Fair’s less than fair argument

Christine Fair, long-time friend and generally a fair scholar, has fallen this time for misreporting and woven an entire argument around it in her articles of February 9 and 10 titled “Sovereignty over servitude — I and II”. But that fact I shall come to at the end. For now, let’s consider her argument. She identifies Pakistan’s structural problems (the worst-kept secret) and argues that they constrain, as they must, Pakistan’s sovereignty. You guys can’t pay your own bills so accept the US diktat, thank you.

On the face of it the argument looks fine, but it is not. The sting is in the tail.

Sure, the Pakistani state cannot do many things. But some of the things it can’t do because it is taking the punishment for previous mistakes and also because democracy often works by not working. How do you tax certain sectors in the presence of political parties, vested interests, lobbyists, a ‘free’ media etc, especially when issues can get mixed up and doing the right thing becomes politically costly? Fair knows how the game is played on the Hill; here it is noisier and messier.

Agreed, our political parties are terrible. The political leaders, “many of whom sit and have sat and will sit in parliament”, are no angels but neither were those British MPs that were returned to parliament by rotten and pocket boroughs. History shows that English gradualness proved much better than bloody revolutions on the Continent.

We have a system we need to work. Vote out those we don’t like and repeat that process. In fact, in Pakistan, as we get used to democracy and its constraints, we have to accept the trade-off between short-term, seeming administrative efficiency — what the troopers promise when they come marching in — and political reconciliation and compromise which sacrifices efficiency at the altar of political participation. But that’s another debate.

Yes, we need to have a better tax-to-GDP ratio; impose agri-income tax and capital gains tax; fix the energy crisis; restructure companies; enforce business law and land titles; privatise state-owned enterprises; do a serious review of non-salary current expenditure in all budgets, federal as well as provincial; look deep and hard into the security sector, get the military to shape up etcetera. This and more we need to do. Some of it is easier, some very difficult because of democracy, as Fair knows. But pray, how and why might doing or not doing all this, succeeding somewhere and coming a cropper in other areas, prevent us from “howling” at the United States for the latter’s policies that quite often, tangentially and directly, make our job at home more difficult?

This is the real strand in Fair’s piece: Pakistan should behave towards the US since it is beholden to the US taxpayers, one of which is Fair herself. This argument would hold only if it could be proved that what the US has done for Pakistan, or may be doing now, is grounded in largesse and altruism and there are no interests involved.

But we know from Fair’s own narrative that “there is no such thing as ‘friends’ in international relations. Any country will help Pakistan because it expects that doing so will advance its interests, not necessarily those of Pakistan and its citizenry.” I agree. In which case, the US — like other states — helps Pakistan because the latter is useful in some ways. And Pakistan plays ball or doesn’t because every state decides when to bandwagon and when to balance. It’s a complex game and Fair knows it. That’s what makes her argument flawed.

Pakistanis must set their house in order. We are trying to do that, fumbling, failing and occasionally succeeding. But that is separate from dealing with the US and criticising Washington when we think the latter is doing something we don’t like. Given the realist framework and its attendant quid pro quo, we are beholden to no one.

Finally, Fair would have spared us this argument if she had looked up Ambassador Cameron Munter’s full speech (read here) instead of relying on de-contextualised bits in the press. But as bits go, here’s the right one: “... we grant money not because we are looking for you to tie that money to certain behaviour...[but] to try to achieve goals that you have defined.”

Published in The Express Tribune, February 14^th, 2011.