-conflict nexus often intensifies resource-based clashes arising from the absence of clear land tenure systems, water insecurity, crop failure, commodity price hikes, and environmental degradation. The last one also reduces the ecosystem’s capacity to support our growing population.

Climate-triggered disasters potentially stoke new or old and simmering community-level tensions that turn into outright conflicts. These are intensified by the slow onset of climate change. Growing social inequalities, low economic growth, displacement, migration, and weak institutions make matters worse.

It must be recognised that climatic change does not always cause conflicts. It does, however, provide the fuel for prevailing environmental, economic, and social factors to turn into conflicts. It is important to recognise that EWEs accelerate the need for adaptation by communities, but also reduce the latter’s ability to adapt on their own.

Climate-triggered disasters potentially stoke new or simmering community-level tensions.

Upper Hunza, for example, has become a hotspot for glacial outbursts. Gilgit hosts the victim communities of the Attabad EWE, where a landslide created an artificial lake in 2010. As a result, Gilgit city, where several neighbourhoods are already prone to sectarian violence between the Shia and Sunni sects, now also has displaced Ismaili communities.

They face resentment from the local populace as they move in and compete for the same resources and municipal services. In the absence of any conflict-resolution and peace-building institutions or other mechanisms, alre­ady simmering ethnic and sectarian undercurrents can be exploited by extremist clergymen.

The measures of simple climate adaptation have needlessly become complicated in countless similar situations. On the Sindh-Balochistan border, for example, conflicts between herders in the Jacobabad-Sibi region are common. Historically, whenever drought conditions intensified, herders from Balochistan migrated towards Sindh.

This is now forcefully resisted by host communities who are already suffering from cycles of prolonged droughts and floods. Seasonal herders, known as kuchis and pawindas, traverse Afghanistan, parts of KP, Gilgit-Baltistan and Punjab.

They now face competition and conflict — from the Deosai national park in GB to the newly merged districts in KP, and the Salt Range in Punjab. At all these places, historically established grazing and water-user rights are being violated because of the intense commercialisation of the shaamlats or communal lands. The cancerous climate-conflict nexus has become visibly stronger over time.

Globally, resource-based conflicts and insecurities limit a community’s ability to adapt to or cope with climate shocks. Examples can be seen in ethnic and sectarian conflicts in Karachi, where many communities migrated because of environmental and climate-induced local conflicts in various parts of the country.

The pattern of climate-induced floods and droughts has resulted in migration and displacement. Regular torrential rains and flash floods have intensified movement from south Punjab to different parts of the country, where local populations sometimes resent the presence of new entrants. Only recently, eight labourers from south Punjab were killed in the newly merged districts, ostensibly due to their ethnicity.

These problems add to security risks. Prolonged military rule and the fragility of democratic institutions have weakened community-based policymaking and conflict-resolution capacities, thus contributing to an increase in local conflicts.

Since the democratic system has in the past been frequently interrupted, all political governments faced uncertainty regarding their continuity. Hence, in order to show immediate results to voters, short-term bias in decision-making has become the norm, prioritising immediate goals over long-term climate action.

Further, electoral cycles do not match the decadal timescales of climatic changes. Political parties and other actors have yet to grasp its gravity and urgency. If mainstream national political parties like the PPP, PML-N, and PTI have failed to integrate the climate-conflict nexus in their manifestos, so have the proponents of national security, national climate, national water, and countless other national and provincial policies.

Worse, even if such policy instruments were developed, they cannot deliver in the absence of local governments and robust local institutions. And they are clearly not on the horizon of the policymaking community for the February elections. It is about time we recognised that the climate challenge needs robust local institutions that can ensure the continuity of policies.

The government’s failure to rein in this problem poses a serious non-traditional threat to national security. A quick review of the work of the country’s leading think tanks, mostly based in Islamabad, shows that the challenges posed by climate change, let alone the climate-conflict nexus, are barely attended to by them.

Hardly any university offers courses on conflict resolution and consensus-building. None of the larger community-based civil society organisations, including the erstwhile RSPs or rural support programmes, designed interventions to redress climate-triggered local disputes. Laws and procedures dealing with alternative dispute resolution have remained mostly unimplemented and are unresponsive to emergent climate change contexts.

We have several law-enforcement institutions that are called upon to maintain law and order. But where are the institutions in the country to proactively resolve and manage conflicts?

Climate hazards intensify conflict dynamics. Climate disasters erode human security, amplify other conflicts and exacerbate fragility. The natural environment has become a casualty of conflict in several parts of the country. Pakistan’s climate security policies need to adapt to rapidly changing realities, and institutions need to develop capabilities to absorb climate shocks and risks in order to proactively avoid local conflicts, domestic instability, and civil unrest.

Read, and gone

Summary

• Termites destroyed a significant portion of the author's personal library, prompting him to reflect on book ownership and preservation.
• The author highlights the challenges of maintaining a large personal library and the importance of public libraries.
• He discusses the cultural value of books and libraries, citing examples from history and personal experience.
• He shares his decision to donate 500 books to a university library to make them accessible to a wider audience.
• He ponders the question of whether authors will ever stop buying books, acknowledging the tension between owning books and writing them.
• He concludes with a reflection on the ancient Egyptian practice of burying books with the dead, suggesting a belief in the enduring value of reading.

Article

It took termites to teach me non-attachment.

Recently, I needed material on the 1971 East Pakistan crisis from a section in my library. There, I unearthed a squirm of termites feasting on my books. As I consigned their residual fragments to a pyre, it occurred to me that, whereas once I owned my books, now they owned me. My remaining days would be consumed in ensuring their preservation.

My collection had been built up over years, since the mid-1960s. Sporadic purchases gave way to more selective accessions which were germane to whichever of my books I happened to be working on. Their subjects covered Pahari painting, Sikh art, British and European artists working in the north of the subcontinent, antique maps, on Dr Henry Kissinger’s secret visit to Beijing in July 1971, US foreign policy towards Pakistan between 1969-74, and the journeys of the British vicereine Charlotte, Lady Canning, from Kolkata to the Khyber Pass.

I justified spending money on these books because they were essential for reference purposes, as books were not as accessible as they are today on the internet or through search engines. As one author put it, my library is “a cave of words that I’d made myself”.

Will one ever stop buying books?

Intellectual hermits may burrow themselves in such caverns of learning, trying to decide whether to read a book or to write one, but they have perforce also to live in an outer world. The Turkish Nobel laureate, Orhan Pamuk, lamented: “I live in a country singularly devoid of books and libraries [,] in a country that views the nonreader as the norm and the reader as somehow defective.”

Over the years, he expanded his library until he had more than 12,000 volumes. In a moment of candour, he admitted that he had truly loved only “perhaps 10 or 15” of them. The rest he needed for his work. “If I were to compare my library to that of a well-read friend in a rich Western country, his would have fewer books than mine does.”

That is not surprising. The tradition of public libraries predates the ancient Great Library at Alexandria, said to contain 400,000 scrolls before it was burnt down. Over the centuries, most developed countries have regarded libraries as necessary adjuncts to education. School libraries became a barometer of their attitude to education. One author admitted that his parents bore him but he was reared by libraries.

Private libraries have always been a luxury. Bibliophiles know that each book has an identity of its own; each set of covers contains the output of a creative mind; each volume is a friend who never fails. Together, they are the sum of many lifetimes and the accumulated wisdom of the ages.

Pamuk mentions that it took an earthquake for him to decide that he needed to weed out his library. “Like a sultan pacing among a crowd of slaves, singling the ones to be lashed, like a capitalist pointing out the lackeys to be sacked, I made my selection summarily.”

The decision to balkanise my library was made for me by ravenous termites. Following the historian Shelby Foote’s maxim, that “a university is just a group of buildings gathered around a library”, I donated 500 of my books to Lums in Lahore, where students could broaden their minds beyond management sciences, engineering and law.

They can delve into the origins of Mehrgarh, the history of the Mughals, the Sikhs and British rule. They can see Pakistan through the eyes of more recent chroniclers like Herbert Feldman and S.M. Burke. Through the memoirs of former politicians, retired bureaucrats, and extinct state functionaries, they can relive their careers. And they will be able to uncurl secrets not taken by authors to the grave.

Books on interfaith subjects have proved more difficult to place. There are too few Hindus, Sikhs, and Zoroastrians left to form a bulk readership.

Will one ever stop buying books? Pamuk tried, but found to his dismay that he continued acquiring them faster than he could throw them away: “For me, the imperative is not to own good books but to write them.”

But then, if authors stopped buying books, where would they find a readership for theirs?

The nightmare of every author/ bibliophile is if his precious library ends up on the footpath. I found a Persian/ Urdu/ Eng­lish dictionary signed by Ghulam Mustafa Tabassum for sale on a hand-cart in Anarkali bazaar. And I bought in Peshawar a romanised version of the Injil-i-Muqqadas (the New Testament), dated 1860, weighed on a scale against some stones.

Perhaps the Ancient Egyptians were wiser than we thought. Their tombs were incised with hieroglyphics, ensuring they took enough reading matter with them to last beyond eternity.

Time to reflect

Summary

• Pakistan's economy has been experiencing recurring stop-go cycles, with short periods of growth followed by longer periods of stagnation or decline.
• The author argues that this is due in part to the IMF's market-driven solutions, which have not taken into account the unique features of Pakistan's economy.
• To address these issues, the author proposes that Pakistan move away from a market-driven exchange rate and instead adopt a managed exchange rate.
• The author also calls for building up Pakistan's reserves and drawing a red line below which reserves will not be allowed to fall.
• By taking these steps, Pakistan can reduce market uncertainty, lift economic activity, and revive growth with macroeconomic stability.

Article

In a recent article in Dawn, the World Bank South Asia vice president, together with the country director, put forward a five-point development strategy to move Pakistan onto a path of sustained and equitable growth. Encompassing improving human capital, generating additional revenues, opening up the economy, transforming agriculture and removing energy inefficiencies, few would disagree with their listed priorities in the medium to long term.

Yet they seem to overlook that the real problem Pakistan faces is in the immediate future; its economy comes to a grinding halt whenever any attempt is made to move it off the ground and move forward. Why?

To illustrate: after achieving near six per cent growth in the preceding two years, 2022-23, the economy abruptly reversed direction as economic growth became negative, inflation rose to an unprecedented 35pc, the country came perilously close to default as reserves fell to less than a month of imports, and poverty levels increased. Even given specific factors such as external shocks (war in Europe, resulting in a sharp rise in oil and food prices) and internal shocks (floods) coupled with poor economic management, it was not the first time this had happened. Over the last three decades, we have gone through frequently recurring stop-go cycles in which episodes of growth have become shorter and shorter, and episodes of very low growth longer and more frequent.

It is time we seriously questioned some critical aspects of the macroeconomic model we have followed, which has created this recurring situation. While no one can deny that, by running huge unsustainable fiscal deficits, our own policymakers must share a large part of the blame, we must also seriously examine some IMF conditionalities, which, rather than improving, accentuate the problem by opting for pure­­ly market-driven solutions to resolve basic structural deficiencies in the economy.

We must seriously examine some IMF conditionalities.

To elaborate, the IMF’s solution to our recurring stop-go cycles was to opt for a market-driven exchange rate and reduce tariffs on imported raw material to encourage more competitive exports — which, in theory, was not unwise. But in doing so, it failed to take into account the working of Pakistan’s complex, multilayered, imperfect foreign exchange market. With a large diaspora and migrant workers abroad who send back as remittances an amount equal to or slightly more than our total export earnings, foreign exchange transfers by resident Pakistanis (including for investment in real estate abroad), hoarders, smugglers and profiteers in the domestic market had disastrous consequences. The rupee-dollar exchange rate came crashing down from Rs110 in 2018 to Rs340 in 2023 once the market-driven exchange rate was introduced, triggering uncertainty and fanning inflation. Foreign reserves again fell to disastrously low levels, fuelled also by large inflows of imports resulting from lower tariffs, thereby bringing the economy to the very edge of default.

The exchange rate would have gone further down — possibly to Rs400 by June 2024 — but for the timely strong-arm action taken by the government’s new and powerful economic decision-making body, the Special Investment Facilitation Council. The SIFC came down hard on hoarders, profiteers and illegal currency networks manipulating the exchange rate market (including some commercial banks, one is sorry to suggest). Since then, the exchange rate has steadied at between Rs280 and Rs300 to the dollar.

To move out of these recurring crises and reignite growth with macroeconomic stability, it is important for the next elected government to propose important changes in a future continuation of the IMF programme, which, given our current situation, is highly desirable. These are as follows:

1.      Move away from the market-driven exchange rate in favour of a managed exchange rate, while ensuring that it is in line with the real effective exchange rate to maintain export competitiveness and adjusts for relative rises in inflation.

2.     Build up our reserves in as short a time as possible through innovative solutions, including diverting at least 10pc of any new foreign investment into a sovereign reserve fund and 10 to 15pc of foreign exchange from the remittances sent annually by our workers and diaspora abroad.

3.     Draw a red line at a level below which our reserves will not be allowed to fall (say, initially three months’ imports or $15 billion) and if they do, take suitable measures to reduce imports.

A prudently managed exchange rate supported by adequate reserves would reduce market uncertainty and lift economic activity and investment, ensuring steady grow­­th. The country urgently needs to revive growth with macroeconomic stability.

Orphaned disputes

Summary

• Pakistan's economic management is lacking a decision-making center, leading to "orphaned disputes".
• These are disputes that arise in routine government functions, but no one has the authority or interest to resolve them.
• Examples of orphaned disputes include:
• Disagreements over the magnitude of a gas tariff hike.
• Conflict between the finance ministry and the FBR over structural changes.
• A plan to devolve spending to the provinces being stalled due to legal authority issues.
• The absence of a decision-making center is causing these disputes to pile up, hindering policy actions and economic management.
• The Special Investment Facilitation Council (SIFC) is being used to resolve these disputes, but it lacks the political wherewithal to do so effectively.
• Normally, forums like the Council of Common Interests (CCI) and the National Finance Commission would resolve these issues, but they are not functioning currently.
• It is imperative to hand over executive powers to a functional government to address this issue.

Article

The absence of a decision-making centre in Pakistan’s economic management is now being felt acutely. A string of news emerging in the past week or so illustrates this perfectly.

The finance team tried to hike gas tariffs to meet an IMF requirement and found itself mired in a court case in Sindh, as well as a dispute on the magnitude of the hike as measured by the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics versus the energy ministry.

The former reported that people are seeing a tariff hike of around 1,100 per cent in their latest bills, whereas the former insists this figure should not be more than 100pc. This may sound like a minor, bureaucratic quibble, but it has important ramifications for the reported inflation out-turn, and hence any monetary policy decisions, among other things.

Earlier, another policy exercise turned into a dispute and escalated into threats of a strike, when the finance ministry tried to bring about a deep-rooted change in the structure of the FBR. The idea was to separate the Internal Revenue Service from the Customs unit, a change long advocated in tax administration reforms, and long resisted by the tax bureaucracy. It is a little puzzling why the finance ministry sought this measure at this point in time.

But in any case, once the matter was pressed, it took the shape of a conflict between the finance ministry and the FBR, with officials from the latter threatening a strike if pressed further.

In yet another example, the finance ministry approached the provinces with a plan for sharing the burden of a few expenditure heads. The plan basically saw spending for the Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP) and the Higher Education Commission (HEC), along with one or two other minor heads, being devolved down to the provinces.

By some estimates provided by people in the provincial governments, the plan might have pared something like Rs400 billion from federal government spending and passed these off to the provinces instead.

Real leadership in any organisation is about removing orphaned disputes from the system.

Not surprisingly, the plan met with instant opposition from the provincial governments, who pointed out that the caretaker government lacked the authority to undertake this expenditure devolution. Article 230 of the Elections Act, 2017, was amended in July to grant additional powers to caretaker governments, but even those additional powers did not empower them to undertake the kind of devolution of expenditures they were seeking, according to the reply they received from the provincial authorities.

The amendment empowered caretaker governments to “take actions of decisions regarding existing bilateral or multilateral agreements or the projects already initiated under the Public Private Partnership Authority Act, 2017… the Inter-governmental Commercial Transactions Act 2022 and the Privatisation Commission Ordinance, 2000”.

It was pointed out to the federal authorities that BISP and HEC fall under neither of the aforementioned acts, and are governed by their own acts of parliament which will need to be amended for their expenditure burden to be shifted from federal to provincial governments. That response effectively stalled the plan until some authority could break the dispute.

In all cases, the finance ministry’s response was to take the matter under dispute to the Special Investment Facilitation Council (SIFC), arguing that it had the authority to compel compliance from the other party. The latter may yet have the legal authority, although this is not yet clear, but it certainly does not have the political wherewithal that will be required to broker a productive settlement on any of these fronts.

Under normal circumstances, matters such as these would routinely be resolved within the normal functioning of the federation. Forums such as the Council of Common Interests (CCI), the National Finance Commission and the federal cabinet could provide the decision-making centre where these matters could be coordinated, discussed and resolved.

But currently, there are no functioning decision-making centres and many matters requiring coordination between centre and province, government and autonomous body, are turning into a dispute which either stalls, or lands at the doorstep of the SIFC, which is not equipped to replace the federation as a decision-making body in such affairs.

This state of indeterminacy will continue producing orphaned disputes of this sort. Orphaned disputes can be thought of as disputes that arise in the discharge of routine government functions that nobody in the set-up has authority or interest in owning and resolving.

Real leadership in any organisation is about removing orphaned disputes from the system. The fewer of them there are, the more smoothly the organisation will be able to function and discharge its routine tasks.

The more orphaned disputes pile up within an organisation, or an amalgamation of organisations like the federation, the more dysfunctional it steadily becomes. As this process unfolds, the objectives towards which policy action is aimed become harder and harder to fulfil.

At the moment, for example, the federation’s policy action is aimed at the simple objective of maintaining a fiscal balance, for which they need continuing expenditure restraint and an aggressive revenue effort. In both areas, their efforts are snagging due to orphaned disputes, that are in turn landing at the doorstep of the SIFC for guidance, coordination and action. And the council will not be able to substitute for a functioning government in order to advance these disputes.

As policy action grinds down under the accumulating weight of these orphaned disputes, the temptation mounts within the system to tackle the problem with a strong hand.

That is the danger here. The longer this state of affairs is allowed to persist, the more the council is dragged into the routine functions of government, the more the situation creates the impression that only a tough guiding hand can manage the road ahead.

This is why it is imperative to hand over executive powers to a functional government, with a credible mandate that is accepted by as many political players as possible within the polarised limits of our time.