Costs of War: Ailing Pakistan

Thanks to research by psychologist external pageMarc Sagemancall_made and economist Allan Krueger, it has become a generally accepted principle of counter-terrorism strategy that there is no direct link between poverty and terrorist recruitment.

“The evidence is nearly unanimous in rejecting either material deprivation or inadequate education as an important cause of support for terrorism or participation in terrorist activities,” wrote Krueger in his important 2007 study “external pageWhat Makes a Terroristcall_made.”

But in Pakistan, there are a number of important caveats to this hypothesis.

Firstly, the struggle against the Pakistani Taliban is more correctly viewed as a counter-insurgency campaign, rather than a counter-terrorist action. And most experts concur that the ability of the government to deliver basic services, as well as security, to the population is a vital pillar of any successful counter-insurgency.

This point was well made by US President Barack Obama at his 100 days external pagepress conferencecall_made last month. “The civilian government there right now is very fragile,” he said of Pakistan, adding that it lacked “the capacity to deliver basic services - schools, health care, rule of law, a judicial system that works for the majority of people. And so as a consequence it is very difficult for them to gain the support and the loyalty of their people.”

In an article for Foreign Policy magazine, researchers Ayesha Khanna and Parag Khanna external pagearguecall_made that what they call “the forced apathy of ineffective governance” has led to a greater tolerance for anti-government forces, including the Taliban, among ordinary Pakistanis.

“Giving millions of mainstream Pakistanis a stake in the economy is the only way for the country to avert a deeper failure,” they conclude.

Secondly, the suicide bombers and others recruited by the Pakistani Taliban for local attacks there or in Afghanistan - as distinct from those recruited by al-Qaida or other global terror groups for international operations - are drawn overwhelmingly from the uneducated and under-employed youth of Pakistan’s least developed regions, such as the tribal areas on the Afghan border.

The Khanna article notes that more than half of the 25 million Pakistanis aged 18 to 24 “have either not completed school or graduated but remain underemployed.” The “listless young men” among these poor and disenfranchised, they argue, form a pool of ready recruits for extremists.

Finally, the intensifying military campaign against the Taliban has created an estimated 1.3 million internally displaced people: a humanitarian crisis and a huge financial burden for the government and aid agencies in the short-term, and - if they cannot safely return home - a national disaster in the long-run.

In an interview with the Council on Foreign Relations, Michael Young of the International Rescue Committee external pagesayscall_made the situation is Pakistan's “worst internal displacement crisis since partition” from India in 1947.

“It will remain a constant challenge to stay on top of the situation,” Young says.

If economics are an important vector for success in Pakistan’s campaign against the Taliban, the prospects look even gloomier than they may otherwise.

“Pakistan suffers from a dearth of infrastructure in the water, irrigation, power, and transport sectors,” external pagenotedcall_made the World Bank in 2007, “infrastructure which is essential for sustained growth and competitiveness.”

Without significant improvements in infrastructure, the World Bank concluded, "the very sustainability of Pakistan as an independent nation may be at stake.”

The IMF predicts a 2.5 percent growth in Pakistan’s GDP this year - a steep decline from the 6 percent growth recorded in 2008, and a return to the disastrously low levels of development seen at the end of the 1990s, when the country experienced a four-year recession, Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid writes in his book external pageDescent into Chaoscall_made.

Although the World Bank external pageratescall_made Pakistan as the second easiest country to do business in within the South Asian region, behind only the Maldives; the countries it is ahead of - Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, India, Bhutan and Afghanistan - are not exactly huge magnets for foreign investment.

In a global external pagesurvey of competitivenesscall_made by the World Economic Forum, Pakistan’s economy is ranked 101 out of 134. The survey rated the country especially low in indicators related to health, education, labor market flexibility and technological adaptation. It found political instability and a corrupt and inefficient government bureaucracy as the biggest barriers to business success in Pakistan.

The government’s failure to deliver services like education and health care led to Pakistan being ranked 139 out of 179 countries by the United Nations Development Program in its 2008 external pageHuman Development Indexcall_made.

A strategy of privatization and de-regulation under former president Pervez Musharraf helped boost total foreign investment from $559 million in 2003 to over $8 billion in 2007, according to the external pageAsian Development Bankcall_made. But following the increasing turmoil and violence last year, that fell again to just over $5 billion in 2008.

International aid could help to fill that gap. An international conference in Tokyo last month pledged $5.3 billion in aid and loans, and the Obama administration has proposed a $7.5 billion program of non-military aid over the next five years - but the effectiveness of such assistance is unclear.

In recent years, according to the external pageKhanna articlecall_made, a “gravy train of contracts for U.S. and European companies and NGOs” has been running in Pakistan “with little accountability or effectiveness.”

The authors conclude by noting that US agencies, including the State Department, Congress and the Pentagon “are presently at odds over how to certify or validate that Pakistan is spending U.S. assistance on the right purposes.”