Foreign influences

Central government needs to take up responsibility of addressing governance imbalances within the country.

Speaking recently in Oxford, Dr Maleeha Lodhi, our former representative in London and Washington, was asked about US involvement in Pakistan. She said that she did not oppose development aid but was baffled by the scale of US involvement in Pakistan. What baffled her, she said, was the wide scope of the ‘tracks’ US-Pakistan conversations had, which included issues like women empowerment, which is a solely national issue. Dr Lodhi identified not only the nature of Pakistan as a rentier state, but also how much foreign governments were in effect ‘running’ the country. It is no surprise therefore that the US demands a say in purely internal affairs of Pakistan — the government is not only getting money for local initiatives from the US but officially asking for advice and interference.

The recent claim by our defence minister that the Chinese had agreed to take over Gwadar port (a report which the Chinese foreign ministry has denied for the present) is yet another example of our government allowing other governments to, in effect, manage our country. Foreign Direct Investment by private sector firms is one thing, but our government ‘requesting’ other governments, all-weather friends or otherwise, to take over an important port and build a naval base is quite another issue.

The basic problem in Pakistan is of governance. For a long time, Pakistan has depended on foreign aid to initiate development projects and for years foreign governments have had a direct and unhidden role in Pakistan’s internal concerns. Therefore, decisions which need to be taken by the elected representatives in Pakistan are parcelled off to foreign capitals, which obviously put their interests, rather than those of Pakistan, at the forefront. These actions not only show a weak government but also its unwillingness to actually govern.

The PPP government has made a lot of noise about it being properly elected and representative. While it is certainly an elected government, the fact that it tries to shirk from its responsibility to govern — whether by asking foreign governments for direct involvement or allowing covert interference — only shows that it is making a mockery of democracy. If Pakistan can be run along the same lines, even better perhaps, by a US representative, then why have the facade of an elected government in Islamabad?

To be a respected, effective and truly democratic government, the central government needs to take up the responsibility of addressing the governance imbalances within the country. It needs to stop blaming its own failures on foreign factors, and take concrete measures to end direct and indirect foreign involvement in the country. The small, but symbolically important, gesture of the Punjab government to refuse US government loans is a step in the right direction. However, this move (which still allows for non-US aid) must be coupled with effective means for increasing the tax base, so that the shortfall from refusing foreign grants can be made up by local sources. As an indication, only 1.9 million people in Pakistan, about one per cent of the population, filed tax returns last year — the lowest figure in the region. Abruptly stopping foreign aid without raising local resources will only adversely affect our poor population, which will sadly not benefit from this symbolic assertion of national sovereignty.

Furthermore, from a government which hailed the 18th Amendment as restoring the federal model, the fact that Gwadar was offered to the Chinese without consultation with, let alone agreement of, the Balochistan government, exhibits the bad faith of the government in honouring provincial autonomy. Lack of respect for provincial autonomy has been the bane of Pakistan since its inception and has repeatedly given rise to regionalism and insurgency. As before, such issues can be adequately dealt with in the democratic dispensation, but only if the democratically elected representatives in the provinces are given their due share of authority and responsibility, ‘doing the job’ for the provinces invites a foreign government in, is not only bad governance, but is no governance at all.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 21^st, 2011.