Questioning another disreputable ranking

It is surprising that meagre entities with modest resources and capacity can make such tall claims about states.

The Failed State Index has moved Pakistan down two spots in comparison to last year. However, it is hardly comforting even if we are now ranked 12th out of 177 countries in terms of state failure.

Before getting into the reasons why we are ranked so dismally on this index, let us consider how other developing countries have fared during the current year’s ranking. Amongst Pakistan’s neighbouring states, Afghanistan is worse off, ranking 7 on the index. The situation for Bangladesh is, however, better as it is placed at 25 on the list, and India ranks 76. Even Burma, which is ranked as 18, is considered less of a failed state than ours.

The above comparison should lessen the credibility of such a drastic ranking for Pakistan in the eyes of anyone with even a bit of common sense about global affairs.

A Washington-based research organisation, Fund for Peace, in collaboration with Foreign Policy magazine, has been putting this index out since 2005. It is actually surprising that meagre entities with modest resources and capacity can make such tall claims about the functionality or dysfunctionality of states, and yet receive so much international attention.

I tried to contact the media personnel of Fund for Peace to obtain more information concerning the methodological details of this Failed State Index, but got no response. Their website claims that the index analyses newspaper articles, government and non-government reports, which are incorporated with quantitative data from reputable institutions (UN, World Bank, etc.), and information emerging from these secondary sources is then subjected to a qualitative review. How the information emerging from the review of written documents is merged with quantitative data and how the resulting findings are subjected to a qualitative review is not clear at all.

The 2011 index claims to have drawn on some 130,000 publicly available sources to analyse 177 countries and rate them on the basis of 12 indicators, ranging from refugee flows to poverty, public services to security threats. Whether the same number and type of ‘publicly available sources’ were used to rank all the countries on the index is not clear. The UN Human Development Report had introduced the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) which is the share of the population that is multidimensionally poor, adjusted by the intensity of the deprivations. The MPI for Pakistan was 0.275, while Pakistan’s neighbours, India and Bangladesh, had MPIs of 0.296 and 0.291, respectively. How then can there be so much disparity between the Failed Index ranking for India, Bangladesh and Pakistan?

While the Failed State Index report for 2011 mentions the devastating 2010 flood, and other evident problems, including economic sluggishness and militancy, emphasis is placed on Pakistan’s threat to a range of US national security concerns, including possession of nuclear weapons, rampant anti-American sentiment and the problem of terrorism. It is perhaps these latter US concerns due to which Pakistan is being labelled as more of a failed state than many other poor developing countries across the world.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 28^th, 2011.