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4 | GLOBAL AGE April 2020
Quarantined – A viral oblivion of an
epidemiological civilization
Ali Inan
Lahore, Pakistan
T he World Health Organization has labelled the novel
coronavirus a pandemic, after it became clear that
Covid-19 was spreading freely across the globe. Novel
virus such as coronavirus usher novel ages. It shakes up
human lives in every sphere: economy, culture, demography,
environment and religion. The challenge arises when it
deteriorates morals, depreciates ethics, and spew chaos in
society. Even history is not immune to the mess created by
epidemics and pandemics. Unexpectedly, humans stop being
agents of history. They become, rather, subservient to other
forces. William H. McNeill implied in his ground-breaking
work “Plagues and Peoples,” (1976) that human history
proceeds along paths of balance and imbalance between
micro-organisms (like bacteria) and macro-organisms
(human beings). Hence, we might be at the crossroads of
civilization – quarantined in oblivion of what is to follow.
Ages ago, the mighty Roman Empire surrendered to
imported viruses. It, consequently, paved the way for the
ascendance of a new religion – Christianity – which offered an
explanation and an opportunity to find reassurance in the face
of the uncertainty of a disease. Mongol invasion created the
backdrop for Black Death. The consequent demographic-drop
lowered land prices and raised the value of individual farmers.
Tenant farming disappeared and the development of technol-
ogies reduced the need for manpower, while improving the
standards of living. It is even argued that Renaissance would
have been impossible without the Black Death. Not only the
economic and intellectual landscape, but also the environ-
mental backdrop was altered by it because the forest bare
Europe of the 13th Century was converted into a forest rich
continent in the 14th Century. Post Corona age might usher an
era of a new age of virtual reality. An era of E- Commerce,
distance learning, robotic emotions, technological innova-
tions, novel industries, and medical pursuits to find a genetic
formula for a superior macro organism combating mysteri-
ously fatal microorganisms. Nature has its weird ways and
inconceivable means to create opportunities out of adversity.
However, adversities are accompanied by fears and
suspicion. Fear of death, poverty, squalor, and suspicion of
conspiracies, sinful lifestyle, war tactics and apocalyptic
schemes are appendages to a pandemic. The biggest appre-
hension during a pandemic is of social and moral disintegra-
tion. The ensuing social and moral chaos is often not dissimilar
to what Thucydides described in his “History of the
Peloponnesian War” (Book 2, 48-53). The last paragraph of
that description opens with a striking sentence, “Fear of gods
or law of man there was none to restrain them.” Hoarding
surgical masks, gloves, sanitizers, edibles, medicines, tissue
papers and wipes is an attitude unrestrained by social and
moral codes. This might create both an economic and social
crisis with humungous challenges of governance and political
stability. Increased crime rate with an appalling economic
collapse might create a social chasm difficult to bridge. Fur-
thermore, fear and suspicion generate a need to find the
wrongdoers. The Jews were accused of poisoning the wells in
the Black Plague and labelled as the ‘Enemies of Civilization.’
In Strasbourg 2,000 Jews were killed and entire communities
were wiped out. Today, it won’t be long to hear a priest, a rabi, a
mulla, a pundit or another to blame it on “the people” who do
not observe their religion properly, or a variety of apocalyptic
explanations would be put forward for the coronavirus. Unfor-
tunately, scientific challenges are often compromised by
fundamentalist interpretations and fanatic rhetoric.
Simultaneously, the unbridled pride over the scientific
and medical advancement in the 21st century often blindfold
us to the desire of modern imperialism for conquest through
medical ascendancy. The medical advancement in the 19th
century was a weapon for gaining supremacy over the African
population. The advancement in medicines proceeded
swiftly–along with the brutal conquest of the entire African
continent. On the other hand, black slaves in Haiti succeeded
in their rebellion against France because of immunity to yel-
low fever while the French were not. In the contemporary era,
trade war and an attempt to gain ascendancy to create a hege-
monic balance amidst the newly resurging multi-polarity
could be associated to such pandemics. An ailing Europe, post-
Brexit, faces a Cold War like dilemma to depend either on a
natural ally USA or bend towards the resurging east and per-
haps fall into a divisive chaos. Chinese and American trade-
war in the backdrop of a pandemic might as well raise ques-
tions of the issues of biological warfare and moral obligations
of major powers. A pandemic in the 21st century, therefore,
raises new issues of political realism and corporate wars.
Significantly, the globalized world order faces an
impending danger of creating a rather protectionist world
order. Quarantined in small pockets with a hope to avert a
major catastrophe, the world might continue to hope for an
unlikely solution of protecting a borderless world order. More-
over, a failure to develop an approach to comprehend the virus
would raise concerns over the power of science to unite the
world. Even more alarming is the apathetic response of masses
consequent of lack of awareness and social responsibility. That
brings to fore a challenge of practicing a global responsibility
as well. It is not a national crisis of putting a country or a nation
first; it is all about understanding that even in isolation it is
about putting the collective humanity first.
Indeed, these are times of unprecedented concern when
man himself is proving to be his own nemesis. The social
animal needs to adopt unsocial ways to preserve the society.
The governments face the challenge of keeping economies
afloat and ensuring employment support, as an inflationary
crisis peeks through. Canada, New Zealand and Denmark were
swift in action; Would others be as well? Even morality is at
stake. While the dark shadows of the past loom over a chaotic
present, a new normal must be established to survive this era
of quarantined oblivion to protect an unchartered future from
a viral misery.
globalagemagazine.kipscss.net
Current edition
April 2020

4 Editorial
Quarantined – A viral oblivion of an epidemiological civilization

AFGHAN PEACE
NATIONAL STRENGTH
34 Why Afghanistan Is America’s Greatest Strategic Disaster
8 Sultans on Wings: The Symbolism of Weapon Names in India and Pakistan
Religion and history are central to how both sides name some of their key platforms and equipment.
Pompeo’s plan to make peace with the resurgent Taliban is a sad reminder of all that went wrong in Afghanistan and how it could have been otherwise.

ENERGY
WOMEN IN PAKISTAN
36 No End in Sight to the Oil Price War Between Russia and Saudi Arabia
10 Pakistani Women Are Ready for Another Aurat March. Is Pakistan?
Since 2018, the march has attracted fierce criticism, especially online. But the organizers and participants are undaunted.
Riyadh and Moscow are both betting they can win a global game of chicken over production.

ANALYSIS
PAKISTAN POLITICS
35 Mapping Pakistan’s Legal Compliance with FATF’s Recommendations
12 Pakistan: How ‘Accountability’ Became a Tool for Political Oppression
Pakistan’s judiciary acknowledges the political victimization of the opposition, backed by military agencies.
OPINION
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
36 This decade belonged to China. So will the next one
16 The Future of AI Depends on Asia
Recent geopolitical, economic and epidemic shocks in Asia reveal the real value of the region in the global economy and its future impact on
The west is still finding it extraordinarily difficult to come to terms with China’s remarkable ascent

world’s technological development. 36 What’s CPEC, and How Does the Future of the Multipolar World Depend on It?

CHINA AND THE WHO

INF TREATY
18 China, ASEAN Band Together in the Fight Against Coronavirus
The ASEAN-China special session on COVID-19 may mark the start of China offering assistance and expertise to other countries battling the outbreak. 41 Arms control provides the only path to peace
The current US approach to nuclear weapons can only lead to Armageddon

THE INFLUENCER
COUNTERTERRORISM
20 Liberalism - According to The Economist
Founded in 1843 to spread the doctrine of laissez-faire, the magazine has wielded influence like no other. But at what cost? 41 The Anti-Terror Fight
Grief-stricken parents and families wanted accountability and an investigation.

ECONOMY
ECONOMY CRISIS
26 Huawei Doubles Down on Europe With New Factory
The France-based plant will be the company’s first manufacturing plant outside of China. 52 A Pandemic of Fear
The two seemingly unrelated developments — the COVID-19 pandemic and the oil price war — are not as unrelated as they may seem at first.

ENVIRONMENT
ENERGY SECTOR
28 How Nepal Is Protecting Its Wildlife
Nepal makes progress in wildlife conservation but it risks becoming a transit hub. 54 The renewable revolution
There is far too much negativity in the air, and some feedback I have received from those who follow my articles says they are keen to hear what
suggestions I might have for the government, rather than just relentless criticism. It is a fair challenge and I accept — so here goes.
FLASHPOINTS
30 Will Climate Change Derail the ‘Asian Century’? POWER POLITICS
Climate change could bring an untimely end to the story of a rising Asia.
56 Dynasties and cults
In developed states, policies largely attract votes. In developing ones, electables gain vote banks by promising patronage goodies directly to
OPINION local clans. These banks, being based on social links, transfer within families, which produces dynastic politics. Patronage pyramids run from
the local to national, linking local electables to national ones, often via family links. Parties have their own vote banks also. However, these too
31 Pakistan’s Uniform Curriculum May Fall Short
The Imran Khan government sees uniformity as a way to address issues of equity
are mostly not based on their policies but on cultist hero worship of top leaders. So, most parties win polls via a mix of top leaders' political
dynasties and cults.

INDIA OF NARENDRA INTERVIEW

32 The Rising Domestic Danger to India’s Foreign Policy Under Modi
Whether New Delhi likes it or not, it is becoming increasingly clear that domestic issues are affecting ties with its neighbors and partners and
58 Ali Hassan Raza
Our bureau talks to Ali, who joined KIPS and passed his CSS exam with merit number 55, He told that I must say that when it comes to CSS
that the costs of this are increasing. preparation, KIPS Institute under the leadership of Sir Dr. Shahid Wazir Khan has made its mark in every nook and corner of the country.

6 | GLOBAL AGE April 2020

globalagemagazine.kipscss.net globalagemagazine.kipscss.net
April 2020 GLOBAL AGE | 7
NATIONAL STRENGTH
Sultans on Wings:
The Symbolism of Weapon Names
in India and Pakistan
Religion and history are central to how both sides name some of their key platforms and
equipment.
s A Pakistani-made ballistic missile NASR is loaded on a trailer rolls down during a military parade to mark Pakistan National Day, in Islamabad, Pakistan.
Krzysztof Iwanek
@Chris_Iwanek
I n January 2020, India twice fired
off a missile a submarine
underwater, testing its capabilities
before starting the weapon’s production.
The missile’s successful test paves the
way for its use, important because of its
ability to carry nuclear warheads. But the
projectile also stands out in a completely
different way. It bears a simple, neutral
name: K-4. Just a letter and a number.
This, by the standards of India and
Pakistan, is rather uncommon.
Religion and history are central to
the India-Pakistan conflict and are
expressed within it on a number of lev-
els. The conflict is even inscribed on
many of each country’s weapons. Unlike
the K-4, various weapon names carry
concrete meanings. Some were con-
sciously borrowed from select languages
and styles. A few are even more straight-
forward in their meaning, carrying the
names of historical personae.
8 | GLOBAL AGE April 2020
The best-known and most clear
examples are the names of some Paki-
stani missiles. Several of these were
named after Muslim rulers (most of
them Turkic) who invaded India at vari-
ous points in history. Ghaznavi (Hatf-
III) is named after Mahmud of Ghazni,
Ghauri-I and Ghauri-II (Hatf-V and
Hatf-VA) after Muhammad Ghori,
Babur (Hatf-VII) after the founder of the
Mughal dynasty in India. One of Babur’s
successors generations later was
Aurangzeb, known for his piety, military
skill and cruelty – thus one of the Paki-
stani frigates bears his title (Alamgir).
Last on the missiles list is Abdali (Hatf-
II), named after Ahmad Shah Abdali, the
founder of the Durrani dynasty in
Afghanistan who attacked and pillaged
parts of India eight times in the 18th cen-
tury.
One person missing here is Muham-
mad bin Qasim, an Arab commander
who conquered the region of Sindh in the
8th century, historically the first Indian
territory to be taken over by a Muslim
force. But he is not entirely left out – one
of Pakistan’s most important ports,
located in Sindh itself, is named after
him (it is not a navy facility, however).
The symbolism of these choices is
rather clear: The Pakistan government
refers to how the establishment of the
country was linked to the historical
growth of Islam in South Asia (a growth
that partially happened in a violent way).
Islamabad is also outspoken in showing
that its missiles are primarily aimed at
India, having been named after leaders
who once invaded it.
A second category among Pakistani
weapon names is those taken from the
history of Islam, but not necessarily that
of its South Asian chapter. The already-
mentioned name of a missile series,
Hatf, is taken from Arabic, it means “ven-
globalagemagazine.kipscss.net
geance” and was an appellation for
Muhammad’s lance. Another Pakistani
frigate, Zulfiquar, is named after
Muhammad’s sabre. Two Pakistani tank
codenames, Al-Khalid and Al-Zarrar, as
well as that of the armored personnel
A third and final category
of names – those bearing an
ideological meaning – would
be those that do not refer to
a historical person or object,
and yet the choice of the
language of origin is telling.
Most of these come from
Arabic – and less often
Persian – in the case of
Pakistan, and Sanskrit in
the case of India. Thus, one
of Pakistan’s missiles is
titled Nasr (“victory” in
Arabic), another one
Ababeel (“sparrow” in
Arabic), yet another
Shaheen (“falcon” in
Persian), while one of the
frigates is Shamsher
(“sword” in Persian)
carrier Talha, immortalize Arabic com-
manders who served under Muhammad.
A third and final category of names
– those bearing an ideological meaning –
would be those that do not refer to a his-
globalagemagazine.kipscss.net
torical person or object, and yet the
choice of the language of origin is telling.
Most of these come from Arabic – and
less often Persian – in the case of Paki-
stan, and Sanskrit in the case of India.
Thus, one of Pakistan’s missiles is titled
Nasr (“victory” in Arabic), another one
Ababeel (“sparrow” in Arabic), yet
another Shaheen (“falcon” in Persian),
while one of the frigates is Shamsher
(“sword” in Persian).
Thus is not just a matter of semantic
nuance. The choice is not simply of lan-
guage, but an ideologically loaded style.
The insistence on pure Arabic and Per-
sian words is a wider process in Pakistan
– and christening weapon systems is but
a small instance of this – and one that is a
part of the ongoing Islamisation of the
country’s identity.
Compared to the above, Indian mili-
tary names are not as aggressive ideolog-
ically. None that I am aware of carry the
memory of a Hindu monarch that would
be known for fighting Muslim rulers. The
symbolism would be have been comple-
mentary had New Delhi named its mis-
siles after those kings that fought the
relevant Islamic conquerors (the ones
whose names appear on Pakistani mis-
siles). But that is not the case. India’s sole
aircraft carrier, Vikramaditya, was chris-
tened after a king, but a one that lived
long before Islam was even born.
One can also barely find the names
of Hindu gods within the Indian army.
Agni, as one generation of missiles is
called, means “fire,” though this could
also be taken as the name of the ancient
god of fire. Another missile name,
Trishul, means “trident” though it could
be understood as Shiva’s weapon as well.
Varuna, an old god of heaven and waters
– and a nearly forgotten one now in
terms of cult practices – appears in the
name of a square rig sail training vessel.
ShamnoVarunah – “Let Varuna be aus-
picious to us” – is also the motto of the
Indian Navy. Some of India’s tanks –
Arjun and Bhishm – carry the names of
characters from the epics (in this case,
the Mahabharata), honored but not
treated as deities.
A large number of Indian army
names are taken from India’s ancient
language, Sanskrit, however. Some of
these codenames were taken from a very
pure style. The name Prithvi means
“earth” and was given to a surface-to-
surface missile, while another one,
Akash, means “sky.” The Arihant subma-
rine – the one on which the boringly-
named K-4 is to be used – means the
“slayer of enemies” in Sanskrit. Apart
from their military usage, such words are
much more frequent in higher forms of
literature or historical sources than in
common speech.
Meanwhile, many of the Indian
Navy’s ships are simply named after geo-
graphic places (such as cities or rivers).
Moreover, despite the dominance of
Sanskrit-origin words, two ships — Baha-
dur and Buland — carry Persian words as
their names. This is one of the few cases
in which the same names could arguably
have been used on the other side of the
border.
Weapons are part of the struggle in
South Asia, not only for their military
intention but in their naming too —
though much more noticeable on the
Pakistani side. Let us hope that this iden-
tify struggle remains in the realm of a
verbal battle.
April 2020 GLOBAL AGE | 9
WOMEN IN PAKISTAN
Pakistani Women Are Ready for
Another Aurat March. Is Pakistan?
Since 2018, the march has attracted fierce criticism, especially online. But the organizers
and participants are undaunted.
Tehreem Azeem
@tehreemazeem
O
n International Women’s Day,
while women around the world
celebrate freedom, inde-
pendence, and womanhood, Pakistani
women will come out of their houses to
demand their right to march. Over the
past two years, the Aurat [women]
march has turned into a massive
resistance movement against the
patriarchal structures of society,
resulting in a strong backlash against the
participants and organizers of the
march.
The Aurat March is organized under
the banner of “Hum Auratain” (we
women), an umbrella term for a collec-
tive of feminist women, transgender
individuals, nonbinary persons, and
gender and sexual minorities who stand
against the patriarchal structures that
result in the sexual, economic, and struc-
tural exploitation of women.
It all started two years ago when a
couple of feminist groups from Karachi
decided to hold a march on International
Women’s Day, March 8.
The core principles of Hum
10 | GLOBAL AGE April 2020
Auratain dictate that the march could
not be funded by NGOs or corporations.
Instead, the organizers arrange fund-
raising events to collect funds. The
marches, designed to be anonymous and
diverse, are held in all major cities of
Pakistan, including Lahore, Islamabad,
Karachi, Peshawar, and Quetta.
Each year, the organizers release an
Aurat March manifesto that demands
accountability and restorative justice
against violence targeted at women at
the workplace, at home, and in public
spaces. It also pushes for economic jus-
tice, inclusion, and access to public
spaces for all. The Aurat March gave new
momentum to the feminist movement in
Pakistan – but with that it put the orga-
nizers and participants at risk.
Last year, the march organizers
complained that they received threats
and were harassed online.
They were labelled as “bad women”
and Western agents who want to damage
the culture of Pakistan. Some men even
threatened them with rape.
A video of a well-known Islamic
cleric has circulated on social media over
the past year. The cleric is visibly furious
over a placard at the Aurat March read-
ing “Mera jism meri marzi” (my body,
my choice). He threatened women with
rape, saying that if they claim the right to
their bodies, men can also claim the right
to rape women.
The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provin-
cial assembly unanimously passed a reso-
lution condemning the Aurat March.
The resolution was moved by a woman
parliament, Rehana Ismail, who said
that the demands made at the march
about women empowerment were “un-
Islamic and shameful.”
The backlash largely targets the
placards women bring with them. At the
first Aurat March, in 2018, a placard
reading “Apna Khana Khud Garam Kar
Lo” [heat up your own food], intended to
highlight the imposed gender roles in
society, was criticized in online plat-
forms. A private television channel aired
a drama television series with the same
title to ridicule the placard and the idea
behind it.
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The placards at the second Aurat
March showed the wittiness of women
participants and their unapologetic atti-
tude toward the backlash. This time, a
placard read “Apna Moza Khud Dhond
Lo” (find your sock yourself) was taken
up by Twitter and became the most dis-
cussed placard of the 2019 march.
This year, organizers are seeing a
strong reaction even before the march. A
controversial drama series that ended in
January has already started a debate on
feminism and the Aurat March. The
series, “Meray Paas Tum Ho” (I Have
You), told the story of a woman who
decides to leave her husband after she
meets a wealthy man through a friend.
Pakistani dramas often tell stories of
men who cheat on their wives, but that is
shown as their right or a mistake; this
show encouraged viewers to side with
the aggrieved husband. The drama
gained popularity with each episode; its
finale a was screened in cinemas across
the country.
Yet at the same time, feminists took
to social media to call out the show for its
misogynist dialogue and plot. The con-
troversy took another turn when the
writer, Khalilur ur Rehman Qamar,
began appearing on talk shows criticiz-
ing the Aurat March, feminism, and
women rights activists for bringing a
“Western agenda” into Pakistan.
In one interview, he said that
“women should gang rape men if they
want equality.” In another interview
Qamar said that the Aurat March is a
conspiracy of some 35 women who
belong to a specific class.
Artist Shehzil Malik designed some
posters for the Aurat March, which she
herself pasted in different areas of
Lahore. These posters pay homage to
brown women and celebrate their wom-
anhood. The organizers found the post-
ers torn down in some areas of the city.
The Aurat March Lahore chapter
tweeted that this is the reason they
march.
Makeup artist Leena Ghani is one of
the main organizers of the Aurat March
in Lahore. While talking about the prep-
arations, she said the beauty of the
march lies in its diversity. It involves
women from a range of backgrounds
who put their efforts toward making this
event happen.
“The theme for this Aurat March is
Khudmukhtari [autonomy] and vio-
lence, both sexual and economic, that
women suffer because of patriarchy. We
have planned some performances
around these themes hoping those will
send a clear message,” she explained.
Ghani says that it is participants’
right to express their anger and concern
through their placards. She also said that
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they will not censor their voices, as what-
ever messages they bring on those plac-
ards tells the issues women face.
“It’s not easy to know what kind of
backlash to expect. However like last
year we are going to remain open to dis-
cussion,” she said. “We will never be apol-
ogetic because we don’t believe in silenc-
ing peoples voices.”
The march’s critics often claim that
women in Pakistan enjoy the utmost
rights. They reject all negative reports on
poor gender equality in the country, call-
ing them propaganda against Pakistan.
The World Economic Forum ranked
Pakistan as third worst in its 2020
Global Gender Gap report, which gauges
economic opportunity, education,
health, and political empowerment. The
report also highlights that Pakistan is the
worst of all the countries in South Asia.
The region’s highest scorer was Bangla-
desh, which separated from Pakistan in
1971. Bangladesh ranked 50th, Pakistan
151st.
Ghani sees the backlash as a testi-
mony of the success of the Aurat March.
She says the response has made the
marchers stronger.
“We had support from senior femi-
nists who have experienced such back-
lash during their struggle for women’s
rights in Pakistan. In all honestly, the
backlash made us all so much stronger
and united.”
Tehreem Hassan is a designer and
visual artist based in Islamabad. Last
year, she was one of the marchers but
this year she is volunteering in the com-
munications department of the Aurat
March, Islamabad organizing team. She
says the Aurat March is a collective
struggle to raise voices against patriar-
chal structures that limit gender equal-
ity.
“This is not struggle of an individ-
ual,” she said. “It is a collective struggle
that has the power to turn into a mass
movement all across Pakistan.”
Critics of the Aurat March often say
that it does not highlight real issues of
Pakistani women. Talking on the sub-
ject, Hassan said that every issue is a real
issue.
“We believe that every issue is a real
issue, whether it is about mobility, body,
autonomy, or gender roles. So many
women are harassed, raped, beaten, and
forced into prostitution. That’s why we
say ‘Mera Jism, Meri Marzi’ [my body,
my choice]. Do they have an issue with
it?”
She also said that this movement
does not belong to any specific group or
class.
“It is not a movement of any specific
class; instead it is our collective struggle
against patriarchy. Women from differ-
ent backgrounds are part of this move-
ment. If an issue is not real for me, it
could be real for some other women.”
Ghani said those who think the
Aurat March does not highlight the real
issues of Pakistani women have probably
missed out on the event. She invites
them to attend this year’s march.
“I would like to extend an invitation
to them so they can come see for them-
selves that the Aurat March platform is
for those who have been forgotten, by
this state and this country — the voice-
less and the helpless. And that is some-
thing one doesn’t see in the media or
online.”
April 2020 GLOBAL AGE | 11
PAKISTAN POLITICS
Pakistan: How ‘Accountability’
Became a Tool for Political
Oppression
Pakistan’s judiciary acknowledges the political victimization of the opposition,
backed by military agencies.
s Shehbaz Sharif, center, brother of Pakistani former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif leaves from Lahore High court after the hearing of a petition, in Lahore,
Pakistan, Saturday, Nov. 16, 2019.
Abdul Rehman
Islamabad, Pakistan.
I n a recent verdict regarding the bail
plea of a Pakistani opposition
leader, Justice Chaudhry Mushtaq
Ahamad of the Lahore High Court
acknowledged that “Political
victimization in our country is an open
secret.” The case saw Rana Sanaullah
Khan, a leader of ex-Prime Minister
Nawaz Sharif’s party who often criticizes
government policies, accused of drug
trafficking and was filed by the military-
controlled Anti Narcotics Force, which is
headed by a serving general. Khan had
denied the charges and maintained that
the case was a targeted attack against
him due to his vocal political stances.
In 2018, Justice Shaukat Siddiqui of
the Islamabad High Court openly gave
his account of being pressured by offi-
cials from ISI, the main military intelli-
12 | GLOBAL AGE April 2020
gence agency of Pakistan, to give a ver-
dict against Nawaz Sharif and keep him
in jail on graft charges. Siddiqui also
alleged that those officials pushed the
chief justice to make favorable court
benches for the cases of their interest. He
was later removed from his post by a
high-level reference.
Last year, Justice Qazi Faez Isa of
the Supreme Court criticized the role of
ISI in his verdict on an earlier political
sit-in, which crippled the capital for 21
days and caused acute troubles for the
government of Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim
League-Nawaz (PML-N). The charges
given in the verdict were denied and the
judge had to face a reference for “mis-
conduct.” Understandably, such back-
lash marks the reason why normally
judges avoid criticizing the powerful
military directly.
Most cases against the opposition
are prepared by National Accountability
Bureau (NAB), the powerful anti-graft
agency constituted by General Pervez
Musharraf and still dominated by the
military. The control of the powerful
military establishment over the NAB is
evident from the fact that, although it is
seemingly headed by a retired judge,
most of its key positions remain occu-
pied by retired army or intelligence offi-
cers, thus enabling the military to selec-
tively chase politicians. One of the earlier
chairmen of the NAB, who was also a
close affiliate of Musharraf, openly
admitted that the general used to manip-
ulate the cases being investigated, as per
his (or the military’s) desires.
In spite of the NAB’s claims of unbi-
globalagemagazine.kipscss.net
ased accountability, higher courts have
been finding otherwise and thus openly
criticized the NAB for specifically victim-
izing major political figures. In the ear-
lier Hudaibia Mills case, the Supreme
Court concluded that the only motive
was to pressure the Sharif family. In
another case against Shehbaz Sharif of
same family, the Lahore High Court also
observed that it was selectively picked up
by the NAB with the intention of target-
ing him.
Additionally, the major courts have
also been showing concern over the
NAB’s biased attitude in general. About a
s PPP co-chairperson Asif Ali Zardari leaving PIMS after the Islamabad High Court granted bail to him on medical grounds.
year back, Supreme Court judges
admonished the NAB for having double-
standards and being politicized in its
treatment of cases, where some are pur-
sued forcefully and others are very con-
veniently delayed. In another comment a
couple of years back, the Supreme Court
had censured the NAB and blamed it for
destroying the country through its poli-
cies.
Some disturbing evidence of
accountability judges being pressured to
obtain verdicts against opposition fig-
ures has also surfaced. Maryam Nawaz
Sharif, the daughter of Nawaz Sharif,
recently released a video evidence show-
ing the judge who convicted Sharif
apparently admitting that he had been
blackmailed to give a guilty verdict
against the accused. Even with such evi-
dence, Nawaz Sharif was not given any
relief from the conviction.
Recently, another case of judiciary
manipulation surfaced when judges on
the same Rana Sanaullah narcotics case
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were abruptly transferred, while one was
allegedly close to giving a verdict. In addi-
tion the head of the powerful Federal
Investigation Agency had to resign, as he
was being forced to coin new cases
against unwanted opposition leaders.
Many political figures in the country
have slammed the NAB for political vic-
timization and there is a general consen-
sus that the opposition is being targeted.
Nawaz Sharif has repeatedly said that it
is victimization in the guise of account-
ability. His brother Shehbaz Sharif, who
had been more cautious in his word
selection earlier, now blasts this recent
campaign as emerging from an “unholy
alliance“ between the ruling party and
the NAB, who seem to be working in tan-
dem.
Bilawal Bhutto Zardari from the
Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), whose
father and aunt have been jailed for
many months, is more expressive. He
openly declares that the institution of the
NAB was formulated by Musharraf with
the purpose of “political engineering“ or
manipulation by the military establish-
ment. Attributing all these recent cases
to behind-the-scene military masters,
Zardari and Maryam Nawaz are very
vocal in calling Prime Minister Imran
Khan as a “selected PM” or a mere “pup-
pet.” Though not as blunt, most opposi-
tion leaders feel similarly.
The focus of the NAB and the
accountability process on the opposition
leaders alone is clearly evident. Nawaz
Sharif is serving a seven-year jail term on
graft charges with his appeal pending,
while his conviction in another case has
been overturned by the high court.
Although he has faced NAB cases since
the beginning of the Musharraf era about
20 years back, the drive picked up after
the famous Panama Leaks. He was first
removed from the office of prime minis-
ter and then was arrested before the last
general elections.
Alongside him, his daughter
Maryam Nawaz has also faced multiple
charges and jail terms since the last elec-
tions. While currently out on bail, she
was arrested by the NAB in early August
on account of graft charges. Nawaz
Sharif’s brother Shehbaz, who has
served multiple terms as chief minister
of Punjab, has also faced legal charges
through the years. In the recent cam-
paign he was arrested in a housing
scheme case; he is on bail with the case
ongoing.
This volley of NAB cases during the
current regime of Imran Khan’s Pakistan
Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) is not limited to
the Sharif family. It has also involved
cases against most of the active leaders of
the major opposition parties, namely the
PML-N and PPP. Ex-president of Paki-
stan and co-chairman of the PPP Asif Ali
Zardari has been accused of money laun-
dering in a fake accounts case by the NAB
and recently got bail after waiting for six
months in jail without being convicted.
The only son of Zardari and former
Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, PPP
chairman Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, is also
a co-accused in the same case and has
been called by the NAB multiple times.
On the other hand, the NAB’s treat-
ment of those affiliated with the ruling
April 2020 GLOBAL AGE | 13
s The accountability court summoned PTI leader Babar Awan and former prime minister (PM) Raja Pervaiz Ashraf in Nandipur corruption case.
PTI is much different and most of the
case files against them are closed. Criti-
cal cases against the PTI, including alle-
gations of the party receiving illegal for-
eign funding and maintaining secret
bank accounts, have effectively been
pushed under the carpet. A case against
Imran Khan himself for the alleged mis-
use of official helicopters has also been
silenced. Proof of undisclosed properties
owned by Imran’s sister Aleema Khan
surfaced and were accepted by her too,
but she was allowed to go free. Similarly,
probes against some other major PTI
players like Pervez Khattak lie conve-
niently suspended.
This recent accountability drive
against the Sharif family was sparked by
the Panama Leaks, which listed the
names of Nawaz’s sons as owners of off-
shore companies. But the great irony in
the Panama case is that the leaks con-
tained names of more than 400 Paki-
stanis, yet none have been pursued by
the NAB other than Nawaz Sharif. Some
of them, including Zulfi Bukhari and
Aleem Khan, are among the close affili-
ates of Imran Khan himself, but they are
seemingly enjoying complete immunity
from the so-called on-going accountabil-
ity drive.
Another irritating fact about this
accountability push is its alleged use to
incentive horse-trading or switching
loyalties, as the opposition often com-
plains. Apparently, some cases are vigor-
ously pursued against certain figures,
but are put to pending status if the
accused join, or agree to join, the “favor-
ite” PTI. Information Minister Fidous
Aashiq Awan from the PPP was facing
14 | GLOBAL AGE April 2020
such charges, which were dropped
around the time she joined PTI. More
visible is the Nandipur Power Plant case
filed against some of the PPP leaders —
the recent verdict absolved the main
accused, Babar Awan, who is now in the
PTI, but indicted his other fellows.
Another disturbing reality in both of
Nawaz Sharif’s convictions by the
Accountability Court is that no corrup-
tion against him could be established.
The punishment was based on “assets
beyond means,” a preposterous charge
in the case of a long-time wealthy indus-
trialist. Due to this, the verdicts have
been duly condemned from within the
legal fraternity too, including from some
eminent lawyers and a Supreme Court
judge admitting disparity in different
accountability decisions. Also important
to note is that Interpol, when asked for
the repatriation of Nawaz’s sons to Paki-
stan this year, declared the proofs in the
case to be “insufficient” and refused to
act on them.
The one-sided nature of account-
ability is even admitted by the chairman
of the NAB who, in a May 2019 interview
to eminent journalist Javed Chaudhry;
himself admitted to not arresting gov-
ernment affiliates in order to avoid insta-
bility. After an uproar about it from the
opposition, an NAB spokesman later
denied it. But the chairman was not
alone in that comment. Recently Senior
Minister Fawad Chaudhry has also
boastingly admitted that it is the PTI,
and not the NAB, who is in control of this
accountability drive.
Although most of the ruling cabinet
members keep repeating their rant
about the opposition’s corruption, some
do open up otherwise. Current Interior
Minister Brigadier General (ret.) Ijaz
Shah, having the earlier fame of being
pointed out by the late Benazir Bhutto
herself as her potential killer, has admit-
ted the “benefits” of arresting the opposi-
tion leaders for getting rid of unwanted
dissent and any ensuing demonstra-
tions. At the same time, this transforma-
tion of accountability into a more famil-
iar oppressive campaign against the
opposition has also been noticed by the
international community and has been
pointed out as such too.
A rather disturbing irony of this
accountability drive is its contrast with
the internationally compiled on-the-
ground data. Global watchdog Transpar-
ency International, in its report on the
three previous regimes, has concluded
that Musharraf’s era was the worst in
terms of corruption and Nawaz’s was the
best, and also that corruption normally
drops when the PML-N comes to power.
But here, in total disregard to all this, the
maximum thrust of accountability is
focused on the same PMLN. Musharraf’s
close affiliates are not only immune to
this, but many are enjoying government
positions once again.
Considering all the hidden painful
facts behind the much-touted slogans of
unbiased accountability, the political
victimization of opposition is evident —
as acknowledged by the higher courts
also. It can only be hoped that this unjus-
tified campaign does get the attention it
deserves from international human
rights and justice organizations.
globalagemagazine.kipscss.net
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
The Future of AI Depends on Asia
Recent geopolitical, economic and epidemic shocks in Asia reveal the real value of the
region in the global economy and its future impact on world’s technological development.
s April 30, 2019, Samsung Electronics’ microchips are displayed at its store in Seoul, South Korea.
Helena Domashneva
facebook.com/Helena Domashneva
T he coronavirus outbreak has
driven a lot of attention to China
and the greater northeast Asian
region, and sparked discussions on its
potential impact on global economies. In
late February, global tech giants Apple,
Google, and Microsoft announced plans
to move manufacturing of new products
from China to Southeast Asia.
This was not the only event that
shook the technology market in the past
year. In May 2019, the U.S.-China trade
war peaked with U.S. President Donald
Trump banning American companies
from buying technologies or equipment
from Huawei, the company being con-
sidered a threat to the national interests
and security of the United States. The
U.S. government also imposed tariffs on
many Chinese goods including raw mate-
rials, excluding, however, rare earth met-
als the dependency rate on which goes as
high as 80 percent.
Meanwhile Asia witnessed another
drama unveiling between South Korea
and Japan. In July 2019, Japan placed
restrictions on exporting to Korea three
elements crucial for production of semi-
conductors: hydrogen fluoride, fluori-
16 | GLOBAL AGE April 2020
nated polyimide and photoresists. The
official pretext for the decision lay in a
long-standing dispute between Korea
and Japan on the use of Korean labor by
Japanese during the Second World War.
The issue, still very sensitive in Korea,
also caused other controversies like a
boycott of the Japanese clothing brand
Uniqlo over a promotional video, which
unintentionally brought back wartime
memories to some Koreans.
These three events — all evoked by
different reasons and lying in different
dimensions of political and economic
relations — impact, among other impor-
tant things, one single process: the pro-
duction chain of semiconductors and
microchips. Every crucial link of that
process, which supplies the whole world
with microchips for almost all smart
electronic equipment, is located in the
northeast Asian region: starting with
raw material extraction and ending with
the manufacturing of high value-added
microchips to be installed in consumer
devices.
The photoresists and hydrogen fluo-
ride — the elements touched by the
South Korea-Japan trade dispute — are
made of Chinese raw materials, more
precisely rare earth metals.
As of now, China holds a leading
position both in deposits and in produc-
tion of rare earth metals. When Deng
Xiaoping visited the Inner Mongolian
rare earth production area of Baotou in
1987, he made a shrewd prediction: “The
Middle East has its oil, China has rare
earths.” Despite the efforts by some coun-
tries, led by the United States in 2017, to
increase domestic production of these
materials, in 2019 China was still
responsible for about 60 percent of
global production, outperforming by
about five to six times its competitors,
such as United States, Australia and
Myanmar. Thus, China remains the
major supplier of these valuable materi-
als for all the countries in the world,
including, naturally, Japan which uses it
for production of semiconductor chemi-
cals. Back in 2010, a territorial dispute
led to a cut of Chinese rare materials
exports to Japan, but eventually it was
resolved and the supplies were restored
in full volume.
In turn, Japan uses China’s rare
earths to produce the three chemicals
globalagemagazine.kipscss.net
s China’s AI dominance reaches across multiple industries compared to the majority of nations only concentrating on a few.
mentioned above that are subsequently semiconductors is crucial for global AI
shipped to South Korea, Taiwan and
Among the big powers, development.
back to China, the world’s largest manu- China is the only one to However, while many countries
facturers of semiconductors and micro- acknowledge the need to adopted AI strategies in the recent years,
chips. According to the government not many pay sufficient attention to the
reports, Japan produces about 90 per- research and develop development of their own AI hardware
cent of fluorinated polyimide, about 70 intelligent computing chips capabilities or at least ensuring access of
percent of hydrogen fluoride and 90 per- the local engineers and IT specialist to
cent of photoresists. This makes Japan
and systems the computational devices. In fact,
almost a full monopolist in this type of among the big powers, China is the only
global market are tremendously impor-
production, making it very difficult for one to acknowledge the need to research
tant for the development of the cutting-
its consumers to find substitutes or build and develop intelligent computing chips
edge technologies, such as artificial
up enough capabilities to avoid Japan and systems. Since the national govern-
intelligence (AI), Blockchain and the
entirely. Commenting on the current ments are making their first steps in sup-
Internet of Things (IoT). While artificial
tensions between Japan and South porting AI developers it is clear that the
intelligence is commonly perceived as a
Korea experts note that Japan developed strategies and tactics are to be adjusted
complex software, the physical device
the processing technology for decades according to the market needs and
which incorporates it is equally impor-
and it will take several years to replicate requirements and most likely will
tant. The new generation of hardware
it. include more practical measures to
required by AI developers possesses
From Japan, the value chain moves ensure access to AI hardware.
several key characteristics including
to the world largest semiconductor and The current situation is shaped by
greater computational power and energy
chipmakers – South Korean Samsung decades of technology developments,
efficiency. According to a recent Deloitte
and Sk Hynix, which are both designers but seem quite fragile and easily trem-
report, AI chips will enjoy explosive
and manufacturers, and China and Tai- bled by myriad external factors. Some
growth. The AI chip market is expected
wan, which host semiconductor found- countries, pushed by these factors, have
to account for over 12 percent of the total
ries for global producers, such as NVidia already started to take some steps to
AI market by 2022, with a compound
or Qualcomm. Historically, semiconduc- loosen their dependency on the supplies
annual growth rate of 54 percent.
tor production is divided into two main of this or that particular good, like the
Today, startups and SMEs contrib-
stages, meaning that R&D and design is United States, which is planning new
ute to global technology development
happening in one company — a fabless domestic rare earth mines, or South
almost as much as big corporations,
manufacturer — while physical assem- Korea seeking to diversify imports of
which is equally true for AI developers. A
bling in another — a foundry. For chemicals necessary for the semiconduc-
recent CB Insights report noted 635 AI
instance, Apple, NVIDIA and Qualcomm tors production. These plans however
acquisitions since 2010, topped by Apple
rely on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufac- will take a lot of time, while other did not
with 20 acquisitions. It is important to
turing Company to manufacture the even start.
note that while corporations mainly use
graphics chips it designs. At the end of All this means that the future of AI
their own hardware, like Google which
the day, it means that no matter where and other modern technologies on both
produced its own Tensor Processing
technology intensive processes are being the national and global scale will not only
Unit (TPU) not available in retail,
performed the product is being physi- depend on the ability of IT specialist to
startups rely on what is available on the
cally fabricated in Asian. develop new solutions but also on the
market. Startups, therefore, remain very
Why is this so important? Semicon- stability in the northeast Asian region,
vulnerable to market shocks. Global
ductors and their availability on the at least in the short term.
access to AI hardware, microchips and
globalagemagazine.kipscss.net
April 2020 GLOBAL AGE | 17
CHINA AND THE WHO
China, ASEAN Band Together in the
Fight Against Coronavirus
The ASEAN-China special session on COVID-19 may mark the start of China offering
assistance and expertise to other countries battling the outbreak.
Lucio Blanco Pitlo
Washington D.C.
A s the novel coronavirus known as
COVID-19 spreads around the
world, China and its neighbors
understand that the struggle against the
epidemic will require more than their
individual national efforts. Hence, the
foreign ministers of ASEAN and China
met in Vientiane, Laos on February 20 to
discuss joint measures to combat the
threat of COVID-19.
The meeting was remarkable for
tackling not only the health dimension of
the crisis, but also its social and eco-
nomic impacts, as well as how technol-
ogy can be harnessed to mitigate the fall-
out. Turning the crisis into an opportu-
nity, it is possible for Beijing to promote
this cooperative template to its North-
east Asian neighbors, Japan and South
Korea, and to other regions like the Mid-
dle East and Europe where the virus is
fast making headway.
Due to proximity and close eco-
nomic and people-to-people ties, South-
east Asia become an easy frontier for the
virus to cross. Annual two-way travel
flows amount to 65 million visits, raising
the region’s vulnerability. As such, it is
18 | GLOBAL AGE April 2020
not surprising that the first reported
COVID-19 case outside China surfaced
in Thailand, the first local transmission
outside China occurred in Vietnam, and
the first fatality outside China happened
in the Philippines. As of March 2, 200
confirmed and new cases had been
reported in the region, with Singapore
and Thailand hardest hit.
That said, the number of cases in
Southeast Asia has largely stabilized. In
contrast, numbers in other countries like
South Korea, Japan, Italy, and Iran have
spiked. The virus also began making
inroads in Germany, France, and the rest
of Europe; the United States; and
Kuwait, Bahrain, and elsewhere in the
Middle East, increasing concern about a
possible pandemic.
Even before the emergency session
in Laos, ASEAN countries had taken
steps to help China in its battle against
coronavirus. While there are points of
friction between China and Southeast
Asian states, most notably maritime
disputes centered on the South China
Sea, humanitarian impulses and the
common threat posed by the growing
epidemic pushed those differences
aside. For instance, a subsidiary of Indo-
nesian conglomerate Sinar Mars Group
donated $14.4 million while another unit
rushed production of protective prod-
ucts and hygiene wipes for delivery to
Hubei province in China, the epicenter of
the outbreak. The Singapore Red Cross
raised funds to aid worst-affected com-
munities, with Singapore’s government
providing $1 million in seed money,
aside from donations of medicine, medi-
cal supplies, and diagnostic test kits.
Vietnam donated $500,000 worth of
goods and medical supplies, with the
Vietnamese Red Cross giving $100,000
worth of medical aid. Malaysia, the
world’s largest producer of medical
gloves, donated 18 million pieces to
Wuhan. The Philippine Red Cross facili-
tated a donation of 3 million face masks
by a local manufacturer, with the govern-
ment also donating basic food and sani-
tation items.
These noble initiatives aside, the
huge social and economic toll of COVID-
19 called for a more concerted strategy.
This led foreign ministers from
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ASEAN and China to hold a special ses-
sion co-chaired by the Philippines and
China in the Laotian capital. In their
joint statement, the 11 countries agreed
to step up cooperation in sharing medi-
cal and health information and best prac-
tices to enhance emergency prepared-
ness and response. They also under-
scored the importance of cooperation in
risk communication and community
engagement to ensure people are
s China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi, center, poses for a group photo with some of the Foreign ministers of The Association of Southeast Asian Nations
(ASEAN) from left, Thailand’s Foreign Minister Don Pramudwinai, Vietnam’s Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Phạm Binh Minh, Philippines’
Foreign Affaires Secretary Teodoro Locsin Jr., and Laos Foreign Minister Saleumxay Kommasith, ahead of the Special ASEAN-China Foreign Ministers’
meeting on the Novel Coronavirus Pneumonia in Vientiane, Laos, Feb. 20, 2020.
promptly and correctly informed, thus
thwarting misinformation and fake
news. Malaysia has already arrested sev-
eral people for spreading rumors about
the virus and regional leaders spoke
against panic and discrimination.
The meeting also stressed the need
to strengthen ASEAN-led and ASEAN-
China cooperative mechanisms in com-
bating infectious and communicable
diseases, recognizing the varying levels
of development of each member coun-
try’s public health system. Parties agreed
to minimize supply chain disruptions for
urgent medical products and to promote
research and development for medicines
and vaccines. They also highlighted the
value of policy dialogue and exchanges to
keep abreast on the latest developments
in the control and treatment of the virus.
These steps may greatly contribute in
institutionalizing health cooperation
between both sides that can go beyond
the present crisis.
ASEAN and China also committed
to reduce the adverse impact of the
coronavirus on regional economies and
social development. The impact from the
globalagemagazine.kipscss.net
outbreak is already being strongly felt.
China is Southeast Asia’s largest trade
partner and inbound tourist market.
Tourism is a big contributor to local econ-
omies with holidays like the Lunar New
Year, the time the virus hit, considered a
peak season. Thailand, which received
around 11 million arrivals from China
last year, already cut economic growth
forecasts for this year owing to the crisis.
Singapore likewise downgraded its
growth forecast this year to between -0.5
percent and 1.5 percent. Regional com-
modity exports to China like palm oil,
rubber, copper, fuel and other minerals
are already feeling the pinch.
Leveraging technology, ASEAN and
China agreed to support micro and small
and medium enterprises (MSMEs),
which are more susceptible to shocks
brought about by the outbreak. Anchor-
ing on the ASEAN-China Year of Digital
Economy, both sides will promote e-
commerce and fintech to sustain eco-
nomic activities until such time that the
situation normalizes for traditional busi-
ness to resume. This may present oppor-
tunities for Chinese e-commerce giants
like Alibaba and JD.com but also for
emerging Southeast Asian unicorns like
Grab, Go-Jek, Sea, and Lazada, among
others. With rapid urbanization and
numerous smart city projects underway,
a growing middle-class, and improving
internet infrastructure, digital com-
merce in the 622 million-strong South-
east Asian market is heating up. As the
outbreak compels more people to avoid
congregating in shopping malls, it may
create more spaces for online business.
As the SARS outbreak in 2003 unleashed
Chinese digital commerce, the
coronavirus may likewise transform
Southeast Asian e-commerce. Both sides
also agreed to maintain trade, invest-
ment and people-to-people exchanges
and to enhance such interaction contin-
gent on the progress in the fight against
COVID-19.
As the outbreak enters its third
month spilling over a wider geography,
emphasis on cooperation is bound to
grow. As of March 2, South Korea had
registered 4,688 confirmed and new
cases, Europe 2,808 and the Middle East
1,561. US President Donald Trump, in
his remarks after the first confirmed U.S.
death from the virus, agreed that
COVID-19 will “bring the world closer.”
The World Health Organization has
acknowledged the unprecedented efforts
taken by Beijing to stem the spread of the
virus. It seems to be paying off as
attested by the decline in domestic cases.
While the massive lockdown and rapid
mobilization may be hard to replicate
abroad, it is likely that certain interven-
tions have emerged with potential appli-
cations to troubled regions. As China,
alongside neighbors like ASEAN, devel-
ops more best practices through cooper-
ation, Beijing can better contribute in the
global campaign against COVID-19. The
dispatch of a team of Chinese experts to
Iran last week may presage similar medi-
cal missions to other badly struck
regions even as China continue to strug-
gle against the disease at home.
April 2020 GLOBAL AGE | 19
THE INFLUENCER
Liberalism - According to
The Economist
Founded in 1843 to spread the doctrine of laissez-faire, the magazine has wielded
influence like no other. But at what cost?
s The magazine was founded in 1843, to disseminate the doctrine of laissez-faire.Illustration by Mark Long
Pankaj Mishra
@pankajontech
L iberalism made the modern
world, but the modern world is
turning against it,” an article in
The Economist lamented last year, on
the occasion of the magazine’s hundred-
and-seventy-fifth anniversary. “Europe
and America are in the throes of a
popular rebellion against liberal élites,
who are seen as self-serving and unable,
or unwilling, to solve the problems of
ordinary people,” even as authoritarian
China is poised to become the world’s
largest economy. For a publication that
was founded “to campaign for
liberalism,” all of this was “profoundly
worrying.”
The crisis in liberalism has become
received wisdom across the political
spectrum. Barack Obama included Pat-
rick Deneen’s “Why Liberalism Failed”
(2018) in his annual list of recom-
mended books; meanwhile, Vladimir
Putin has gleefully pronounced liberal-
ism “obsolete.” The right accuses liberals
of promoting selfish individualism and
crass materialism at the expense of social
20 | GLOBAL AGE April 2020
cohesion and cultural identity. Centrists
claim that liberals’ obsession with politi-
cal correctness and minority rights drove
white voters to Donald Trump. For the
newly resurgent left, the rise of dema-
goguery looks like payback for the small-
government doctrines of technocratic
neoliberalism—tax cuts, privatization,
financial deregulation, antilabor legisla-
tion, cuts in Social Security—which have
shaped policy in Europe and America
since the eighties.
Attacks on liberalism are nothing
new. In 1843, the year The Economist
was founded, Karl Marx wrote, “The glo-
rious robes of liberalism have fallen
away, and the most repulsive despotism
stands revealed for all the world to see.”
Nietzsche dismissed John Stuart Mill,
the author of the canonical liberal text
“On Liberty” (1859), as a “numbskull.” In
colonized Asia and Africa, critics—such
as R. C. Dutt, in India, and Sun Yat-sen,
in China—pointed out liberalism’s com-
plicity in Western imperialism. Muham-
mad Abduh, the Grand Mufti of Egypt,
wrote, “Your liberalness, we see plainly,
is only for yourselves.” (Mill, indeed, had
justified colonialism on the ground that
it would lead to the improvement of “bar-
barians.”) From a different vantage, cri-
tiques came from aspiring imperialist
powers, such as Germany (Carl Schmitt),
Italy (Gaetano Salvemini), and Japan
(Tokutomi Sohō). Since then, Anglo-
American thinkers such as Reinhold
Niebuhr and John Gray have pointed out
liberalism’s troubled relationship with
democracy and human rights, and its
overly complacent belief in reason and
progress.
Yet the sheer variety of criticisms of
liberalism makes it hard to know right
away what precisely is being criticized.
Liberalism’s ancestry has been traced
back to John Locke’s writings on individ-
ual reason, Adam Smith’s economic the-
ory, and the empiricism of David Hume,
but today the doctrine seems to contain
potentially contradictory elements. The
philosophy of individual liberty con-
notes both a desire for freedom from
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state regulation in economic matters (a
stance close to libertarianism) and a
demand for the state to insure a minimal
degree of social and economic jus-
tice—the liberalism of the New Deal and
of European welfare states. The iconic
figures of liberalism themselves moved
between these commitments. Mill, even
while supporting British imperialism in
India and Ireland, called himself a
socialist and outlined the aim of achiev-
ing “common ownership in the raw mate-
rials of the globe.” The Great Depression
forced John Dewey to conclude that “the
socialized economy is the means of free
individual development.” Isaiah Berlin
championed the noninterference of the
state in 1958, in his celebrated lecture
“Two Concepts of Liberty”; but eleven
years later he had come to believe that
such “negative liberty” armed “the able
and ruthless against the less gifted and
less fortunate.”
Because of this conceptual morass,
liberalism has, to an unusual degree,
been defined by what it wasn’t. For s John Locke was the first to develop a liberal philosophy as he coherently described the elementary
principles of the liberal movement, such as the right to private property and the consent of the governed
French liberals in the early nineteenth
century, it was a defense against the were retrospectively found for it. Locke, West against such illiberal enemies as
excesses of Jacobins and ultra- a devout Christian, was not regarded as a Islamofascism and Chinese authoritari-
monarchists. For the free-trading Man- philosopher of liberalism until the early anism.
chester Liberals of the mid-nineteenth twentieth century. Nor was the word The Economist proudly enlists itself
century, it was anticolonial. Liberals in “liberal” part of U.S. political discourse in this combative Anglo-American tradi-
Germany, on the other hand, were allied before that time. When Lionel Trilling tion, having vigorously claimed to be
with both nationalists and imperialists. claimed, in 1950, that liberalism in Amer- advancing the liberal cause since its
In the twentieth century, liberalism ica was “not only the dominant but even founding. In “Liberalism at Large”
became a banner under which to march the sole intellectual tradition,” the term (Verso), Alexander Zevin, a historian at
against Communism and Fascism. was becoming a catchall signifier of the City University of New York, takes it
Recent scholars have argued that it was- moral prestige, variously synonymous at its word, telling the story not only of
n’t until liberalism became the default with “democracy,” “capitalism,” and the magazine itself but also of its impact
“other” of totalitarian ideologies that even simply “the West.” Since 9/11, it has on world affairs. Using The Economist as
inner coherence and intellectual lineage seemed more than ever to define the a proxy for liberalism enables Zevin to
s Historians believe that the liberals planned to restore greatness of Russia and protect its national interests in the Balkans and Central Asia through
proposed reform programmes.
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April 2020 GLOBAL AGE | 21
sidestep much conceptual muddle about
the doctrine. His examination of The
Economist’s pronouncements and of the
policies of those who heeded them
yields, in effect, a study of several liberal-
isms as they have been widely practiced
in the course of a hundred and seventy-
five years. The magazine emerges as a
force that—thanks to the military, cul-
tural, and economic power of Britain
and, later, America—can truly be said to
have made the modern world, if not in
the way that many liberals would sup-
pose.
In terms of its influence, The Econo-
mist has long been a publication like no
other. Within a decade of its founding,
Marx was describing it as the organ of
“the aristocracy of finance.” In 1895,
Woodrow Wilson called it “a sort of
financial providence for businessmen on
both sides of the Atlantic.” (Wilson, an
Anglophile, wooed his evidently forbear-
ing wife with quotations from Walter
Bagehot, the most famous of The Econo-
mist’s editors.) For years, the magazine
was proud of the exclusivity of its reader-
ship. Now it has nearly a million sub-
scribers in North America (more than in
Britain), and seven hundred thousand in
the rest of the world. Since the early nine-
ties, it has served, alongside the Finan-
cial Times, as the suavely British-
accented voice of globalization (scoring
over the too stridently partisan and
American Wall Street Journal).
According to its own statistics, its
readers are the richest and the most prod-
igal consumers of all periodical readers;
more than twenty per cent once claimed
ownership of “a cellar of vintage wines.”
Like Aston Martin, Burberry, and other
global British brands, The Economist
invokes the glamour of élitism. “It’s
lonely at the top,” one of its ads says, “but
at least there’s something to read.” Its
articles, almost all of which are
unsigned, were until recently edited
from an office in St. James’s, London, a
redoubt of posh Englishness, with pri-
vate clubs, cigar merchants, hatters, and
tailors. The present editor, Zanny
Minton Beddoes, is the first woman ever
to hold the position. The staff, predomi-
nantly white, is recruited overwhelm-
ingly from the universities of Oxford and
Cambridge, and a disproportionate num-
ber of the most important editors have
come from just one Oxford college,
Magdalen. “Lack of diversity is a bene-
fit,” Gideon Rachman, a former editor
who is now a columnist at the Financial
Times, told Zevin, explaining that it pro-
duces an assertive and coherent point of
view. Indeed, contributors are not shy
about adding prescription (how to fix
India’s power problems, say) to their
reporting and analysis. The pieces are
22 | GLOBAL AGE April 2020
mostly short, but the coverage is com-
prehensive; a single issue might cover
the insurgency in south Thailand, public
transportation in Jakarta, commodities
prices, and recent advances in artificial
intelligence. This air of crisp editorial
omniscience insures that the magazine is
as likely to be found on an aspirant think
tanker’s iPad in New Delhi as it is on Bill
Gates’s private jet.
Zevin, having evidently mastered
the magazine’s archives, commands a
deep knowledge of its inner workings
and its historical connection to political
and economic power. He shows how its
editors and contributors pioneered the
revolving doors that link media, politics,
business, and finance—alumni have
gone on to such jobs as deputy governor
of the Bank of England, Prime Minister
s Woodrow Wilson is best known for his service as the twenty-eighth president of the United States
and his influence on American foreign policy in the twentieth century and beyond.
of Britain, and President of Italy—and
how such people have defined, at crucial
moments in history, liberalism’s ever-
changing relationship with capitalism,
imperialism, democracy, and war.
A capsule version of this thesis can
be found in the career of James Wilson,
The Economist’s founder and first edi-
tor. Wilson, who was born in Scotland
and became the owner of a struggling
hatmaking business, intended his jour-
nal to develop and disseminate the doc-
trine of laissez-faire—“nothing but pure
principles,” as he put it. He was particu-
larly vociferous in his opposition to the
Corn Laws, agricultural tariffs that were
unpopular with merchants. The Corn
Laws were repealed in 1846, three years
after the magazine first appeared, and
Wilson began to proselytize more ener-
getically for free trade and the increas-
ingly prominent discipline of economics.
He became a Member of Parliament and
held several positions in the British gov-
ernment. He also founded a pan-Asian
bank, now known as Standard Char-
tered, which expanded fast on the back of
the opium trade with China. In 1859,
Wilson became Chancellor of the Indian
Exchequer. He died in India the follow-
ing year, trying to reconfigure the coun-
try’s financial system.
During his short career as a journal-
ist-cum-crusader, Wilson briskly clari-
fied what he meant by “pure principles.”
He opposed a ban on trading with
slaveholding countries on the ground
that it would punish slaves as well as
British consumers. In the eighteen-
forties, when Ireland was struck with
famine, which was largely caused by free
trade—the British insisted on exporting
Irish food, despite catastrophic crop
failure—Wilson called for a homeopathic
remedy: more free trade. With Irish
intransigence becoming a nuisance, he
advised the British to respond with “pow-
erful, resolute, but just repression.” Wil-
son was equally stern with those suffer-
ing from rising inequality at home. In his
view, the government was wrong to
oblige rail companies to provide better
service for working-class passengers,
who were hitherto forced to travel in
exposed freight cars: “Where the most
profit is made, the public is best served.
Limit the profit, and you limit the exer-
tion of ingenuity in a thousand ways.” A
factory bill limiting women to a twelve-
hour workday was deemed equally per-
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nicious. As for public schooling, com-
mon people should be “left to provide
education as they provide food for them-
selves.”
The Economist held that, “if the
pursuit of self-interest, left equally free
for all, does not lead to the general wel-
fare, no system of government can
accomplish it.” But this opposition to
government intervention, it turned out,
did not extend to situations in which
liberalism appeared to be under threat.
In the eighteen-fifties, Zevin writes, the
Crimean War, the Second Opium War,
and the Indian Mutiny “rocked British
liberalism at home and recast it abroad.”
Proponents of free trade had consis-
tently claimed that it was the best hedge
against war. However, Britain’s expan-
sion across Asia, in which free trade was
often imposed at gunpoint, predictably
provoked conflict, and, for The Econo-
mist, wherever Britain’s “imperial inter-
ests were at stake, war could become an
absolute necessity, to be embraced.”
In the eighteen-forties,
when Ireland was struck with
famine, which was largely
caused by free trade—the
British insisted on exporting
Irish food, despite
catastrophic crop failure—
Wilson called for a
homeopathic remedy: more
free trade
This betrayal of principle alienated,
among others, the businessman and
statesman Richard Cobden, who had
helped Wilson found The Economist,
and had shared his early view of free
trade as a guarantee of world peace.
India, for Cobden, was a “country we do
not know how to govern,” and Indians
were justified in rebelling against an
inept despotism. For Wilson’s Econo-
mist, however, Indians, like the Irish,
exemplified the “native character . . . half
child, half savage, actuated by sudden
and unreasoning impulses.” Besides,
“commerce with India would be at an
end were English power withdrawn.”
The next editor, Wilson’s son-in-law
Walter Bagehot, broadened the maga-
zine’s appeal and gave its opinions a
more seductive intellectual sheen. But
the editorial line remained much the
same. During the American Civil War,
Bagehot convinced himself that the Con-
federacy, with which he was personally
sympathetic, could not be defeated by
the Northern states, whose “other con-
tests have been against naked Indians
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and degenerate and undisciplined Mexi-
cans.” He also believed that abolition
would best be achieved by a Southern
victory. More important, trade with the
Southern states would be freer.
Discussing these and other editorial
misjudgments, Zevin refrains from vir-
tue signalling and applying anachronis-
tic standards. He seems genuinely fasci-
nated by how the liberal vision of indi-
vidual freedom and international har-
mony was, as Niebuhr once put it, “trans-
muted into the sorry realities of an inter-
national capitalism which recognized
neither moral scruples nor political
restraints in expanding its power over
the world.” Part of the explanation lies in
Zevin’s sociology of élites, in which liber-
alism emerges as a self-legitimating ide-
ology of a rich, powerful, and networked
ruling class. Private ambition played a
significant role. Bagehot stood for Par-
liament four times as a member of Brit-
ain’s Liberal Party. Born into a family of
bankers, he saw himself and his maga-
zine as offering counsel to a new genera-
tion of buccaneering British financiers.
His tenure coincided with the age of capi-
tal, when British finance transformed
the world economy, expanding food cul-
tivation in North America and Eastern
Europe, cotton manufacturing in India,
mineral extraction in Australia, and rail
networks everywhere. According to
Zevin, “it fell to Bagehot’s Economist to
map this new world, tracing the theoreti-
cal insights of political economy to the
people and places men of business were
sending their money.”
The pressures of capitalist expan-
sion abroad and rising disaffection at
home further transformed liberal doc-
trine. Zevin fruitfully describes how lib-
erals coped with the growing demand for
democracy. Bagehot had read and
admired John Stuart Mill as a young
man, but, as an editor, he agreed with
him on little more than the need to civi-
lize the natives of Ireland and India. To
Bagehot, Mill’s idea of broadly extending
suffrage to women seemed absurd. Nor
could he support Mill’s proposal to
enfranchise the laboring classes in Brit-
ain, reminding his readers that “a politi-
cal combination of the lower classes, as
such and for their own objects, is an evil
of the first magnitude.” Not surprisingly,
The Economist commended Mussolini
(a devoted reader) for sorting out an Ital-
ian economy destabilized by labor
unrest.
Nonetheless, by the early twentieth
century, the magazine was groping
toward an awareness that, in an
advanced industrial society, classical
liberalism had to be moderated, and that
progressive taxation and basic social-
welfare systems were the price of defus-
ing rising discontent. The magazine has
since presented this volte-face as evi-
dence of its pragmatic liberalism. Zevin
reveals it as a grudging response to demo-
cratic pressures from below. Moreover,
there were clear limits to The Econo-
mist’s newfound compassionate liberal-
ism. As late as 1914, one editor, Francis
Hirst, was still denouncing “the shriek-
ing, struggling, fighting viragoes” who
had demanded the right to vote despite
having no capacity for reason. His com-
parison of suffragettes to Russian and
Turkish marauders—pillaging “solemn
vows, ties of love and affection, honor,
romance”—helped drive his own wife to
suffragism.
As more people acquired the right to
vote, and as market mechanisms failed,
empowering autocrats and accelerating
international conflicts, The Economist
was finally forced to compromise the
purity of its principles. In 1943, in a book
celebrating the centenary of the maga-
zine, its editor at the time acknowledged
that larger electorates saw “inequality
and insecurity” as a serious problem. The
Economist disagreed with the socialists
“not on their objective, but only on the
methods they proposed for attaining it.”
Such a stance mirrored a widespread
acceptance on both sides of the Atlantic
that governments should do more to
protect citizens from an inherently vola-
tile economic system. Since the nine-
teen-sixties, however, The Economist
has steadily reinstated its foundational
ideals.
In the process, it missed an oppor-
tunity to reconfigure for the postcolonial
age a liberalism forged during the high
noon of imperialism. The emergence of
new, independent nation-states across
Asia and Africa from the late forties
onward was arguably the most impor-
tant development of the twentieth cen-
tury. Liberalism faced a new test among
a great majority of the world’s popula-
tion: Could newly sovereign peoples,
largely poor and illiterate, embrace free
markets and minimize government right
away? Would such a policy succeed with-
out prior government-led investment in
public health, education, and local manu-
facturing? Even a Cold War liberal like
Raymond Aron questioned the efficacy
of Western-style liberalism in Asia and
Africa. But The Economist seemed con-
tent to see postcolonial nations and their
complex challenges through the Cold
War’s simple dichotomy of the “free” and
the “unfree” world. In any case, by the
seventies, the magazine’s editors were
increasingly taking their inspiration
from economics departments and think
tanks, where the pure neoliberal princi-
ples of Milton Friedman and Friedrich
Hayek were dominant, rather than from
April 2020 GLOBAL AGE | 23
such liberal theorists of justice as John
Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, and Amartya
Sen.
In the nineteen-eighties, The Econ-
omist’s cheerleading for Margaret
Thatcher and Ronald Reagan’s embrace
of neoliberalism led to a dramatic rise in
its American circulation. (Reagan per-
sonally thanked the magazine’s editor
for his support over dinner.) Dean
Acheson famously remarked that “Great
Britain has lost an empire and has not yet
found a role.” No such status anxiety
inhibited The Economist as it crossed the
Atlantic to make new friends and influ-
ence more people. After the Second
World War, when the U.S. emerged as
the new global hegemon, the maga-
zine—despite some initial resentment,
commonplace among British élites at the
time—quickly adjusted itself to the Pax
Americana. It came to revere the U.S. as,
in the words of one editor, “a giant elder
brother, a source of reassurance, trust
and stability for weaker members of the
family, and nervousness and uncertainty
for any budding bullies.”
This meant stalwart support for
American interventions abroad, starting
with Vietnam, where, as the historian
and former staff writer Hugh Brogan
tells Zevin, the magazine’s coverage was
“pure CIA propaganda.” It euphemized
the war’s horrors, characterizing the My
Lai massacre as “minor variations on the
general theme of the fallibility of men at
war.” By 1972, following the saturation
bombing of North Vietnam, the maga-
zine was complaining that Henry
Kissinger was too soft on the North Viet-
namese. A policy of fealty to the giant
elder brother also made some campaign-
ers for liberalism a bit too prone to skul-
duggery. Zevin relates colorful stories
about the magazine’s overzealous Cold
Warriors, such as Robert Moss, who dili-
gently prepared international opinion
for the military coup in Chile in 1973,
which brought down its democratically
elected leader, Salvador Allende. In
Moss’s view, “Chile’s generals reached
the conclusion that democracy does not
have the right to commit suicide.” (The
generals expressed their gratitude by
buying and distributing nearly ten thou-
sand copies of the magazine.) Zevin
relates that, when news of Allende’s
death reached Moss in London, he
danced down the corridors of The Econ-
omist’s office, chanting, “My enemy is
dead!” Moss went on to edit a magazine
owned by Anastasio Somoza, Nicara-
gua’s U.S.-backed dictator.
After the fall of Communist regimes
in 1989, The Economist embraced a fer-
vently activist role in Russia and Eastern
Europe, armed with the mantras of pri-
vatization and deregulation. In its pages,
24 | GLOBAL AGE April 2020
the economist Jeffrey Sachs, who was
then working to reshape “transition econ-
omies” in the region, coined the term
“shock therapy” for these policies. The
socioeconomic reëngineering was bru-
tal—salaries and public services col-
lapsed—and, in 1998, Russia’s financial
system imploded. Only a few months
before this disaster, The Economist was
still hailing the “dynamism, guile and
vision” of Anatoly Chubais, the politician
whose sale of Russia’s assets to oligarchs
had by then made him the most despised
public figure in the country. In 2009, a
study in The Lancet estimated that
“shock therapy” had led to the premature
The reputation, central to
much Cold War liberalism,
of England as a model liberal
society also lies shattered
amid the calamity of Brexit
deaths of millions of Russians, mostly
men of employment age. The Economist
was unrepentant, insisting that “Russia’s
tragedy was that reform came too slowly,
not too fast.”
“Who can trust Trump’s America?”
a recent Economist cover story asked,
forlornly surveying the ruins of the Pax
Americana. The political earthquakes of
the past few years perhaps make it lone-
lier at the top for the magazine than at
any other time in its history; the articles
celebrating last year’s anniversary were
presented as a manifesto for “renewing
liberalism.” Ten years before, when the
financial crisis erupted, the magazine
overcame its primal distrust of govern-
ment intervention to endorse bank bail-
outs, arguing that it was “a time to put
dogma and politics to one side.” It also
continued to defend neoliberal policies,
on the basis that “the people running the
system, not the system itself, are to
blame.” Now, finally chastened, if not by
the financial crisis then by its grisly polit-
ical upshot, the magazine has conceded
that “liberals have become too comfort-
able with power” and “wrapped up in
preserving the status quo.” Its anniver-
sary manifesto touted a “liberalism for
the people.” But soul-searching has its
limits: the manifesto admiringly quoted
Milton Friedman on the need to be “radi-
cal,” resurrected John McCain’s fantasy
of a “league of democracies” as an alter-
native to the United Nations, and scoffed
at millennials who don’t wish to fight for
the old “liberal world order.” A more
recent cover story warns “American
bosses” about Elizabeth Warren’s plans
to tackle inequality, and revives
Friedmanite verities about how “creative
destruction” and “the dynamic power of
markets” can best help “middle-class
Americans.”
The Economist is no doubt sincere
about wanting to be more “woke.” It
seeks more female readers, according to
a 2016 briefing for advertisers, and is
anxious to dispel the idea that the maga-
zine is “an arrogant, dull handbook for
outdated men.” Whereas, in 2002, it
rushed to defend Bjørn Lomborg, the
global-warming skeptic, this fall it dedi-
cated an entire issue to the climate emer-
gency. Still, The Economist may find it
more difficult than much of the old
Anglo-American establishment to check
its privilege. Its limitations arise not only
from a defiantly nondiverse and paro-
chial intellectual culture but also from a
house style too prone to contrarianism.
A review, in 2014, of a book titled “The
Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and
the Making of American Capitalism”
accused its author of not being “objec-
tive,” complaining that “almost all the
blacks in his book are victims, almost all
the whites villains.” Following an outcry,
the magazine retracted the review. How-
ever, a recent assessment of Brazil’s pri-
vatization drive—“Jair Bolsonaro is a
dangerous populist, with some good
ideas”—suggests that it is hard to tone
down what the journalist James Fallows
has described as the magazine’s “Oxford
Union argumentative style,” a stance too
“cocksure of its rightness and superior-
ity.”
This insouciance, bred by the cer-
tainty of having made the modern world,
cannot seem anything but incongruous
in the rancorously polarized societies of
Britain and the United States. The two
blond demagogues currently leading the
world’s two oldest “liberal” democracies
bespeak a ruling class that—through a
global financial crisis, rising inequality,
and ill-conceived military interventions
in large parts of the Middle East, Central
Asia, and North Africa—has squandered
its authority and legitimacy. The reputa-
tion, central to much Cold War liberal-
ism, of England as a model liberal society
also lies shattered amid the calamity of
Brexit.
For the young, in particular, old
frameworks of liberalism seem to be a
constraint on the possibilities of politics.
It should be remembered, however, that
these new critics of liberalism seek not to
destroy but to fulfill its promise of indi-
vidual freedom. They are looking, just as
John Dewey was, for suitable modes of
politics and economy in a world radically
altered by capitalism and technology—a
liberalism for the people, not just for
their networked rulers. In that sense, it is
not so much liberalism that is in crisis as
its self-styled campaigners, who are
seen, not unreasonably, as complicit in
unmaking the modern world.
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ECONOMY
Huawei Doubles Down on Europe
With New Factory
The France-based plant will be the company’s first manufacturing plant outside of China.
Eleanor Albert
@eleanor_ma
H uawei, the world’s largest
telecommunications
equipment producer, has
announced plans to build its first
manufacturing plant in Europe. The
$225 million production hub, set to be
based in France, will create an estimated
500 jobs. The plant, the first outside of
China, will first focus on radio
equipment for 5G to serve all of
continental Europe. Liang Hua,
Huawei’s chairman, said “Our group’s
activities are worldwide and for this we
need a global industrial footprint.”
The announcement of this new
plant is but one part in the Chinese
telecom giant’s ongoing expansion, with
Europe increasingly presented as a 5G
battleground. Despite being the site of
Huawei’s European plant, the French
government has yet to articulate a clear
position on the company. Meanwhile,
France’s largest mobile operator,
Orange, opted to partner with Noki and
Ericsson for 5G development. Other
French providers, including Bouygues
Telecom and SFR, already rely on
Huawei, though they have not finalized
26 | GLOBAL AGE April 2020
5G partnerships.
The United States has sought to
convince its allies and partners, particu-
larly in Europe, to be reticent of Huawei
over national security concerns. In 2018,
top U.S. intelligence officials shared
their distrust of both Huawei and ZTE in
testimony before the U.S. Senate Foreign
Relations Committee. FBI Director
Christopher Wray said, “We’re deeply
concerned about the risks of allowing
any company or entity that is beholden
to foreign governments that don’t share
our values to gain positions of power
inside our telecommunications net-
works.”
Over the past two years, this suspi-
cion of Huawei has grown. In May 2019,
the U.S. government added Huawei to an
Entity List, which effectively banned the
company from purchasing components
and parts from American firms. Earlier
this year, after the U.K. agreed to let
Huawei bid for a limited role in the coun-
try’s 5G development, U.S. Secretary of
State Mike Pompeo echoed claims that
Huawei products and networks provide
the Chinese government with a
“backdoor” that could be used for espio-
nage. “Our view of Huawei has been that
putting it in your system creates real risk.
This is an extension – an extension of the
Chinese Communist Party with a legal
requirement to hand over information to
the Chinese Communist Party,” Pompeo
said to reporters while in London. Last
month while in Lisbon, the U.S. deputy
assistant secretary for cyber, interna-
tional communications and information
policy at the State Department encour-
aged European officials to pursue 5G
deals with Ericsson, Nokia, or Samsung,
presenting them as on par with Huawei
in terms of advanced technology, with-
out the security risks.
Despite U.S. reservations and pres-
sure, European countries and businesses
have not wholesale shunned Huawei’s
advances. In addition to the U.K., a num-
ber of European countries have opted to
let Huawei compete for 5G contracts. For
example, Huawei won contracts with
providers in Hungary and Spain to build
part of their future wireless networks.
Germany, the Netherlands, and Portugal
are among member states that have
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s Huawei’s rotating CEO Eric Xu
expressed that Huawei can bid for their
5G development, but that all firms would
be subject to EU and national regula-
tions.
In addition to extensive advertising
campaigns in Europe, Huawei partici-
pated in a public, live-streamed debate
in October 2019 in the European Parlia-
ment to boost transparency and con-
vince member states. Still, the EU issued
details earlier this year about its tools to
secure 5G networks to protect its econ-
omy and citizens, signaling to member
states they should better coordinate
their cybersecurity approaches. The
European Union and the U.K. appear to
have adopted the notion that they can
implement measures to mitigate risk by
promoting market diversity with numer-
ous members and avoiding dependence
on any vendor deemed high-risk. And
yet, debate remains on how to reconcile
the benefits and shortcomings of doing
business with Huawei moving forward.
This debate also knows no geo-
graphic bounds. Countries in other
regions — in Africa, Asia, and Latin Amer-
ica — will need to make their own assess-
ments of how to weigh their capacity to
mitigate risks from Huawei partnership
with the gains of upgrading to a 5G econ-
omy
Pakistan-based organizations like
Lashkar-e-Taiba or Jaish-e-
Mohammed, which claimed responsibil-
ity for a suicide attack last year in the
Indian-controlled portion of Kashmir,
have been banned only to be resurrected
under new names.
“Radicalization and terrorism
remain very real threats, even if the main
perpetrators of terror have become shad-
globalagemagazine.kipscss.net
ows of their former selves,” Kugelman
said.
Amir Rana, executive director of the
Islamabad-based Pakistan Institute for
Peace Studies, one of the groups that
released a report on the decreasing
attacks, said the decline was indicative of
the long-haul nature of fighting terror
and those who perpetrate it. He said it
involves years of surveillance, military
counterterrorism offensives, and a
counterterrorism strategy that seeks to
identify and curb funding.
Still, Pakistan has a way to go in mak-
ing the institutional changes necessary
to curb terror financing and the militant
groups still operating, Rana said. Less
than 1 percent of Pakistanis pay taxes,
revenues are routinely undocumented,
and the so-called hawala system of infor-
mally sending money around the globe
still flourishes, all of which bedevils
efforts to curtail terror financing.
Pakistan’s success in tackling terror
is essential amid American attempts to
wind down the war in Afghanistan and
withdraw U.S. troops.
President Donald Trump has
repeatedly expressed a desire to bring
home the roughly 13,000 U.S. soldiers
still in Afghanistan and last November
gave his peace envoy, ZalmayKhalilzad,
the go-ahead to resume talks with the
Taliban. Last week, the insurgent group
handed Khalilzad a seven- to 10-day
cease fire offer, which could pave the way
for American troops to withdraw and
jumpstart peace negotiations between
Afghans on both sides of the conflict.
Khalilzad said previously that any
agreement will require the Taliban to
abandon terror groups like al-Qaeda
with which they have longstanding ties
that some analysts say could prove diffi-
cult to sever.
Links still bind the militant groups
operating between Pakistan and Afghan-
istan, according to Abdullah Khan, of the
Pakistan Institute for Conflict and Secu-
rity Studies, which also released a report
documenting the declining attacks in
Pakistan.
Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subconti-
nent, which emerged in 2014 as a rival to
the Islamic State affiliate that set up shop
in Afghanistan the same year, might be
vastly degraded, yet it still has cells in
both Pakistan and Afghanistan, as does
IS.
Earlier this month, 15 people,
including a police official tracking mili-
tants, died in an attack on a mosque in
Pakistan’s southwestern Baluchistan
province, for which the IS affiliate
claimed responsibility.
Last month, police raided the safe
house of a cell of al-Qaeda in the Indian
Subcontinent that had just moved into
the Punjab city of Gujranwala from the
southern port city of Karachi. They dis-
covered a trove of documents, weapons
and propaganda material.
A police charge sheet seen by The
Associated Press said the five men who
were arrested “possessed weapons, sui-
cide jackets, hate material, laptop, print-
ing machine, printing material etc. and
funds and receipts to achieve al-Qaeda’s
organizational objectives.”
The police document went on to say
that the cell was sending money to al-
Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent’s
branch in Afghanistan.
April 2020 GLOBAL AGE | 27
ENVIRONMENT
How Nepal Is Protecting
Its Wildlife
Nepal makes progress in wildlife conservation but it risks becoming a transit hub.
Kamal Dev Bhattarai and Sujata Karki
Kathmandu, Nepal
E very year, March 3 is celebrated
as World Wildlife Day; this year’s
theme is “sustaining all life on
Earth.” It’s a good time to look back at
how Nepal has set an example in
conservation through creating a
favorable environment for wildlife.
According to the National
Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan
(NBSAP) designed for the period 2014-
2020, a total of 118 ecosystems have
been identified in Nepal. “The issue of
protected areas is one of the few sub-
sectors that have made impressive prog-
ress in biodiversity conservation in the
last few decades. The country’s protected
area grew by more than 30 times in
between 1973 and 2010. Currently,
23.23 percent of the country’s total land
area is under protection, which is one of
the highest in Asia,” according to the
NBSAP.
According to government data, the
populations of some flagship species,
including tigers and rhinos, have
increased in recent years, even as wild-
life crimes decrease. The zero poaching
of rhinos since 2011 and impressive
28 | GLOBAL AGE April 2020
increase of the tiger population is a case
in point. By achieving zero poaching,
Nepal has shown an example to other
countries that it can be done.
In an amazing show of progress for
wildlife, Nepal is on track to become the
first country in the world to double its
wild tiger population since 2010, accord-
ing to WWF, a global conservation body.
According to results from the country’s
most recent tiger survey, there are now
an estimated 235 wild tigers, nearly
twice the number of tigers counted in
2009, WWF said.
This success has been achieved due
to the coordinated and concerted efforts
made by various organizations, includ-
ing governmental mechanisms. There
are various coordination teams tirelessly
working from the top level to the grass-
roots. Currently, Community Based
Anti-Poaching Units (CBAPUs) have
been formed in various regions of the
country to control killings and trade of
wildlife.
A close study of five years of data
provided by the Central Investigation
Bureau (CIB) of Nepal clearly shows that
wildlife crime is on a downward trend,
which shows that conservation efforts
are yielding positive results. In fiscal
year 2013-14, 109 cases of wildlife crimes
were recorded; that dropped to 69 in FY
2018-19. In the last 10 years, 693 crimi-
nals were arrested for wildlife crimes by
the Nepal Police, 661 males and 32
females.
Though Nepal is observing zero
poaching of rhino and wildlife are pro-
tected, the illegal trade in wild animals’
body parts is still rampant in the country.
According to government officials, rack-
eteers are using Kathmandu as a transit
route for smuggling wildlife parts to
other countries, mainly India and China.
Similarly, though there has been prog-
ress in the protection of tigers and rhi-
nos, killings of other animals continue.
From FY 1998-99 to FY 2017-18, 371
cases were filed against 761 Nepalis, 22
Chinese, two Saudis, two Americans,
and 44 Indians for wildlife crimes. Police
confiscated birds, leopard skins, red
panda skins, rhino horns, pangolin
scales, bear gall bladders, tiger skins,
musk pods, and elephant tusks, among
globalagemagazine.kipscss.net
others. According to the CIB, they gener-
ally seize poachers along with different
wildlife parts in groups. In other words,
wildlife crime is known an organized
crime in Nepal and wildlife parts are
often smuggled alongside illegal drugs.
Rhinos (Rhinoceros unicornis),
tigers (Pantheratigristigris), musk deer
(Moschuschrysogaster), and pangolins
(Maniscrassicaudata) are some of the
species that are especially at risk from
poaching, according to government offi-
cials. Nepal has strict legal provisions for
wildlife crimes but many people are still
unaware of that. They can become
involved in wildlife criminal acts both
knowingly and unknowingly.
According to National Parks and
Wildlife Conservation Act (1973), penal-
ties range from 500,000 to 1 million
Nepali rupees ($4,300 to $8,600) for
those found guilty of trading wildlife
parts such rhino horns, deer musk, snow
leopard skins, or keeping the carcasses of
other protected wild animals. Those who
violate the law can also receive jail sen-
tences ranging from five to 15 years — or
both jailtime and a fine — for violating
the law.
Bel Bahadur Pandely, an informa-
tion officer at the CIB, said achieving
zero poaching of rhino and the increase
in the tiger population both clearly show
that Nepal is achieving progress in wild-
life conservation. But he acknowledges
that controlling the smugglers who are
globalagemagazine.kipscss.net
using Nepal as a transit route has been a
major challenge for government agen-
cies.
Madhav Khadka, senior manager at
WWF’s Wildlife Trade Monitoring
Department, said that wildlife crime has
been decreasing in Nepal. He said, “We
are working for wildlife protection [by]
combating crime in transportation [and]
Strong collaboration
between international NGOs
and local NGOs, government
agencies, and local
communities has been the
key factor that has broadly
curbed poaching and illegal
activities, making Nepal an
admirable example of
wildlife conservation
empowering community people and
women journalists and the education
sector as well.”
Khadka shares that although poach-
ing is decreasing, the transit and trade of
wildlife parts remains a major challenge
for Nepal. He further added that Nepal is
used by many international criminals,
with the involvement of national crimi-
nals, as a transaction point for wildlife.
Bishnu Shrestha, a spokesperson at
the Department of National Parks and
Wildlife Conservation, said the ratio of
wildlife crime is decreasing in Nepal due
to the coordination mechanism under
the National Tiger Conservation Com-
mittee, which links Community Based
Anti-Poaching Units all the way up to the
prime minister’s office. According to
Shrestha, security forces – mainly the
Nepal Police and Nepal Army — are play-
ing a vital role in the conservation of wild-
life in Nepal.
With the purpose of protecting wild-
life, the National Wildlife Crime Control
Committee was formed in 2010. The
committee coordinates among different
agencies such as Customs, the Ministry
of Home Affairs, the Ministry of Defense,
the Nepal Police, and the Nepal Army to
prevent and control wildlife poaching
and trade. The Wildlife Crime Control
Bureau was established at the center and
28 district levels.
Strong collaboration between inter-
national NGOs and local NGOs, govern-
ment agencies, and local communities
has been the key factor that has broadly
curbed poaching and illegal activities,
making Nepal an admirable example of
wildlife conservation.
Nepal’s success in wildlife conserva-
tion is appreciated at the international
level as well. Nepal’s achievements were
recognized by the Convention on Inter-
national Trade in Endangered Species of
Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) through a
Secretary-General’s Certificate of Com-
mendation in 2014. This acknowledged
Nepal’s innovative measures introduced
to combat wildlife crime, including
strong interagency collaboration and the
deployment of combined patrols of rang-
ers and the Nepal Army in protected
areas supported by Community-Based
Anti-Poaching Units outside of parks.
Showing its zero tolerance for the illegal
wildfire trade, Nepal’s government in
2017 burnt more than 4,000 confiscated
wildlife parts.
Despite the progress in wildlife con-
versation, there are still challenges. To
control the illegal transboundary transit
and trade of wildlife parts, there is a need
for regional cooperation. Mainly, Nepal,
India, and China should work closely to
control poaching and the illegal wildlife
trade. Similarly, there is a need for col-
laboration among the three tiers of gov-
ernment, with sound policy in place.
More than that, there is a need for mas-
sive public awareness about wildlife pro-
tection. Nepal has an international obli-
gation to protect wildlife because it is a
party to the Convention on Biological
Diversity so it has to work with interna-
tional stakeholders as well.
April 2020 GLOBAL AGE | 29
FLASHPOINTS
Will Climate Change Derail the
‘Asian Century’?
Climate change could bring an untimely end to the story of a rising Asia.
Andreas Unterstaller
Singapore
T here is a glaring disconnect
between climate science and the
economic and political narrative
of a rising Asia, set to dominate the 21st
century. Climate projections now point
toward global warming far beyond the
1.5 degree Celsius danger line identified
by science. If that happens, Asia’s
economic hotspots will be badly
affected. This could knock the region off
its growth trajectory and put an
untimely end to the Asian century.
Just a few years ago, no one could be
faulted for predicting that the 21st cen-
tury would be Asia’s. If anything, it
seemed like a safe bet. And, yes, by all
fundamental measures, economic and
political power has shifted eastward.
According to the World Economic
Forum, Asia’s combined GDP is set to
surpass the combined GDP of the rest of
the world in purchasing power parity
terms this year.
However, there is one thing that has
not been factored in: climate change. If
you read the literature about the Asian
century, you will rarely come across this
term. The world now is already 1°C hot-
ter than in pre-industrial times. There is
little doubt that the global average tem-
perature will climb further. If far-
reaching greenhouse gas reduction mea-
sures are taken now, it may be possible
to hold the increase below 2°C. How-
ever, it is doubtful whether this will be
achieved. If you sum up the current emis-
sion reduction pledges made under the
Paris agreement, warming of 3°C or
more by mid-century seems likely.
This will have a profound impact on
the economic and political balance of the
world as the 21st century progresses.
The wealth of nations is not just built on
comparative advantage. Above all, it
rests on stable, predictable, and recur-
ring climatic patterns within a narrow
temperature band. This enables agricul-
tural surplus, trade and long-term
investment. Likewise, access to credit
and insurance depends on predictable
and manageable climate risks. Higher
risk means higher cost of capital, declin-
ing growth rates, a drag on productivity,
falling incomes, and, possibly, political
30 | GLOBAL AGE April 2020
instability.
Climate change is a formidable chal-
lenge for all world regions, but particu-
larly for South, Southeast, and parts of
East Asia where temperatures and
humidity are already high and destruc-
tive weather events are already more
prevalent and severe than elsewhere.
Adding more heat to the region’s climate
systems means moving into an
uncharted territory. A recent report from
the International Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) shows that going from
1.5°C to 2°C of global warming makes a
big difference. And, for the moment, 2°C
warming or more is clearly the path the
world is on. The impact will be asymmet-
rical. Asia’s most economically dynamic
and densely populated places will be
heavily affected. More frequent and
extreme heat waves, droughts, and tropi-
cal cyclones will undermine the liveli-
hoods and health of hundreds of millions
and could sap the region of its economic
dynamism.
The IPCC also warns that sea levels
could rise by more than a meter by the
end of the 21st century if carbon emis-
sions do not go down. This would mean
more frequent and severe inundation in
Asia’s densely populated coastal areas,
including megacities like Jakarta, Bang-
kok, and Shanghai, unless huge sums are
spent on coastal protection measures.
Some places have adaptation plans to
prepare for these changes. Singapore
alone expects to spend S$100 billion or
more on protecting itself from the rising
sea. The city-state already requires new
building sites to be 4 meters above the
OPINION
Pakistan’s Uniform Curriculum
May Fall Short
The Imran Khan government sees uniformity as a way to address issues of equity
Fawad Kaiser
United Kingdom
W hile Pakistan’s schools and
universities remained aloof
and untouched by any
education-reform policy, their teaching
to a great extent became purely
traditional and formal, and they were
rapidly losing touch with real life. It has
been a long-standing vision of the
current prime minister, Imran Khan, to
provide a strong theoretical framework
for how to introduce a uniform national
curriculum. Thus for the first time in
Pakistan, a uniform national curriculum
has begun to take a modern shape, with
current sea level, with stricter require- the addition of education on values and
ments for critical infrastructure. Less character-building.
affluent and bigger Asian nations won’t The new uniform national curricu-
be able to afford such measures and will lum will overhaul the country’s educa-
suffer the consequences. The poorest tion system, and will put special empha-
households and communities will be sis on teaching values and character-
worst affected. building of the society. The major com-
Data from the International Energy ponents of this emphasis will be critical
Agency show that global energy-related thinking, citizenship, innovation and
greenhouse gas emissions would have use of technology. Once the uniform
fallen significantly last year, if emissions curriculum is introduced, it will allow
had not grown strongly in Asia. Despite madrassa students to get the same edu-
an encouraging expansion of electricity cation as offered by the private and pub-
from renewable sources in countries like lic educational institutes.
China and India, coal consumption in There has been a demise in the quan-
Asia is still on the rise as energy demand tity and quality of education in Pakistan,
keeps growing. This means that Asia is and of social accessibility to it, for many
not just highly vulnerable to climate years. The division of Pakistani society
change, but also partly in control of how into privileged and underprivileged
bad it gets. makes the implementation of a uniform
Given current emission trends, national curriculum an event of obvious
there is simply no way for other parts of importance.
the world to compensate for the pro- Previous governments also gave
jected increase in Asia. Keeping the thought to implementing changes in
world below the 2°C mark requires a educational policies but they bowed
rapid shift toward renewable energy down against the pressure from the elite
sources, such as solar and wind, and a class and they have been blamed for
strong push for energy efficiency. Con- extinguishing the prospects of reforms
tinuing on a path of high-carbon growth even though such reforms were dis-
and taking care of global warming and its cussed in parliament.
effects later would be wrong and costly. The government plans to imple-
Global warming and its effects make ment this reform next month, and pro-
the 21st century a century of unpredict- vided it is launched as promised, this
ability and, with it, the Asian century will end the decades-old disparities
becomes uncertain. If we do not get a among different educational systems in
firm grip on greenhouse gas emissions the country. Children in every province,
soon, it will be no one’s century. in cities as well as rural areas, across
gender and across socioeconomic status
l
Andreas Unterstaller is a transport and environment expert at the European
Environment Agency in Copenhagen. He holds a Master in Public Administration will study the same things at more or less
degree from Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy.
the same time and will be tested in the
globalagemagazine.kipscss.net globalagemagazine.kipscss.net
s Imran Khan’s government has done little to combat the Covid-19 outbreak.
same way.
Education Minister Shafqat
Mahmood says the key targets of the
comprehensive plan is to end the incon-
sistencies among the public and private
schools and madrassas.
Arguably, education as a whole has
suffered. What is remarkable is that the
current government has considered
reforming educational uniformity when
the Pakistani elite are already reacting
against the idea. Resistance and opposi-
tion sentiments seen among the elite
class against the educational reforms
merely expose their conviction that uni-
form learning is a dangerous thing in the
hands of the lower social class, seminar-
ies and madrassas.
The government sees uniformity as
a way to address issues of equity. The
problem is that a uniform curriculum,
however it is implemented, may not
reduce disparities.
Children have different socio-
economic backgrounds, and they come
from different households where par-
ents have different levels of education.
They have different endowments, they
have different language skills, they come
from different cultural and religious
backgrounds, and they live in very differ-
ent geographical environments. The
same curriculum, the same books and
even the same examinations will not
reduce disparities. In fact, it could even
increase disparities.
Since education began, there has
always been much debate about what
children need to learn and how they
should be taught. It is quite clear that the
current government of Pakistan is look-
ing more at conformity/uniformity
rather than creativity and diversity. The
new national curriculum and assess-
ment initiatives are an example of this,
as is the constant push toward trying to
improve equity.
Equity issues have to be addressed
while remaining within the framework
of the diversity of circumstances, needs,
abilities and ambitions of children. A
uniform curriculum may not do any-
thing here. In fact, to the contrary, it may
exacerbate some of these equity issues.
Countries need creative, entrepre-
neurial talents, able to create value for
others. A country’s education system is
an effective machine that could instill
what the government wants students to
learn, and it seems the proposed revolu-
tionary plan is not nurturing creativity.
This may result in Pakistan having a pop-
ulation with similar skills on a narrow
spectrum.
Revolutionary educational reform
is about to change the face of Pakistan. It
will finally force the state to take seri-
ously the provision of education,
because industry will require much more
than limited reading skills acquired
through a moral catechism. However,
progress in establishing a new education
system in Pakistan could prove to be a
perilous pursuit.
l DrFawad Kaiser is a professor, Fellowship Diplomate of the American Board of
Psychotherapists, and a member of the International Association of Forensic
Criminologists. He is currently a consultant forensic psychiatrist in the UK.
April 2020 GLOBAL AGE | 31
INDIA OF NARENDRA
The Rising Domestic Danger to
India’s Foreign Policy Under Modi
Whether New Delhi likes it or not, it is becoming increasingly clear that domestic issues
are affecting ties with its neighbors and partners and that the costs of this are increasing.
Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan
New Delhi, India
O
ver the past few months, it has
become increasingly clear that
India’s domestic issues are
increasingly threatening to impact
India’s foreign policy. Issues such as the
Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and
India’s actions in Kashmir are beginning
to affect India’s relations with its
neighbors, major Islamic countries such
as Iran and Indonesia, and strategic
partners such as the United States. Last
week’s violence in Delhi, in particular, is
drawing negative attention to India’s
internal matters and could possibly
affect its reputation.
In an exceptional move, and a first
for India, the Geneva-based Office of the
High Commissioner for Human Rights
(OHCHR) has said that it was planning
to file an application on the CAA in the
Indian Supreme Court. The UN Higher
Commissioner for Human Rights
Michelle Bachelet subsequently filed an
Intervention Application against the
CAA. The MEA responded to this by say-
ing that the CAA is an internal issue of
India and “no foreign party has any locus
32 | GLOBAL AGE April 2020
standi on issues pertaining to India’s
sovereignty.”
Iran is another recent critic, and
another surprising one too, and it was
vocal in condemning the communal vio-
lence in Delhi, especially the targeting of
India’s Muslim citizens. Iranian Foreign
Minister Javad Zarif had a tough tweet
on the Delhi violence, saying, “Iran con-
demns the wave of organized violence
against Indian Muslims. For centuries,
Iran has been a friend of India. We urge
Indian authorities to ensure the well-
being of ALL Indians & not let senseless
thuggery prevail. Path forward lies in
peaceful dialogue and rule of law.”
New Delhi did not respond kindly to
the foreign minister’s comments.
Responding to a question on the Iranian
foreign minister’s tweet, the MEA
spokesperson stated that India had sum-
moned Iranian Ambassador Ali Chegeni
and “a strong protest was lodged against
the unwarranted remarks made by the
Iranian Foreign Minister. It was con-
veyed that his selective and tendentious
characterization of recent events in
Delhi are not acceptable. We do not
expect such comments from a country
like Iran.” Apparently, it was made clear
to the Iranian ambassador that this was
an internal issue of India and that Ira-
nian comments were not appreciated.
It is strange that the Iranian foreign
minister’s particularly harsh tweet came
just a few days after India joined hands
with Iran to speed up the Chabahar port
development. While Iran is known to
champion the rights of Muslim minori-
ties in other countries, it was a bit incon-
gruous considering that Iran has said
little about China’s behavior towards its
Muslim Uyghur minority, large numbers
of whom have been placed in concentra-
tion camps simply because of their
Islamic faith. Of course, nations are not
always consistent in their policies, and
Iran fears China far more than it fears
India.
While Iran is not a particularly stra-
tegic partner for India and can possibly
be ignored, others are more difficult to
dismiss. Indonesia, an important part-
ner in India’s Act East and Indo-Pacific
globalagemagazine.kipscss.net
strategy, has also voiced serious con-
cerns about the violence in Delhi.
Muhammadiyah, Indonesia’s second
largest Muslim group, expressed dis-
quiet about the violent clashes between
Hindus and Muslims on account of the
CAA. Muhammadiyah secretary-general
Abdul Mu’thi while denouncing the vio-
lence, said that the violence was “clearly
against human rights principles.” A day
after the violence, hashtag
#ShameOnYouIndia was among the top
trending topics on Twitter in Indonesia,
and as many as 46,000 tweets were
related to the Delhi violence, many con-
demning the violence.
This was mirrored by some of the
government reactions as well. There was
an unusually strong statement issued by
the Indonesian Religious Affairs Minis-
try condemning the religious violence in
Delhi. Within hours of this statement,
the Indonesian foreign ministry made a
s Hindu mob sets Delhi mosque on fire, places Hanuman flag on top. Shops within and around the mosque’s compound also looted by extremists.
statement saying that “The Government
of Indonesia has complete confidence
that the Government of India will be able
to manage the situation and ensure the
harmonious relations among its reli-
gious communities. Moreover, both
countries share similar characteristics,
as pluralistic countries that uphold dem-
ocratic values and tolerance.” The Indo-
nesian foreign ministry also called in the
Indian Ambassador to Jakarta, Pradeep
Rawat, seeking details on the Delhi vio-
lence.
Of course, this pales in comparison
to any damage that may be caused to
India’s ties to the United States, its most
important strategic partner. Despite the
successful Trump visit to India, this
globalagemagazine.kipscss.net
The Government of
Indonesia has complete
confidence that the
Government of India will be
able to manage the situation
and ensure the harmonious
relations among its religious
communities. Moreover,
both countries share similar
characteristics, as pluralistic
countries that uphold
democratic values and
tolerance
bears watching. India’s foreign minister
and its diplomats have done a good job
explaining its position in the United
States after the revoking Article 370 in
Jammu and Kashmir, but India’s
approach after the CAA has been quite
poor. For instance, Indian Foreign Min-
ister Jaishankar’s cancellation of meet-
ings with U.S. House Foreign Affairs
Committee (HFAC) because Pramila
Jayapal was part of the delegation possi-
bly did not help. In fact, the resolution in
the Congress, seeking a return to nor-
malcy in Kashmir, sponsored by Jayapal
found 10 additional legislators ready to
co-sponsor it right after the cancellation
of the meeting.
Last week’s violence in the capital
sparked new concerns in the United
States with several leading names from
the House Foreign Affairs Committee,
the U.S. Commission on International
Religious Freedom (USCIRF) and oth-
ers, including Democrat presidential
candidate Bernie Sanders, expressing
serious concerns. Once again, the MEA
spokesperson called these statements
“irresponsible.” Raveesh Kumar, the
MEA spokesperson went on to state that
“Our law enforcement agencies are work-
ing on the ground to prevent violence
and ensure restoration of confidence and
normalcy. Senior representatives of the
government have been involved in that
process. Prime Minister has publicly
appealed for peace and brotherhood.” A
lot of India’s diplomatic bandwidth now
has to be used for fighting these fires
than for improving a vital relationship.
India can continue to dismiss these
criticisms and concerns as unnecessary
interference in its internal affairs, but it
is unlikely this would help much. Even
India’s well-wishers are beginning to
worry. This will eventually be expensive
if these problems are not resolved, espe-
cially because New Delhi will be wasting
effort in explaining itself and creating
unnecessary tensions and discomfort in
critical relationships. Of course, the
most important reason for resolving
these problems is that India should be a
society in which no section feels perse-
cuted and differences are resolved
peacefully, which it is difficult to say
right now.
l Dr. Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan is Distinguished Fellow and Head of the Nuclear
and Space Policy Initiative at the Observer Research Foundation (ORF), one of
India’s leading think tanks.
April 2020 GLOBAL AGE | 33
AFGHAN PEACE
Why Afghanistan Is America’s
Greatest Strategic Disaster
Pompeo’s plan to make peace with the resurgent Taliban is a sad reminder of all that
went wrong in Afghanistan—and how it could have been otherwise.
s Soldiers lift a coffin into a van during the dignified transfer of two U.S. soldiers killed in Afghanistan at Dover Air Force Base in Dover, Delaware, on Feb. 10.
Michael Hirsh
@michaelphirsh
W ay back in January 2002, a
few weeks after the Taliban
fled terrified from Kabul,
Kandahar, and other major cities, I went
to Afghanistan to report on the
aftermath. In just seven weeks, the
world’s lone superpower had pounded
Afghanistan’s Islamist occupiers into the
ground, literally, with B-52s dropping
massive laser-targeted bombs that
seemed, to the hapless Taliban, to come
from nowhere. It was the moment that
“the nineteenth century met the twenty-
first century,” an ebullient Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld later wrote.
As I drove around, there wasn’t a Taliban
fighter in sight, and the country seemed
to lay wide open, practically begging the
Americans to occupy it.
What’s keeping the peace? I asked
the warlords I met. Pretty much the same
answer came back over and over, often
preceded by a gap-toothed grin: “B-52
justice,” said one man, pointing upward.
Eighteen bloody years later, the
conventional wisdom in Washington is
that Afghanistan was always destined to
34 | GLOBAL AGE April 2020
be a failure. When Secretary of State
Mike Pompeo tweeted Friday that the
United States had reached “an under-
standing with the Taliban on a signifi-
cant reduction in violence across #Af-
ghanistan” and announced that peace
talks would soon begin in earnest,
almost no one complained about the
relegitimization of the Taliban, who will
now have a powerful voice in ruling the
country and may even take it over again.
After all, it was inevitable, wasn’t it?
No, in fact, it wasn’t, and some very
smart strategists will tell you so. But you
certainly won’t hear that from the many
columnists, pundits, and scholars who
blindly supported the diversion into
Iraq—the main reason for the disaster of
Afghanistan— and to this day can’t admit
that they became what President George
W. Bush’s former spokesman Scott
McClellan called “complicit enablers” in
possibly the worst strategic misdirection
in American history.
Yet some military historians and
thinkers, including David Kilcullen, the
author of a new book called The Dragons
and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned
to Fight the West, argue persuasively
that Afghanistan—while it never was
going to be easy—was a winnable con-
flict. At the very least, Washington could
have stabilized the country with far less
investment of time, money, and blood,
had it simply paid attention.
“People say we took our eye off the
ball. But we didn’t even realize there was
a ball,” Kilcullen, a career soldier who
served in both Iraq and Afghanistan and
was chief strategist for counterterrorism
coordination at the State Department,
said in an interview. Around the time the
Taliban were beginning to creep back
down from their mountainous hiding
places in the fall of 2003 to consolidate
the Quetta Shura, the Taliban leaders’
council across the border in Pakistan, the
Bush administration was in panic mode
some 1,400 miles away in Iraq. U.S.
troops there were fighting an insurgency
the Bush administration failed to antici-
pate, after no weapons of mass destruc-
tion or links to Osama bin Laden—that
is, to 9/11—ever materialized. Rumsfeld,
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who had blithely decided to keep what he
called a “small footprint” in Afghanistan
because he didn’t like the idea of nation-
building (his boss, Bush, had cam-
paigned against it in 2000) was by then
paying Afghanistan no mind at all.
The Afghans I met, meanwhile,
were desperate for foreign intervention,
knowing the consequences of U.S. with-
drawal in the previous era, when Wash-
ington funded the mujahideen against
the Soviets and then simply left (and the
Taliban moved in). As Ismail Qasimyar,
the head of the Loya Jirga commission,
told me when I was there, Afghans saw
that “a window of opportunity had been
opened for them” and that Afghanistan
was now “a baby of the international
community.”
“Everybody knows who the real
muscle is,” Sayed Hamed Gailani, the
son and spokesman for a powerful war-
lord in the south, Pir Gailani, said at the
time. “I want the Americans here as
much as possible to give me back my
country.”
The moment was ripe, because just
about every non-Taliban warlord was
open for business to the CIA—happy to
work with the Americans in exchange for
payoffs. “The Taliban were scattered.
Many of them went home,” Kilcullen
said. “Gradually they went to Pakistan
and formed the Quetta Shura. By 2004
the insurgency begins, and it starts to get
really bad by 2005. If we hadn’t invaded
Iraq when things started to go bad, and
in the early phase had a much more
engaged political stance in Afghanistan
… but it was basically ignored until
[Barack] Obama got elected.”
And by the time President Obama
and his team debated what to do in the
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early 2010s, matters may have gone too
far, especially after the Taliban took the
city of Kunduz in 2015, surging back to
threaten the urban areas and the Kabul
government itself.
Indeed, what gets lost in discussions
of the now-infamous “Afghanistan
Papers”—the not-so-secret Pentagon
history of the 18-year Afghan war
revealed by the Washington Post late
last year—is that Afghanistan was never
just one long continuous history. Instead
the conflict had at least two distinct
phases: one in which the United States
under Bush diverted most of its
resources and energy elsewhere, sending
even critical stabilizing U.S. forces like
Pashto- and Dari-speaking special ops
units to Iraq, and a second phase in
which Washington abruptly awakened
to the Taliban’s return and recklessly
threw money and troops at a problem
that had already metastasized out of
control.
“The Bush administration made
three fundamental early errors in
Afghanistan,” said James Dobbins, who
served as Bush’s first envoy to post-
Taliban Afghanistan and later lamented
to me that Washington had turned
Afghanistan into “the most under-
resourced nation-building effort in his-
tory.”
“First was believing that a devas-
tated country with no national army or
police could secure its territory and popu-
lation unaided,” Dobbins said in an
email Friday. “Second was the failure to
engage those elements of the Taliban,
including its top leadership, that were
prepared to lay down their arms.
“Third was not understanding that
while Pakistan had ceased supporting
the Taliban government after 9/11, it had
not ceased to support the Taliban move-
ment. By the time these failings were
rectified the Taliban had regrouped,
rearmed and, operating from its Paki-
stan safe haven, projected a large scale
insurgency back into Afghanistan.”
Recalcitrance from neighboring
Pakistan was critical to the Taliban’s
return. But much evidence suggests that
the abrupt shift into Iraq also disillu-
sioned the Pakistanis, who until then
had been successfully strong-armed by
Washington into containing the Taliban
somewhat, as well as hunting al-Qaeda
terrorists. Pakistan helped, for instance,
in the capture of 9/11 mastermind Khalid
Shaikh Mohammed in Rawalpindi in
March 2003.
But sensing that Washington was
going to leave the region to its own
devices, Islamabad reverted to past prac-
tices, setting up the Taliban once again
as an Islamist ally. In an interview with
me in the mid 2000s, Mahmud Ali
Durrani, then Pakistan’s ambassador to
the United States, said that just as Bush
was about to invade Iraq, “al-Qaeda was
almost destroyed in an operational
sense. But then al-Qaeda got a vacuum in
Afghanistan [as U.S. focus wandered].
And they got a motivational area in Iraq.
Al-Qaeda rejuvenated.”
All of which suggests, Kilcullen said,
that the so-called war on terror that
began with 9/11 may well have resulted
in the worst strategic mistake made by
any major world leader since Adolf Hit-
ler decided, on the cusp of total victory
over Europe and Great Britain, to turn
and invade the Soviet Union—a decision
that most historians agree cost the Nazi
dictator World War II.
“Hitler thinks England was just
going to fall on its own, and then he
launches into what he thinks is going to
be a cakewalk” against the Soviet Union,
Kilcullen said. “That is literally what
happened to us with Afghanistan and
Iraq. While the battle of Tora Bora [the
mountain redoubt where a fleeing bin
Laden was said to be holed up] was still
going on, the Bush administration was
already starting the planning process for
Iraq.”
Worse, America’s worst enemies
have used the nearly two decades since
9/11 and America’s initial invasion of
Afghanistan—a moment when U.S.
power, manifested as “B-52 justice,” still
inspired awe—to learn innumerable
asymmetric techniques, including IEDs
and the use of small, spread-out cells
that began in Iraq, Kilcullen said.
“In 1991 the Gulf War showed every-
one how not to fight us, but the 2003
invasion of Iraq showed everybody how
to fight us.”
April 2020 GLOBAL AGE | 35
ENERGY
No End in Sight to the Oil Price War
Between Russia and Saudi Arabia
Riyadh and Moscow are both betting they can win a global game of chicken over
production.
s Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, left, and Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G-20 summit in Osaka, Japan, on Jun. 28, 2019.
Reid Standish and Keith Johnson
@ReidStan @KFJ_FP
R ussia and Saudi Arabia, two of
the world’s biggest oil
producers, are each making a
bet that they are better placed than the
other to bear the pain of the oil price war
that they set off over the past week—and
that they can get what they want as a
result.
That raises two big questions: Are
they able to stand the pain? And what
exactly do they want?
One week ago, as Saudi Arabia and
other big OPEC countries and Russia
gathered in Vienna to plan production
cuts that could put a floor under falling
prices due to the outbreak of
coronavirus, crude was trading at more
than $50 a barrel. That’s when Moscow
decided to blow up a three-year-old pact
to manage global oil supplies, refusing to
sign on to Saudi Arabia’s proposed cuts,
sending the price of oil sharply down.
Riyadh responded not with unilat-
eral cuts of its own but in the opposite
direction: It slashed selling prices for its
oil and later announced plans to mas-
sively increase oil output, further driving
36 | GLOBAL AGE April 2020
down the price of oil that was already
plunging due to the disease outbreak and
its toll on the global economy. Oil trades
today around $33 a barrel.
For Russia and Saudi Arabia, both
more or less dependent on oil sales to
fund their national budgets, it was—and
still is—a dangerous game of chicken.
Russia figured that it could afford to
walk away from its informal cooperation
with Saudi Arabia and other OPEC coun-
tries, even if that meant crashing the
price of oil, for a few simple reasons.
First, it has tucked lots of money away in
the years since the last oil-price crash,
giving it a big financial cushion. Second,
the biggest losers in any oil-price war,
Russia figures, will be high-cost U.S.
shale producers; driving the price down
would both inflict economic harm on the
United States and undermine its ability
to wield its favorite tool of international
coercion: sanctions.
“Russia is better positioned to sur-
vive this crisis,” said Sofya Donets, the
chief Russia economist at Renaissance
Capital and a former senior Russian cen-
tral bank officer.
“It will be tough, but they have
enough resources to pull through.”
Russia has spent the last five years
tightening its budget and building up
$550 billion in reserves that officials say
will let it cope with oil prices between
$25 and $30 a barrel for up to a decade, if
need be. On Monday, Russia's finance
ministry said that it would draw from its
$150 billion national wealth fund in
order to supplement the budget even if
oil prices stay low. If crude sells for an
average of $27 a barrel—it was in the
low-$30s most of this week—Russia
would need to draw $20 billion a year
from the fund to balance the budget.
That war chest is the result of Mos-
cow's decision to restructure its econ-
omy after it was pushed into recession in
2015—following the last big one-two
punch of Western sanctions over the
annexation of Crimea and OPEC's deci-
sion to open the spigots the year before.
While efforts to diversify away from
hydrocarbons have largely fallen flat,
Moscow has emphasized stability over
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If Russia threw the first The added benefit of reducing U.S. oil as expensive as Russia does in order to
output could also limit America's ability balance its budget—is playing with fire
punch, Riyadh, like U.S.
baseball legend Billy Martin,
threw the second four
to levy sanctions, such as the ones it
slapped on a unit of Rosneft for doing
business with Venezuela.
by pushing prices down to force Russia
to rejoin the informal OPEC+ grouping.
“It is reckless in some ways—he is
In one way, Russia's right—the shale trying to do a 'shock and awe' attack,
growth in recent years, and in many ways
it is now in a better position to weather
producers, loaded with high-yielding
debt, are a fuse that could blow up the
whole U.S. corporate debt market. If
telling the Russians, 'We mean business,
and if we lose our shirt, you will too, so
you better get back in line,'” said Jean-
the current shock than it was the last
Russia wants to push buttons to cause François Seznec, an expert on oil and
time around.
chaos in the United States, that's a good Saudi Arabia at the Atlantic Council.
There is one problem, though: Rus-
one. That's why some experts are calling Saudi Arabia has cash reserves to
sian President Vladimir Putin needs to
for a very targeted government interven- withstand lower prices, though less than
spend more. Putin rode the oil boom of
tion—not to save the billionaire oil exec- it did in 2014—and less than Russia does
the early 2000s to a strong economy and
utives, but to forestall a wider credit col- today, given its budget imperatives.
huge popularity—but that's a harder act
lapse. Saudi Arabia was already on track for a
to maintain when oil prices plummet.
“If you want to limit bankruptcies fiscal deficit of about $50 billion, and
With economic growth a focal point of
and keep shale from destabilizing credit lower oil revenues will boost that by
Putin's current presidential term—and
markets, you'd want to see the U.S. Trea- another $70 billion, for a $120 billion
with his time in office now possibly
sury look at term lending options to fore- annual hit. The Saudi financial war chest
extending until 2036—big increases in
stall defaults,” said Amy Myers Jaffe, an could take that for about four years at
infrastructure investment and social
energy expert at the Council on Foreign best—but Riyadh is clearly hoping for a
spending are central to his future and
Relations, suggesting ideas like asset- short and sharp oil war.
key to promises to help turn around
backed loan facilities that would prevent “They knew that going in, and they
long-stagnant living standards. Lowered
defaults. “I don't think we should be wor- figured the Russians would give in
incomes and austerity have been the
ried about the oilmen per se, but we quickly, thinking a 30-day war,” Seznec
source of his falling popularity and a key
should be worried about the credit mar- said. “But the Russians think the Saudis
factor behind a January government
kets.” will also give up quickly.”
reshuffle that saw Dmitry Medvedev
But the U.S. shale industry has The stakes for Saudi Arabia go
pushed out as prime minister.
proved resilient in the past, as when beyond short-term survival and touch on
Before oil prices collapsed, the gov-
OPEC tried to smother it in 2014 and transformation. Mohammed bin Salman
ernment planned to tap the wealth fund
2015 with a flood of cheap oil. When has a hugely ambitious plan—Saudi
to help drive a slew of projects central to
prices fall, U.S. production falls, just Vision 2030—to spend billions to turn
its growth agenda. But a prolonged oil
enough to get prices up, and then rigs the Saudi economy from an oil-rentier
price war could force them to go back to
start pumping again—a self-regulating state into something resembling a mod-
the drawing board.
mechanism. While the U.S. oil industry ern economy. But that requires ready
“If there is not another [OPEC+]
may have less cushion now than before, cash, which will be in short supply the
agreement by the middle of the summer
it could still absorb a few body blows. longer the oil-price war lasts.
and oil stabilizes around $30 a barrel,
That's why some puzzle over the latest “I think he is killing his own Saudi
then Russia will have to adjust,” said
Russian effort to kill shale dead. Vision plan,” Seznec said.
Natalia Orlova, the chief economist at
“It's all really strange. If you look at Others see method in the madness.
Alfa-Bank in Moscow.
the numbers and data, it makes no Though prices have collapsed and Saudi
A weaker ruble will offset some of
sense,” said Sergei Guriev, a professor of Arabia is ramping up production and
the budgetary support lost due to low oil
economics at Sciences Po in Paris and exports dramatically, that may not be a
prices, but if oil prices stay low, the Rus-
the former chief economist of the Euro- net loss for the kingdom, said
sian government will need to cut spend-
pean Bank for Reconstruction and AnasAlhajji, an expert on the Saudi oil
ing or raise taxes, possibly both—neither
Development. “The only explanation is sector. Oil prices were already cratering
of which is politically appealing.
that it's a miscalculation by people who due to the virus and Russian intransi-
“The national wealth fund is for use
don't have a comprehensive analysis of gence. By raising exports from 7-plus
in emergency cases. If things look bad,
the markets and don't grasp how the million barrels a day to 9-plus million
they will have to tighten the budget or
American oil industry works.” barrels a day, or even more, Saudi Arabia
increase tax collection,” Orlova said. “In
Many are equally puzzled by the can make the same amount of money as
a way, this would be paid by Russian con-
Saudi decision not only to forgo produc- it would have in a world without Russian
sumers.”
tion cuts but also to slash prices and cooperation, but snatching more market
What Russia wanted when it made
boost production to drive prices even share, Alhajji noted.
this gamble was to kill off U.S. shale oil
further down. If Russia threw the first In the end, both Russia and Saudi
production once and for all. Igor Sechin,
punch, Riyadh, like U.S. baseball legend Arabia are gambling that the other will
the head of Russia's state-controlled oil
Billy Martin, threw the second four. blink first. Both have reasons to think
giant Rosneft and a close confidant of
It seemed a risky move by a young they're right. There are reasons both, or
Putin, has argued that efforts to keep oil
and inexperienced Saudi crown prince, either, could be wrong. Both are plan-
prices high by limiting output only
Mohammed bin Salman, who has over- ning for short-term pain to compel the
boosted shale oil production in the
seen bold yet catastrophic moves since other to submit on their terms.
United States; clawing back that market
taking de facto control of the kingdom, “It reminds me of the First World
share was the Kremlin's main objective
from the disastrous war in Yemen to a War, when France and Germany went to
by pulling out of the Saudi deal.
bonesaw approach to dealing with dissi- war thinking they'd be home by Christ-
With the shale patch facing high
dents like Washington Post columnist mas, and spent four years in the
production costs and loads of debt, Rus-
Jamal Khashoggi. On paper, Saudi Ara- trenches,” Seznec said. “That’s why this
sia figures cheap oil will push many U.S.
bia—which needs oil to be roughly twice is so dangerous—it’s a mirror image.”
firms into bankruptcy or restructuring.
globalagemagazine.kipscss.net
April 2020 GLOBAL AGE | 37
ANALYSIS
Mapping Pakistan’s Legal
Compliance with FATF’s
Recommendations
The KIPS Bureau
Lahore, Pakistan
FATF and Pakistan
T he Financial Action Task Force
(FATF) is an intergovernmental
organization founded by the G7
to develop policies for curbing money
laundering and financing of terrorism.
FATF primarily works to set standards
and guidelines that promote the imple-
mentation of legal, regulatory and oper-
ational measures for Countering Financ-
ing of Terrorism Financing and Anti-
Money Laundering, (CFT/AML) in order
to preserve the security and integrity of
the global financial system. In light of
this, FATF has issued 40 Recommenda-
tions and nine special recommendations
to countries as the legal framework to
target Terrorism Financing /Money
Laundering, (TF/ML) and offers techni-
cal guidance that would enhance techni-
cal compliance and effective implemen-
tation of laws to member countries.
In 2018, FATF placed Pakistan on
its ‘grey-list’ citing ‘structural deficien-
38 | GLOBAL AGE April 2020
cies’ that resulted in failure to target ter-
rorism financing and money laundering.
These included lack of necessary legal
frameworks to target TF/ML, lack of
coordination amongst governmental
actors and law enforcement agencies,
and no coherent risk-based assessment
tools. FATF instructed Pakistan to abide
by the Action Plan, and improve legisla-
tive frameworks so as to align with inter-
national standards. By October 2019,
Pakistan’s progress in overhauling and
amending its existing laws was acknowl-
edged by the global community, but it
was still kept on the grey list as it had
fully complied with only 5 targets on a
27-target plan, with varying levels of
implementation on the remaining tar-
gets.
With the FATF Week underway in
Paris, a final decision is expected on Paki-
stan’s status on the 21st of February
2020. In light of these developments,
this article factually highlights the legis-
lative changes that Pakistan has intro-
duced since 2019 in light of the initiative
to implement FATF’s 27-point Action
Plan. It concludes with further legisla-
tive amendments expected to be imple-
mented in the near future.
Foreign Exchange
Regulation Act
(Amendment) Bill 2020
The FERA Act (1947) governs the move-
ment of foreign currency and other
forms of monetary instruments such as
securities and bullion. The purpose
behind the amendment in 2013 was to
create a standardised regime allowing
the State Bank of Pakistan to act as a regu-
lator in this field and to implement
stricter punishments.
Amendments to Section 8 of FERA
Act stipulate that limits ought to be
introduced to the movement of money
within Pakistan. According to Section
8A, foreign currency or other physical
items valued at USD 10,000 can be
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moved or transferred within Pakistan;
any amounts exceeding this limit will
require prior permission and would have
to meet other procedural requirements
set by the State Bank of Pakistan.
Changes were also made in section 23,
that further strengthens the role of the
State Bank as the central regulator and
cements offences and/or violations as
“cognizable and non-bailable” under the
Act.
These amendments to FERA how-
ever have been challenged in the Senate
in January 2020. Section 8A, imposing
limits on transfers above USD 10,000
was “unanimously rejected” by members
of the Senate Standing Committee on
Finance, while incorporating other
amendments.
This bill, along with the AMLA
Amendment Bill 2019 are currently back
at the National Assembly for further
deliberation with suggestions from the
Upper House.
Anti-Money Laundering
(Amendment) Bill, 2019
In September 2019, the Anti-Money
Laundering (Amendment) Bill 2019 was
laid in the National Assembly. The pur-
pose of the amendment was to
strengthen the current Anti Money Laun-
dering regime in the country with more
stringent provisions.
According to the Bill, Anti Money
Laundering Act (AMLA) offences under
Section 21 would now be considered “cog-
nizable” offences as opposed to “non-
cognizable” in line with the recommen-
dations of the Financial Action Task
Force (FATF). Furthermore, violators of
the law would now be subject to greater
financial penalties i.e. fines would be
increased from 1 million rupees to 5 mil-
lion rupees, and sentences would be
increased from two years to ten years
imprisonment (Article 4). The amended
AMLA also equips the investigating offi-
cer with the authority to hold a person in
remand for up to 180 days, up from 90
days previously (Article 8, subsection 1),
and further does not require the need to
obtain arrest warrants (Article 16, sub-
section 1).
The Senate Standing Committee on
Finance, however proposed certain sug-
gestions regarding the penalties
imposed. The Ministry of Finance sug-
gested that imprisonment terms for vio-
lations should range from “one to ten
years” instead of ten years, and the
amount of fine range should extend from
“one million to five million rupees.” It
was also cited within the debate that this
Bill along with FERA Amendment Act,
were critical in bolstering local
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AML/CFT frameworks, as well as Paki-
stan’s standing with the Financial Action
Task Force, especially prior to the review
meeting in February 2020. Currently,
this Bill is back at the National Assembly
where the recommendations from the
Upper House will be deliberated upon.
Mutual Legal Assistance
(Criminal Matters) Act
(MLA) 2020
The MLA Act 2020, formalizes the pro-
cesses of requesting and providing legal
assistance to and from foreign govern-
ments when investigating criminal con-
duct. Section 3 of the Act states that the
manner of MLA may be provided on the
basis of a reciprocal agreement or other
This Act was designed to
accommodate international
cooperation in criminal
matters through mutual
legal assistance. In the
statement of objectives and
reasons, it is mentioned that
the Act intends to bridge
existing gaps in countries
towards effective law
enforcement. Debates in the
Parliament have also
highlighted the inclusion of
this Act as part of a wider
governmental effort to curb
terrorism financing and
money laundering, as part
of the FATF’s
recommendations
arrangements; and if both do not exist,
then the provisions of the MLA Act will
prevail.
As per the bill, Pakistan would
receive and act upon requests relating to
a criminal offence either committed or
suspected to have been committed in a
foreign country when notified. After an
MLA request has been sought by Paki-
stan, the central authority may authorize
temporary detention in Pakistan of the
offender, if he has been in detention in
the sending state. Section 17 also stipu-
lates that Pakistan may refuse the
request of assistance to a foreign govern-
ment if it jeopardizes its national secu-
rity interests or if the request made is
contrary to the laws of Pakistan.
Concerns arose about the potential
misuse of power by the central authority,
as it rests only with one person effec-
tively. Opposition senators have noted
that such authorities can undermine the
sanctity of the process, opening it up for
political uses or selective targeting.
This Act was designed to accommo-
date international cooperation in crimi-
nal matters through mutual legal assis-
tance. In the statement of objectives and
reasons, it is mentioned that the Act
intends to bridge existing gaps in coun-
tries towards effective law enforcement.
Debates in the Parliament have also high-
lighted the inclusion of this Act as part of
a wider governmental effort to curb ter-
rorism financing and money laundering,
as part of the FATF’s recommendations.
Amendments to the ATA
1997 (2020)
The amendments finalized in the Anti-
Terrorism Amendment Bill (2020) iden-
tify harsher punishments for certain
violations. Section 11O lays out the pro-
cedure for seizure, freeze and detention
under S.11B and S.11EE of properties
controlled by proscribed organizations
and individuals. The recent amend-
ments have increased the punishment
for violation from 10 million rupees fine,
to 10 years imprisonment on conviction
and/or a fine of rupees twenty-five mil-
lion. It has also promulgated action
against public servants or officers who
are negligent in complying with sub-
section (1) of 11O.
The insertion of a new section
(11OOO), criminalizes any violations of
United Nations Security Council Resolu-
tions, enacted via Section 2 of the United
Nations (Security Council) Act 1948.
Violations would be penalized by a
prison term of ten years and/or a twenty-
five million rupee fine. Additionally, if a
‘legal person’ commits an offence, the
accused would be liable to pay fifty mil-
lion rupees on conviction. Any negli-
gence on part of public officials would
also be sanctioned with relevant admin-
istrative action.
As per the objectives of the amend-
ment, it is explicitly mentioned that this
section aims for compliance under the
UNSCR 1267 and 1373 regime to facili-
tate countering of terrorism financing.
These resolutions enact sanctions via
powers of asset freeze, travel ban and
arms embargo, and promote the restruc-
turing of the domestic legal framework
that will allow these sanctions measures
to get effectively implemented Hence.
The insertion of 11OOO was an attempt
at further entrench the UNSCRs in Paki-
stan’s domestic legal framework.
NACTA Amendment
April 2020 GLOBAL AGE | 39
Ordinance 2019
The National Counter Terrorism
Authority (NACTA) Act was amended by
way of a Presidential Ordinance, coming
into immediate effect on 8th November
2019 for 120 days. The amendments
herein mainly concerned changes in the
hierarchy of governmental actors in
order to streamline the process of coor-
dination with various law enforcement
actors. Section 3(2) of the Act is removed
in the ensuing amendment, and the
Board of Governors convening the
Authority will now be led by the Minister
in-charge of Interior Division in lieu of
the Prime Minister (Section 5(1)). In the
same sub-section, the new amendments
state that the Board of Directors will now
include Home Secretaries and Inspec-
tor-Generals of Police from all prov-
inces, Islamabad Capital Territory,
Gilgit-Baltistan and State of Azad
Jammu and Kashmir in the Board of
Governors.
In Section 8, changes were made in
the membership of the Executive Com-
mittee (EC). The Ordinance now allows
Additional Secretaries instead of Secre-
taries of relevant ministries as well as
Additional Secretaries of Home Minis-
tries of all provinces, Gilgit-Baltistan,
ICT and State of Azad Jammu and Kash-
mir to attend the meetings of the EC.
As specified by the amendment bill,
the primary objective of the Ordinance
Offence Rigorous imprisonment
Benami transaction
or property
1 to 7 years
False statement/
information
6 months to 5 years
and its amendments are to counter the
increased violence and terrorist activi-
ties in the provinces of Khyber
Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan. There-
fore, to counter these threats, the Minis-
try of Interior and all relevant stake-
holders ought to be empowered through
NACTA to enact changes “on war foot-
ings.” These amendments will therefore
allow NACTA as an authority to react
more effectively and efficiently to emerg-
ing threats to internal peace.
A private member’s bill, the
National Counter Terrorism Authority
(Amendment) Bill 2019 was also intro-
duced to formalize the changes intro-
duced by the Ordinance in the NACTA
Act of 2013.[25] In the Senate however,
the current Minister of Interior raised
concerns with respect to this bill.[26]
The Senate Standing Committee cur-
rently is looking into recommendations
40 | GLOBAL AGE April 2020
that would increase coordination with all
provincial actors and implement short,
medium and long-term goals, as well as
regularize reporting to the Parliament.
Benami Transactions
(Prohibition) Rules 2019
and Benami Transactions
Ordinance 2019
The Benami Transactions (Prohibition)
Act 2017 enables relevant regulators to
draft rules and regulations curtailing the
practice of benami transactions. These
involve layering and integrating assets
into the formal financial system under
the names of the extended family mem-
bers or others, instead of the owner.
Benami transactions are therefore used
extensively for the purposes of money
laundering, tax evasion and terrorism
financing. With the passing of the
Benami Transaction (Prohibition) Rules
by the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR)
in March 2019, the Benami Transactions
(Prohibition) Act 2017 has come into
force.
The Benami Transactions (Prohibi-
tion) Rules, issued by the FBR, define the
ambit of benami property, the
benamidar and the beneficial owner with
respect to transactions. It lays out the
following framework of the offence for
violating the rules (see the table).
The Benami Transactions Ordi-
Fine (% property value)
25%
10%
nance 2019 further adds to the Benami
Rules 2019. This Ordinance enhances
the definition and scope of whistle-
blowers, allowing entities and agencies
to act in the capacity of whistle-blowers.
Furthermore, it allows the information
obtained by the National Accountability
Bureau (NAB) and the Federal Investi-
gation Agency (FIA) to be used for the
purpose of tracing and identifying real
owners of Benami properties.
The primary reason provided in the
objectives statement for the Ordinance is
to expand the term “whistleblower” as it
appears in the initial Rules. Previously,
whistle-blowers were restricted only to
individuals – the Ordinance now
expands this to include other entities
and agencies as well. These whistleblow-
ers can file a complaint or provide infor-
mation concerning benami property for
offences that are also included under the
NAB Ordinance 1999, the Schedule in
the FIA Act 1974, AMLA 2010, Securities
Act 2015 as well as other federal and pro-
vincial laws. This would further
strengthen the AML regime in Pakistan,
targeting particularly the transfer of real
Rejoicing Years of Glory With 1500+ Civil Servants and Counting...
estate, which has been identified as a
highly vulnerable sector for Pakistan in
terms of parking laundered funds. The Largest CSS Preparatory Network in Pakistan
Proposed Amendments
Morning, Afternoon & Evening Sessions
In February 2020, the National Execu-
tive Committee (NEC) announced that it
would introduce major amendments to
at least a dozen laws in the coming
months. The NEC is a high-level body,
comprised of representatives of various
Ministries and law enforcement agen-
cies, and is at the forefront of spearhead-
ing the initiative to strengthen the
AML/CFT regimes in the country.
Going forwards, the NEC has
resolved to introduce amendments and
other changes to the following statutes
and/or subordinate legislations:
1948 – Including rigorous penalties for
proscribed terrorists and organizations
under the United Nations (Security
Council) Act of 1948. This includes
upping fines to Rs. 200 million and
prison sentences to 10 years.
1949 – Amendments to the Criminal
Procedure Code (CrPC) to meet interna-
tional standards.
l Amendments to the Companies Act
2017 to comply with FATF standards
Purpose-Built CSS Campuses
in curbing money laundering.
1. Enhancing the role of regulators,
particularly the Securities and
Exchange Commission of Pakistan
NEW Library
(SECP), Federal Board of Revenue
and Ministry of Finance to regulate
at-risk sectors in the economy,
CAMPUS Cafeteria
particularly Pakistan Post and AT
Central Directorate of National
Savings, and accounting 141 UPPER MALL Permanent Help-Desk Facility
professions.
2. Creation of a national registry of all
Non-Profit Organizations (NPOs)
and Non-Governmental
PIONEER Free Global Age Magazine
Organizations (NGOs), operating in
all four provinces plus Azad Jammu
and Kashmir, Gilgit-Baltistan and
the Islamabad Capital Territory
CAMPUS Discount on CSS Publications
(ICT). AT
3. Empowering the Federal Board of
Revenue (FBR) to regulate the real
12 AIBAK BLOCK GARDEN TOWN
estate and precious stones and
metals and jewelry sectors.
l Bolstering the powers of the Minis- PURPOSE BUILT CAMPUS: 141-Upper Mall Lahore.
try of Law and the Pakistan Bar Coun- Tel: 042-35757747 Cell: 0313-4437562 UAN: 03-111-999-101
cil to regulate lawyers, legal advisers PIONEER CAMPUS: 12 Aibak Block, Garden Town (Near Mughal-e-Azam Hall), Lahore.
and law firms in Pakistan.
Tel: 042-35941921 Cell: 0311-4345337 UAN: 03-111-999-101
globalagemagazine.kipscss.net
OPINION
This decade belonged to China.
So will the next one
The west is still finding it extraordinarily difficult to come to terms with China’s
remarkable ascent
s ‘China has proven itself to have a formidably innovative economy.’ Xi Jinping proposes a toast at the welcome banquet for the Belt and Road Forum in
Beijing, 26 April 2019. Photograph: Reuters
Martin Jacques
@martjacques
B y 2010, China was beginning to
have an impact on the global
consciousness in a new way.
Prior to the western financial crisis, it
had been seen as the new but very junior
kid on the block. The financial crash
changed all that. Before 2008 the
conventional western wisdom had been
that sooner or later China would suffer a
big economic meltdown. It never did.
Instead, the crisis happened in the west,
with huge consequences for the latter’s
stability and self-confidence.
Every year for the past decade,
China, not the US, has been the main
source of global economic growth. In
2014, according to the World Bank’s
international comparison program, the
Chinese economy overtook that of the
US to become the world’s largest, mea-
sured by purchasing power parity.
Although China’s growth rate over the
past decade has declined to its present
6.2%, it is still one of the world’s fastest-
growing economies. Today its economy
42 | GLOBAL AGE April 2020
is more than twice as big as it was in
2010.
This is the story, as pertaining to the
past decade, of the most remarkable eco-
nomic transformation in human history.
Unsurprisingly the west is finding the
phenomenon difficult to come to terms
with, displaying a kaleidoscope of emo-
tions from denial, dismissal and con-
demnation to respect, appreciation and
admiration; though there is presently
much more of the former than the latter.
The rise of China has provoked an exis-
tential crisis in the US and Europe that
will last for the rest of this century. The
west is in the process of being displaced
and, beyond a point, it can do nothing
about it. China’s rise is one of those
world-transforming changes that occur
very rarely in history. And only during
this past decade has the west begun to
realise that China’s rise will, indeed,
change the world.
The story keeps moving. Five years,
let alone a decade, ago, China was synon-
ymous with cheap manufacturing. The
west believed that China would for long
remain essentially defined by imitation,
unable to match the west’s capacity for
innovation. But China has proven itself
to have a formidably innovative econ-
omy. Shenzhen has come to rival Silicon
Valley – while Huawei, Tencent and
Alibaba can be counted in the same
league as Microsoft, Google, Facebook
and Amazon. Far from this being a prod-
uct of copying, the Chinese are increas-
ingly engaging in groundbreaking inno-
vation: China accounted for almost half
of all patent filings in the world last year.
But why should we be surprised? People
living in a country growing at 10% per
annum for 35 years and between 6% and
8% for the past decade are used to rapid
change and constant innovation. And
don’t forget that China is an extraordi-
narily rich and intellectually endowed
civilization that has always been hugely
committed to learning and education.
Perhaps the starkest demonstration
globalagemagazine.kipscss.net
At root the new US
attitude is based on a fear
that China represents a
threat to its global
hegemony, something that
many Americans regard to be
part of the country’s DNA.
This fear has in part been
stimulated by China’s
increasingly proactive role
on the global stage, most
notably with the belt and
road initiative, along with
the formation of the Asian
Infrastructure Investment
Q&A Bank, to which Britain was
the first non-Asian
What is the China-US trade war about?
signatory
The roots of the dispute come from US president Donald Trump’s “America first”
project to protect the US’ position as the world’s leading economy, while encouraging to be part of the country’s DNA. This fear
businesses to hire more workers in the US and to manufacture their products there. has in part been stimulated by China’s
Trump complains of a large trade deficit with China, which he views as a symbol of the increasingly proactive role on the global
US’s decline as a manufacturing powerhouse. Chinese imports to the US totalled stage, most notably with the belt and
$539.5bn last year, while $120.3bn was sold the other way – leaving a trade deficit of road initiative, along with the formation
$419.2bn. of the Asian Infrastructure Investment
Bank, to which Britain was the first non-
The president has accused Beijing of “unfair” trade policies, including allowing the theft Asian signatory.
of US companies’ intellectual property. The threat of import tariffs on Chinese goods is The US’s increasing unwillingness
being used as leverage in talks where Trump is seeking changes to Beijing’s trade policy. to support the international system that
Tariffs have been imposed by Washington on some Chinese goods sold in the US for about it largely created – as seen in Trump’s
a year. They came on top of broader tariffs used by Trump that have hit China and other attitude towards the World Trade Orga-
trading partners such as the EU, Canada and Mexico, on goods including steel and alu- nization and Nato – marks a retreat. It is
minium. already clear that Trump’s trade war
against China has not achieved its objec-
In May 2019 the US president further ratcheted up existing import tariffs of 10% on tives. Nor will its tech war against China:
$200bn (£153bn) of Chinese goods sold in the US to 25%, hitting everything on a long list Huawei’s 5G will prevail in much of the
of products. Trump has previously warned that 25% tariffs could be slapped on a further
world, probably including most of
$325bn of goods – which would mean all Chinese imports being covered by tariffs. Europe. As US-China relations continue
However, talks in November 2019 aimed at easing tensions were welcomed as the begin- to deteriorate, and begin to look like a
ning of a thaw in the trade war between the two nations. new cold war, it will be no replica of the
last cold war. Then, the US was on the
Richard Partington and Jasper Jolly rise, the USSR in decline: this time the
US is patently in decline and China very
of China’s growing influence has been of a new order, not in the literal sense, much on the rise. Whereas a singular
the belt and road initiative – a global but symbolically. First, with the predom- characteristic of the last cold war was
network of Chinese-financed highways, inance of the developing world, repre- military competition, China has histori-
railways, ports and energy infrastruc- senting 85% of the world’s population; cally never competed as a military power
ture, launched in 2013. The ambition is and second, in the overriding priority and its rise – compared with the aggres-
no less than the transformation of the given to development, hugely important sive expansionism of the US, UK, France
Eurasian landmass, home to more than to the developing world but which barely and Germany in their equivalent stages
60% of the world’s population. More features on the west’s agenda. of development – has been remarkably
than 140 countries, overwhelmingly For more than four decades the rela- restrained.
from the developing world, have now tionship between China and the US was The next decade will see a continu-
signed up; and the great majority were relatively benign. Donald Trump’s elec- ing fragmentation of the western-centric
represented by their leaders at the belt tion in 2016 marked a turning point. His international system, together with the
and road summit held in early 2019, a hostility towards China, however, is far growing influence of Chinese-oriented
level of representation no other country from unique. It is bipartisan. And not institutions. The process will be uneven,
could match, the US included. unpredictable. At root the new US atti- unpredictable and, at times, fraught –
With the present international sys- tude is based on a fear that China repre- but ultimately irresistible.
tem entering its twilight, the belt and sents a threat to its global hegemony,
road initiative can be seen as the embryo something that many Americans regard l Martin Jacques is the author of When China Rules the World
globalagemagazine.kipscss.net
April 2020 GLOBAL AGE | 43
OPINION
What’s CPEC, and How Does the
Future of the Multipolar World
Depend on It?
Andrew Korybko
@Akorybko
T he world order is going through
profound changes in
transitioning from the Western-
controlled unipolar system to the non-
Western model of multipolarity, and the
ongoing multifaceted friction between
the opposing forces sums up the nature
of the New Cold War. The US and its
allies are struggling to retain their
erstwhile dominance over global affairs,
while Russia, China, and their respective
partners are working hard to achieve
peaceful breakthroughs in undermining
their rivals’ control.
The development of alternative
governance systems such as BRICS, the
Shanghai Cooperation Organization
(SCO), and the Asian Infrastructure
Investment Bank (AIIB) are central to
the multipolar initiatives to reform the
world system, but what’s needed most of
all is to integrate the Afro-Eurasian coun-
tries of the Eastern Hemisphere into a
win-win network of real-sector eco-
nomic relations. China’s solution to this
pressing need is its One Belt, One Road
(OBOR) global vision of New Silk Road
44 | GLOBAL AGE April 2020
connectivity which aims to construct a
series of multipolar transnational con-
nective infrastructure projects designed
to do just that.
CPEC Connectivity
The most important Silk Road project is
the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor
(CPEC), which is a $55 billion invest-
ment (and counting) that seeks to con-
nect East Asia with South Asia by means
of a non-Malacca mainland trade pas-
sage. Upon full completion, CPEC will be
a geopolitical game-changer for the sim-
ple reason that it will provide China with
an alternative to the South China Sea and
Strait of Malacca, thereby making it
impossible for the troublesome US Navy
to control the People’s Republic’s trade
routes via maritime manipulations in
these two aforementioned chokepoints.
This, in turn, will allow China to trade
more freely with its Western European,
Mideast, and African partners and there-
fore advance its globally transformative
vision of New Silk Road connectivity
which lies at the heart of structurally
reforming the unipolar-controlled
global system.
While China is indeed streamlining
other mainland corridors across Eurasia
and plans to outfit them with high-speed
rail technology, they each run the risk of
being disrupted, controlled, or influ-
enced by the externally provoked iden-
tity-driven conflicts of Hybrid Wars. The
same can be said for CPEC, too, but it’s
much easier to manage these distur-
bances in the two transit states of China
and Pakistan than it is to do so all across
the Eurasian landmass. This makes
CPEC the most solid and dependable
New Silk Road investment from a secu-
rity standpoint, which is doubly under-
standable if one acknowledges the
geostrategic seriousness of this project.
CPEC doesn’t just connect China to
the Indian Ocean, but also lays the
groundwork for Pakistan to function as
the Zipper of Eurasia in linking together
a series of Eurasian economic blocs. As I
explained in my September 2015 analy-
sis for the Russian Institute of Strategic
globalagemagazine.kipscss.net
Studies, CPEC holds the promise of “zip-
ping” the Russian-led Eurasian Eco-
nomic Union, China, Iran, and South
Asia Association for Regional Coopera-
t i o n ( S AARC ) - me mb e r Paki s t an
together in economically strengthening
the SCO and subsequently enhancing the
viability of the emerging Multipolar
World Order.
Accepting that CPEC holds the real-
istic possibility of connecting Europe,
the Arab countries, and Africa with their
SCO counterparts, then it’s foreseeable
that a Convergence of Civilizations will
take place on Pakistani territory which
could consequently counter the divide-
and-rule blueprint of a “Clash of Civiliza-
tions.”
Cognizant of the irreplaceable sig-
nificance of the Indian Ocean and appre-
ciating the dual roles that CPEC is poised
to play as the Zipper of Eurasia and Con-
vergence of Civilizations, it’s reasonable
to assert that the present century is an
Indo-Pacific one and that Pakistan sits
right in the middle of the most influential
global processes.
How It Works
None of the abovementioned concepts –
the Zipper of Eurasia, Convergence of
Civilizations, and Indo-Pacific Century –
are hyperbolic slogans, however, as
there’s solid economic reasoning behind
each one.
To succinctly explain, the expansion
of transport connectivity generally
equates to an improvement in economic
relations between all related parties
which come to employ the said route,
which thereby justifies the Zipper of Eur-
asia paradigm.
Concerning the Convergence of
Civilizations, any company could be
interested in relocating their production
facilities to Pakistan in order to achieve
equidistance between their pan-Eastern
Hemispheric suppliers and consumers,
as well as to cut down on related trans-
port and labor costs.
Manufacturing, assembly, or sales
outposts in South Asia could make it
much easier to balance commercial con-
nectivity between Western Europe and
East Asia, as well as to in principle
acquire access to SAARC (provided that
political-administrative roadblocks can
be surmounted).
CPEC is also importantly located
midway between the booming East Afri-
can marketplace and China’s East Asian
manufacturing coast, so it can addition-
ally be utilized by either of these sides or
interested third-party partners to facili-
tate trade between this emerging eco-
nomic axis.
Altogether, the crisscrossing trade
networks in the Indian Ocean and
globalagemagazine.kipscss.net
China and its multitude of
partners won’t be dissuaded
from continuing their
breakneck progress on OBOR
just because two spoilsports
are against this series of
initiatives, and there’s a
strong likelihood that Beijing
will make the New Silk Road
and BRICS+ concepts the
tangible manifestations of
the four themes that the
People’s Republic plans to
promote during the 9th
BRICS Summit
CPEC’s central location in enabling all of
this adds credence to the argument that
the world is moving towards an Indo-
Pacific Century which will see South Asia
become the focal point of global geopoli-
tics and economic competition.
Broadening the BRICS
Having acquired familiarity with the
driving logic behind CPEC and its
salience to the New Cold War, it’s now
time to introduce the reader to how this
game-changing project is slated to con-
tribute to the bolstering of the BRICS
bloc and the consequent promotion of
the emerging Multipolar World Order.
Chief economist with the Eurasian
Development Bank and Programme
Director of the Valdai Discussion Club
Yaroslav Lissovolik published a thought-
provoking policy proposal in February
titled “Re-Thinking The BRICS: On The
Concepts Of BRICS+ and BRICS++,” in
which he elaborated on the most feasible
prospects for broadening the five-
member BRICS partnerships into a truly
global multipolar platform. Soon there-
after, China proposed its own concept of
“BRICS-Plus” which it vaguely alluded to
as being composed of key OBOR part-
ners, thereby strongly inferring that Paki-
stan and CPEC (the largest Silk Road
investment) would naturally be
involved.
This immediately drew the ire of
India, which has been steadfastly
opposed to CPEC on the grounds that it
allegedly violates New Delhi’s
maximalist claims to Kashmir. I compre-
hensively explored the various nuances
involved with this in an article that I pub-
lished for the Islamabad-based Regional
Rapport analytical outlet titled “India’s
Freaking Out Over China’s ‘BRICS-Plus’
Proposal,” and I suggest that any curious
readers reference it if they’d like to learn
more about this important issue. The
topic of India’s resistance to this project
isn’t the focus of the given article, nor is
its rapidly developing military-strategic
partnership with the US which might be
playing a guiding role in these said calcu-
lations, so I’ll move along and continue
to discuss the positive aspects related to
CPEC instead.
China’s OBOR vision of global New
Silk Road connectivity recently received
official UNSC backing in mid-March,
and this has set the stage for Beijing’s
upcoming Belt and Road Initiative sum-
mit (BRI, another name for OBOR) next
month which will be attended by dozens
of world leaders including President
Putin. India and the US, in what may
either be coincidence or coordination,
both have yet to signal their interest in
participating, which might thus mean
that they’re voluntarily isolating them-
selves by choosing to remain outside of
this new global economic framework.
Either way, China and its multitude
of partners won’t be dissuaded from con-
tinuing their breakneck progress on
OBOR just because two spoilsports are
against this series of initiatives, and
there’s a strong likelihood that Beijing
will make the New Silk Road and
BRICS+ concepts the tangible manifes-
tations of the four themes that the Peo-
ple’s Republic plans to promote during
the 9th BRICS Summit which it will host
this September. Accordingly, there’s no
escaping the fact that CPEC is primed to
steal the show in such a scenario due to
its previously explained geostrategic
significance, so it’s fair to state that this
New Silk Road project will form the
inseparable spine of BRICS+ and
thenceforth the future of the multipolar
world.
This makes it all the more curious
why more people aren’t up to speed
about CPEC and its pertinence in cata-
lyzing the global transition from
unipolarity to multipolarity, but this lack
of awareness can likely be attributable to
the ongoing infowar campaign being
waged by China and Pakistan’s rivals and
which is designed to suppress any objec-
tive information about this ambitious
undertaking. Nevertheless, China seems
ready to bring CPEC to the forefront of
the world’s mainstream attention during
the upcoming BRI and BRICS Summits,
at which time this project is expected to
be debuted as the cornerstone of the equi-
table and just alternative world system
that China and its partners are con-
structing.
In every which way, the future of the
multipolar world depends on CPEC, and
given the strong global support that this
initiative is receiving, it’s safe to say that
the future lies in good hands.
April 2020 GLOBAL AGE | 45
INF TREATY
Arms control provides the only
path to peace
The current US approach to nuclear weapons can only lead to Armageddon
s Worst case scenario: Are North Korea’s nuclear weapons designed for actual use?
Prabir Purkayastha
New Delhi, India
T he last decade ended with two
major threats to humanity: global
warming leading to a climate
catastrophe and the threat of a nuclear
war extinguishing our civilization. The
US has pulled out of the Paris Agreement
and is wrecker-in-chief of the weak
climate-change agreement that all the
countries had signed to limit the
emission of greenhouse gases. It is also
leading the charge for a nuclear
Armageddon, dismantling all nuclear-
arms-control treaties.
Expectedly, there has been a Rus-
sian response, but not by matching the
US efforts but by asymmetric measures
designed to defeat the US attempts of
gaining nuclear dominance. Such an
asymmetric response does not reduce
the threat of a nuclear exchange but only
ensures that there will be no winner in
such a nuclear war.
There were three nuclear-arms-
control treaties that were reached
between the US and Russia in the 1970s
and 1980s, all of which were based on the
understanding that nuclear war was not
46 | GLOBAL AGE April 2020
winnable; each side had enough weap-
ons to destroy not only each other but
also the entire globe. They were the Anti-
Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, the Inter-
mediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF)
Treaty, and the Strategic Arms Limita-
tion Treaty, which metamorphosed into
the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty
(START).
All these treaties were based on
what is called mutually assured destruc-
tion (MAD) doctrine, that if each side
had enough nuclear weapons to destroy
the other after receiving a first strike,
there would be a balance of terror and
therefore less likelihood of a nuclear war.
Two of them – the ABM Treaty and the
INF Treaty – have been formally aban-
doned by the US, while the fate of the
third, START, which expires in 2021,
hangs in balance.
To add to nuclear dangers, India
and Pakistan have stepped up the rheto-
ric of war, with India withdrawing from
its no-first-use policy. A nuclear
exchange in South Asia would have
global consequences including a nuclear
winter. The US withdrawing from the
Iran nuclear deal could also start a
nuclear race in West Asia, with Iran look-
ing to acquire nuclear weapons as its
only defense against the US – a Samson
option – and Saudi Arabia following suit.
The US actions stem from a strate-
gic view that nuclear weapons are like
just any other weapon, only bigger, and
not that they have qualitatively changed
war into an option that surely would –
not could – destroy all civilization, and
perhaps human life itself. While MAD
looks indeed mad compared with
nuclear disarmament, it is certainly pref-
erable to a view of winnable nuclear
wars.
Summarizing the Donald Trump
administration’s 2018 Nuclear Posture
Review first-strike policy, The Nation
editor Katrina vanden Heuvel writes in
The Washington Post:
“The United States is building a new
generation of nuclear weapons and
delivery systems, will deploy more
usable nuclear weapons in ‘forward’
areas, remains committed to possible
globalagemagazine.kipscss.net
‘first use’ of nuclear weapons even
against non-nuclear attacks in defense of
30 countries, retains missiles on active
alert ready to launch, is skeptical of the
possibility of any progress in arms con-
trol and is hostile to the global move-
ment to make nuclear weapons illegal.”
This is not a defensive, but an offen-
sive vision of enhancing first-strike capa-
bilities and a winnable nuclear war. This
Developing first-strike
capabilities must be seen
along with the US withdrawal
under president George
W Bush from the ABM Treaty
in 2002, and the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization’s
25-year march to Russia’s
borders, in spite of explicit
assurances to the contrary
given by the US and other
NATO leaders. While the
withdrawal by itself does not
change the balance of
nuclear terror, the intention
was clear: Now that Russia is
down and out, and under
Boris Yeltsin, Russia had
indeed become a basket
case, the US can re-establish
its nuclear dominance
vision is also a part of the document
titled “Nuclear Operations” dated June
11, 2019, drafted by the Joint Chiefs of
Staff of the United States. It was pub-
lished and then hurriedly withdrawn
from the US government’s websites, and
is now only available from the Federa-
tion of American Scientists website.
Developing first-strike capabilities
must be seen along with the US with-
drawal under president George W Bush
from the ABM Treaty in 2002, and the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s 25-
year march to Russia’s borders, in spite
of explicit assurances to the contrary
given by the US and other NATO leaders.
While the withdrawal by itself does not
change the balance of nuclear terror, the
intention was clear: Now that Russia is
down and out, and under Boris Yeltsin,
Russia had indeed become a basket case,
the US can re-establish its nuclear domi-
nance. This meant a return to the 1945-
1949 era, when the US was the sole
nuclear power.
The Russian response, stated
explicitly by President Vladimir Putin in
globalagemagazine.kipscss.net
his yearly address to the Federal Assem-
bly of the Russian Federation on March
1, 2018, announced a new range of weap-
ons that were designed to defeat a mis-
sile shield, and therefore restore the bal-
ance of nuclear terror.
The recent testing of a maneuver-
able hypersonic glider called Avangard is
a part of Putin’s new weapons that Rus-
sia had developed to defeat missile
shields. It follows an earlier hypersonic
glider, Kinzhal, whose “tests” he said in
his 2018 speech “have been successfully
completed.” He said Kinzhal weapons
had already started “their trial service.”
The two other missiles are Sarmat, a
new intercontinental ballistic missile
(ICBM) that can attack from any direc-
tion and therefore defeat the northern
anti-missile batteries that the US has,
and a submarine drone that can destroy
aircraft carriers and naval harbors.
The one missile that Putin
announced that seems to have encoun-
tered problems is a nuclear-powered
cruise missile. This seems to have
exploded during testing. All of the others
have now been tested or are under test-
ing.
After his 2018 speech, US media
ridiculed Putin and deemed Russia inca-
pable of developing a new generation of
weapons. The underlying vision was that
in a new era where Pax Americana was
here to stay, nuclear dominance was
feasible as a US strategy, and Putin’s
claims of restoring parity were the
rantings of a vainglorious leader. And let
us not think this was just a Trumpian
vision; former president Barack Obama
also contemptuously dismissed Russia
as a regional power that did not pose a
security threat to the US. The Trumpian
vision of winnable nuclear wars is not
just the aberration of a megalomaniac
and a narcissistic leader, but very much
the worldview of the US bipartisan lead-
ership.
It is important to register what Rus-
sia has not done in response to the US
ratcheting up its nuclear weapons sys-
tems. It has not followed the US in trying
to develop defense shields similar to
what the US is investing in. Instead, it
has followed a doctrine of asymmetric
response by stepping up its offensive
capability.
Russia recognizes that nuclear wars
are not winnable, and parity is not com-
peting with developing the same systems
that the “enemy” has. It is enough to
develop systems that will make nuclear
wars unwinnable, hence Russia’s new
weapons whose target is limited to
defeating missile shields. Nuclear-
proliferation expert Joshua Pollack says
on why Russia is developing so many
systems, “Perhaps all this excess is
meant to convince the US of the futility of
the BMD enterprise, and induce a more
cooperative line of thought in Washing-
ton.”
Putin ended his speech on the new
weapons with a plea to the US to return
to stop the folly of global nuclear domi-
nance. Instead, the US response has
been to go forward and test new missiles
that were earlier banned under the INF
Treaty.
On the New START negotiations,
the US has said it could start such talks
on the condition that they include China.
Even US arms-control experts are mysti-
fied by this demand for a Chinese inclu-
sion. Currently, the United States and
Russia have more than 6,000 nuclear
warheads each, while China has about
300. So any such discussion that brings
in China can only increase its voluntary
limit and not reduce it. The Trump
administration’s desire to bring only
China into the New START negotiations
is either ignorant or simply
grandstanding.
Just for the record, France also has
300, with the UK at 200, and India and
Pakistan around 150 each. Israel has
about 100, and North Korea has up to 30.
The US media and their experts
have looked at the arms-control issue
through the lens of national interest
while examining the claims of the US and
the Russian governments. They may
dislike Trump, but when it comes to for-
eign affairs, that gives way to the
national imperative of rallying behind
the leader, even while holding one’s
nose. If there are critical voices, most of
them are muted. Russia is guilty unless
proven otherwise. The US is always
truthful, even after the mega scams over
Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass
destruction for the Iraq war and the Gulf
of Tonkin for the Vietnam War.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, the
US is returning to its post-World War II
vision of a Pax Americana. This is
embedded in its nuclear doctrine, its
strategic vision of controlling all theaters
of war, and defining its competition in
regional theaters as “revisionist powers.”
That the US and its leaders do not under-
stand the world would not have mattered
so much in an earlier era. Today, any
war, let alone a nuclear one, will inevita-
bly have global consequences.
A war between nuclear-armed pow-
ers would possibly end humanity, cer-
tainly human civilization. The Russian
response to America’s nuclear path has
been asymmetric – developing new weap-
ons as low costs – with the hope that the
US would return to Earth and negotiate.
The Earth is still waiting. Will the
global citizens and community of
nations now speak up?
April 2020 GLOBAL AGE | 47
COUNTERTERRORISM
The Anti-Terror Fight
Grief-stricken parents and families wanted accountability and an investigation.
Tariq Khosa
Lahore, Pakistan
A n year ago on March 15, an
Australian gunman killed 51
worshippers in Christchurch.
The victims included nationals from
Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Pakistan,
Indonesia and Egypt as well as New
Zealand citizens. A rookie political
leader of a small nation demonstrated
qualities of ‘strength and sanity’ while
pursuing an agenda of ‘compassion and
community’. Prime Minister Jacinda
Ardern stood out as a ‘pragmatic idealist’
in a field dominated by old men. Her deft
handling of the shootings was noted
globally.
Here is what she thought of the vic-
tims: “Regardless of whether someone
had been in New Zealand for a genera-
tion or whether or not they moved here a
year ago, this was their home, and they
should have been safe and they should
have been able to worship here … they
are us.” Her embrace of New Zealand’s
Muslim community stood out in a global
environment of divisiveness. Her don-
ning a headscarf while visiting a mosque
or condoling with bereaved families
“made a plausible case that kindness was
a strength, compassion was actionable,
and inclusion was possible’’. Within days
of the tragedy, she proposed and got
48 | GLOBAL AGE April 2020
passed New Zealand’s first far-reaching
gun control legislation.
Ardern set the precedent of never
taking the shooter’s name, and her moral
leadership forced the media to follow
suit. She enlisted the support of world
leaders including Emmanuel Macron
and Angela Merkel. Only two months
after the carnage, they came up with the
Christchurch Call, a meeting of heads of
state and tech companies “to commit to
preventing the spread of online terrorist
and violent extremist content”.
Some larger social media networks
had already established the Global
Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism
(GIFCT) to tackle the online influence of
the militant Islamic State group and to
boost coordination between govern-
ments and networks “to study, respond
to and prevent extremist and terrorist
activity on the sharing platforms”.
Ardern is involved in the expansion
of the scope of this initiative as she feels
responsible. “That’s not to say this
started from zero, it did not. The work
that Jordan had done was really critical.
And equally the likes of the UK and
France. But I do think that the GIFCT
will be a fundamentally different body
because of the Christchurch Call,” she
told Time magazine recently, whose cor-
respondent praised her for moving
“enough chess pieces among the public,
governments and industry to offer the
beginnings of a coherent international
response to a problem against which
traditional power structures have
proved ineffective”.
One must reflect on the 2014 Army
Public School, Peshawar, tragedy that
left 144 people, including 132 children,
dead at the hands of six terrorist gun-
men. Grief-stricken parents and families
wanted accountability and an investiga-
tion into the security lapses in a garri-
son-guarded area. They wanted exem-
plary punishment for those who
accepted responsibility for the gruesome
act. But the security establishment failed
to satisfy them. The terrorists’ spokes-
man who was in custody ‘escaped’ from a
safe house in Peshawar recently. The
military’s silence speaks volumes.
As a member of a working group of
professionals who drafted the
Counterterrorism National Action Plan
(CT NAP) on Dec 21, 2014, I believe
policymakers should rethink the strat-
egy whose short-term gains through
kinetic means may not serve the long-
term goal of countering violent extrem-
globalagemagazine.kipscss.net
We do not have a
national security policy, and
the internal security policy
remains unimplemented
ism. A recent study reported a 13 per cent
decline in terrorist incidents in 2019
compared to 2018; however, 2019 saw
229 incidents, including four suicide
assaults, which claimed 357 lives.
What went wrong? Firstly, there
was no political ownership of CT NAP.
Our main recommendation for the
prime minister to lead this war was omit-
ted. Resultantly, the commander of an
armed and strong institution took the
lead and we saw the militarisation of our
internal security strategy. Apex commit-
tees were constituted in the provinces
with corps commanders calling the
shots. Political governments and civilian
agencies simply followed military doc-
trine.
Secondly, the political government
lifted the six-year moratorium on capital
globalagemagazine.kipscss.net
punishment in order to execute con-
victed terrorists. But a decision was
taken to execute some 5,000 convicts on
death row in all categories. Some 600
were hanged. Glaring cases of injustice
were highlighted. But it was too late.
Some people went to the gallows as a
result of miscarriage of justice. Did all
this act as a deterrent? I doubt it. It is the
certainty and not the severity of punish-
ment that deters criminality.
Thirdly, special military courts were
established for speedy trial of terrorists.
During their four-year duration, 344
accused were awarded capital punish-
ment in 650 cases decided by 14 such
courts; 56 were executed. In November
2018, the Peshawar High Court acquit-
ted several convicts sentenced by mili-
tary courts on grounds of “malice in law
and fact”. The convictions awarded on
callously recorded routine “confessional
statements” were held to be in violation
of the right to a fair trial. The matter is
now before the Supreme Court.
In view of a recent Supreme Court
verdict in which terrorism has been rede-
fined and its application restricted to the
nature of offences under certain condi-
tions, anti-terrorism courts can be more
effective with the provision of a day-to-
day trial restricted to a week and the
right to be defended by a lawyer guaran-
teed. Even those suspected of terrorism
deserve due process.
Fourthly, CT NAP has the following
provisions for a communication strat-
egy: countering hate speech and extrem-
ist material; ban on glorifying terrorism
and terrorist groups through
print/electronic media; and tangible
measures against the abuse of internet
and social media for terrorism. Task
forces under the IT and information min-
isters were to propose comprehensive
strategies but after dilly-dallying for
years, the government recently came up
with the Citizens Protection (Against
Online Harm) Rules 2020. Oddly, the
cabinet approved these rules framed
without consultation with concerned
stakeholders.
In its manifesto, the PTI had an
ambitious plan for tackling terrorism by
enforcing NAP, continuing security oper-
ations against militants, winning over
‘passive’ militants, and spreading coun-
ter-narratives including through
madressah reform. Unfortunately, we do
not have a national security policy, and
the internal security policy approved by
the previous government remains
unimplemented.
Our rookie prime minister needs to
adopt Ardern’s leadership traits and
revisit the CT NAP to come up with long-
term solutions to counter violent
extremism.
l The writer is former IG Police and author of ‘The Faltering State and Inconvenient
Truths’.
April 2020 GLOBAL AGE | 49
ECONOMY CRISIS
A Pandemic of Fear
The two seemingly unrelated developments — the COVID-19 pandemic and the oil price
war — are not as unrelated as they may seem at first.
Sakib Sherani
Islamabad, Pakistan
G
lobal financial markets have
been roiled the past week by
extreme panic-induced
volatility. Lower locks/circuit breakers
have been activated in stock exchanges
around the world, oil prices have
dropped the most in a single day since
1991, while the yield on the US 30-Year
Treasury bond has sunk to below one per
cent for the first time in history.
An estimated $9 trillion has been
wiped off the market capitalisation of
global stocks in the past two weeks, with
the S&P 500 index plunging 20pc since
its peak on Feb19. The Pakistan Stock
Exchange’s KSE-100 index has fallen
10pc since. Not surprisingly, traders
have dubbed the price action on March 9
as Black Monday and the recent carnage
more generally as a ‘bloodbath’.
The two immediate catalysts for the
collapse witnessed on global financial
markets are the rapid, contagious spread
across the world of the novel coronavirus
(COVID-19), and the start of an oil price
war between Saudi Arabia and Russia
after the dramatic collapse of the OPEC+
agreement on production cuts.
The two seemingly unrelated devel-
opments — the COVID-19 pandemic and
50 | GLOBAL AGE April 2020
the oil price war — are not as unrelated as
they may seem at first. The first develop-
ment has amplified pre-existing worries
about the health of the global economy.
These concerns have played into oil mar-
ket fears about weak demand. The sec-
ond development (collapse of OPEC+
agreement) has added a supply shock to
the disquiet of oil exporting nations.
Since the demand for oil — and in a sec-
ond-hand way, its international price —
is an important indicator of the health of
the global economy, the sharp fall in oil
benchmarks has reinforced the prevail-
ing sentiment of gloom and doom.
The categorisation by WHO of
COVID-19 as a pandemic will fuel the
panic. Given that over 103 countries
were reported affected as of March 9,
including hard-hit advanced economies
such as Italy, compared to around 26
each at the time of SARS or MERS, and
the extreme containment measures that
countries around the world are having to
take, the scale of potential economic
disruption is unprecedented. Huge
losses are being incurred by airlines,
h o t e l s , a n d t h e w i d e r t o u r-
ism/hospitality and recreation indus-
tries, among others.
The fact that China was at the epi-
centre of this virus is leading to fears
about the economic contagion spreading
far and wide. While China absorbs
around 11pc of the world’s exports,
almost 40pc of its own exports, or nearly
$1tr, are supplied to global companies as
part of the latter’s supply chains. (This
number is down from around 80pc at its
peak in the early 2000s.) The closure of
factories and all means of transportation
between December and end-February
would have imposed colossal losses that
are unlikely to be recouped with a global
economy tipping into a ‘recession’.
According to an estimate by
Bloomberg Economics, the COVID-19
pandemic can cost as much as $2.7tr to
the global economy in the worst case,
with the loss to China’s economy esti-
mated at 2.4pc of GDP.
The more relevant question for us of
course is what will be the economic
impact on Pakistan? The most visible
number that commentators are focused
on is the international price of oil. With
every decline of $10 per barrel, Paki-
stan’s oil import bill drops by approxi-
mately $1.3 billion. With benchmark
Brent crude trading at $59 on Feb 20,
globalagemagazine.kipscss.net
and having lost almost $25 per barrel as
of March 11, the import bill can fall by
over $3.2bn over the next 12 months if
current levels are sustained. Since a fall
in the international price of oil is linked
to other important energy products that
Pakistan imports, such as LNG, the
potential savings are likely to be larger.
Lower imported energy prices
should translate into a sharp fall in infla-
tion, with the magnitude depending on
how much of the fall in international
prices is passed on to domestic consum-
ers by the government. The prospect of
sharply lower inflation should spur an
interest rate-cutting cycle by the central
bank, which will ease budgetary pressure
on the one hand, and lower the burden of
globalagemagazine.kipscss.net
financial charges for businesses.
Cheaper imported energy prices will also
potentially translate into lower energy
costs for businesses and households via a
reduction in electricity and gas tariffs.
This should also ease the pace of accu-
mulation of circular debt.
The global economy has
hit severe turbulence
These are substantial positives.
However, the impact is not unambigu-
ously positive. The upside from lower oil
prices will be limited to an extent by the
growth-diminishing effects of fiscal con-
solidation. Global recessionary condi-
tions will also provide headwinds for
Pakistan’s exports. The lower demand
and price of oil could at some stage
impact Saudi Arabia’s willingness to
continue with the generous oil facility it
has granted to Pakistan. The enormous
impact on the global economy, with the
oil export-dependent Gulf economies
hardest hit, could spill over into the coun-
try’s flow of worker remittances.
In addition, lower oil prices will
negatively affect the government’s main
revenue spinner. However, lower reve-
nue from the import and sale of petro-
leum will be offset to some extent by rais-
ing the petroleum levy, as well as via
lower debt servicing costs. Finally, con-
ditions in the global financial markets
have prompted significant outflows from
the stock of foreign portfolio investment
in government securities. Between
March 9 and 11, around $400 million has
flown out from the ‘hot money’ book, or
roughly 12pc of the total invested stock
in a space of three days. This is possibly
the start of the worst case scenario read-
ers will recall I have been warning
against since July last year.
An even bigger risk that stalks Paki-
stan’s outlook than all the foregoing
near-term ones, however, is that the eco-
nomic reprieve from falling oil prices
could engender complacency in the
already fairly underwhelming reform
effort this government is undertaking. If
so, that would take us back to where we
started — square one.
l The writer is a former member of the prime minister’s economic advisory council,
and heads a macroeconomic consultancy based in Islamabad.
April 2020 GLOBAL AGE | 51
ENERGY SECTOR
The renewable revolution
There is far too much negativity in the air, and some feedback I have received from those
who follow my articles says they are keen to hear what suggestions I might have for the
government, rather than just relentless criticism. It is a fair challenge and I accept — so
here goes.
Khurram Husain
@KhurramHusain
I have made it clear in the past that I
am a big fan of the renewable energy
revolution that is currently
sweeping the world. I am very keen to see
this revolution reach its full potential
here in Pakistan and have some ideas on
how it can be catalysed.
First, consider how the industry is
developing. Back in 2010, the Obama
administration launched what they
called the Sunshot Initiative, an ambi-
tious drive to bring down the price of
utility-scale, grid connected solar power
to a point where it achieves what they call
‘grid parity’, or the same price as the elec-
tricity that is already present in the
power grid. At that time, they figured this
grid power price was six cents per unit,
whereas solar was 28 cents (for utility-
scale grid connected power), and they
targeted to bring solar down to six cents
by the year 2020.
Likewise, they brought down the
price of residential and commercial solar
power from 52 and 40 cents to 16 and 11
cents respectively by 2017. By the end of
this year, they want these numbers down
52 | GLOBAL AGE April 2020
to 10 and eight cents respectively. It is
quite possible these targets have already
been reached or surpassed.
In utility-scale, grid connected solar
power, they passed the six cents mark by
2017 instead, three years ahead of sched-
ule. Now they are targeting to bring it
down to three cents by 2030.
Last year, the International Renew-
able Energy Agency (IRENA) found that
“83 per cent of the utility-scale PV pipe-
line commissioned for 2020 will boast
prices lower than the cheapest fossil-fuel
alternatives.” As per their survey, utility-
scale solar projects will have an average
tariff of 4.8 cents per unit, beating the
target set for the Sunshot Initiative. They
find that solar and wind will, in this year,
beat the 700GW of total operational coal
fired power generation worldwide, mean-
ing the revolution will hit a tipping point
in both financial and operational terms
in this year. From here, there is no look-
ing back.
We are in the middle of a profound
revolution in power generation that is
perhaps similar to the revolution in com-
munications that cellular phones ush-
ered in about a decade and a half ago. In
the late 1990s, it was rare to see people
with a mobile phone. Today, it is rare to
see someone without one. It will be the
same with solar panels. By the time the
2020s end, it will be rare to find someone
who does not have a solar panel in their
home, office or factory.
Our challenge here is to catalyse this
process, not sit and wait for it to arrive on
its own. Unlike the mobile communica-
tions revolution, this one does not rely
on large operators, with billions of dol-
lars in investment. Small traders are now
importing the technology that can bring
an entire home’s power bills down to
zero.
In 2015, the country’s first ‘net
metering’ regime was initiated by Nepra,
the power sector regulator. This enables
a power consumer to generate electricity
on their own premises and sell whatever
they are not using back into the grid. As
of 2010, large sections of our power
bureaucracy had not heard of such a
thing. For a couple of years after 2015,
globalagemagazine.kipscss.net
when the regulations were announced,
the number of net metering license
applications actually processed
remained near zero.
Our challenge is to
catalyse this process, not sit
and wait for it to arrive on
its own
Today, hundreds of these applica-
tions have been processed, with the num-
ber rising exponentially and processing
time coming down significantly.
How can it be catalysed? The energy
s NEPRA has issued guidelines for net metering so consumers can now sell excess solar energy
globalagemagazine.kipscss.net
ministry simply needs to put some
incentives for the power distribution
companies to issue more net metering
licenses. They can do this by helping cre-
ate a partnership between the distribu-
tion companies, the banks and
authorised suppliers of solar panels
whose products have passed quality con-
trol guidelines set by the Alternate
Energy Development Board.
The banks will provide the capital
for each home-based installation, much
like an auto loan, to be repaid through
the consumer’s power bills. The vendor
will provide the technology, installation
and after sales service. The distribution
company will advertise the scheme
through its monthly bills, telling the con-
sumers that there is no upfront cost. The
bank will pay the upfront cost, and the
loan will be repaid from the savings that
the consumer gets from the installation.
For the first year or two, the savings are
used to repay the bank (depending on
the repayment plan the consumer
chooses), and after that the savings
belong to the consumer.
The distribution companies can be
told that every unit of power that you buy
from rooftop solar entitles you to an
equal number of units to be purchased
from the grid at a reduced price. They
can be given benchmarks to reduce their
receivables and increasingly told to rely
on their own liquidity to run their busi-
ness, with appropriate bonuses for per-
formance.
Bringing the renewal revolution
into the homes of millions of people
around the country is a visible marker of
progress, and will have a lasting impact
on power sector development in the
future.
Our power sector difficulties, such
as the continuously rising circular debt,
will not be solved through reforms
because the power of the entrenched,
vested interests — whether the bureau-
cracy, the rackets, or the large independ-
ent power producers — is too powerful
for the state to manage without
upheaval. Ultimately, these chronic prob-
lems will only disappear when technol-
ogy makes the entire apparatus anachro-
nistic, much like cellular technology
made large-scale landline telephone
infrastructure obsolete. Reforms to miti-
gate the rise of the circular debt are
important, but why not start pushing
large-scale solar installations as well?
April 2020 GLOBAL AGE | 53
POWER POLITICS

Dynasties and cults

In developed states, policies largely attract votes. In developing ones, electables gain
vote banks by promising patronage goodies directly to local clans. These banks, being
based on social links, transfer within families, which produces dynastic politics.
Patronage pyramids run from the local to national, linking local electables to national
ones, often via family links. Parties have their own vote banks also. However, these too
are mostly not based on their policies but on cultist hero worship of top leaders. So,
most parties win polls via a mix of top leaders' political dynasties and cults.

s Political system in Pakistan seems to be driven by the blemished concept of dynastic politics

politics is infeasible. So the brand of cor-
rupt patronage politics of mostly poor
illiterates at least has a narrow validity.
However, educated middle-class
minds hate such politics and want a
better one. But then one sees that vast
sections of such people lack even narrow
validity. So they often join the political
cults of charismatic ‘messiahs’ like Altaf
Hussain and now Imran Khan more
broadly. Here, there is no focus on poli-
cies and competence, only on the
claimed supernatural virtues of messi-
ahs which are magically expected to
directly produce progress.
Elsewhere, middle classes are even
ardent fans of bigots. Other pearls of
wisdom educated people share involve
regime tinkering, eg presidentialism,
proportionate representation and even
technocracies and autocracies though
there is no proof these work. So shock-
ingly, the politics of our rich and edu-
cated is much worse than even that of
poor illiterates.
The brand that offers most hope but
that few follow is the rights-based, leftist
politics offered by small parties like the
Awami Workers Party. The poor don’t
adopt it given their constraints. The edu-
cated don’t adopt it due to lack of politi-
cal sense. So, in the short term at least,
the most selling political brands in Paki-
stan will remain dynastic, cultist and
bigoted politics. Dynastic politics is the
least odious. If one ends it artificially, the
void will be filed by cultist, fascist and/or
bigoted politics rather than high politics.
Thus, one may detest the Bhuttos and
Sharifs for their misrule and graft. But
removing them artificially via rigged
polls and trials will cause more misrule
and political instability, as is true today.
l The writer is a Fellow with UC Berkeley and heads INSPIRING Pakistan, a
progressive policy unit.

Dr Niaz Murtaza
@NiazMurtaza2

P olitical variances come from

economic ones. Developed states
produce high-end goods that
require educated labour. Thus, merit
prevails in economics and politics and
individual progress mostly depend on
what one knows. But developing states
produce low-end goods where producers
need merit less than personal loyalty.
Here, patronage prevails in economics
and politics and individual progress
depends on whom one knows.
Sleaze emerges naturally in low-end
economies — not initially due to the
greed of politicians and bureaucrats but
the needs of economic agents to bypass
onerous laws given low-profit margins
and intense competition in most low-
end sectors. Laws emerged slowly and
organically in today’s developed states.
But today’s developing states inorgani-
cally and rapidly adopt laws from devel-
oped states. Economic agents then offer
sleaze to state officials to bypass them;
they oblige and use it to distribute
patronage and get rich. Other forms of
sleaze duly emerge.
Thus, developing states exhibit tight
and complex politico-economic systems
whose parts can’t be changed easily with-
out risking a system collapse. Angry mid-
dle-class minds want a quick end to
political dynasties and sleaze via ruthless
accountability of politicians, naively
believing this would give progress. In
reality, their end may create economic
and political chaos.
On one side, the needs of economic
agents will go unmet, leading to eco-
nomic chaos. On the other, the patron-
age needs of electables and the masses
will go unmet, producing political insta-
bility. This happens where overzealous
anti-sleaze steps are unleashed thought-
lessly, eg Indian demonetisation and PTI
accountability drives. The seductive idea
that honest politicians can quickly intro-
duce brilliant policies for rapid progress
is not backed by global evidence. Where
honest top leaders have captured power,
they have failed to ignite progress, as
with the PTI today. States that have
developed rapidly in recent years have
done so not by ending sleaze and dynas-
tic politics first but despite them.
This lesson from political economy
lenses only cautions against viewing
anti-sleaze policies as major drivers of
progress and not against tackling sleaze
as a legal issue, which it basically is. But
the lens of global legal norms too says
accountability must involve strong due
process, which means few politicos will
be convicted. Thus, both political econ-
omy and legal lenses give the same
insight, ie a quick end to corrupt dynastic s Chairman of Pakistan Peoples Party, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, right, and his sister Bakhtawar wave to supporters at a rally in Karachi

54 | GLOBAL AGE April 2020

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April 2020 GLOBAL AGE | 55
INTERVIEW - PAKISTAN CUSTOMS SERVICE
Ali Hassan Raza
Our bureau talks to Ali, who joined KIPS and passed his CSS exam with merit number 55,
He told that I must say that when it comes to CSS preparation, KIPS Institute under the
leadership of Sir Dr. Shahid Wazir Khan has made its mark in every nook and corner of
the country.
The KIPS Bureau
Lahore, Pakistan
He suggests aspirants must consult not more than two pertinent books for each subject.
They must make short notes and keep on revising them till their exams. This will help
them to diffuse anxiety and infuse confidence in them.
G.A. Our readers would like to
know about your educational back-
ground.
I acquired basic education till class 7
from my hometown, Jauharabad and the
name of the school was Falcon House. I
was a student with mediocre caliber but I
have always believed in hard work and
persistence. After completing my early
seven years of education, I got admission
in Cadet College Palandri, AJK. I com-
pleted my matriculation and FSc from
there with glowing colors. Then, I earned
a bachelor's degree in Electrical Engi-
neering from UET Lahore (FSD Cam-
pus) with distinction followed by several
certifications such as Project Manage-
ment from PITAC, PRIMAVERA-P6
from Computer College Pakistan Engi-
neering Congress and Lean Six Sigma
(White Belt) from Aveta Business Insti-
56 | GLOBAL AGE April 2020
tute, Pennsylvania, USA. Along with
that, I also took admission in Law and
have completed two years of LLB degree
program from Punjab University.
G.A. What was the strategy you fol-
lowed for full fledge preparation of
competitive exam?
In my early days of CSS preparation, I
was literally moving from pillar to post in
search of proper guidance. I had no idea
of CSS preparation but then with the
passage of time and after learning from
my failures in PMS-2016 (secured 73rd
position but was not allocated) and CSS-
2016, I refined my preparation and meth-
odology. I studied twelve hours a day
from 9 am to 9 pm throughout my two
years of CSS preparation without any
holiday. I broke down these twelve hours
into various categories. I used to start my
study routine from the recitation of the
Holy Quran. It was then followed by read-
ing a newspaper, revision of vocabulary,
writing practice, preparation of MCQs,
grammar, past papers review, prepara-
tion of an optional and a compulsory
subject. Moreover, I made good use of
the internet and Microsoft OneNote for
making notes. There is no backing out
once you start CSS preparation, so make
sure that when you start CSS preparation
be mentally prepared for it and do not
quit preparation in the middle.
G.A. What would you like to recom-
mend the CSS candidates in the
light of your experience regarding
paper attempting techniques, prep-
aration, and books that must be
consulted besides other sources?
If one wants to clear CSS in one's first
globalagemagazine.kipscss.net
attempt it is imperative that one must
abide by certain golden principles and
that are: persistence, smart work, time
management, and dedication. As far as
the paper attempting techniques are
concerned, the answer must be limited
to six pages. It must be started from a 4-5
line introduction with a punch line, in
the end, body including pertinent main
headings and sub-headings along with
I worked a lot on MCQs’
preparation and for that, I
consulted the Union Public
Service Commission’s
(UPSC) course of Public
Administration. This helped
me in answering 20 out of
20 MCQs in the paper
relevant references and facts, and a
crispy conclusion. Paper presentation
skills also play an important in securing
good marks so make sure to write neatly,
no cuttings, use black and blue markers
for headings, margins at corners, draw
maps, flow charts and table if required.
Moreover, I always recommend aspi-
rants to browse the internet for keeping
them abreast of times and for making
notes. Internet is the ocean of knowl-
edge; aspirants can download tons of
relevant material from it. So, after con-
sulting basic CSS syllabus books, aspi-
rants are advised that they must consult
the internet also.
G.A. How do you see KIPS as an
ultimate source of guidance for the
CSS aspirants, and how did this
platform benefit you?
KIPS played a pivotal role in turning my
dream of becoming a CSP into reality.
Learned instructors, top quality study
material and supportive staff are the
hallmark of this institute. KIPS guided
me throughout my CSS journey and gave
me an opportunity to interact with the
finest civil servants. Moreover, I must
say that when it comes to CSS prepara-
tion, KIPS Institute under the leadership
of Sir Dr. Shahid Wazir Khan has made
its mark in every nook and corner of the
country.
G.A. Which civil service are you in?
I have been allocated to Pakistan Cus-
toms Service. I am honored to be part of
such a royal and uniformed service. It is
one of the elite cadres of the Civil Ser-
vices of Pakistan. It is serving as the
guardian of Pakistan's borders against
the movement of contraband goods and
encourages bona-fide trade. Moreover, it
is providing a major source of revenue to
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April 2020 GLOBAL AGE | 57
the Government of Pakistan in the form
of taxes levied.
G.A. In which subject you scored
the most and how you prepared it?
I scored 88 out of 100 marks in Public
Administration and that was the subject
in which I got the highest marks. The
reason for getting exceptional marks in
this subject was that I drew flow-charts,
my all answers were hitting the bud. I
went the extra mile by mentioning perti-
nent references, case studies, and facts.
Moreover, I worked a lot on MCQs' prep-
aration and for that, I consulted the
Union Public Service Commission's
(UPSC) course of Public Administration.
This helped me in answering 20 out of 20
MCQs in the paper. In the end, I would
advise aspirants to read articles of the
Dawn News and especially of Dr. Ishrat
Hussain that are related to the public
administration.
G.A. What role Global Age can play
in ensuring positive results in CSS?
Without an iota of doubt, Global Age
magazine is one of the best magazines for
CSS aspirants. In fact, it is a complete
package for all those who want to ace CSS
exams. It gives broad and all-inclusive
insight to both national and interna-
tional events. CSS aspirants must read
this magazine regularly, extract facts
plus references, jot down catchy phrases,
build vocabulary, and develop their opin-
ion from it. Additionally, they must read
the interview section thoroughly and
learn from the experiences, which are
shared by civil servants.
G.A. Your thoughts may become a
source of inspiration to many and
they may opt to go for CSS. What
58 | GLOBAL AGE April 2020
would be your advice to such aspi-
rants?
CSS is undoubtedly the most competi-
tive exam of Pakistan but having said
that aspirants must bear one thing in
their mind that nothing is impossible.
CSS is all about belief and passion. If you
have faith in yourself, you will clear the
CSS examination. Work hard no matter
what, do get proper guidance from a
proper academy or a mentor and while
you are attempting paper do not beat
about the bush.
G.A. Any tip to overcome exam anx-
iety?
I would suggest that aspirants must con-
sult not more than two pertinent books
for each subject. They must make short
notes by the end of October and then
keep on revising them till their exams.
This will help them to diffuse anxiety and
infuse confidence in them. Moreover,
they must appear in mock exams and
then later on work on their weaknesses
based on the feedback. Similarly, they
must keep on refreshing their vocabu-
lary and other objective portion (pair of
words, idioms, correction, punctuation)
of English Precis and Composition paper
because once they stop refreshing it they
will feel stress in the end.
G.A. What specific methodology
did you adopt to crackdown on
Essay?
To crack English Essay paper, I followed
one principle and that was “The more
you practice, the better it is”. There is no
specific book for Essay writing and it is a
fact. So, to play safe aspirants must, first
of all, improve their grammar skills, get
themselves acquaint with the basic skills
of Essay writing because there is a proper
way of writing an outline, introduction,
body of an essay and conclusion. I can
still remember that I got zero marks in
my first essay but I did not lose hope. I
worked on my weaknesses and I took
that feedback positively and proved my
mettle later on. Moreover, prepare ten to
fifteen broad topics such as terrorism,
women related issues, globalization,
economy, etc. To sum it up, Essay should
contain ingredients such as fact, refer-
ences, coherence, clarity of thought,
proper structure, relevant outline, rea-
sonable use of good vocabulary for gar-
nishing purpose, crispy sentences and
grammatical error-free writing.
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