"Deepak Jois" <[email protected]> writes: > On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 4:14 AM, Perry E. Metzger <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> No country ever becomes rich through foreign aid or military >> hardware. Countries become rich through improvements to trade, which >> in most countries these days requires substantial reduction in >> government interference in trade. Pakistan's economy will remain a >> basket case until it embraces deregulation and free trade. Both of >> these are unlikely events, but it doesn't make it less true that it is >> what is required. >> > > While what you say is valid as is, it is completely vacuous when it is > taken in the context of whether India should maintain trade links with > Pakistan, or whether it will solve the current problems of Pakistan. > Free trade is not a panacea.
I am aware of no panaceas. However, generally speaking, I can't think of a single scenario in which Pakistan becoming a failed state and an economic basket case is in India's best interest. Like it or not, geography chains India to Pakistan. It is better to be shackled to someone who is calm and well fed than to someone who is hungry and not entirely sane. Similarly, the more Pakistanis who are concerned about which television they will buy in the coming year, the fewer that will be paying attention to politics. > The economic component of the problem is far less than you are > imagining it to be. It doesn't really matter if the source of tension is economic or not. A good economy can improve a situation even if it is not the proximate cause of violence, just as a full belly and a good night's sleep make a person calmer in an auto accident even if the auto accident had nothing to do with whether they ate recently. There was an interesting study in the US many years ago that showed that racially motivated violence declined when economic prosperity hit and became worse in recessions. I don't think the underlying social mechanisms are so different in other countries. > There are intertwined social, cultural and religious aspects to it > which cannot be addressed by economic solutions alone. Probably not, but on the other hand, I cannot imagine that economic hardship makes Pakistan more stable. Again, I cannot imagine the scenario in which Pakistani disintegration does not cause India serious trouble. Lots of idle, angry and hopeless people provide a reservoir from which anti-social groups may draw support. > I think that you are spectacularly uninformed of the geopolitical > realities of the South Asian region. Doubtless. I'm spectacularly ignorant in general. That said, it is sometimes the case that an ignorant child can see that the emperor is naked when others fail to notice. > You chose to dismiss Shiv's statement about how : "India's success is > Pakistan's failure. India has to fail for Pakistan to succeed." ; > without grasping the fact that (AFAIK) this is not Shiv's personal > viewpoint or something that he thinks *should* be the case. It is a > mindset that permeates the psyche of the Pakistani establishment and > has a big role to play in internal and external policymaking. The > Indian response *must* take this into account. For the most part, the world's governments are ignorant and inefficient monsters that make a lot of noise, kill a lot of people, and otherwise accomplish very little indeed. I don't think the Pakistani government will have much say in the future of Pakistan (except perhaps to make it worse and kill a bunch of people), just as I don't think the government in the US or in India will have much say in the futures of those countries. The question is never what a ruling elite believe or what they propose to do. The question is always what will happen several levels down in society. The revolution in the Indian economy of late did not come from the directives of the Indian government -- at best it came from a lack of directives that would otherwise have caused harm. The revolution in the Chinese economy did not come from the action of the center, but rather from its inaction. Success or failure of the Pakistani society will not come from the directives of the Pakistani state, either. > As Nitin Pai from The Acorn puts it [1] in referring to the Rediff > article cited above: > > <quote> > So while attempting to bring about a collapse of Pakistan is > undesirable, many of Prof Vaidyanathan's prescriptions lend themselves > for coercive diplomacy. They allow India to pursue a variety of > punitive and coercive policies in a calibrated manner, without raising > military tensions. For instance, it would be untenable for the > international community to disagree that all economic aid to Pakistan > must be made contingent on its government meeting concrete > deliverables, like extraditing terrorists that live in the open in its > territory. I think that, in general, no country should be giving Pakistan, or any other country, *any* economic aid. None, zero, zip. Whether they're doing what other countries want or not, they shouldn't get one gram of silver. It is counterproductive. Rather than conditioning economic aid on the behavior of the Pakistani government, foreign countries should stop giving it entirely, permanently. All the economic aid serves to do is prop up an untenable and ultimately doomed system longer, permitting the postponement of necessary reform. > In fact, The Acorn has long argued that the greatest failure of the > "peace process" was that it distracted attention from the important > objective of creating a range of flexible policy instruments that > could not only be turned on and off, but also fine-tuned and > targeted. I think the central confusion here is the notion that a government is like the brain of a country, which is like a single organism, and with sufficient positive and negative reinforcement it is possible to fine tune the behavior of said organism. In fact, a government is nothing like a brain and a country is not a single beast with one mind and one set of behaviors. A country has a vast number of different actors with different world views and independent motives. A government is at best a gang of opportunists (and at worst a gang of thugs) riding a bucking monster, desperately trying to pick the monster's pockets as much as they can before they are thrown from its back into the dirt. Even the members of said gang are individuals with wildly different motives, interests and behaviors -- they are not one entity with a monolithic mind. > To modify B Raman's words a little, the capability to cause "a divided > Pakistan, a bleeding Pakistan, a Pakistan ever on the verge of > collapse without actually collapsing—-that should be our objective > till it stops using terrorism against India." > </quote> The beatings must therefore continue until they learn to love their neighbor's whip? Perry -- Perry E. Metzger [email protected]
