Is India now set to become a science juggernaut, a leader of the coming "Asian Century"? A nascent superpower of the East? Some Western analysts think so, with the National Intelligence Council, a CIA think-tank, putting India at the very top under the head "availability of scientists and engineers" together with high marks for foreign technology licensing and absorption. But will this be enough? Where is India actually heading?
Few Pakistanis get to visit India, the so-called "enemy country", and fewer still to independently assess the development of science and education across its hugely diverse regions. I had the exceptional good fortune to make such a visit recently, made possible by the award of UNESCO’s Kalinga Prize for the popularization of science. One part of the Prize included a 4-week lecture tour that took me around India: Delhi, Pune, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Bhubhaneswar, Cuttack, Calcutta, and then back to Delhi again before I returned home to Islamabad in mid-February. Although the Prize was awarded in 2003, frosty Pakistan-India relations had made my tour impossible until 2005.
It was a relentless schedule from the first day onwards with several lectures daily at schools, colleges, universities, research institutions, and peace groups. I chatted with children from excellent schools as well as those from rather ordinary ones; had long sessions with students and professors from colleges and universities; met with the "junta" (cooks, taxi drivers, and rickshawallas); and was invited to see ministers and chief ministers in several states, as well as the president of India.
Believing that readers might be interested in looking at India’s academic institutions and society through the eyes of a Pakistani, and that answering the crucial questions posed at the beginning will need more than just aggregated statistics, I offer the following observations:
Many Indian universities have a cosmopolitan character and are world class. Their social culture is secular, modern, and similar to that in universities located in free societies across the world. (In Pakistan, AKU and LUMS would be the closest approximations.) Male and female students freely intermingle, library and laboratory facilities are good, seminars and colloquia are frequent, and the faculty engages in research. Entrance exams are tough and competition for grades is intense. Some universities, "deemed universities" and other research institutions I visited (TIFR, IISC, IITs, IMSC, IICT, IUCAA, JNCASR, IPB, Raman Institute, Swaminathan Institute,...) do research work at the cutting edge of science. A strong tradition of mathematics and theoretical science forms a backbone that sustains progress in areas ranging from space exploration and super-computing to nanotechnology and biotechnology.
The rural-urban divide, and the class divide in education, is strong. Schools and colleges in small towns have a culture steeped in religion. Here one sees hierarchy, obedience, and even servility. The national anthem is sung in schools and religious symbols are given much prominence.
Some students I met were bright, but many appeared rather dull. Although most Indian colleges are coeducational (unlike in Pakistan), male and female students sit separately and are not encouraged to intermingle. It is sometimes difficult to understand the English spoken there. Where possible, I spoke in Hindi/Urdu. This enhanced my ability to communicate and also created a certain kind of bonding. There is an evident desire to improve, however, and at least some college principals go out of their way to organize events and invite guest speakers. My lecture at the Basavanagudi National College, a fairly ordinary college in Bangalore, was the 1978th lecture given by academicians over a period of 30 years!
Independent thought in India’s better universities is alive and well. Office bearers of the Jawaharlal Nehru University students union in Delhi were requested by the university’s administration to present flowers to President Abdul Kalam at the annual convocation. They flatly refused, saying that he is a nuclear hawk and an appointee of a Hindu fundamentalist party. Moreover, as young women of dignity they could not agree to act as mere flower girls presenting bouquets to a man. Eventually the head of the physics department, also a woman, somewhat reluctantly presented flowers to Dr. Kalam but said that she was doing so as a scientist honoring another scientist, not because she was a woman. Bravo! I have not seen comparable boldness and intellectual courage in Pakistani students. Student unions in Pakistan have been banned for two decades and so it is a moot question if any union there could have mustered similar independence of thought.
Taking science to the masses has become a kind of mantra all over India. My columnist friend Praful Bidwai - a powerful critic of the Indian state and its militaristic policies - counts among India’s greatest achievements the energisation of its democracy and refers to "our social movements, with their rich traditions of people’s self-organisation, innovative protest and daring questioning of power". These movements have ensured that, unlike in Pakistan, land grabbers in Indian cities have found fierce resistance when they try to gobble up public spaces - parks, zoos, playgrounds, historical sites, etc. Praful should also include in his list the huge number of science popularization movements, sometimes supported by the state but often spontaneous. These are sweeping through India’s towns and villages, seeking to bring about an understanding of natural phenomena, teach simple health care, and introduce technology appropriate to a rural environment. There is not even one comparable Pakistani counterpart. I watched some science communicators, such as Arvind Gupta at IUCAA in Pune, whose infectious enthusiasm leaves children thrilled and desirous of pursuing careers in science. Individual Indian states have funded and created numerous impressive planetariums and science museums, and local organizations are putting out a huge volume of written and audio-visual science materials in the local languages.
Attitudes of Indian scientists towards science are conservative.
Progress through science is an immensely popular notion in India, stressed both by past and present leaders. But what is science understood to be? I was a little jolted upon reading Nehru’s words, written in stone at the entrance to the Jawaharlal Nehru Institute for Advanced Research in Bangalore: "I too have worshipped at the shrine of science". The notion of "worship" and "shrine of science" do not go well with the modern science and the scientific temper. Science is about challenging, not worshipping.
As a secular man, Nehru was not given to worship but his metaphorical allusions to industries and factories as temples of science found full resonance. Indeed, science in India is largely seen as an instrument that enhances productive capabilities, and not as a transformational tool for producing an informed, just, and rational society. Most Indian scientists are techno-nationalists - they put their science at the service of their state rather than the people. In this respect, Pakistan is no different.
India’s nuclear and space programs are nationally venerated as symbols of high achievement. This led to India’s nuclear hero, Dr. Abdul Kalam, becoming the country’s president. When Dr. Kalam received me in his office, after the usual pleasantries, I expressed my regret at India having gone nuclear and causing Pakistan to follow suit. Shouldn’t India now reduce dangers by initiating a process of nuclear disarmament? Dr. Kalam gave me a well-practiced response: India would get rid of its nuclear weapons the very minute that America agreed to do the same. He displayed little enthusiasm for an agreement to cut off fissile material production. However, he did agree to my suggestion that exchange of academics could be an important way to build good relations between Pakistan and India.
Indian society remains deeply superstitious, caste divisions are important, and women still have a long way to go. While I found myself admiring the energetic popular science movements, I was disappointed that they pay relatively little attention to the anti-scientific superstitions widely prevalent in Indian society. After I had given a strong pitch for fighting irrational beliefs at a meeting of science popularization activists from villages in Northern India, a young woman asked me what to do if "koi devi aap pay utr jayai" (if a spirit should descend upon you).
The jyoti (astrologer) dictates the dates when a marriage is possible, and even whether a couple can marry at all. When I was in Bangalore, hundreds of thousands thronged to be cured by an American faith-healer, Benny Hinn.
Inter-caste marriages are still frowned upon, and usually forbidden. In local newspapers one typically reads of tragic accounts such as that of a boy and girl from different castes who jointly commit suicide after their families forbid the match. Although Indian women are freer, more visible, and more confident than their Pakistani counterparts, India is still a strongly male dominated society. However, the rapidly increasing number of bold and well-educated young women gives hope for the future.
Muslims in India remain at the margins of scientific research and higher education. Hamdard University in Delhi is distinctly better than the university bearing the same name on the Pakistani side. Jamia Millia, a largely Muslim university, appears to be doing well and probably better than any Pakistani university in the field of physics. But, although Muslims form 12% of India’s population, I met only a few Muslim scientists in leading Indian research institutes and universities. Discrimination against Muslims does not appear to be the dominant cause. A professor at Jamia told me that an overwhelming number of Muslim students were inclined towards seeking easier (and more lucrative) professions in spite of special incentives offered to them at his university. In general, Muslims in India appear more modern and secular than in Pakistan. However, Hyderabad astonished me. Is it a total exception? In the lecture that I gave at a government women’s college, there was only one young woman without a burqa in an audience of about a hundred. These women were surprised to learn that Pakistan - at least in most places - is more liberal than Hyderabad. The extreme conservatism in the Muslim part of the city reminds one of Peshawar.
There was a remarkable lack of hostility towards Pakistan. Indeed a desire for friendly relations was repeatedly expressed in every forum I went to. This is not to be taken lightly: many of my public lectures were either about (or on) science, but others dealt with deeply contentious issues - nuclear weapons, India-Pakistan relations, and the Kashmir conflict. Various Indian peace groups and NGOs organized public discussions and screenings of the two documentaries that I had made (with my friend Zia Mian): "Pakistan and India under the Nuclear Shadow", and "Crossing the Lines - Kashmir, Pakistan, India". To be sure, my views on Indian policies and actions in Kashmir occasionally provoked knee-jerk nationalistic responses and accusations of pushing "a Pakistani line". But these were infrequent and even heated exchanges always remained within the bounds of civility.
Ignorance about Pakistan is widespread. In most public gatherings, and certainly in every school that I spoke at, people had never seen a Pakistani. A puzzled 12-year old girl asked me: "Sir, are you really a Pakistani?". Many Indians have a misconception of Pakistan as a medieval, theocratic state. In fact, only a few parts of Pakistan are really so. I also encountered the belief that Pakistanis have been totally muzzled and live in a police state. This is untrue - articles in the Pakistani press are often blunter and more critical than in the Indian press. An Indian friend hypothesized that knowledge of the other country is inversely proportional to the geographical distance between our countries.
Unfortunately this will remain true unless there is a substantial exchange of visitors.
Indians are deeply nationalistic and may dislike particular governments but they only rarely criticize the Indian state. This is not difficult to understand: the democratic process has given a strong sense of participation to most citizens and has successfully forged a national identity (except in Kashmir, and parts of the North East) that transcends the immense diversity of Indian cultures. But this has an important downside: nationalism is easy to mobilize and highly dangerous in matters of war and conflict. I found the Indian elite (especially the former heads of nuclear, space, and technology programs) condescending and irritatingly smug. Even if India has done well in many respects, in most others it is still behind the rest of the world. Fortunately, Pakistani intellectuals are less attached to their nation state and therefore more forthright. The reason is rather clear: three decades of military rule have dealt a serious blow to nation building and firming up the Pakistani identity.
Similarities between the two countries exceed the differences. Cities in both countries are poisoned with thick car fumes and grid-locks are frequent; megaslums and exploding populations threaten to swallow up the countryside; electricity supplies are intermittent; and water is fast disappearing from rivers and aquifers. The rural poor are fleeing to the cities, and wretched beggars with amputated limbs are casually accepted as part of the urban scenery. There is little long-term planning, and none at all for coping with the inevitable changes that global warming will soon bring.
India is upbeat about its future and the feeling of optimism is palpable down to the lower middle class. The steady improvement in educational quality and outreach, the growth of social movements that keep excesses of power and authority in check, and a sense of participation among people are among India’s most significant gains. But its problems are no less than its accomplishments. Will India’s poor be able to find a voice, get help in fighting superstitions and notions of caste, and be spared the marginalization that accompanies globalization? Will India’s leadership have the wisdom to arrive at some reasonable accommodation on Kashmir, cease obsessive militarization, and divert resources to pressing social needs? These larger issues, and not just advances in science and technology, will decide just how high India can rise.
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
Reforms! What Reforms?
Dr. Atta-ur-Rahman, appointed as chairman of the Higher Education Commission by General Pervez Musharraf in 2002, lays claim to setting up a "revolutionary programme" of reforms that is already reversing the decades-old decline of Pakistan’s universities. Not a day passes without the announcement of some big achievement -- a new university, college, equipment, training programs, awards and seminars. The chairman seems particularly proud of what he has achieved when it comes to promoting teaching and research in physics.
Dr. Atta is entitled to his opinion about his own success. My judgement, after over 30 years of teaching and research in physics at Quaid-i-Azam University, is that these reforms are not working. Our science institutions and universities are fast becoming intellectual and moral wastelands. Incompetence is rife. There is deep indifference, even antipathy, to scholarship and knowledge. Basic academic values are missing, and there is casual acceptance of abysmal ethical behavior -- cheating, lying, and plagiarism by faculty and students. Resources are wasted on an epic scale. And, the HEC whirlwind is making all of these problems worse.
The reasons for the failure of the HEC reforms are many. Money is one of them. There has been too much of it, too quickly. Foreign donor agencies and governments, fearful that an uneducated and unskilled Pakistan may become an epicenter of terrorism, have panicked and tripped over each other to offer aid for education. The higher education budget has skyrocketed over three years by an incredible 12 times -- a world record perhaps -- and then increased again in the latest budget (June, 2005) from 9.1 billion rupees to 11.7 billion rupees.
These fabulous sums pouring into higher education have created the all too familiar behaviour of the newly wealthy. HEC has paid for a massive publicity blitz, with huge newspaper advertisements and colored multi-page supplements, devoted to breathless self-promotion of HEC, its leadership and its projects.
The HEC boasts of over 350 scientific and university related projects, amounting to 25% of the total number of projects being executed by the Government of Pakistan in all fields. But looking at the projects on the HEC website (www.hec.gov.pk) produces disturbing proof of gross administrative incompetence, carelessness, wastage on an unprecedented scale, and a culture of sycophancy. Projects that bear no relation to meaningful improvements of science or education in the country are being approved in desperate haste. Some examples follow.
PROJECTS GONE ASTRAY
On June 25, 2005 the HEC chairman announced that the Higher Education Commission has sanctioned 180 million rupees ($3 million) for the establishment of a 5 MeV tandem Van de Graaf accelerator to be housed at the National Center for Physics, Quaid-e-Azam University. He described it as a "national facility" that will "accelerate the generation of competent scientific and technical manpower within the country".
For those familiar with the field, this is nonsense. Such Van de Graaf machines were the mainstay of research in physics seventy years ago. They are useless for cutting edge science research today. They are, at best, museum pieces.
The reader, who wishes to see what the developed world is doing with such equipment, should visit the website:
www.its.caltech.edu/~arice/tandem.html. This contains an obituary, written many years ago, at Caltech: "After 38 years of service to the Nuclear Astrophysics and Material Science communities, [Caltech’s tandem Van de Graaf accelerator] facility has closed. Sorry to see the old machines fade away. This one had been very good to us. Not putting it too delicately; the machine was cut up and sold for scrap." That scrap -- or more likely scrap from elsewhere -- is now headed for Quaid-e-Azam University where it will add to other scrap imported over the decades.
Still more inexplicable wastage: the HEC chairman says that another 164 million rupees will be spent on an experimental physics laboratory at QAU.
Alas, no researcher there -- who are my colleagues -- acknowledges being informed, much less consulted on the purpose and nature of the laboratory.
The department’s chairman alone admitted knowledge of the project, but flatly refused to divulge details. A pessimistic conclusion is that, as in the past, these millions will also prove to be highly enriching but not to science in Pakistan.
MISMANAGEMENT UNLIMITED
An HEC "Best University Teacher" program has been extensively advertised and promoted. Everyone would agree with the need to recognize and reward good teaching, and that the key to success lies in selecting the best teachers.
So how does HEC select the "best" university teachers? The obvious way, of course, is to ask students. They are after all the best placed to judge whether a particular teacher knows his or her subject well, can actually teach in class room, and has that special ability to inspire enthusiasm in students for the subject. But this is not HEC’s way.
The HEC asked department chairmen and deans to nominate who they think are the best teachers. It is no surprise then to discover that some simply named themselves, and others nominated their favorites. Students at my university laughed incredulously when they learned the names of individuals who had thus been selected as "best teachers".
To take another example, consider HEC’s "Master Trainers in Physics", a project that Dr. Atta cites as one of his successes in promoting physics.
The idea here is to encourage junior physics faculty in Pakistani universities to enhance their subject and teaching skills by attending workshops where they can be taught by skilled and experienced physicists.
The project is supposed to be managed by the department of physics at Quaid-i-Azam University, with junior faculty and "master trainers" brought in from around the country.
The "Master Trainers in Physics" is, put simply, a disgrace. The project is rife with crass cronyism and unfair selection. Some of the so-called "master trainers" hand-picked by the HEC -- and paid huge sums of money for every lecture -- know little about physics and have an abysmally poor reputation as teachers in their parent institutions.
The pattern that emerges is one where HEC chooses as a solution some of the very people who are part of the problem.
IS THIS RESEARCH?
HEC is allocating enormous sums for research. But these are being thrown at half-baked proposals that will add nothing of value to science in Pakistan. Good judgment has been abandoned at the altar of expediency, propaganda, and a compulsive craving to show progress.
In certain HEC projects, even common sense seems to be a casualty.
Consider, for example, Grant Number 247 on the "Research Grant Award List 2003-2004" (it is the most recent list given on the HEC website, http://www.hec.gov.pk/htmls/rsp/rgp/research.asp). This is a research project worth an astonishing rupees 5,581,000 (Rs 5.6 million) and is titled as "Quranization of Science Courses At The M.Sc Level". It was awarded to Dr. Saadia Khawar Khan Chishti, whose address is listed as "Higher Education Commission, Islamabad". The purpose of this project -- to inject religion into science courses -- is reminiscent of the failed efforts of long-dead dictator and ideologue General Zia-ul-Haq to create an "Islamic Science". Academic merit aside, it is hard to see how can anyone can justify spending such colossal amounts of money on something that involves nothing more than access to a library.
There are many other puzzlers on the same web page. A grant for Rs 5,355,000 has been awarded to the Allama Iqbal Open University (AIOU) for research in a specialized area of chemistry. According to the project summary, this work aims to correct the mistakes made in this area by a Nobel Prize winner in chemistry.
Such grand notions of challenging Nobel Prize winners are highly suspect in the world of science, but not impossible. What is worrying is how anyone believes this can be done at AIOU, which is a distance-learning university with no tradition of cutting edge chemistry research. The principal investigator listed for this project is not from AIOU and already holds several other full time jobs at other institutions. The HEC website lists him to be Dr. Atta-ur-Rahman, chairman of the HEC.
There are other such projects and the costs runs into many millions of rupees. The explanation offered by the HEC for funding such projects is that they have all been vetted by independent scientific referees. But how true is this?
In the early days of HEC, some colleagues, as well as myself, were sent project proposals for refereeing. Some of the proposals we received made us wonder what HEC was doing by even sending them out for review. They deserved to be rejected out of hand. To offer just one example, I was sent a proposal for review that implicitly assumed it could violate a fundamental law of physics. (More specifically, it disrespected the second law of thermodynamics and demanded that heat should flow from a cold body into a hot body!).
Other proposals were more about making money than creating knowledge -- the cost of equipment and components was often given as 100 to 1000 times higher than what one normally expects. One project included a demand for a special $90,000 cyrogenic refrigerator which no obvious scientific purpose. Another requested a salary for a "computer operator" to run a laptop computer. When my colleagues and I rejected such proposals as unsound, we found ourselves quietly black-listed and received no more proposals to referee. The authorities apparently had no difficulty finding more pliable individuals, who approved payment for the scientific-sounding junk that now litters the HEC website.
PH.D FACTORIES
HEC has announced that the total number of PhD faculty in Pakistan is to be increased from the current 2000 to over 20,000 over ten years. Many of them will come from a HEC financed increase in local PhD production from the current 100-200 a year to 1000 annually, an increase by a factor of 5-10.
This is another disaster in the making. The painful fact is that the near-collapse of secondary schools and colleges means few students are now capable of benefiting from a genuine PhD level education. And, there are few Pakistani institutions capable of supporting genuine PhD level research work.
The HEC claims that it will check prospective PhD candidates through a "GRE type test" (the American graduate school admission test). A glance at the question papers shows that the HEC test is in fact a rather shoddy literacy and numeracy high school level test. It resembles the GREs only in that it is a multiple choice test.
To make sure the PhD scheme works, regardless of the quality of students, and faculty HEC pays supervisors a handsome monthly Rs 5000 for every PhD student they have enrolled (up to a maximum of 8 with HEC funding, but other sources are also available). This makes sure supervisors and departments take on as many students as possible and pass as many as they can.
The evidence is not hard to find. In my department, advertised as the best physics department in the country, the average PhD student has trouble with high-school level physics and even with reading English. Nevertheless there are as many as 15 PhD students registered with one supervisor! In the QAU biology department, that number rises to an incredible 40 students for one supervisor.
What will become of these hundreds and, in time, thousands of PhDs after they have been cranked out with no regard for quality of scholarship? What kind of teachers and researchers will they become? Eventually these PhDs will become heads of departments and institutions. When appointed gatekeepers, they will regard abler individuals as threats to be kept locked out. The degenerative spiral, long evident in any number of Pakistani institutions, will worsen further and become yet more difficult to break.
WHERE LIES THE PROBLEM?
We would be deluding ourselves to think that that difference between Pakistan’s universities, and those of our neighboring countries, is because of any real or imagined difference in the level of funding or resources. Consider mathematics and theoretical physics, which are academically the most intellectually challenging and difficult disciplines. They need only some modest salaries, an easily available computer, paper and pen, blackboard and chalk -- and plenty of brains. Yet these disciplines -- which flourish in India and Iran and cost next to nothing -- are almost extinct in Pakistan’s universities and scientific institutions. Clearly, the problem is a much deeper one than most people are willing to admit. The real problem lies in the realm of ideas and ideology, as well as management of institutions and organizations.
There is no doubt that some benefits have accrued from the HEC reforms -- with the huge amounts being spent it would be nearly impossible to avoid doing at least some good. Internet, digital libraries, and other such frills are nice to have. But even if this deluge of money from the skies is doing some good somewhere, the flooding it has caused elsewhere is doing enormous damage. It is time to stop and take a long, hard look at what HEC is doing with the public’s money.
HEC should stop all useless, sometimes fraudulent, research projects and stop encouraging the award of worthless PhD degrees. There needs to be a full financial audit of its accounts, and these should be submitted to the Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee and the National Accountability Bureau. In addition, an international panel of independently appointed experts should perform an academic audit and do a comprehensive review.
This is essential to check the current squandering of resources, and wholesale corruption and cronyism. The review should be asked to lay out criteria for how to make future funding of higher education fair, transparent and accountable.
WHAT TRUE REFORM MEANS
True reforms -- if and when they are implemented -- will have to be divided into two mutually distinct sets. One set must deal with creating a freer university environment, controlling campus vigilantes, and stopping campus violence. These are purely administrative issues. Another set must be aimed at raising the level of general competence of teachers and students by ensuring that they actually have an understanding of the subject they teach or study, and with increasing the amount of research in specific disciplines.
More specifically, entrance tests for students must be made mandatory and efficiently administered. Examinations at the national level are essential to separate individuals who can benefit from higher education from those who cannot. No such system exists in Pakistan. Only local board examinations -- where rote memorization and massive cheating are rampant
-- are used to select students. Let us note that both Iran and India have centralized university admissions systems which work very well. Although corruption in India is perhaps as pervasive as in Pakistan, admissions to the IITs have nevertheless retained their integrity and intensely competitive nature over several decades.
At the PhD level, if the HEC is at all serious about standards, it should make it mandatory for every Pakistani university to require that a PhD candidate achieve a certain minimum in an international examination such as the GRE. These exams are used by US universities for admission into graduate programs. Thesis evaluation needs to be made transparent and subject to public challenge -- the present safeguard of having "foreign experts" evaluate theses is insufficient for a variety of reasons, including the manipulations commonly made in the (highly opaque!) process of referee selection.
Entrance tests for new university faculty must also be made mandatory. The system has remained broken for so long that written entrance tests for junior faculty, standardized at a central facility, are essential. Without them, universities will continue to hire teachers who freely convey their confusion and ignorance to students. Most teachers today never consult a textbook, choosing to dictate from notes they saved from the time when they were students in the same department. No teacher has ever been fired for demonstrating incompetence in his/her subject.
There is much else that will be necessary: better and more transparent ways to recruit vice-chancellors and senior administrators; foreign faculty (including those from India) to be brought in an organized and systematic manner; training courses to be fairly and efficiently executed; etc.
Reforming science and education in Pakistan has a chance only if it is clearly thought out and -- even more importantly -- if it is executed with honesty and integrity. The monumental task of reform has yet to begin.
Pakistan lost its giants, Abdus Salam and Salimuzzaman Siddiqui, a long time ago. Its academic institutions may have to wait a long time for someone to lead them out of the growing darkness.
A shorter version of this article, with certain crucial omissions, was published in The News on 07 July 2005.
Dr. Atta is entitled to his opinion about his own success. My judgement, after over 30 years of teaching and research in physics at Quaid-i-Azam University, is that these reforms are not working. Our science institutions and universities are fast becoming intellectual and moral wastelands. Incompetence is rife. There is deep indifference, even antipathy, to scholarship and knowledge. Basic academic values are missing, and there is casual acceptance of abysmal ethical behavior -- cheating, lying, and plagiarism by faculty and students. Resources are wasted on an epic scale. And, the HEC whirlwind is making all of these problems worse.
The reasons for the failure of the HEC reforms are many. Money is one of them. There has been too much of it, too quickly. Foreign donor agencies and governments, fearful that an uneducated and unskilled Pakistan may become an epicenter of terrorism, have panicked and tripped over each other to offer aid for education. The higher education budget has skyrocketed over three years by an incredible 12 times -- a world record perhaps -- and then increased again in the latest budget (June, 2005) from 9.1 billion rupees to 11.7 billion rupees.
These fabulous sums pouring into higher education have created the all too familiar behaviour of the newly wealthy. HEC has paid for a massive publicity blitz, with huge newspaper advertisements and colored multi-page supplements, devoted to breathless self-promotion of HEC, its leadership and its projects.
The HEC boasts of over 350 scientific and university related projects, amounting to 25% of the total number of projects being executed by the Government of Pakistan in all fields. But looking at the projects on the HEC website (www.hec.gov.pk) produces disturbing proof of gross administrative incompetence, carelessness, wastage on an unprecedented scale, and a culture of sycophancy. Projects that bear no relation to meaningful improvements of science or education in the country are being approved in desperate haste. Some examples follow.
PROJECTS GONE ASTRAY
On June 25, 2005 the HEC chairman announced that the Higher Education Commission has sanctioned 180 million rupees ($3 million) for the establishment of a 5 MeV tandem Van de Graaf accelerator to be housed at the National Center for Physics, Quaid-e-Azam University. He described it as a "national facility" that will "accelerate the generation of competent scientific and technical manpower within the country".
For those familiar with the field, this is nonsense. Such Van de Graaf machines were the mainstay of research in physics seventy years ago. They are useless for cutting edge science research today. They are, at best, museum pieces.
The reader, who wishes to see what the developed world is doing with such equipment, should visit the website:
www.its.caltech.edu/~arice/tandem.html. This contains an obituary, written many years ago, at Caltech: "After 38 years of service to the Nuclear Astrophysics and Material Science communities, [Caltech’s tandem Van de Graaf accelerator] facility has closed. Sorry to see the old machines fade away. This one had been very good to us. Not putting it too delicately; the machine was cut up and sold for scrap." That scrap -- or more likely scrap from elsewhere -- is now headed for Quaid-e-Azam University where it will add to other scrap imported over the decades.
Still more inexplicable wastage: the HEC chairman says that another 164 million rupees will be spent on an experimental physics laboratory at QAU.
Alas, no researcher there -- who are my colleagues -- acknowledges being informed, much less consulted on the purpose and nature of the laboratory.
The department’s chairman alone admitted knowledge of the project, but flatly refused to divulge details. A pessimistic conclusion is that, as in the past, these millions will also prove to be highly enriching but not to science in Pakistan.
MISMANAGEMENT UNLIMITED
An HEC "Best University Teacher" program has been extensively advertised and promoted. Everyone would agree with the need to recognize and reward good teaching, and that the key to success lies in selecting the best teachers.
So how does HEC select the "best" university teachers? The obvious way, of course, is to ask students. They are after all the best placed to judge whether a particular teacher knows his or her subject well, can actually teach in class room, and has that special ability to inspire enthusiasm in students for the subject. But this is not HEC’s way.
The HEC asked department chairmen and deans to nominate who they think are the best teachers. It is no surprise then to discover that some simply named themselves, and others nominated their favorites. Students at my university laughed incredulously when they learned the names of individuals who had thus been selected as "best teachers".
To take another example, consider HEC’s "Master Trainers in Physics", a project that Dr. Atta cites as one of his successes in promoting physics.
The idea here is to encourage junior physics faculty in Pakistani universities to enhance their subject and teaching skills by attending workshops where they can be taught by skilled and experienced physicists.
The project is supposed to be managed by the department of physics at Quaid-i-Azam University, with junior faculty and "master trainers" brought in from around the country.
The "Master Trainers in Physics" is, put simply, a disgrace. The project is rife with crass cronyism and unfair selection. Some of the so-called "master trainers" hand-picked by the HEC -- and paid huge sums of money for every lecture -- know little about physics and have an abysmally poor reputation as teachers in their parent institutions.
The pattern that emerges is one where HEC chooses as a solution some of the very people who are part of the problem.
IS THIS RESEARCH?
HEC is allocating enormous sums for research. But these are being thrown at half-baked proposals that will add nothing of value to science in Pakistan. Good judgment has been abandoned at the altar of expediency, propaganda, and a compulsive craving to show progress.
In certain HEC projects, even common sense seems to be a casualty.
Consider, for example, Grant Number 247 on the "Research Grant Award List 2003-2004" (it is the most recent list given on the HEC website, http://www.hec.gov.pk/htmls/rsp/rgp/research.asp). This is a research project worth an astonishing rupees 5,581,000 (Rs 5.6 million) and is titled as "Quranization of Science Courses At The M.Sc Level". It was awarded to Dr. Saadia Khawar Khan Chishti, whose address is listed as "Higher Education Commission, Islamabad". The purpose of this project -- to inject religion into science courses -- is reminiscent of the failed efforts of long-dead dictator and ideologue General Zia-ul-Haq to create an "Islamic Science". Academic merit aside, it is hard to see how can anyone can justify spending such colossal amounts of money on something that involves nothing more than access to a library.
There are many other puzzlers on the same web page. A grant for Rs 5,355,000 has been awarded to the Allama Iqbal Open University (AIOU) for research in a specialized area of chemistry. According to the project summary, this work aims to correct the mistakes made in this area by a Nobel Prize winner in chemistry.
Such grand notions of challenging Nobel Prize winners are highly suspect in the world of science, but not impossible. What is worrying is how anyone believes this can be done at AIOU, which is a distance-learning university with no tradition of cutting edge chemistry research. The principal investigator listed for this project is not from AIOU and already holds several other full time jobs at other institutions. The HEC website lists him to be Dr. Atta-ur-Rahman, chairman of the HEC.
There are other such projects and the costs runs into many millions of rupees. The explanation offered by the HEC for funding such projects is that they have all been vetted by independent scientific referees. But how true is this?
In the early days of HEC, some colleagues, as well as myself, were sent project proposals for refereeing. Some of the proposals we received made us wonder what HEC was doing by even sending them out for review. They deserved to be rejected out of hand. To offer just one example, I was sent a proposal for review that implicitly assumed it could violate a fundamental law of physics. (More specifically, it disrespected the second law of thermodynamics and demanded that heat should flow from a cold body into a hot body!).
Other proposals were more about making money than creating knowledge -- the cost of equipment and components was often given as 100 to 1000 times higher than what one normally expects. One project included a demand for a special $90,000 cyrogenic refrigerator which no obvious scientific purpose. Another requested a salary for a "computer operator" to run a laptop computer. When my colleagues and I rejected such proposals as unsound, we found ourselves quietly black-listed and received no more proposals to referee. The authorities apparently had no difficulty finding more pliable individuals, who approved payment for the scientific-sounding junk that now litters the HEC website.
PH.D FACTORIES
HEC has announced that the total number of PhD faculty in Pakistan is to be increased from the current 2000 to over 20,000 over ten years. Many of them will come from a HEC financed increase in local PhD production from the current 100-200 a year to 1000 annually, an increase by a factor of 5-10.
This is another disaster in the making. The painful fact is that the near-collapse of secondary schools and colleges means few students are now capable of benefiting from a genuine PhD level education. And, there are few Pakistani institutions capable of supporting genuine PhD level research work.
The HEC claims that it will check prospective PhD candidates through a "GRE type test" (the American graduate school admission test). A glance at the question papers shows that the HEC test is in fact a rather shoddy literacy and numeracy high school level test. It resembles the GREs only in that it is a multiple choice test.
To make sure the PhD scheme works, regardless of the quality of students, and faculty HEC pays supervisors a handsome monthly Rs 5000 for every PhD student they have enrolled (up to a maximum of 8 with HEC funding, but other sources are also available). This makes sure supervisors and departments take on as many students as possible and pass as many as they can.
The evidence is not hard to find. In my department, advertised as the best physics department in the country, the average PhD student has trouble with high-school level physics and even with reading English. Nevertheless there are as many as 15 PhD students registered with one supervisor! In the QAU biology department, that number rises to an incredible 40 students for one supervisor.
What will become of these hundreds and, in time, thousands of PhDs after they have been cranked out with no regard for quality of scholarship? What kind of teachers and researchers will they become? Eventually these PhDs will become heads of departments and institutions. When appointed gatekeepers, they will regard abler individuals as threats to be kept locked out. The degenerative spiral, long evident in any number of Pakistani institutions, will worsen further and become yet more difficult to break.
WHERE LIES THE PROBLEM?
We would be deluding ourselves to think that that difference between Pakistan’s universities, and those of our neighboring countries, is because of any real or imagined difference in the level of funding or resources. Consider mathematics and theoretical physics, which are academically the most intellectually challenging and difficult disciplines. They need only some modest salaries, an easily available computer, paper and pen, blackboard and chalk -- and plenty of brains. Yet these disciplines -- which flourish in India and Iran and cost next to nothing -- are almost extinct in Pakistan’s universities and scientific institutions. Clearly, the problem is a much deeper one than most people are willing to admit. The real problem lies in the realm of ideas and ideology, as well as management of institutions and organizations.
There is no doubt that some benefits have accrued from the HEC reforms -- with the huge amounts being spent it would be nearly impossible to avoid doing at least some good. Internet, digital libraries, and other such frills are nice to have. But even if this deluge of money from the skies is doing some good somewhere, the flooding it has caused elsewhere is doing enormous damage. It is time to stop and take a long, hard look at what HEC is doing with the public’s money.
HEC should stop all useless, sometimes fraudulent, research projects and stop encouraging the award of worthless PhD degrees. There needs to be a full financial audit of its accounts, and these should be submitted to the Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee and the National Accountability Bureau. In addition, an international panel of independently appointed experts should perform an academic audit and do a comprehensive review.
This is essential to check the current squandering of resources, and wholesale corruption and cronyism. The review should be asked to lay out criteria for how to make future funding of higher education fair, transparent and accountable.
WHAT TRUE REFORM MEANS
True reforms -- if and when they are implemented -- will have to be divided into two mutually distinct sets. One set must deal with creating a freer university environment, controlling campus vigilantes, and stopping campus violence. These are purely administrative issues. Another set must be aimed at raising the level of general competence of teachers and students by ensuring that they actually have an understanding of the subject they teach or study, and with increasing the amount of research in specific disciplines.
More specifically, entrance tests for students must be made mandatory and efficiently administered. Examinations at the national level are essential to separate individuals who can benefit from higher education from those who cannot. No such system exists in Pakistan. Only local board examinations -- where rote memorization and massive cheating are rampant
-- are used to select students. Let us note that both Iran and India have centralized university admissions systems which work very well. Although corruption in India is perhaps as pervasive as in Pakistan, admissions to the IITs have nevertheless retained their integrity and intensely competitive nature over several decades.
At the PhD level, if the HEC is at all serious about standards, it should make it mandatory for every Pakistani university to require that a PhD candidate achieve a certain minimum in an international examination such as the GRE. These exams are used by US universities for admission into graduate programs. Thesis evaluation needs to be made transparent and subject to public challenge -- the present safeguard of having "foreign experts" evaluate theses is insufficient for a variety of reasons, including the manipulations commonly made in the (highly opaque!) process of referee selection.
Entrance tests for new university faculty must also be made mandatory. The system has remained broken for so long that written entrance tests for junior faculty, standardized at a central facility, are essential. Without them, universities will continue to hire teachers who freely convey their confusion and ignorance to students. Most teachers today never consult a textbook, choosing to dictate from notes they saved from the time when they were students in the same department. No teacher has ever been fired for demonstrating incompetence in his/her subject.
There is much else that will be necessary: better and more transparent ways to recruit vice-chancellors and senior administrators; foreign faculty (including those from India) to be brought in an organized and systematic manner; training courses to be fairly and efficiently executed; etc.
Reforming science and education in Pakistan has a chance only if it is clearly thought out and -- even more importantly -- if it is executed with honesty and integrity. The monumental task of reform has yet to begin.
Pakistan lost its giants, Abdus Salam and Salimuzzaman Siddiqui, a long time ago. Its academic institutions may have to wait a long time for someone to lead them out of the growing darkness.
A shorter version of this article, with certain crucial omissions, was published in The News on 07 July 2005.
Thursday, July 1, 2010
No Burial for Balakot
Four days later, they are still not even trying to extricate the dead in the town of Balakot, flattened on the morning of October 8. From under the rubble of collapsed buildings, a gut-wrenching smell of decaying corpses now fills the town. The rats have it good; the one I accidentally stepped upon was already fat. If there is indeed a plan to clear the concrete rubble in and around the town, nobody seems to have any clue. But the Balakotis are taking it in their stride – nose masks are everywhere.
From this destroyed mountainous tourist base town, a relief group from my university returned today (Thursday, Oct 13, 2005). We were just one of the dozens of groups of ordinary citizens that were spontaneously galvanized into action after the enormity of last Saturday’s earthquake became apparent.
There is good news. The Mansehra to Balakot road stretch, finally forced open by huge army bulldozers and earth moving machinery, is now open to relief trucks and goods donated across the country are piled to the truck roofs. If there ever was a time when the people of Pakistan moved together, this is it. Even the armed bandits who waylay relief supplies – to guard against whom soldiers with automatic weapons stand at alert every few hundred yards – cannot destroy the euphoria of having this solitary moment of unspoiled national unity.
The army’s presence is important and positive, but no senior officers appeared to be present. I heard criticism that soldiers did little to stop looting. The Edhi Trust was visible and effective.
Aid from across the world is making its way, and the United States is here too. Double bladed Chinook helicopters, diverted from fighting Al-Qaida in Afghanistan, weave their way through the mountains. They fly over the heartland of jihad and the militant training camps in Mansehra to drop food and tents a few miles beyond. Temporarily birds of peace instead of war, they do immensely more to soothe the highly Islamic, highly conservative, bearded mountain people than the reams of silly propaganda on glossy paper put out by the US information services in Pakistan.
Their visibility makes relief choppers terrific propaganda, for good or for worse. This is undoubtedly why the Pakistani government refused an Indian offer to send in helicopters for relief work in and around Muzzafarabad, the flattened capital of Pakistani administered Kashmir. In spite of a much celebrated peace process, Pakistan has also not issued visas to Indian peace groups and activists that seek participation in the relief effort.
Islamic groups from across the country have arrived in vast numbers. Some bring relief supplies, others simply harangue poor goat herders and simple tillers of the soil to tell them that their misdeeds brought about this catastrophe. None seem to have an explanation for why God’s wrath was especially directed to mosques, madrassas, and schools – all of which have collapsed in huge numbers. And none say why thousands of the faithful have been buried alive in this sacred month of fasting.
Bad news: the aid is still too little, often of the wrong kind, and is not getting to those most affected. Hundreds of destroyed communities lie scattered deep in the mountains. We saw helicopters attempt aerial drops; landing is impossible in most places. But people told us that they often miss and the supplies land up thousands of feet below or in deep forests.
Distribution is haphazard and uncoordinated, done with little thought. In Balakot we saw relief workers simply throw packets of food and clothes from the top of trucks, and a subsequent riot. Hustlers thrive, the weak watch passively. Tons of clothes, lovingly donated and packed by citizens around Pakistan, but mostly useless because of specific cultural and climatic conditions, are mixed and scattered with garbage and rubble throughout the town.
For me personally, there was a sense of dejavu. Nearly 31 years ago, on 25th December 1974, a powerful earthquake had flattened towns along the Karakorum Highway killing nearly 10,000 people. I had traveled with a university team into the same mountains for similar relief work. Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto had made a passionate appeal for funds around the world, taken a token helicopter trip to the destroyed town of Besham, and made fantastic promises for rehabilitation. But then hundreds of millions of dollars in relief funds received from abroad mysteriously disappeared. Some well-informed people believe that those funds were used to kick off Pakistan’s secret nuclear program.
Shall the present government do better? This will only be if citizens, and international donors, demand transparency and accounts are available for public audit.
The clock is ticking. In barely two months from now, the mountains will get their first snowfall and temperatures will plummet below zero. There are simply not enough tents, blankets, and warm clothes to go around. Hundreds of tent clusters have come up, but thousands of families remain out under the skies, facing rain and hail, and with dread in their hearts. These families have lost everything but the tattered clothes on their backs. Some even lost the land they had lived upon for generations – the top soil simply slid away, leaving behind hard rock and rubble. Those without shelter will die. From a special university fund we have pledged a dozen families to rebuild their houses but ten thousand or more will be needed in the Mansehra-Balakot-Kaghan area alone, not to speak of adjoining Kashmir. Relief groups and donors around the world must make reconstruction of homes their primary goal.
From this destroyed mountainous tourist base town, a relief group from my university returned today (Thursday, Oct 13, 2005). We were just one of the dozens of groups of ordinary citizens that were spontaneously galvanized into action after the enormity of last Saturday’s earthquake became apparent.
There is good news. The Mansehra to Balakot road stretch, finally forced open by huge army bulldozers and earth moving machinery, is now open to relief trucks and goods donated across the country are piled to the truck roofs. If there ever was a time when the people of Pakistan moved together, this is it. Even the armed bandits who waylay relief supplies – to guard against whom soldiers with automatic weapons stand at alert every few hundred yards – cannot destroy the euphoria of having this solitary moment of unspoiled national unity.
The army’s presence is important and positive, but no senior officers appeared to be present. I heard criticism that soldiers did little to stop looting. The Edhi Trust was visible and effective.
Aid from across the world is making its way, and the United States is here too. Double bladed Chinook helicopters, diverted from fighting Al-Qaida in Afghanistan, weave their way through the mountains. They fly over the heartland of jihad and the militant training camps in Mansehra to drop food and tents a few miles beyond. Temporarily birds of peace instead of war, they do immensely more to soothe the highly Islamic, highly conservative, bearded mountain people than the reams of silly propaganda on glossy paper put out by the US information services in Pakistan.
Their visibility makes relief choppers terrific propaganda, for good or for worse. This is undoubtedly why the Pakistani government refused an Indian offer to send in helicopters for relief work in and around Muzzafarabad, the flattened capital of Pakistani administered Kashmir. In spite of a much celebrated peace process, Pakistan has also not issued visas to Indian peace groups and activists that seek participation in the relief effort.
Islamic groups from across the country have arrived in vast numbers. Some bring relief supplies, others simply harangue poor goat herders and simple tillers of the soil to tell them that their misdeeds brought about this catastrophe. None seem to have an explanation for why God’s wrath was especially directed to mosques, madrassas, and schools – all of which have collapsed in huge numbers. And none say why thousands of the faithful have been buried alive in this sacred month of fasting.
Bad news: the aid is still too little, often of the wrong kind, and is not getting to those most affected. Hundreds of destroyed communities lie scattered deep in the mountains. We saw helicopters attempt aerial drops; landing is impossible in most places. But people told us that they often miss and the supplies land up thousands of feet below or in deep forests.
Distribution is haphazard and uncoordinated, done with little thought. In Balakot we saw relief workers simply throw packets of food and clothes from the top of trucks, and a subsequent riot. Hustlers thrive, the weak watch passively. Tons of clothes, lovingly donated and packed by citizens around Pakistan, but mostly useless because of specific cultural and climatic conditions, are mixed and scattered with garbage and rubble throughout the town.
For me personally, there was a sense of dejavu. Nearly 31 years ago, on 25th December 1974, a powerful earthquake had flattened towns along the Karakorum Highway killing nearly 10,000 people. I had traveled with a university team into the same mountains for similar relief work. Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto had made a passionate appeal for funds around the world, taken a token helicopter trip to the destroyed town of Besham, and made fantastic promises for rehabilitation. But then hundreds of millions of dollars in relief funds received from abroad mysteriously disappeared. Some well-informed people believe that those funds were used to kick off Pakistan’s secret nuclear program.
Shall the present government do better? This will only be if citizens, and international donors, demand transparency and accounts are available for public audit.
The clock is ticking. In barely two months from now, the mountains will get their first snowfall and temperatures will plummet below zero. There are simply not enough tents, blankets, and warm clothes to go around. Hundreds of tent clusters have come up, but thousands of families remain out under the skies, facing rain and hail, and with dread in their hearts. These families have lost everything but the tattered clothes on their backs. Some even lost the land they had lived upon for generations – the top soil simply slid away, leaving behind hard rock and rubble. Those without shelter will die. From a special university fund we have pledged a dozen families to rebuild their houses but ten thousand or more will be needed in the Mansehra-Balakot-Kaghan area alone, not to speak of adjoining Kashmir. Relief groups and donors around the world must make reconstruction of homes their primary goal.
Assessing Pakistani Science
Constitution Avenue in Islamabad, the 8-lane arterial road that goes into the heart of Pakistan’s political establishment and the Presidency, is lined with impressive buildings bearing the names of many scientific institutions. These include the Pakistan Academy of Sciences, Pakistan Science Foundation, Islamic Academy of Sciences, Pakistan Council for Science and Technology, Committee on S&T of Organization of Islamic Countries (COMSTECH), Commission on S&T for Sustainable Development in the South (COMSATS), and others. A short distance from the Presidency is the head office of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, the largest single science-based institution in the country. Other institutions are spread across Islamabad. Their large numbers, astronomically high real estate value, and obvious wealth, shows that Pakistan’s ruling establishment wants to be seen as taking science seriously. The question is: does it, and how far down the road has Pakistan’s science actually come since 1947?
The answer depends considerably upon how one chooses to define scientific accomplishment. In defense technology, which is applied science, it has done relatively well. Pakistan manufactures nuclear weapons and intermediate range missiles that, once upon a time, were considered as cutting-edge technology. There is now also a burgeoning, increasingly export-oriented, Pakistani arms industry that turns out a large range of weapons from grenades to tanks, night vision devices to laser guided weapons, and small submarines to training aircraft. Dozens of industrial sized units in and around Wah, with many subsidiaries, are producing armaments worth hundreds of millions of dollars with export earnings of roughly 100 million dollars yearly. Much of the production is under license from foreign countries, some from CKD kits, and most machinery for the arms factories is imported from the West or China. Chinese assistance in every nuclear area, peaceful and otherwise, has been crucial. Nonetheless, even though Pakistan’s defense production is mostly a triumph of reverse engineering rather than original research and development, its leaders have demonstrated the capability to exercise technical judgment and sufficient understanding of principles at some level.
There is less evidence of success in the civilian technology sector. High technology exports, as a percentage of total exports, amounted to only one percent in 2004. Much of this comes from software exports officially evaluated at $40 million but unofficially estimated at around 150 million dollars. This figure should be compared against India’s 12.5 billion dollars in 2004. The difference of 80 times or more is wholly out of the proportion with the difference in populations, about 6.5 to 1. Although the economy is currently growing well, Pakistan has an economy deeply dependent upon remittances from overseas workers, most of whom constitute unskilled labour in Middle Eastern countries. Instead, low-tech textile exports are the mainstay of Pakistan’s industrial production. According to the Pakistan Council for Science and Technology (PCST), in 43 years Pakistani scientists and technologists have managed to get just eight patents registered internationally.
Disaggregating the Sciences
Pakistan is at its weakest in the area of original scientific research, and the causes of weakness here appear poorly understood. The lack of understanding here has led to fundamentally flawed policies and delusions of achieving a quick turn around.
To engage in a sensible discourse on this important matter requires that, at the outset, we separate pure science from applied science. Pure science seeks to uncover new principles and fathom the inner workings of nature. Its discoveries, such as in cosmology or elementary particle physics, often have little or no relation to any kind of technology or economic need. The famous English pure mathematician and number theorist, G.H. Hardy, took much pride in the lack of application of his discoveries to anything in the real world. Nonetheless, without such foundational works in pure science and mathematics there would be no applied science, and no technology. Maxwell’s equations led to wireless and television, abstract quantum mechanics to the transistor and integrated circuit, and Einstein’s relativity to nuclear power and the bomb.
Pure science and applied science are judged by two different sets of criteria. Good pure science must be current, introduce or employ new concepts or uncover hidden relationships, be intellectually interesting to practitioners of the field, and stimulate further research into the discovering the nature of physical reality. Good applied science, on the other hand, is that which uses known scientific facts in non-obvious ways with the goal of creating technology in the form of processes, devices, pharmaceutical drugs, machines, computing systems, etc.
These elementary distinctions are important to understand now that tens of billions of rupees are suddenly being poured into funding scientific research in Pakistan, and enormous incentives are being given to Pakistani scientists to buy research equipment and publish research papers. This so-called “renaissance” of science in Pakistan owes principally to the chairman of Pakistan’s Higher Education Commission, and a well-known chemist, Dr. Atta-ur-Rahman.
Writing in the prestigious journal “Nature”, Dr. Atta bemoans the state of scientific research in Islamic countries and offers his recipe for improving it. He thinks that the answer lies in increasing the number of scientific publications, and the number of science PhDs. He then proceeds to declare Pakistan as a success story. In his words:
“During the period 2001 to 2003, the sharpest increase has come from Pakistan, with a 40% increase from 636 to 890. This is a result of a system introduced in 2002 that provides researchers with an opportunity to more than quadruple their earnings if they increase the numbers of their papers published in peer-reviewed journals.”
Other claimed successes include a huge increase in the number of PhD students enrolled in Pakistani universities, and a doubling of the number of universities in the public sector over a period of five years or so.
A Disputable Criterion
Does success lie in increasing numbers? Is it a good idea to use the number of published papers as a means to “quadruple their earnings” of scientists, and to go in for whole-sale production of PhDs? On the face of it, this seems eminently sensible. But experience in other countries points in the other direction. Two of Iran’s most distinguished chemists, Dr. Mohamed Yalpani and Dr. Akbar Heydari of Tarbiat Modarres University, argue that such a path is likely to do more harm than good.
Yalpani and Heydari , in a 2005 paper published in the journal “Scientometrics”, argue that this approach has failed in Iran. Intrigued by the fact that publications by Iranian scientists had exploded from a total of 1040 in 1998 to 3277 in 2003 – with over 30% of these in chemistry – these two scientists set about uncovering a number of facts that many had suspected but none had adequately documented.
Working systematically, paper-by-paper, Yalpani and Heydari discovered that:
1. Many scientific papers by Iranian chemists that were claimed as “original” by their authors, and which had been published in internationally peer-reviewed journals, had actually been published twice, and sometimes thrice, by the same authors with identical or nearly identical contents. Trivial changes had been made in the titles, with the contents, graphs, and references being 90% or more similar. These were clear cut-and-paste papers. Others were plagiarized papers that could have been easily detected by any reasonably careful referee.
2. Many Iranian researchers have chosen to repeat the same basic chemical reactions – of dubious practical or scientific value – over and over again. While this generates a lot of data and graphs, it is unlikely to be of much use for anything other than increasing the number of their publications.
3. Interestingly, in some of the papers published by Iranian groups, the exchange of N for O had been represented as acid catalyzed and in some as oxidative! Clearly, the international journal referees were sleeping.
4. Many important details, which ought to be provided by journal authors (such as sample preparation procedures, curing temperatures, etc), were missing. This leads to a suspicion that the experiments were carried out under circumstances that make the results unreliable.
5. While certain international journals are careful and demanding, others are fairly sloppy. Prospective authors, whose work is shoddy, obviously prefer journals which do not require a high degree of proof. Under pressure to publish, or attracted by the incentives offered by the Iranian system, authors often chose to follow the path of least resistance paved for them by the increasingly commercialized policies of many scientific journals. Prospective authors well know that editors are under pressure to produce a journal of a certain thickness every month.
6. Referring to the incentives proposed by Dr. Atta-ur-Rahman in his self-congratulatory Nature article, Yalpani and Heydari show their strong disapproval and note that “significantly, there is no mention of quality in his entire article”. They censure his approach for rewarding the “cut-and-paste” method which his incentives encourage. In their opinion this damages the scientific enterprise because it focuses the attention of the Third World scientist primarily on momentary personal material gain. When reporting a finding in a Western scientific journal, the essence is lost because individuals often attempt only a minimal mimic of the formalism that lies behind true science.
The two authors note the general decline of the scientific quality of papers published by Iranian chemists although chemical concepts, reagents, instrumentation, and other tools had progressively become more sophisticated. Simply put: there is an explosion of junk scientific papers, perhaps cleverly packaged and capable of getting past referees, but of little use.
No comparable scientometric research, to my knowledge, has ever been done for Pakistani scientists. But these two Iranian chemists, who obviously are not writing for a Pakistani audience, have nevertheless put their fingers on a sensitive spot. They have given enough evidence for everyone to be worried, particularly those concerned with science in Pakistan.
Alternative Criteria
How then is one to judge the state of science, and the individual merit of scientists if not by the number of published papers? To say that published scientific works carry no value is foolish. There is absolutely no doubt that the genuine scientific publication is extremely important to science, both theoretical and experimental. But it has value only if it is strictly preserved as a medium that succinctly and accurately conveys the essence of true scientific discoveries. If this medium is corrupted, either totally or partially, one must search for better achievement indicators. A better, though still imperfect, estimation of scientific quality is to see how many times a scientist’s work is cited by others working in the same field. Citations – excluding self-citations or those made by members of the same group – is a relatively better criterion for assessment of achievement in the pure sciences.
For assessing research in the applied sciences, the task is much simpler. The value to industry of such research must be clear and apparent. This suggests that one must judge the plethora of scientific institutions in Pakistan – which are predominantly applied science institutions – principally by the technology, products, and processes that their work has given birth to. For agricultural research – which is relatively simple science but of immense economic importance – there are some good results to show in terms of cotton and wheat varieties produced, rice and tea strains, etc.
But in non-agricultural fields there is much confusion. It is time to demand clarity. Surely PCSIR, with an annual budget of over 80 million rupees is obliged to tell the nation what that money has produced (beyond a process for making mineral water). The websites of almost all Pakistani S&T institutions are national embarrassments – that of the Centre for Applied and Molecular Biology has pictures of political personalities, starting with General Pervez Musharraf, but links leading to its activities (particularly research) lead nowhere.
One must judge the “miracle” of the HEJ Institute – said to be Pakistan’s premier research institution – by criteria different from the present ones. Papers published on applied chemistry, the large number of PhDs produced, or the impressive international conferences it has organized, are indeed positive achievements. But the real criteria should be: what has it produced in the way of pharmaceutical products, patents, and services to industry. Unfortunately its otherwise elaborate website does not, at least as yet, provide information on this aspect. It is the responsibility of HEJ to provide proof of its success because it consumes the lion’s share of research funding. Dr. Abdullah Riaz, an opposition parliamentarian, has recently pointed out that the HEC had made grants amounting to a massive 1.36 billion rupees over 5 years to HEJ, and that both institutions are headed by the same individual.
As in India, in Pakistan all publicly funded national research institutions in the non-defence sector, as well as universities, should be required by law to put their achievements on the internet so that some level of monitoring is possible. Without transparency, unlimited amounts of money can easily disappear without increasing real scientific productivity.
Future Prospects
The future of science in Pakistan will depend fundamentally upon the kind and quality of education that students receive in their schools and colleges. Fancy equipment for scientific research, or increased access to the internet and various glitzy technologies, are add-ons that acquire meaning and importance only after there is an adequate understanding of fundamental concepts.
Unfortunately, by and large, our school education continues to be based upon rote learning. As such it actively seeks to destroy the questioning mind from early childhood by rewarding obedience and punishing originality. One does not see many positive trends here. A moribund examination system that rewards rote learning continues to resist all reform attempts. The recent decision by the ministry of education to downgrade the importance of science practicals at the matriculation level from 25% of total marks to 15% is an alarming development.
So far, in the absence of a real understanding of the problem, the only prescription for boosting science remains the present one – throw unlimited amounts of money at the problem in the hope that things will turn around some day. The science budget for universities and institutes has shot up 12-15 times over the last 3-4 years.
But money and resources are fake issues. The most powerful engines of science, meaning mathematics and theoretical physics, are exceedingly parsimonious and undemanding of resources. A mathematician or theoretical physicist needs no equipment. Yet, with modest exceptions, high talent has nearly disappeared from Pakistan. Today one cannot count even 10 Pakistani physicists and mathematicians, living in Pakistan, who are good enough to get a job in a reasonable US university. But 30-35 years ago there were probably more than 3 times this number. India has many hundreds in this category, if not a thousand or two.
The dismal situation in Pakistani science is unlikely to change much until there is an understanding that science brings with it a world-view – a weltenschaung within which creativity, freedom, intellectual rigour, and scientific honesty are given the kind of value they receive in the West. The leaders of Pakistan’s scientific establishment, who head a plethora of institutes and academies, never cease to demand more resources. But they never speak of the need for exercising the scientific method, critical thinking, skepticism, or viewing the world rationally. They stood by as if struck deaf and dumb after the October 8 earthquake. Comfortably situated in plush offices and driven around in fancy new cars, not a single one from among them moved to challenge the ridiculous and counter-scientific beliefs, freely propagated over the mass media, that this earthquake was God’s punishment for our sinful behavior.
Let us face the fact squarely: pre-modern societies, or those which dispute the very basis of science, simply cannot produce meaningful science. Scientific progress requires social progress and a battle against superstition and fatalism. The task of bringing science in Pakistan will therefore have to go side-by-side with a much wider struggle to bring modern thought, the arts, philosophy and pluralism. Science cannot prosper under authoritarianism. And authoritarianism runs deep everywhere. It is underlies the conventional family structure that demands absolute obedience, and a tyrannical educational system where the teacher crushes independent thought. But without intellectual and personal freedoms, Pakistan shall continue to suffocate. Today’s orgiastic money-dumping – one which has dazzled the world – will fizzle whenever the country’s political administration changes. Suddenly the party will be over. By that time, the distance from India, and the developed world, will have increased many-fold.
The answer depends considerably upon how one chooses to define scientific accomplishment. In defense technology, which is applied science, it has done relatively well. Pakistan manufactures nuclear weapons and intermediate range missiles that, once upon a time, were considered as cutting-edge technology. There is now also a burgeoning, increasingly export-oriented, Pakistani arms industry that turns out a large range of weapons from grenades to tanks, night vision devices to laser guided weapons, and small submarines to training aircraft. Dozens of industrial sized units in and around Wah, with many subsidiaries, are producing armaments worth hundreds of millions of dollars with export earnings of roughly 100 million dollars yearly. Much of the production is under license from foreign countries, some from CKD kits, and most machinery for the arms factories is imported from the West or China. Chinese assistance in every nuclear area, peaceful and otherwise, has been crucial. Nonetheless, even though Pakistan’s defense production is mostly a triumph of reverse engineering rather than original research and development, its leaders have demonstrated the capability to exercise technical judgment and sufficient understanding of principles at some level.
There is less evidence of success in the civilian technology sector. High technology exports, as a percentage of total exports, amounted to only one percent in 2004. Much of this comes from software exports officially evaluated at $40 million but unofficially estimated at around 150 million dollars. This figure should be compared against India’s 12.5 billion dollars in 2004. The difference of 80 times or more is wholly out of the proportion with the difference in populations, about 6.5 to 1. Although the economy is currently growing well, Pakistan has an economy deeply dependent upon remittances from overseas workers, most of whom constitute unskilled labour in Middle Eastern countries. Instead, low-tech textile exports are the mainstay of Pakistan’s industrial production. According to the Pakistan Council for Science and Technology (PCST), in 43 years Pakistani scientists and technologists have managed to get just eight patents registered internationally.
Disaggregating the Sciences
Pakistan is at its weakest in the area of original scientific research, and the causes of weakness here appear poorly understood. The lack of understanding here has led to fundamentally flawed policies and delusions of achieving a quick turn around.
To engage in a sensible discourse on this important matter requires that, at the outset, we separate pure science from applied science. Pure science seeks to uncover new principles and fathom the inner workings of nature. Its discoveries, such as in cosmology or elementary particle physics, often have little or no relation to any kind of technology or economic need. The famous English pure mathematician and number theorist, G.H. Hardy, took much pride in the lack of application of his discoveries to anything in the real world. Nonetheless, without such foundational works in pure science and mathematics there would be no applied science, and no technology. Maxwell’s equations led to wireless and television, abstract quantum mechanics to the transistor and integrated circuit, and Einstein’s relativity to nuclear power and the bomb.
Pure science and applied science are judged by two different sets of criteria. Good pure science must be current, introduce or employ new concepts or uncover hidden relationships, be intellectually interesting to practitioners of the field, and stimulate further research into the discovering the nature of physical reality. Good applied science, on the other hand, is that which uses known scientific facts in non-obvious ways with the goal of creating technology in the form of processes, devices, pharmaceutical drugs, machines, computing systems, etc.
These elementary distinctions are important to understand now that tens of billions of rupees are suddenly being poured into funding scientific research in Pakistan, and enormous incentives are being given to Pakistani scientists to buy research equipment and publish research papers. This so-called “renaissance” of science in Pakistan owes principally to the chairman of Pakistan’s Higher Education Commission, and a well-known chemist, Dr. Atta-ur-Rahman.
Writing in the prestigious journal “Nature”, Dr. Atta bemoans the state of scientific research in Islamic countries and offers his recipe for improving it. He thinks that the answer lies in increasing the number of scientific publications, and the number of science PhDs. He then proceeds to declare Pakistan as a success story. In his words:
“During the period 2001 to 2003, the sharpest increase has come from Pakistan, with a 40% increase from 636 to 890. This is a result of a system introduced in 2002 that provides researchers with an opportunity to more than quadruple their earnings if they increase the numbers of their papers published in peer-reviewed journals.”
Other claimed successes include a huge increase in the number of PhD students enrolled in Pakistani universities, and a doubling of the number of universities in the public sector over a period of five years or so.
A Disputable Criterion
Does success lie in increasing numbers? Is it a good idea to use the number of published papers as a means to “quadruple their earnings” of scientists, and to go in for whole-sale production of PhDs? On the face of it, this seems eminently sensible. But experience in other countries points in the other direction. Two of Iran’s most distinguished chemists, Dr. Mohamed Yalpani and Dr. Akbar Heydari of Tarbiat Modarres University, argue that such a path is likely to do more harm than good.
Yalpani and Heydari , in a 2005 paper published in the journal “Scientometrics”, argue that this approach has failed in Iran. Intrigued by the fact that publications by Iranian scientists had exploded from a total of 1040 in 1998 to 3277 in 2003 – with over 30% of these in chemistry – these two scientists set about uncovering a number of facts that many had suspected but none had adequately documented.
Working systematically, paper-by-paper, Yalpani and Heydari discovered that:
1. Many scientific papers by Iranian chemists that were claimed as “original” by their authors, and which had been published in internationally peer-reviewed journals, had actually been published twice, and sometimes thrice, by the same authors with identical or nearly identical contents. Trivial changes had been made in the titles, with the contents, graphs, and references being 90% or more similar. These were clear cut-and-paste papers. Others were plagiarized papers that could have been easily detected by any reasonably careful referee.
2. Many Iranian researchers have chosen to repeat the same basic chemical reactions – of dubious practical or scientific value – over and over again. While this generates a lot of data and graphs, it is unlikely to be of much use for anything other than increasing the number of their publications.
3. Interestingly, in some of the papers published by Iranian groups, the exchange of N for O had been represented as acid catalyzed and in some as oxidative! Clearly, the international journal referees were sleeping.
4. Many important details, which ought to be provided by journal authors (such as sample preparation procedures, curing temperatures, etc), were missing. This leads to a suspicion that the experiments were carried out under circumstances that make the results unreliable.
5. While certain international journals are careful and demanding, others are fairly sloppy. Prospective authors, whose work is shoddy, obviously prefer journals which do not require a high degree of proof. Under pressure to publish, or attracted by the incentives offered by the Iranian system, authors often chose to follow the path of least resistance paved for them by the increasingly commercialized policies of many scientific journals. Prospective authors well know that editors are under pressure to produce a journal of a certain thickness every month.
6. Referring to the incentives proposed by Dr. Atta-ur-Rahman in his self-congratulatory Nature article, Yalpani and Heydari show their strong disapproval and note that “significantly, there is no mention of quality in his entire article”. They censure his approach for rewarding the “cut-and-paste” method which his incentives encourage. In their opinion this damages the scientific enterprise because it focuses the attention of the Third World scientist primarily on momentary personal material gain. When reporting a finding in a Western scientific journal, the essence is lost because individuals often attempt only a minimal mimic of the formalism that lies behind true science.
The two authors note the general decline of the scientific quality of papers published by Iranian chemists although chemical concepts, reagents, instrumentation, and other tools had progressively become more sophisticated. Simply put: there is an explosion of junk scientific papers, perhaps cleverly packaged and capable of getting past referees, but of little use.
No comparable scientometric research, to my knowledge, has ever been done for Pakistani scientists. But these two Iranian chemists, who obviously are not writing for a Pakistani audience, have nevertheless put their fingers on a sensitive spot. They have given enough evidence for everyone to be worried, particularly those concerned with science in Pakistan.
Alternative Criteria
How then is one to judge the state of science, and the individual merit of scientists if not by the number of published papers? To say that published scientific works carry no value is foolish. There is absolutely no doubt that the genuine scientific publication is extremely important to science, both theoretical and experimental. But it has value only if it is strictly preserved as a medium that succinctly and accurately conveys the essence of true scientific discoveries. If this medium is corrupted, either totally or partially, one must search for better achievement indicators. A better, though still imperfect, estimation of scientific quality is to see how many times a scientist’s work is cited by others working in the same field. Citations – excluding self-citations or those made by members of the same group – is a relatively better criterion for assessment of achievement in the pure sciences.
For assessing research in the applied sciences, the task is much simpler. The value to industry of such research must be clear and apparent. This suggests that one must judge the plethora of scientific institutions in Pakistan – which are predominantly applied science institutions – principally by the technology, products, and processes that their work has given birth to. For agricultural research – which is relatively simple science but of immense economic importance – there are some good results to show in terms of cotton and wheat varieties produced, rice and tea strains, etc.
But in non-agricultural fields there is much confusion. It is time to demand clarity. Surely PCSIR, with an annual budget of over 80 million rupees is obliged to tell the nation what that money has produced (beyond a process for making mineral water). The websites of almost all Pakistani S&T institutions are national embarrassments – that of the Centre for Applied and Molecular Biology has pictures of political personalities, starting with General Pervez Musharraf, but links leading to its activities (particularly research) lead nowhere.
One must judge the “miracle” of the HEJ Institute – said to be Pakistan’s premier research institution – by criteria different from the present ones. Papers published on applied chemistry, the large number of PhDs produced, or the impressive international conferences it has organized, are indeed positive achievements. But the real criteria should be: what has it produced in the way of pharmaceutical products, patents, and services to industry. Unfortunately its otherwise elaborate website does not, at least as yet, provide information on this aspect. It is the responsibility of HEJ to provide proof of its success because it consumes the lion’s share of research funding. Dr. Abdullah Riaz, an opposition parliamentarian, has recently pointed out that the HEC had made grants amounting to a massive 1.36 billion rupees over 5 years to HEJ, and that both institutions are headed by the same individual.
As in India, in Pakistan all publicly funded national research institutions in the non-defence sector, as well as universities, should be required by law to put their achievements on the internet so that some level of monitoring is possible. Without transparency, unlimited amounts of money can easily disappear without increasing real scientific productivity.
Future Prospects
The future of science in Pakistan will depend fundamentally upon the kind and quality of education that students receive in their schools and colleges. Fancy equipment for scientific research, or increased access to the internet and various glitzy technologies, are add-ons that acquire meaning and importance only after there is an adequate understanding of fundamental concepts.
Unfortunately, by and large, our school education continues to be based upon rote learning. As such it actively seeks to destroy the questioning mind from early childhood by rewarding obedience and punishing originality. One does not see many positive trends here. A moribund examination system that rewards rote learning continues to resist all reform attempts. The recent decision by the ministry of education to downgrade the importance of science practicals at the matriculation level from 25% of total marks to 15% is an alarming development.
So far, in the absence of a real understanding of the problem, the only prescription for boosting science remains the present one – throw unlimited amounts of money at the problem in the hope that things will turn around some day. The science budget for universities and institutes has shot up 12-15 times over the last 3-4 years.
But money and resources are fake issues. The most powerful engines of science, meaning mathematics and theoretical physics, are exceedingly parsimonious and undemanding of resources. A mathematician or theoretical physicist needs no equipment. Yet, with modest exceptions, high talent has nearly disappeared from Pakistan. Today one cannot count even 10 Pakistani physicists and mathematicians, living in Pakistan, who are good enough to get a job in a reasonable US university. But 30-35 years ago there were probably more than 3 times this number. India has many hundreds in this category, if not a thousand or two.
The dismal situation in Pakistani science is unlikely to change much until there is an understanding that science brings with it a world-view – a weltenschaung within which creativity, freedom, intellectual rigour, and scientific honesty are given the kind of value they receive in the West. The leaders of Pakistan’s scientific establishment, who head a plethora of institutes and academies, never cease to demand more resources. But they never speak of the need for exercising the scientific method, critical thinking, skepticism, or viewing the world rationally. They stood by as if struck deaf and dumb after the October 8 earthquake. Comfortably situated in plush offices and driven around in fancy new cars, not a single one from among them moved to challenge the ridiculous and counter-scientific beliefs, freely propagated over the mass media, that this earthquake was God’s punishment for our sinful behavior.
Let us face the fact squarely: pre-modern societies, or those which dispute the very basis of science, simply cannot produce meaningful science. Scientific progress requires social progress and a battle against superstition and fatalism. The task of bringing science in Pakistan will therefore have to go side-by-side with a much wider struggle to bring modern thought, the arts, philosophy and pluralism. Science cannot prosper under authoritarianism. And authoritarianism runs deep everywhere. It is underlies the conventional family structure that demands absolute obedience, and a tyrannical educational system where the teacher crushes independent thought. But without intellectual and personal freedoms, Pakistan shall continue to suffocate. Today’s orgiastic money-dumping – one which has dazzled the world – will fizzle whenever the country’s political administration changes. Suddenly the party will be over. By that time, the distance from India, and the developed world, will have increased many-fold.
South Asia Needs a Bomb-less Deal
For all who have opposed Pakistan’s nuclear program over the years – including myself – the US-India nuclear agreement may probably be the worst thing that has happened in a long time.
Post agreement:
Pakistan’s ruling elite is confused and bitter. They know that India has overtaken Pakistan in far too many areas for there to be any reasonable basis for symmetry. They see the US is now interested in reconstructing the geopolitics of South Asia and in repairing relations with India, not in mollifying Pakistani grievances. Nevertheless, there were lingering hopes of a sweetener during President George W. Bush’s furtive and unwelcome visit in March 2006 to Islamabad. There was none.
This change in US policy thrilled many in India. Many enjoyed President Musharraf’s discomfiture. But they would do well to restrain their exuberance. The nuclear deal, even if ratified, will not dramatically increase nuclear power production – currently this stands at only 3% of the total production, and can at most double to 6% if currently planned reactors are built and made operational over the next decade. On the other hand, Pakistan is bound to react – and react badly – once US nuclear materials and equipment starting rolling into India.
One certain consequence will be more bombs on both sides of the border. The deal is widely seen in Pakistan as signaling America’s support or acquiescence, or perhaps even surrender, to India’s nuclear ambitions. India will be freely able to import uranium fuel for its safeguarded civilian reactors. This will free up the remainder of its scarce uranium resources for making plutonium. Further, when India’s thorium-fuelled breeder reactors are fully operational, India will be able to produce more bombs in one year than in the last 30.
Not surprisingly, important voices in Pakistan have started to demand that Pakistan match India bomb-for-bomb. Abdus Sattar, ex-foreign minister of Pakistan, advocates “replication of the Kahuta plant to produce more fissile uranium…. to rationalize and upgrade Pakistan’s minimum deterrence capability”. He has also written about the need to “accelerate its [Pakistan’s] missile development programme”.
This is a prescription for unlimited nuclear racing, given that “minimum deterrence” is essentially an open-ended concept. Pakistan has mastered centrifuge technology, and giving birth to more Kahutas would require only a political decision. Moreover, unlike India, Pakistan is not constrained by supplies of natural uranium. Thus, at least in principle, Pakistan can increase its bomb production considerably.
Although nuclear hawks in India and Pakistan had once pooh-poohed the notion of an arms race, there is little doubt that India and Pakistan are solidly placed on a Cold War trajectory. As more bombs are added to the inventory every year, and intermediate range ballistic missiles steadily roll off the production lines, both countries seek ever more potent weaponry.
Many years ago, all three countries crossed the point where they could lay cities to waste and kill millions in a matter of minutes. The fantastically cruel logic, known as nuclear deterrence, requires only the certainty that one nuclear bomb will be able to penetrate the adversary’s defences and land in the heart of a city. No one has the slightest doubt that this capability was crossed multiple times over during the past few decades.
What action would best serve the interest of the peoples of India and Pakistan, as well as of China?
A fissile material cutoff is the easiest and most straightforward way to ease nuclear tensions. It offers the best hope to limit the upwards spiral in warhead numbers. Instead of threatening to create more Kahutas, Pakistan should offer to stop production of highly enriched uranium while India should respond by ceasing to reprocess its reactor wastes. Previous stockpiles possessed by either country should not be brought into issue because their credible verification is extremely difficult and would inevitably derail an agreement. Years of negotiation at the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva came to naught for this very reason. A series of “Nuclear Risk Reduction” talks between Pakistan and India have also produced zero results. The cessation of fissile material production is completely absent from the agenda; it must be made a central item now.
If a Pakistan-India bilateral agreement could somehow come through, it would have fantastically positive effects elsewhere. China – which is the major target of US nuclear weapons – may not have enough warheads to match the US but has more than a sufficient number to constitute a nuclear deterrent. Inspired by an Indian cutoff, it could formally declare a moratorium on fissile material production. The US, which no longer produces fissile materials because it has a huge excess, could encourage the Chinese action by offering to suspend work on its Nuclear Missile Defence (NMD) system.
Unfortunately the United States is not acting as a force for peace in South Asia. Confronted by the accusation that it is pumping arms into a region that some of its leaders had once described as a “nuclear tinder box”, US officials have responded defensively with answers such as: you have to deal with the world as it is and the Indian program cannot be rolled back; India is a democracy; India needs to import nuclear fuel and technology and we need to sell them. But such lame replies sweep under the carpet the disturbing history of near-nuclear conflict on the subcontinent for which the US has often taken credit for defusing.
The arms race directly benefits Indian and Pakistan elites. Hence they are tacit collaborators as they woo the US and prove that their states belong to the community of “responsible nuclear states” that are worthy of military and nuclear assistance. The past has been banished by an unwritten agreement. Retired Pakistani and Indian generals and leaders meet cordially at conferences around the world and happily clink glasses together. They emphatically deny that the two countries had even come close to a nuclear crisis in the past. Being now charged with the mission of projecting an image of “responsibility” abroad, none amongst them wants to bring back the memory of South Asian leaders hurling ugly nuclear threats against each other.
But instances of criminal nuclear behaviour are to be found even in the very recent past. For example, India’s Defence Minister George Fernandes told the International Herald Tribune on June 3, 2002 that “India can survive a nuclear attack, but Pakistan cannot.” Indian Defence Secretary Yogendra Narain had taken things a step further in an interview with Outlook Magazine: “A surgical strike is the answer,” adding that if this failed to resolve things, “We must be prepared for total mutual destruction.” On the Pakistani side, at the peak of the 2002 crisis, General Musharraf had threatened that Pakistan would use “unconventional means” against India if necessary.
Tense times may return at some point in the in the future. But Indian and Pakistani leaders are likely to once again abdicate from their own responsibilities whenever that happens. Instead, they will again entrust disaster prevention to the US.
Of course, it would be absurd to lay the blame on the US for all that has gone wrong between the two countries. Surely the US does not want to destabilize the subcontinent, and it does not want a South Asian holocaust. But one must be aware that for the US this is only a peripheral interest – the core of its interest in South Asian nuclear issues stems from the need to limit Chinese power and influence, fear of Al-Qaida and Muslim extremism, and the associated threat of nuclear terrorism.
The Americans will sort out their business and priorities as they see fit. But it is unwise to participate in a plan that leaves South Asian neighbours at each others throats while benefiting a power that sits on the other side of the globe.
Regional tensions will increase because of the deal. Given that the motivation for the US-India nuclear agreement comes partly from the US’s desire to contain China, the Pakistan-China strategic relationship will be considerably strengthened. In practical terms, this may amount to enhanced support for Pakistan’s missile program, or even its military nuclear program. Speaking at Pakistan’s National Defense College in Islamabad a day before Bush’s arrival there, Musharraf declared that “My recent trip to China was part of my effort to keep Pakistan’s strategic options open.”
By proceeding with the nuclear deal with India the US may destabilize South Asia. It will also wreck the NPT, take the heat off Iran and North Korea, open the door for Japan to convert its plutonium stocks into bombs, and bring about global nuclear anarchy.
This articles was published in Economic and Political Weekly (India) and The Friday Times (Pakistan), week of 17 April, 2006.
Post agreement:
Pakistan’s ruling elite is confused and bitter. They know that India has overtaken Pakistan in far too many areas for there to be any reasonable basis for symmetry. They see the US is now interested in reconstructing the geopolitics of South Asia and in repairing relations with India, not in mollifying Pakistani grievances. Nevertheless, there were lingering hopes of a sweetener during President George W. Bush’s furtive and unwelcome visit in March 2006 to Islamabad. There was none.
This change in US policy thrilled many in India. Many enjoyed President Musharraf’s discomfiture. But they would do well to restrain their exuberance. The nuclear deal, even if ratified, will not dramatically increase nuclear power production – currently this stands at only 3% of the total production, and can at most double to 6% if currently planned reactors are built and made operational over the next decade. On the other hand, Pakistan is bound to react – and react badly – once US nuclear materials and equipment starting rolling into India.
One certain consequence will be more bombs on both sides of the border. The deal is widely seen in Pakistan as signaling America’s support or acquiescence, or perhaps even surrender, to India’s nuclear ambitions. India will be freely able to import uranium fuel for its safeguarded civilian reactors. This will free up the remainder of its scarce uranium resources for making plutonium. Further, when India’s thorium-fuelled breeder reactors are fully operational, India will be able to produce more bombs in one year than in the last 30.
Not surprisingly, important voices in Pakistan have started to demand that Pakistan match India bomb-for-bomb. Abdus Sattar, ex-foreign minister of Pakistan, advocates “replication of the Kahuta plant to produce more fissile uranium…. to rationalize and upgrade Pakistan’s minimum deterrence capability”. He has also written about the need to “accelerate its [Pakistan’s] missile development programme”.
This is a prescription for unlimited nuclear racing, given that “minimum deterrence” is essentially an open-ended concept. Pakistan has mastered centrifuge technology, and giving birth to more Kahutas would require only a political decision. Moreover, unlike India, Pakistan is not constrained by supplies of natural uranium. Thus, at least in principle, Pakistan can increase its bomb production considerably.
Although nuclear hawks in India and Pakistan had once pooh-poohed the notion of an arms race, there is little doubt that India and Pakistan are solidly placed on a Cold War trajectory. As more bombs are added to the inventory every year, and intermediate range ballistic missiles steadily roll off the production lines, both countries seek ever more potent weaponry.
Many years ago, all three countries crossed the point where they could lay cities to waste and kill millions in a matter of minutes. The fantastically cruel logic, known as nuclear deterrence, requires only the certainty that one nuclear bomb will be able to penetrate the adversary’s defences and land in the heart of a city. No one has the slightest doubt that this capability was crossed multiple times over during the past few decades.
What action would best serve the interest of the peoples of India and Pakistan, as well as of China?
A fissile material cutoff is the easiest and most straightforward way to ease nuclear tensions. It offers the best hope to limit the upwards spiral in warhead numbers. Instead of threatening to create more Kahutas, Pakistan should offer to stop production of highly enriched uranium while India should respond by ceasing to reprocess its reactor wastes. Previous stockpiles possessed by either country should not be brought into issue because their credible verification is extremely difficult and would inevitably derail an agreement. Years of negotiation at the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva came to naught for this very reason. A series of “Nuclear Risk Reduction” talks between Pakistan and India have also produced zero results. The cessation of fissile material production is completely absent from the agenda; it must be made a central item now.
If a Pakistan-India bilateral agreement could somehow come through, it would have fantastically positive effects elsewhere. China – which is the major target of US nuclear weapons – may not have enough warheads to match the US but has more than a sufficient number to constitute a nuclear deterrent. Inspired by an Indian cutoff, it could formally declare a moratorium on fissile material production. The US, which no longer produces fissile materials because it has a huge excess, could encourage the Chinese action by offering to suspend work on its Nuclear Missile Defence (NMD) system.
Unfortunately the United States is not acting as a force for peace in South Asia. Confronted by the accusation that it is pumping arms into a region that some of its leaders had once described as a “nuclear tinder box”, US officials have responded defensively with answers such as: you have to deal with the world as it is and the Indian program cannot be rolled back; India is a democracy; India needs to import nuclear fuel and technology and we need to sell them. But such lame replies sweep under the carpet the disturbing history of near-nuclear conflict on the subcontinent for which the US has often taken credit for defusing.
The arms race directly benefits Indian and Pakistan elites. Hence they are tacit collaborators as they woo the US and prove that their states belong to the community of “responsible nuclear states” that are worthy of military and nuclear assistance. The past has been banished by an unwritten agreement. Retired Pakistani and Indian generals and leaders meet cordially at conferences around the world and happily clink glasses together. They emphatically deny that the two countries had even come close to a nuclear crisis in the past. Being now charged with the mission of projecting an image of “responsibility” abroad, none amongst them wants to bring back the memory of South Asian leaders hurling ugly nuclear threats against each other.
But instances of criminal nuclear behaviour are to be found even in the very recent past. For example, India’s Defence Minister George Fernandes told the International Herald Tribune on June 3, 2002 that “India can survive a nuclear attack, but Pakistan cannot.” Indian Defence Secretary Yogendra Narain had taken things a step further in an interview with Outlook Magazine: “A surgical strike is the answer,” adding that if this failed to resolve things, “We must be prepared for total mutual destruction.” On the Pakistani side, at the peak of the 2002 crisis, General Musharraf had threatened that Pakistan would use “unconventional means” against India if necessary.
Tense times may return at some point in the in the future. But Indian and Pakistani leaders are likely to once again abdicate from their own responsibilities whenever that happens. Instead, they will again entrust disaster prevention to the US.
Of course, it would be absurd to lay the blame on the US for all that has gone wrong between the two countries. Surely the US does not want to destabilize the subcontinent, and it does not want a South Asian holocaust. But one must be aware that for the US this is only a peripheral interest – the core of its interest in South Asian nuclear issues stems from the need to limit Chinese power and influence, fear of Al-Qaida and Muslim extremism, and the associated threat of nuclear terrorism.
The Americans will sort out their business and priorities as they see fit. But it is unwise to participate in a plan that leaves South Asian neighbours at each others throats while benefiting a power that sits on the other side of the globe.
Regional tensions will increase because of the deal. Given that the motivation for the US-India nuclear agreement comes partly from the US’s desire to contain China, the Pakistan-China strategic relationship will be considerably strengthened. In practical terms, this may amount to enhanced support for Pakistan’s missile program, or even its military nuclear program. Speaking at Pakistan’s National Defense College in Islamabad a day before Bush’s arrival there, Musharraf declared that “My recent trip to China was part of my effort to keep Pakistan’s strategic options open.”
By proceeding with the nuclear deal with India the US may destabilize South Asia. It will also wreck the NPT, take the heat off Iran and North Korea, open the door for Japan to convert its plutonium stocks into bombs, and bring about global nuclear anarchy.
This articles was published in Economic and Political Weekly (India) and The Friday Times (Pakistan), week of 17 April, 2006.
What Pakistan’s Bomb Could Not Buy
On the eight anniversary of Pakistan’s nuclear tests, there is little point in debating whether we should have followed India down the nuclear gutter. But there is need for a sober stock-taking that moves us away from the still rampant, chest-thumping, nuclear triumphalism. So far the region’s nuclear “experts” and “strategists”, actively assisted on both sides of the border by their respective states, have effectively monopolized discussion on nuclear policy. But many promises remain unfulfilled and various political and social costs for Pakistan are barely acknowledged. What are these?
The most obvious fact is that testing the Bomb speeded up the subcontinent’s arms race, rather than slowing it down. If you had believed what the nuclear pundits used to say, it should have been the other way around. Their argument was so seductive and simple that even well-meaning people were taken for a ride. They said acquiring the Bomb would assure national security into eternity – the threat of a nuclear response would deter territorial violations by the other, and hence the need for conventional arms would evaporate. Just a few bombs would do. Before the May 1998 tests, and even for several months later, some Pakistanis cheerfully wrote that after going nuclear, little more than salaries for soldiers would be needed. Defence budgets could be slashed, and (at last) funds would go into development and education.
Instead, what have we seen? Today the acquisition of battle tanks, artillery, fighter aircraft, surface ships, submarines, anti-ballistic missile systems, early warning aircraft, and space-based surveillance systems is now claimed – by many of the same people – to be more urgent than ever before. The US-India nuclear deal, if ratified by Congress, will add fuel to the fire. After India’s breeder reactors come on line, it will be able to produce as many nuclear warheads in just one year as it had in the previous 30. Pakistan is sure to react in various ways.
The once-popular concept of “minimal deterrence” died after India’s firm statement that the requirements for a deterrent force will be “dynamically determined” and cannot be explicitly stated. In other words, it will never say how many bombs are enough. That is not how it used to be. I well remember my intervention during a conference in Chicago (1992) which provoked the Indian strategist K. Subramanyam to angrily protest that “arms racing is a Cold War concept invented by the western powers and totally alien to sub-continental thinking”. We Pakistanis and Indians were supposed to be infinitely wiser than the compulsive Americans and Soviets. But one sees that every aspect of Cold War racing has been punctiliously followed on the subcontinent. Tactical nuclear war-fighting, once considered escalatory, is reported to be incorporated into current Indian and Pakistani military doctrines.
The fact is that nuclear racing and doctrines is everywhere and always driven by the same implacable, mad, runaway logic. Should there be the slightest danger of the race slackening, a nuclear “expert” will point to the other side’s latest acquisition and shout wolf. With every passing decade, advances in technology make it easier and cheaper to create ever more deadly nuclear weapons, buy or make longer range and more effective missiles, and go for various hi-tech weapon systems that could not have been imagined just a while ago.
For Pakistan, the nuclear cost – political and social – has been even higher than for India.
First, nuclear weapons led to Pakistan’s Kargil debacle. The 1998 tests gave to the country’s leaders a false sense of security. This was the direct cause of a misadventure that ended in a stunning political and diplomatic defeat for Pakistan. If anything, it made clear that Pakistan can now never hope for a military victory in Kashmir.
The Kargil episode offers the very first example in history where nuclear weapons, by dint of creating a presumed shield for launching conventional covert operations, were responsible for having brought about a war. The unrestrained propagation of false beliefs in nuclear security brought India and Pakistan to the brink of a full-blown confrontation that could well have been the very last one. Arguably it was the BJP that, by ordering Pokhran-II, fathered Kargil.
Second, Pakistan’s acquisition of nuclear weapons has made it effectively a less independent state, rather than the other way around. While Pakistan became popular in Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries after testing, its inability to stand up for real Muslim interests remains as chronically weak as ever. Unlike many European and non-aligned countries – which were vociferous in their opposition to the US war upon Iraq – Pakistan chose the side of pragmatism. One can also be sure that if Iran’s nuclear facilities are bombed by the US, Pakistan’s leaders will do no more than cluck their tongues and shake their heads in mild disapproval. The Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline provides yet another example of nuclear Pakistan unable to assert even its trade preferences.
Although nukes have pushed up Pakistan’s rental value for fighting the wars of other nations, the constraints put upon its behavior have also greatly increased. The danger that our nukes may turn loose is a source of deep discomfort to Pakistan’s chief patron and paymaster, the United States of America. The fiery rhetoric of religious parties, who claim the Bomb for the entire Muslim Ummah rather than just for Pakistan, understandably terrifies many in the West. Moreover, the A.Q.Khan episode – in spite of Pakistan’s repeated assertions that the matter has now closed – is still very much on the minds of the US establishment and media. These reasons account for the US’s flat rejection of any kind of nuclear deal with Pakistan along the lines that it had proposed to India.
For the time being, with General Musharraf in power, the US is willing to tolerate Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal – and may even satisfy some of its needs for advanced conventional weaponry. But this could be short lived. Many gaming scenarios played in the US strategic war planning institutions indicate that there are well-rehearsed contingency plans if Pakistan’s political situation changes radically after General Musharraf’s departure, planned or otherwise. Clearly, Pakistan is a country that is closely watched and monitored.
Third, and finally, while a connection is sometimes alleged, in fact nuclear weapons have been irrelevant to two of Pakistan’s critical needs – national integration and high technology. If anything, the effect has gone the other way.
National integration remains a distant goal, and the hope that the Bomb would be a rallying call for all Pakistanis has essentially disappeared. The tumultuous, officially inspired, 1999 celebrations of “youm-e-takbir” in all four provinces and dozens of cities were supposed to infuse a new sense of national spirit. Bomb and missile replicas were installed at every other street corner; many still survive. But love for the centralized Islamabad-based Pakistani state, run by military generals with a passion for real-estate and wealth, is conspicuously absent. The ongoing widespread insurgency in Baluchistan and rising bitterness in Sind are sending clear messages of a dangerous disaffection. Nuclear weapons cannot compensate for the absence of a democratic process, which alone can weld Pakistan’s disparate people into a nation.
The failure is evident. Punjab celebrates the Bomb while Baluchistan protests it. It resents the fact that the nuclear test site – now radioactive and put out of bounds – is located upon Baluch soil. Accused of dumping nuclear wastes, the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission is now being increasingly targeted by Baluch nationalists as an instrument of foreign domination. On May 15, 2006 Baluchi insurgents reportedly launched a mortar attack on a Pakistani nuclear establishment controlled by the PAEC in the vicinity of the Dera Ghazi Khan-Quetta highway.
And, what of the Bomb being a technical miracle? Over thirty years ago, fearful of India’s newly acquired nuclear weapons, Pakistan set out on its own quest to become a nuclear weapons state. It lacked a strong technological base. But its secret search of the world’s industrialized countries for nuclear weapons technologies was successful. It now advertises itself as a high-tech state.
But in a world where science moves at super-high speeds, nuclear weapons and missile development is today second-rate science. The undeniable fact is that the technology of nuclear bombs is six decades old. Famine-stricken North Korea, with few other achievements, is probably also a nuclear power and clearly has a very advanced missile program. In fact it had transferred this technology to Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Libya, and other countries. While Pakistani and Indian weapons programs have diverted substantial financial and material resources away from social and scientific needs, they have merely used scientific principles discovered and developed elsewhere. Not surprisingly, there are no worthwhile spin-offs. Surely it is time to drop the pretence that making nuclear weapons and guided missiles is a wonderful thing.
The article was published in The News (Karachi, Lahore,Islamabad) on 28th May 2006, the eight anniversary of Pakistan’s nuclear tests.
The most obvious fact is that testing the Bomb speeded up the subcontinent’s arms race, rather than slowing it down. If you had believed what the nuclear pundits used to say, it should have been the other way around. Their argument was so seductive and simple that even well-meaning people were taken for a ride. They said acquiring the Bomb would assure national security into eternity – the threat of a nuclear response would deter territorial violations by the other, and hence the need for conventional arms would evaporate. Just a few bombs would do. Before the May 1998 tests, and even for several months later, some Pakistanis cheerfully wrote that after going nuclear, little more than salaries for soldiers would be needed. Defence budgets could be slashed, and (at last) funds would go into development and education.
Instead, what have we seen? Today the acquisition of battle tanks, artillery, fighter aircraft, surface ships, submarines, anti-ballistic missile systems, early warning aircraft, and space-based surveillance systems is now claimed – by many of the same people – to be more urgent than ever before. The US-India nuclear deal, if ratified by Congress, will add fuel to the fire. After India’s breeder reactors come on line, it will be able to produce as many nuclear warheads in just one year as it had in the previous 30. Pakistan is sure to react in various ways.
The once-popular concept of “minimal deterrence” died after India’s firm statement that the requirements for a deterrent force will be “dynamically determined” and cannot be explicitly stated. In other words, it will never say how many bombs are enough. That is not how it used to be. I well remember my intervention during a conference in Chicago (1992) which provoked the Indian strategist K. Subramanyam to angrily protest that “arms racing is a Cold War concept invented by the western powers and totally alien to sub-continental thinking”. We Pakistanis and Indians were supposed to be infinitely wiser than the compulsive Americans and Soviets. But one sees that every aspect of Cold War racing has been punctiliously followed on the subcontinent. Tactical nuclear war-fighting, once considered escalatory, is reported to be incorporated into current Indian and Pakistani military doctrines.
The fact is that nuclear racing and doctrines is everywhere and always driven by the same implacable, mad, runaway logic. Should there be the slightest danger of the race slackening, a nuclear “expert” will point to the other side’s latest acquisition and shout wolf. With every passing decade, advances in technology make it easier and cheaper to create ever more deadly nuclear weapons, buy or make longer range and more effective missiles, and go for various hi-tech weapon systems that could not have been imagined just a while ago.
For Pakistan, the nuclear cost – political and social – has been even higher than for India.
First, nuclear weapons led to Pakistan’s Kargil debacle. The 1998 tests gave to the country’s leaders a false sense of security. This was the direct cause of a misadventure that ended in a stunning political and diplomatic defeat for Pakistan. If anything, it made clear that Pakistan can now never hope for a military victory in Kashmir.
The Kargil episode offers the very first example in history where nuclear weapons, by dint of creating a presumed shield for launching conventional covert operations, were responsible for having brought about a war. The unrestrained propagation of false beliefs in nuclear security brought India and Pakistan to the brink of a full-blown confrontation that could well have been the very last one. Arguably it was the BJP that, by ordering Pokhran-II, fathered Kargil.
Second, Pakistan’s acquisition of nuclear weapons has made it effectively a less independent state, rather than the other way around. While Pakistan became popular in Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries after testing, its inability to stand up for real Muslim interests remains as chronically weak as ever. Unlike many European and non-aligned countries – which were vociferous in their opposition to the US war upon Iraq – Pakistan chose the side of pragmatism. One can also be sure that if Iran’s nuclear facilities are bombed by the US, Pakistan’s leaders will do no more than cluck their tongues and shake their heads in mild disapproval. The Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline provides yet another example of nuclear Pakistan unable to assert even its trade preferences.
Although nukes have pushed up Pakistan’s rental value for fighting the wars of other nations, the constraints put upon its behavior have also greatly increased. The danger that our nukes may turn loose is a source of deep discomfort to Pakistan’s chief patron and paymaster, the United States of America. The fiery rhetoric of religious parties, who claim the Bomb for the entire Muslim Ummah rather than just for Pakistan, understandably terrifies many in the West. Moreover, the A.Q.Khan episode – in spite of Pakistan’s repeated assertions that the matter has now closed – is still very much on the minds of the US establishment and media. These reasons account for the US’s flat rejection of any kind of nuclear deal with Pakistan along the lines that it had proposed to India.
For the time being, with General Musharraf in power, the US is willing to tolerate Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal – and may even satisfy some of its needs for advanced conventional weaponry. But this could be short lived. Many gaming scenarios played in the US strategic war planning institutions indicate that there are well-rehearsed contingency plans if Pakistan’s political situation changes radically after General Musharraf’s departure, planned or otherwise. Clearly, Pakistan is a country that is closely watched and monitored.
Third, and finally, while a connection is sometimes alleged, in fact nuclear weapons have been irrelevant to two of Pakistan’s critical needs – national integration and high technology. If anything, the effect has gone the other way.
National integration remains a distant goal, and the hope that the Bomb would be a rallying call for all Pakistanis has essentially disappeared. The tumultuous, officially inspired, 1999 celebrations of “youm-e-takbir” in all four provinces and dozens of cities were supposed to infuse a new sense of national spirit. Bomb and missile replicas were installed at every other street corner; many still survive. But love for the centralized Islamabad-based Pakistani state, run by military generals with a passion for real-estate and wealth, is conspicuously absent. The ongoing widespread insurgency in Baluchistan and rising bitterness in Sind are sending clear messages of a dangerous disaffection. Nuclear weapons cannot compensate for the absence of a democratic process, which alone can weld Pakistan’s disparate people into a nation.
The failure is evident. Punjab celebrates the Bomb while Baluchistan protests it. It resents the fact that the nuclear test site – now radioactive and put out of bounds – is located upon Baluch soil. Accused of dumping nuclear wastes, the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission is now being increasingly targeted by Baluch nationalists as an instrument of foreign domination. On May 15, 2006 Baluchi insurgents reportedly launched a mortar attack on a Pakistani nuclear establishment controlled by the PAEC in the vicinity of the Dera Ghazi Khan-Quetta highway.
And, what of the Bomb being a technical miracle? Over thirty years ago, fearful of India’s newly acquired nuclear weapons, Pakistan set out on its own quest to become a nuclear weapons state. It lacked a strong technological base. But its secret search of the world’s industrialized countries for nuclear weapons technologies was successful. It now advertises itself as a high-tech state.
But in a world where science moves at super-high speeds, nuclear weapons and missile development is today second-rate science. The undeniable fact is that the technology of nuclear bombs is six decades old. Famine-stricken North Korea, with few other achievements, is probably also a nuclear power and clearly has a very advanced missile program. In fact it had transferred this technology to Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Libya, and other countries. While Pakistani and Indian weapons programs have diverted substantial financial and material resources away from social and scientific needs, they have merely used scientific principles discovered and developed elsewhere. Not surprisingly, there are no worthwhile spin-offs. Surely it is time to drop the pretence that making nuclear weapons and guided missiles is a wonderful thing.
The article was published in The News (Karachi, Lahore,Islamabad) on 28th May 2006, the eight anniversary of Pakistan’s nuclear tests.
Waiting for Enlightenment
The centrepiece of Pakistan’s relationship with the West since September 11, 2001, has been dubbed “enlightened moderation” by its president and philosopher-general, Pervez Musharraf. Under his rule, Musharraf claims, Pakistan has rejected the orthodox, militant, violent Islam imposed by the previous chief of army staff to seize power in Pakistan, General Zia ul-Haq (who ruled from 1977-1988), in favour of a more ‘modern’ and ‘moderate’ Islam. But Musharraf’s actions, and those of his government and its allies, are often at odds with this. In fact, after almost five years of ‘enlightened moderation,’ it seems there is more continuity than change. And, with each passing day, it becomes harder to see how such a policy can hope to stem the tide of religious radicalism that is overwhelming Pakistani society.
No one doubts that there have been some changes for the good. There is a perceptible shift in institutional practices and inclinations. Heads of government organizations are no longer required to lead noon prayers as in the 1980’s; female announcers with undraped heads freely appear on Pakistan Television; to the relief of many passengers thickly bearded stewards are disappearing from PIA flights; the first women fighter pilots have been inducted into the Pakistan Air Force. More importantly, in early July 2006, Musharraf directed the Council of Islamic Ideology to draft an amendment to the controversial Hudood Ordinance, put in place by General Zia-ul-Haq and not repealed by any of the civilian governments that ruled from 1988 to 1999. This law gives women a lower legal status and punishes the victims of rape. Repeal of these anti-women laws has been a long standing demand of Pakistani women’s groups. A vastly overdue – but nevertheless welcome – action was taken by the government when it released in July hundreds of women prisoners arrested under the Hudood Ordinance, many of whom had spent years awaiting their trial.
But the force of these pluses cannot outweigh the many more weighty minuses. General Musharraf has formally banned some of many Jihadi groups that the Pakistan army has helped train and arm for over two decades, but they still operate quite freely. After the October earthquake, some of these extremist groups in Kashmir seized the opportunity of relief work to fully reestablish and expand their presence. Exploiting Musharraf’s ambivalence, they openly flaunted their banners and weapons in all major towns of Azad Kashmir and fully advertised their strength. Some obtained relief materials from government stocks to pass off as their own, and used heavy vehicles that could only have been provided by the authorities. Many national and international relief organizations were left insecure by their overwhelming presence. Only recently have the jihadists moved out of full public view into more sheltered places.
Other Pakistani leaders send similar messages. Shaukat Aziz, a former Citibanker and now prime minister of Pakistan, made a call for nation-wide prayers for rain in a year of drought. This effort to improve his Islamic credentials became less laughable when, at an education conference in Islamabad, he proposed that Islamic religious education must start as soon as children enter school. This came in response to a suggestion by the moderate Islamic scholar, Javed Ghamdi, that only school children in their fifth year and above should be given formal Islamic education. Otherwise, said Ghamdi, they would stand in danger of becoming rigid and doctrinaire. The government’s 2006 education policy now requires Islamic studies to begin in the third year of school, a year earlier than in the previous policy.
Other ministers are no less determined to show Islamic zeal. The federal minister for religious affairs, Ijaz ul Haq, speaking at the launch of a book authored by a leading Islamic extremist leader on “Christian Terrorism and The Muslim World,” argued that anyone who did not believe in jihad was neither a Muslim nor a Pakistani. He then declared that given the situation facing Muslims today, he was prepared to be a suicide bomber.
According to a newspaper report, Pakistani health minister, Mohammad Nasir Khan, assured the upper house of parliament that the government could consider banning female nurses looking after male patients at hospitals. This move arose from a motion moved by female parliamentary members of the MMA, the Islamist party that commands majorities in the provincial assemblies of the Frontier and Baluchistan provinces and offered crucial support for Musharraf staying on as president. Women’s bodies are of particular concern to these holy men: “We think that men could derive sexual pleasure from women’s bodies while conducting ECG or ultrasound,” proclaimed Maulana Gul Naseeb Khan, provincial secretary of the MMA. In his opinion women would be able to lure men under the pretext of these medical procedures. Therefore, he said, “to save the supreme values of Islam and the message of the Holy Prophet (PBUH), the MMA has decided to impose the ban.” Destroyed or damaged billboards with women’s faces can be seen in several cities of the Frontier because the MMA deems the exhibition of unveiled women as un-Islamic.
Total separation of the sexes is a central goal of the Islamists, the consequences of which have been catastrophic. For example, on April 9, 2006, 21 women and 8 children were crushed to death, and scores injured, in a stampede inside a three-storey madrassa in Karachi where a large number of women had gathered for a weekly congregation. Male rescuers, who arrived in ambulances, were prevented from moving injured women to hospitals.
One cannot dismiss this as just one incident. Soon after the October 2005 earthquake, as I walked through the destroyed city of Balakot, a student of the Frontier Medical College described to me how he and his male colleagues were stopped by religious elders from digging out injured girl students from under the rubble of their school building. The action of these elders was similar to that of Saudi Arabia’s ubiquitous religious “mutaween” police who, in March 2002, had stopped schoolgirls from leaving a blazing building because they were not wearing their abayas. In rare criticism, Saudi newspapers had blamed the mutaween for letting 15 girls burn to death.
The Saudiization of a once-vibrant Pakistani culture continues at a relentless pace. The drive to segregate is now also being found among educated women. Vigorous proselytizers bringing this message, such as Mrs. Farhat Hashmi, have been catapulted to heights of fame and fortune. Their success is evident. Two decades ago the fully veiled student was a rarity on Pakistani university and college campuses. Now she outnumbers her sisters who still dare show their faces. This has had the effect of further enhancing passivity and unquestioning obedience to the teacher, and of decreasing the self-confidence of female students.
The intensification of religious feelings has had a myriad other more significant consequences. Depoliticization and destruction of all non-religious organizations has lead to the absence of any noticeable public mobilization – even on specifically Muslim causes like US actions against Iraq, Palestine, or Iran. Events in these areas rarely bring more than a few dozen protesters on to the streets – if that. Nevertheless large numbers of Pakistanis are driven to fury and violence when they perceive their faith has been maligned. Mobs set on fire the Punjab Assembly, as well as shops and cars in Lahore, for an act of blasphemy committed in Denmark. Even as religious fanaticism grips the population there is a curious, almost fatalistic, disconnection with the real world which suggests that fellow Muslims don’t matter any more – only the Faith does.
Religious identity has also become increasingly sectarian. A suicide bomber, as yet unidentified, killed 57 people and eliminated the entire leadership of the “Sunni Movement” when he leapt on to the stage at a religious gathering in Karachi in April, 2006. Months earlier, barely a mile down from my university, at the shrine of Bari Imam, 25 Shias were killed in similar attack. In the tribal areas, sectarian tensions have frequently exploded into open warfare: in the villages of Hangu district, Sunnis and Shias exchanged light artillery and rocket fire leaving scores dead. Earlier this year, when I traveled for lecturing in the town of Gilgit, I saw soldiers crouched in bunkers behind mounted machine guns. It looked more like a town under siege than a tourist resort.
The clearest political expression of this shift towards a more violent and intolerant religious identity is the rise of the MMA as a national force, which on key issues both supports and is supported by General Musharraf’s government. A measure of its power, and the threat it poses to society and the state, is the Pakistani Taliban movement that it has helped create, especially in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan. Their success draws in large measure on the lessons they learned when working hand in the hand with the Pakistan army to create and sustain the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Unable to combat the toxic mix of religion with tribalism, the Pakistani government is rapidly losing what little authority it ever had in the tribal parts. Under US pressure, the army has been mounting military offensives against Al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters who fled Afghanistan. The convenient fiction that the army is merely combating “foreign militants” from the Arab and Central Asian countries is accepted by no one. Its assaults have taken a heavy civilian toll and local resistance has grown.
The local Taliban, as well as Al-Qaida, are popular and the army is not. In the tribal areas, the local Taliban now run a parallel administration that dispenses primitive justice according to tribal and Islamic principles. A widely available Taliban-made video that I saw shows the bodies of criminals dangling from electricity poles in the town of Miranshah while thousands of appreciative spectators look on. In Wana, a regional capital, about 20 miles from the Afghan border, Taliban supporters have decreed that men are forbidden to shave. A Pathan barber, who migrated to Islamabad, told me last month that many others like him are making their way to the big cities or abandoning their traditional occupation.
The Pakistani Taliban (like their brothers in Afghanistan) see education as insidious. Pakistani newspapers frequently carry news of schools in the tribal regions being attacked destroyed by the Taliban. But rarely are these incidents followed by angry editorials or letters-to-the editor. Implicit sympathy for the Taliban remains strong among urban middle-class Pakistanis because they are perceived as standing up to the Americans, while the government has caved in. In Waziristan, one of the locales of a growing insurgency, the state has essentially capitulated and accepted Talibanic rule over tribal society as long as the army is allowed to maintain a spectator presence.
Stepping back, the Islamist shift underway in Pakistan becomes yet more evident. According to the Pew Global Survey (2006), the percentage of Pakistanis who expressed confidence in Osama bin Laden as a world leader grew from 45% in 2003 to 51% in 2005. This 6 point increase must be compared against responses to an identical questionnaire in Morocco, Turkey, and Lebanon, where bin Laden’s popularity has sharply dropped by as much as 20 points.
It is worth asking what has changed Pakistan so and what makes it so different from other Muslim countries? What set one section of its people upon the other, created notions of morality centred on separating the sexes, and sapped the country’s vitality? Some well meaning Pakistanis – particularly those who live overseas – think that it is best to avoid such difficult questions. These days they are venturing to “repackage Pakistan” for the media. They want to change negative perceptions of Pakistan in the West while, at the same time, hesitating to call for a change in the structure of the state and its outlook.
But at the heart of Pakistan’s problems lies a truth – one etched in stone – that when a state proclaims a religious identity and mission, it is bound to privilege those who organize religious life and interpret religious text. Since there are many models and interpretations within every religion, there is bound to be conflict between religious forces over whose model shall prevail. There is also the larger confrontation between religious principles and practices and what we now consider to be ‘modern’ ideas of society, which have emerged over the past several hundred years. This truth, for all its simplicity, escaped the attention of several generations of soldiers, politicians, and citizens of Pakistan. It is true that there has been some learning – Musharraf’s call for “enlightened moderation” is a tacit (and welcome) admission that a theocratic Pakistan cannot work. But his call conflicts with his other, more important, responsibility as chief of the Pakistan Army.
Pakistan is what it is because its army finds greater benefit in the status quo. Today the Pakistan Army is vast, and as an institution, has acquired enormous corporate interests that sprawl across real estate, manufacturing, and service sectors. It also receives large amounts of military aid, all of which would be threatened if it comes into direct conflict with the US. In the 1960s and 1980s, and again since 9/11, the army discovered its high rental value when serving the US. Each time the long-term costs to the society and state have been terrible.
The relationship between the army and religious radicals is today no longer as simple as in the 1980’s. To maintain a positive image in the West, the Pakistani establishment must continue to decry Islamic radicalism, and display elements of liberalism that are deeply disliked by the orthodox. But hard actions will be taken only if the Islamists threaten the army’s corporate and political interests, or if senior army commanders are targeted for assassination. The Islamists for their part hope for, and seek to incite, action by zealous officers to bring back the glory days of the military-mullah alliance led by General Zia ul Haq.
Musharraf and his corps commanders well know that they cannot afford to sleep too well. It is in the lower ranks that the Islamists are busily establishing bases. A mass of junior officers and low-ranking soldiers – whose world view is similar to that of the Taliban in most respects – feels resentful of being used as cannon fodder for fighting America’s war. It is they who die, not their senior officers. So far, army discipline has successfully squelched dissent and forced it underground. But this sleeping giant can – if and when it wakes up – tear asunder the Pakistan Army, and shake the Pakistani state from its very foundations.
This article was published in the Economic and Political Weekly (India) and The Friday Times(Pakistan) on 21/22 July 2006.
No one doubts that there have been some changes for the good. There is a perceptible shift in institutional practices and inclinations. Heads of government organizations are no longer required to lead noon prayers as in the 1980’s; female announcers with undraped heads freely appear on Pakistan Television; to the relief of many passengers thickly bearded stewards are disappearing from PIA flights; the first women fighter pilots have been inducted into the Pakistan Air Force. More importantly, in early July 2006, Musharraf directed the Council of Islamic Ideology to draft an amendment to the controversial Hudood Ordinance, put in place by General Zia-ul-Haq and not repealed by any of the civilian governments that ruled from 1988 to 1999. This law gives women a lower legal status and punishes the victims of rape. Repeal of these anti-women laws has been a long standing demand of Pakistani women’s groups. A vastly overdue – but nevertheless welcome – action was taken by the government when it released in July hundreds of women prisoners arrested under the Hudood Ordinance, many of whom had spent years awaiting their trial.
But the force of these pluses cannot outweigh the many more weighty minuses. General Musharraf has formally banned some of many Jihadi groups that the Pakistan army has helped train and arm for over two decades, but they still operate quite freely. After the October earthquake, some of these extremist groups in Kashmir seized the opportunity of relief work to fully reestablish and expand their presence. Exploiting Musharraf’s ambivalence, they openly flaunted their banners and weapons in all major towns of Azad Kashmir and fully advertised their strength. Some obtained relief materials from government stocks to pass off as their own, and used heavy vehicles that could only have been provided by the authorities. Many national and international relief organizations were left insecure by their overwhelming presence. Only recently have the jihadists moved out of full public view into more sheltered places.
Other Pakistani leaders send similar messages. Shaukat Aziz, a former Citibanker and now prime minister of Pakistan, made a call for nation-wide prayers for rain in a year of drought. This effort to improve his Islamic credentials became less laughable when, at an education conference in Islamabad, he proposed that Islamic religious education must start as soon as children enter school. This came in response to a suggestion by the moderate Islamic scholar, Javed Ghamdi, that only school children in their fifth year and above should be given formal Islamic education. Otherwise, said Ghamdi, they would stand in danger of becoming rigid and doctrinaire. The government’s 2006 education policy now requires Islamic studies to begin in the third year of school, a year earlier than in the previous policy.
Other ministers are no less determined to show Islamic zeal. The federal minister for religious affairs, Ijaz ul Haq, speaking at the launch of a book authored by a leading Islamic extremist leader on “Christian Terrorism and The Muslim World,” argued that anyone who did not believe in jihad was neither a Muslim nor a Pakistani. He then declared that given the situation facing Muslims today, he was prepared to be a suicide bomber.
According to a newspaper report, Pakistani health minister, Mohammad Nasir Khan, assured the upper house of parliament that the government could consider banning female nurses looking after male patients at hospitals. This move arose from a motion moved by female parliamentary members of the MMA, the Islamist party that commands majorities in the provincial assemblies of the Frontier and Baluchistan provinces and offered crucial support for Musharraf staying on as president. Women’s bodies are of particular concern to these holy men: “We think that men could derive sexual pleasure from women’s bodies while conducting ECG or ultrasound,” proclaimed Maulana Gul Naseeb Khan, provincial secretary of the MMA. In his opinion women would be able to lure men under the pretext of these medical procedures. Therefore, he said, “to save the supreme values of Islam and the message of the Holy Prophet (PBUH), the MMA has decided to impose the ban.” Destroyed or damaged billboards with women’s faces can be seen in several cities of the Frontier because the MMA deems the exhibition of unveiled women as un-Islamic.
Total separation of the sexes is a central goal of the Islamists, the consequences of which have been catastrophic. For example, on April 9, 2006, 21 women and 8 children were crushed to death, and scores injured, in a stampede inside a three-storey madrassa in Karachi where a large number of women had gathered for a weekly congregation. Male rescuers, who arrived in ambulances, were prevented from moving injured women to hospitals.
One cannot dismiss this as just one incident. Soon after the October 2005 earthquake, as I walked through the destroyed city of Balakot, a student of the Frontier Medical College described to me how he and his male colleagues were stopped by religious elders from digging out injured girl students from under the rubble of their school building. The action of these elders was similar to that of Saudi Arabia’s ubiquitous religious “mutaween” police who, in March 2002, had stopped schoolgirls from leaving a blazing building because they were not wearing their abayas. In rare criticism, Saudi newspapers had blamed the mutaween for letting 15 girls burn to death.
The Saudiization of a once-vibrant Pakistani culture continues at a relentless pace. The drive to segregate is now also being found among educated women. Vigorous proselytizers bringing this message, such as Mrs. Farhat Hashmi, have been catapulted to heights of fame and fortune. Their success is evident. Two decades ago the fully veiled student was a rarity on Pakistani university and college campuses. Now she outnumbers her sisters who still dare show their faces. This has had the effect of further enhancing passivity and unquestioning obedience to the teacher, and of decreasing the self-confidence of female students.
The intensification of religious feelings has had a myriad other more significant consequences. Depoliticization and destruction of all non-religious organizations has lead to the absence of any noticeable public mobilization – even on specifically Muslim causes like US actions against Iraq, Palestine, or Iran. Events in these areas rarely bring more than a few dozen protesters on to the streets – if that. Nevertheless large numbers of Pakistanis are driven to fury and violence when they perceive their faith has been maligned. Mobs set on fire the Punjab Assembly, as well as shops and cars in Lahore, for an act of blasphemy committed in Denmark. Even as religious fanaticism grips the population there is a curious, almost fatalistic, disconnection with the real world which suggests that fellow Muslims don’t matter any more – only the Faith does.
Religious identity has also become increasingly sectarian. A suicide bomber, as yet unidentified, killed 57 people and eliminated the entire leadership of the “Sunni Movement” when he leapt on to the stage at a religious gathering in Karachi in April, 2006. Months earlier, barely a mile down from my university, at the shrine of Bari Imam, 25 Shias were killed in similar attack. In the tribal areas, sectarian tensions have frequently exploded into open warfare: in the villages of Hangu district, Sunnis and Shias exchanged light artillery and rocket fire leaving scores dead. Earlier this year, when I traveled for lecturing in the town of Gilgit, I saw soldiers crouched in bunkers behind mounted machine guns. It looked more like a town under siege than a tourist resort.
The clearest political expression of this shift towards a more violent and intolerant religious identity is the rise of the MMA as a national force, which on key issues both supports and is supported by General Musharraf’s government. A measure of its power, and the threat it poses to society and the state, is the Pakistani Taliban movement that it has helped create, especially in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan. Their success draws in large measure on the lessons they learned when working hand in the hand with the Pakistan army to create and sustain the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Unable to combat the toxic mix of religion with tribalism, the Pakistani government is rapidly losing what little authority it ever had in the tribal parts. Under US pressure, the army has been mounting military offensives against Al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters who fled Afghanistan. The convenient fiction that the army is merely combating “foreign militants” from the Arab and Central Asian countries is accepted by no one. Its assaults have taken a heavy civilian toll and local resistance has grown.
The local Taliban, as well as Al-Qaida, are popular and the army is not. In the tribal areas, the local Taliban now run a parallel administration that dispenses primitive justice according to tribal and Islamic principles. A widely available Taliban-made video that I saw shows the bodies of criminals dangling from electricity poles in the town of Miranshah while thousands of appreciative spectators look on. In Wana, a regional capital, about 20 miles from the Afghan border, Taliban supporters have decreed that men are forbidden to shave. A Pathan barber, who migrated to Islamabad, told me last month that many others like him are making their way to the big cities or abandoning their traditional occupation.
The Pakistani Taliban (like their brothers in Afghanistan) see education as insidious. Pakistani newspapers frequently carry news of schools in the tribal regions being attacked destroyed by the Taliban. But rarely are these incidents followed by angry editorials or letters-to-the editor. Implicit sympathy for the Taliban remains strong among urban middle-class Pakistanis because they are perceived as standing up to the Americans, while the government has caved in. In Waziristan, one of the locales of a growing insurgency, the state has essentially capitulated and accepted Talibanic rule over tribal society as long as the army is allowed to maintain a spectator presence.
Stepping back, the Islamist shift underway in Pakistan becomes yet more evident. According to the Pew Global Survey (2006), the percentage of Pakistanis who expressed confidence in Osama bin Laden as a world leader grew from 45% in 2003 to 51% in 2005. This 6 point increase must be compared against responses to an identical questionnaire in Morocco, Turkey, and Lebanon, where bin Laden’s popularity has sharply dropped by as much as 20 points.
It is worth asking what has changed Pakistan so and what makes it so different from other Muslim countries? What set one section of its people upon the other, created notions of morality centred on separating the sexes, and sapped the country’s vitality? Some well meaning Pakistanis – particularly those who live overseas – think that it is best to avoid such difficult questions. These days they are venturing to “repackage Pakistan” for the media. They want to change negative perceptions of Pakistan in the West while, at the same time, hesitating to call for a change in the structure of the state and its outlook.
But at the heart of Pakistan’s problems lies a truth – one etched in stone – that when a state proclaims a religious identity and mission, it is bound to privilege those who organize religious life and interpret religious text. Since there are many models and interpretations within every religion, there is bound to be conflict between religious forces over whose model shall prevail. There is also the larger confrontation between religious principles and practices and what we now consider to be ‘modern’ ideas of society, which have emerged over the past several hundred years. This truth, for all its simplicity, escaped the attention of several generations of soldiers, politicians, and citizens of Pakistan. It is true that there has been some learning – Musharraf’s call for “enlightened moderation” is a tacit (and welcome) admission that a theocratic Pakistan cannot work. But his call conflicts with his other, more important, responsibility as chief of the Pakistan Army.
Pakistan is what it is because its army finds greater benefit in the status quo. Today the Pakistan Army is vast, and as an institution, has acquired enormous corporate interests that sprawl across real estate, manufacturing, and service sectors. It also receives large amounts of military aid, all of which would be threatened if it comes into direct conflict with the US. In the 1960s and 1980s, and again since 9/11, the army discovered its high rental value when serving the US. Each time the long-term costs to the society and state have been terrible.
The relationship between the army and religious radicals is today no longer as simple as in the 1980’s. To maintain a positive image in the West, the Pakistani establishment must continue to decry Islamic radicalism, and display elements of liberalism that are deeply disliked by the orthodox. But hard actions will be taken only if the Islamists threaten the army’s corporate and political interests, or if senior army commanders are targeted for assassination. The Islamists for their part hope for, and seek to incite, action by zealous officers to bring back the glory days of the military-mullah alliance led by General Zia ul Haq.
Musharraf and his corps commanders well know that they cannot afford to sleep too well. It is in the lower ranks that the Islamists are busily establishing bases. A mass of junior officers and low-ranking soldiers – whose world view is similar to that of the Taliban in most respects – feels resentful of being used as cannon fodder for fighting America’s war. It is they who die, not their senior officers. So far, army discipline has successfully squelched dissent and forced it underground. But this sleeping giant can – if and when it wakes up – tear asunder the Pakistan Army, and shake the Pakistani state from its very foundations.
This article was published in the Economic and Political Weekly (India) and The Friday Times(Pakistan) on 21/22 July 2006.
Musharraf’s Coup - Seven Years Later
Some had feared – while others had hoped – that General Pervez Musharraf’s coup of October 12, 1999, would bring the revolution of Kemal Ataturk to a Pakistan firmly in the iron grip of mullahs. But years later a definitive truth has emerged. Like the other insecure governments before it, both military and civilian, the present regime also has a single point agenda – to stay in power at all costs. It therefore does whatever it must and Pakistan falls further from any prospect of acquiring modern values, and of building and strengthening democratic institutions.
The requirements for survival of the present regime are clear: on the one hand the Army leadership knows that its critical dependence upon the West requires that it be perceived abroad as a liberal regime pitted against radical Islamists. But, on the other hand, in actual fact, to preserve and extend its grip on power, it must preserve the status quo.
The staged conflicts between General Musharraf and the mullahs are therefore a regular part of Pakistani politics. This September, nearly seven years later, the religious parties needed no demonstration of muscle power for winning two major victories in less than a fortnight; just a few noisy threats sufficed. From experience they knew that the Pakistan Army and its sagacious leader – of “enlightened moderation” fame – would stick to their predictable pattern of dealing with Islamists. In a nutshell: provoke a fight, get the excitement going, let diplomatic missions in Islamabad make their notes and CNN and BBC get their clips – and then beat a retreat. At the end of it all the mullahs would get what they want, but so would the General.
Examples abound. On 21st April 2000, General Musharraf announced a new administrative procedure for registration of cases under the Blasphemy Law. This law, under which the minimum penalty is death, has frequently been used to harass personal and political opponents. To reduce such occurrences, Musharraf’s modified procedure would have required the local district magistrate’s approval for registration of a blasphemy case. It would have been an improvement, albeit a modest one. But 25 days later – on the 16th of May 2000 – under the watchful glare of the mullahs, Musharraf hastily climbed down: “As it was the unanimous demand of the ulema, mashaikh and the people, therefore, I have decided to do away with the procedural change in the registration of FIR under the Blasphemy Law”.
Another example. In October 2004, as a new system for issuing machine readable passports was being installed, Musharraf’s government declared that henceforth it would not be necessary for passport holders to specify their religion. Expectedly this was denounced by the Islamic parties as a grand conspiracy aimed at secularizing Pakistan and destroying its Islamic character. But even before the mullahs actually took to the streets, the government lost nerve and the volte-face was announced on 24 March, 2005. Information Minister Sheikh Rashid said the decision to revive the religion column was made else, “Qadianis and apostates would be able to pose as Muslims and perform pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia”.
But even these climb downs – significant as they are – are less dramatic than the astonishing recent retreat over reforming the Hudood Ordinance, a grotesque imposition of General Zia-ul-Haq’s government unparalleled both for its cruelty and irrationality.
Enacted into the law in 1979, it was conceived as part of a more comprehensive process for converting Pakistan into a theocracy governed by Sharia laws. These laws prescribe death by stoning for married Muslims who are found guilty of extra-marital sex (for unmarried couples or non-Muslims, the penalty is 100 lashes). The law is exact in stating how the death penalty is to be administered: “Such of the witnesses who deposed against the convict as may be available shall start stoning him and, while stoning is being carried on, he may be shot dead, whereupon stoning and shooting shall be stopped”.
Rape is still more problematic. A woman who fails to prove that she has been raped is automatically charged with fornication and adultery. Under the Hudood Law, she is considered guilty unless she can prove her innocence. Proof of innocence requires that the rape victim must produce “at least four Muslim adult male witnesses, about whom the Court is satisfied” who saw the actual act of penetration. Inability to do so may result in her being jailed, or perhaps even sentenced to death for adultery.
President and Chief of Army Staff General Musharraf, and his Citibank Prime Minister, Shuakat Aziz, proposed amending the Hudood Ordinance. They sent a draft for parliamentary discussion in early September, 2006. As expected, it outraged the fundamentalists of the MMA, the main Islamic parliamentary opposition. MMA members tore up copies of the proposed amendments on the floor of the National Assembly and threatened to resign en masse. The government cowered abjectly and withdrew.
Musharraf’s government proved no more enlightened, or more moderate or more resolute and behaved no differently from the more than half a dozen civilian administrations, including two terms of Benazir Bhutto as Prime Minister and several ‘technocrat’ regimes. None made a serious effort to confront or reform these laws.
But the pattern is broader then deference to the mullahs. General Musharraf has been willing to use the iron fist in other circumstances. Two examples stand out: Waziristan and Balochistan. Each offers instruction.
In 2002, presumably on Washington’s instructions, the Pakistan Army established military bases in South Waziristan which had become a refuge for Taliban and Al Qaeda fleeing Afghanistan. It unleashed artillery and US-supplied Cobra gunships. By 2005 heavy fighting had spread to North Waziristan and the army was bogged down.
The generals, safely removed from combat areas, and busy in building their personal financial empires, ascribed the resistance to “a few hundred foreign militants and terrorists”. But the Army was taking losses (how serious is suggested by the fact that casualty figures were not revealed), soldiers rarely ventured out from their forts, morale collapsed as junior officers wondered why they were being asked to attack their ideological comrades – the Taliban – at American instruction. Reportedly, local clerics refused to conduct funeral prayers for soldiers killed in action.
In 2004, the army made peace with the militants in South Waziristan. It conceded the territory to them, which had made the militants immensely stronger. A similar “peace treaty” was signed on 1 September 2006 in the town of Miramshah, in North Waziristan, now firmly in the grip of the Pakistani Taliban.
The Miramshah treaty met all demands made by the militants: the release of all jailed militants; dismantling of army checkpoints; return of seized weapons and vehicles; the right of the Taliban to display weapons (except heavy weapons); and residence rights for fellow fighters from other Islamic countries. As for “foreign militants” – who Musharraf had blamed exclusively for the resistance, the militants were nonchalant: we will let you know if we find any! The financial compensation demanded by the Taliban for loss of property and life has not been revealed, but some officials have remarked that it is “astronomical”. In turn they promised to cease their attacks on civil and military installations, and give the army a safe passage out.
While the army has extricated itself, the locals have been left to pay the price. The militants have closed girls’ schools and are enforcing harsh Sharia laws in all of Waziristan, both North and South. Barbers have been told ‘shave and die’. Taliban vigilante groups patrol the streets of Miramshah. They check such things as the length of beards, whether the “shalwars” are worn at an appropriate height above the ankles, and attendance of individuals in the mosques.
And then there is Balochistan. Eight years ago when the army seized power, there was no visible separatist movement in Balochistan, which makes nearly 44% of Pakistan’s land mass and is the repository of its gas and oil. Now there is a full blown insurgency built upon Baloch grievances, most of which arise from a perception of being ruled from Islamabad and of being denied a fair share of the benefits of the natural resources extracted from their land.
The army has spurned negotiations. Force is the only answer: “They won’t know what hit them”, boasted Musharraf, after threatening to crush the insurgency. The Army has used everything it can, including its American supplied F-16 jet fighters. The crisis worsened when the charismatic 80-year old Baloch chieftain and former governor of Balochistan, Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti, was killed by army bombs. Musharraf outraged the Baloch by calling it “a great victory”. Reconciliation in Balochistan now seems, at best, a distant dream.
Musharraf and his generals are determined to stay in power. They will protect the source of their power – the army. They will accommodate those they must – the Americans. They will pander to the mullahs. They will crush those who threaten their power and privilege, and ignore the rest. No price is too high for them. They are the reason Pakistan fails.
The requirements for survival of the present regime are clear: on the one hand the Army leadership knows that its critical dependence upon the West requires that it be perceived abroad as a liberal regime pitted against radical Islamists. But, on the other hand, in actual fact, to preserve and extend its grip on power, it must preserve the status quo.
The staged conflicts between General Musharraf and the mullahs are therefore a regular part of Pakistani politics. This September, nearly seven years later, the religious parties needed no demonstration of muscle power for winning two major victories in less than a fortnight; just a few noisy threats sufficed. From experience they knew that the Pakistan Army and its sagacious leader – of “enlightened moderation” fame – would stick to their predictable pattern of dealing with Islamists. In a nutshell: provoke a fight, get the excitement going, let diplomatic missions in Islamabad make their notes and CNN and BBC get their clips – and then beat a retreat. At the end of it all the mullahs would get what they want, but so would the General.
Examples abound. On 21st April 2000, General Musharraf announced a new administrative procedure for registration of cases under the Blasphemy Law. This law, under which the minimum penalty is death, has frequently been used to harass personal and political opponents. To reduce such occurrences, Musharraf’s modified procedure would have required the local district magistrate’s approval for registration of a blasphemy case. It would have been an improvement, albeit a modest one. But 25 days later – on the 16th of May 2000 – under the watchful glare of the mullahs, Musharraf hastily climbed down: “As it was the unanimous demand of the ulema, mashaikh and the people, therefore, I have decided to do away with the procedural change in the registration of FIR under the Blasphemy Law”.
Another example. In October 2004, as a new system for issuing machine readable passports was being installed, Musharraf’s government declared that henceforth it would not be necessary for passport holders to specify their religion. Expectedly this was denounced by the Islamic parties as a grand conspiracy aimed at secularizing Pakistan and destroying its Islamic character. But even before the mullahs actually took to the streets, the government lost nerve and the volte-face was announced on 24 March, 2005. Information Minister Sheikh Rashid said the decision to revive the religion column was made else, “Qadianis and apostates would be able to pose as Muslims and perform pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia”.
But even these climb downs – significant as they are – are less dramatic than the astonishing recent retreat over reforming the Hudood Ordinance, a grotesque imposition of General Zia-ul-Haq’s government unparalleled both for its cruelty and irrationality.
Enacted into the law in 1979, it was conceived as part of a more comprehensive process for converting Pakistan into a theocracy governed by Sharia laws. These laws prescribe death by stoning for married Muslims who are found guilty of extra-marital sex (for unmarried couples or non-Muslims, the penalty is 100 lashes). The law is exact in stating how the death penalty is to be administered: “Such of the witnesses who deposed against the convict as may be available shall start stoning him and, while stoning is being carried on, he may be shot dead, whereupon stoning and shooting shall be stopped”.
Rape is still more problematic. A woman who fails to prove that she has been raped is automatically charged with fornication and adultery. Under the Hudood Law, she is considered guilty unless she can prove her innocence. Proof of innocence requires that the rape victim must produce “at least four Muslim adult male witnesses, about whom the Court is satisfied” who saw the actual act of penetration. Inability to do so may result in her being jailed, or perhaps even sentenced to death for adultery.
President and Chief of Army Staff General Musharraf, and his Citibank Prime Minister, Shuakat Aziz, proposed amending the Hudood Ordinance. They sent a draft for parliamentary discussion in early September, 2006. As expected, it outraged the fundamentalists of the MMA, the main Islamic parliamentary opposition. MMA members tore up copies of the proposed amendments on the floor of the National Assembly and threatened to resign en masse. The government cowered abjectly and withdrew.
Musharraf’s government proved no more enlightened, or more moderate or more resolute and behaved no differently from the more than half a dozen civilian administrations, including two terms of Benazir Bhutto as Prime Minister and several ‘technocrat’ regimes. None made a serious effort to confront or reform these laws.
But the pattern is broader then deference to the mullahs. General Musharraf has been willing to use the iron fist in other circumstances. Two examples stand out: Waziristan and Balochistan. Each offers instruction.
In 2002, presumably on Washington’s instructions, the Pakistan Army established military bases in South Waziristan which had become a refuge for Taliban and Al Qaeda fleeing Afghanistan. It unleashed artillery and US-supplied Cobra gunships. By 2005 heavy fighting had spread to North Waziristan and the army was bogged down.
The generals, safely removed from combat areas, and busy in building their personal financial empires, ascribed the resistance to “a few hundred foreign militants and terrorists”. But the Army was taking losses (how serious is suggested by the fact that casualty figures were not revealed), soldiers rarely ventured out from their forts, morale collapsed as junior officers wondered why they were being asked to attack their ideological comrades – the Taliban – at American instruction. Reportedly, local clerics refused to conduct funeral prayers for soldiers killed in action.
In 2004, the army made peace with the militants in South Waziristan. It conceded the territory to them, which had made the militants immensely stronger. A similar “peace treaty” was signed on 1 September 2006 in the town of Miramshah, in North Waziristan, now firmly in the grip of the Pakistani Taliban.
The Miramshah treaty met all demands made by the militants: the release of all jailed militants; dismantling of army checkpoints; return of seized weapons and vehicles; the right of the Taliban to display weapons (except heavy weapons); and residence rights for fellow fighters from other Islamic countries. As for “foreign militants” – who Musharraf had blamed exclusively for the resistance, the militants were nonchalant: we will let you know if we find any! The financial compensation demanded by the Taliban for loss of property and life has not been revealed, but some officials have remarked that it is “astronomical”. In turn they promised to cease their attacks on civil and military installations, and give the army a safe passage out.
While the army has extricated itself, the locals have been left to pay the price. The militants have closed girls’ schools and are enforcing harsh Sharia laws in all of Waziristan, both North and South. Barbers have been told ‘shave and die’. Taliban vigilante groups patrol the streets of Miramshah. They check such things as the length of beards, whether the “shalwars” are worn at an appropriate height above the ankles, and attendance of individuals in the mosques.
And then there is Balochistan. Eight years ago when the army seized power, there was no visible separatist movement in Balochistan, which makes nearly 44% of Pakistan’s land mass and is the repository of its gas and oil. Now there is a full blown insurgency built upon Baloch grievances, most of which arise from a perception of being ruled from Islamabad and of being denied a fair share of the benefits of the natural resources extracted from their land.
The army has spurned negotiations. Force is the only answer: “They won’t know what hit them”, boasted Musharraf, after threatening to crush the insurgency. The Army has used everything it can, including its American supplied F-16 jet fighters. The crisis worsened when the charismatic 80-year old Baloch chieftain and former governor of Balochistan, Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti, was killed by army bombs. Musharraf outraged the Baloch by calling it “a great victory”. Reconciliation in Balochistan now seems, at best, a distant dream.
Musharraf and his generals are determined to stay in power. They will protect the source of their power – the army. They will accommodate those they must – the Americans. They will pander to the mullahs. They will crush those who threaten their power and privilege, and ignore the rest. No price is too high for them. They are the reason Pakistan fails.
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