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Extension legacy

LAST Tuesday marked an unenviable end to six years of near-absolute power. Gen
Qamar Javed Bajwa would not have wanted to go as he did, spurned by friend and foe
alike. Even the general public — usually so enamoured of men in uniform — seemed
unforgiving as he hung up his boots, with many taking to social media to express their
criticism.

It is unfortunate that it had to be so, and the retired general will no doubt spend many a moment of
solitude pondering where it all went wrong. Was it ambition that became his undoing, or naiveté?
That question will rankle him as he comes to terms with the legacy he leaves behind.

Gen Bajwa is not the only army chief who squandered his prestige by sticking around for longer than
he ought to have. Others before him who also overstayed their tenure suffered more or less similar
fates, leaving it to their institution to pay the price for their hubris.

This publication has long argued against service extensions unless these have to be made purely for
strategic purposes during an ongoing war. The practice of having individuals carry on well beyond
their time is up — and, in the process, denying successive batches of capable officers the chance to
lead and mould their institution in new ways — weakens the armed forces by eroding their prestige. It
has tied the military and the executive together in a co-dependent relationship, in which one side
invariably ends up using its leverage on the other for quid pro quo arrangements that may extend its
grip on power.

Indeed, if the army is serious about its recent commitment to detaching itself from domestic politics,
it should, as a starting step, encourage a legislative initiative to do away with this practice completely.
The civilian leadership, too, must take the opportunity to bury this harmful precedent rather than
find new ways to enforce it, such as the amendments to the Army Act that were recently being
considered.

The army chief should come in for a term, lead it capably, chart a course for the future in consultation
with his prospective successors, and then depart on time and gracefully — without any of the needless
speculation and political machinations seen this year. There is no shortage of capable people in the
forces that just one should be considered indispensable.

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The outgoing year has shown us that Pakistan has changed — perhaps irreversibly so — and that it
cannot be business as usual in matters such as these. It is time our system evolved as well.

Published in Dawn, December 5th, 2022

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Dodging accountability

A WARNING carried in these pages in August appears to have gone completely

unheeded. Months ago, as the government was bulldozing legislation after legislation
through parliament to ‘reform’ the prevailing accountability laws, concern had been
raised that the sweeping changes being made could completely paralyse ongoing
efforts to hold powerful wrongdoers accountable. It fell on deaf ears. The government
appears to have been concerned solely with saving its leaders’ skins as it proceeded to
gut the National Accountability Bureau and defang its governing law, the National
Accountability Ordinance, without putting a robust alternative system in place. A
rather outrageous consequence of this self-serving ‘reform’ effort manifested itself on
Thursday, as property magnate Malik Riaz was able to walk away ‘scot-free’ from a
multibillion-rupee corruption reference related to Karachi’s Bahria Icon Tower.

Neither Mr Riaz nor the many megaprojects he oversees are known for above-board operations. The
Icon Tower skyscraper partly occupies an amenity plot that would hardly have been meant for
housing the rich; yet, somehow, it ended up in Bahria Town’s hands. When a three-year-old reference
regarding the legality of this deal was brought before an accountability court judge on Thursday, he
was forced to close it because he no longer has jurisdiction over the matter. The suspects nominated
in the reference had filed applications seeking this outcome, citing recent amendments made by the
PDM government to the National Accountability Ordinance to make their case. The reference is now
once again with NAB, which is supposed to transmit it onward to a “competent forum”. One wonders
if there is any hope that we may see further progress in this case. The impunity with which the
powerful seem to be operating was evident when Mr Riaz failed to show up before NAB on the same
day in connection with another suspicious multibillion-rupee land deal that he was allegedly involved
in. “You are advised that failure to comply with this notice may entail penal consequences under NAO
1999,” the real estate tycoon had been warned. It had no effect. While NAB has earned its reputation
of being a failed institution that serves little purpose other than to settle political scores, the need had
been for the government to fix it, not cripple it completely. The PDM government is itself responsible
for giving credence to those who feel it came into power to give ‘NROs’ to the corrupt.

Published in Dawn, December 5th, 2022

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Double standards

IN a globalised world, if states fail to protect the human rights of their citizens, or
worse, participate in abuses, the international community takes notice. However,
problems arise when accountability for rights abuses is politicised, where allies are
given a free pass, and geopolitical adversaries are raked over the coals. The US State
Department’s annual Religious Freedom Designations listing very much appears to be
a politicised project, where the above-mentioned dichotomy is clearly visible. This
year, just as last year, Pakistan has been retained on the list of ‘Countries of Particular
Concern’ where religious rights’ violations are concerned. Other states on this dubious
list include China, Cuba, Iran, Russia and Saudi Arabia. With the exception of the
Saudis, all of the states listed are geopolitical adversaries of the US, while it is not
apparent whether Washington considers Pakistan a friend or a foe. But there is one
glaring exception: India. In the press release announcing the listing, the US secretary
of state has castigated governments and non-state actors that “harass, threaten, jail,
and even kill individuals on account of their beliefs” and “exploit opportunities for
political gain”. India under the BJP’s watch very much fits the bill.

According to the US Commission on International Religious Freedom — a bipartisan body of the

American federal government — the Indian government’s policies “negatively affect Muslims,
Christians, Sikhs, Dalits” while the outfit clearly recommends that the American administration
should designate India as a ‘Country of Particular Concern’, and impose sanctions on individuals and
entities responsible for religious persecution. Has Secretary of State Antony Blinken not read the
USCIRF report? This paper has always argued that the state in Pakistan needs to do much more to
protect the rights of religious minorities in this country. Yet the US State Department’s listing of
Pakistan and exclusion of India as violators of religious freedom smacks of hypocrisy. Instead of
individual states sermonising to others, bodies such as the UN should be used to discuss rights’
violations, so that states can explain their positions.

Published in Dawn, December 5th, 2022

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Elite politics

The writer is a former ambassador to the US, UK & UN.

UNREMITTING political confrontations have left the country exhausted and

emaciated. Political tensions show no sign of abating. Political leaders often claim the
next round of battle will be decisive but their war rages on. The war paradigm guides
their political behaviour. Opponents are seen as enemies, not competitors. Politics is
about vanquishing the enemy and eliminating them from the political scene in a
terminal conflict.

This of course is not new. This pattern of behaviour has resonated throughout Pakistan’s history and
is part of an unedifying political tradition characterised by intolerance and lack of respect for

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democratic norms.

Those in power have rarely accepted the need to engage with the opposition, while those in
opposition have often sought to destabilise the government of the day. There have been moments of
rare cooperation, as for example, in the consensus that led to adoption of the 18th Constitutional
Amendment. But for the most part, Pakistan’s fractious politics has seen fierce government-
opposition conflict and mutual efforts to upend each other.

These endless political feuds opened space for the military’s manipulation of politics and frequent
return to the political stage.

There was another cost to the country. The lack of a stable and predictable environment proved a
huge hurdle to solving the country’s daunting problems, which were either left to fester or met by
imprudent short-term policy responses. Pakistan’s economic troubles are in no small measure a
consequence of this.

Since 2008, the country has seen a period of uninterrupted civilian rule, despite the so-called ‘hybrid
experiment’ of recent years that gave the army an informal but extensive role in national affairs. This
period should nonetheless have involved a strengthening of democracy. It should have seen efforts by
political parties to create a democratic culture. But this didn’t happen.

An opportunity was also lost to rebalance and reset power among state institutions as well as realign
politics with the economic and social changes sweeping the country. These changes included greater
urbanisation, expansion of a more assertive middle class, emergence of a diverse and vibrant civil
society and a more ‘connected’ and informed citizenry, thanks to the spread of technology.

Instead of a new form of politics emerging, it remained in a mostly old mould.

The rise of PTI, which came to represent the aspirations of the middle class and youth and also
tapped into public resentment against the elite, promised a departure from politics-as-usual. But it
became a cult following rather than a modern political party that could act ‘independently’ of its
establishment benefactors once it assumed power. Like other parties it included members of the old
political elite, local influentials and habitual turncoats — prominent figures who were previously part
of the two traditional parties that the PTI condemned as corrupt and bankrupt. Expediency denuded
it from the chance to chart a new political course for the country. The primacy of personality over
party organisation also made the new party resemble older ones.

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Bereft of ideas intra-elite conflict offers no

escape from the quagmire Pakistan is
trapped in.

As a result, there has been little break from the past in the way politics functions, the narrow social
base of party leaders and what status quo-oriented parties have to offer the public in whose name
they play the power game.

It also means there is no significant change in the relationship between the state and citizens, despite
the transformed social and political environment. Politics remains a competition between and among
political elites. It is sadly bereft of ideas or a vision — other than platitudes — about where opposing
parties want to take the country. There are barely any significant policy differences between rival
parties who nonetheless declare each other unfit to govern.

Pakistan’s disappointing economic record illustrates this.

Governments, even when run by different political parties, have adopted a similar economic stance,
despite their claims to the contrary. Rather than undertake reform and raise domestic resources to
address the country’s widening budget and balance of payments deficits, they all resorted to excessive
borrowing.

The availability of external resources as a result of Pakistan’s foreign policy alignments during the
Cold War and beyond created a habit of dependence on ‘outside help’. This habit urged successive
governments — representing rural and urban elites — to avoid economic reform, mobilise adequate
revenue or tax its network of influential supporters. Aid-fuelled or ‘borrowed’ economic growth may
not necessarily have been a bad thing if the fiscal space it provided was used to launch reforms to
solve the underlying structural problems of the economy: broadening the tax net, documenting the
economy, diversifying the export base, and encouraging savings to finance a level of investment that
could sustain an economic growth rate higher than the rise in population. But none of this happened.
The availability of external resources along with high levels of remittances from overseas Pakistanis
simply enabled ruling elites to paper over the structural problems of the economy. Every government
sought IMF bailouts to avert insolvency.

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Economic management that relied on someone else’s money permitted the country’s rulers — both
civilian and military — to postpone much-needed structural reforms, including tax reform, that could
have placed the economy on a viable, self-sustaining path. Successive governments borrowed heavily
to finance development as well as consumption. In the process, the country accumulated
unsustainable debt both by borrowing abroad and at home. This burden continues to cripple the
economy today and fuel record levels of inflation.

With few if any exceptions, governments formed by different political parties preferred to pursue
‘pain-free’ ways to manage public finances. This has left the country lurching from one financial crisis
to another. While playing to populist constituencies their policies perpetuated the status quo.

This can be only explained in terms of a political elite or ‘privilegentsia’ averse to measures it saw as
eroding its political position or undermining its class interests. Their economic policies testify that
elite capture of public resources is an abiding reality.

This intra-elite conflict is hardly obscured by the highfalutin rhetoric which it is wrapped in. Its most
troubling aspect is that it offers no escape from the quagmire the country is trapped in — of
dysfunctional politics, mounting governance challenges, visionless economic management and
crumbling public faith in state institutions.

The writer is a former ambassador to the US, UK & UN.

Published in Dawn, December 5th, 2022

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Ignoring undernutrition

DESTRUCTION. Devastation. Death. That the floods in Pakistan have left people quite
literally clutching at straws is no secret. Although the floods have receded for now,
those that have been affected by it are only just resuming their lives amid a survival
crisis.

There is a dire need for not only medical intervention as disease grows, but also an even greater one
for the bare minimum required for survival: food and water. In the wake of these floods, we need to
demand immediate action in the face of one of Pakistan’s long-standing problems: undernutrition.

According to Save the Children, the floods of 2022 have increased the number of people facing food
insecurity by 45 per cent; the number of people in Pakistan who were already facing a severe food
crisis before the floods has gone up from 5.96 million to 8.62m after the deluge. Now, more than ever
before, it is time to talk about how these circumstances did not come about overnight. In fact,
Pakistan has been grappling with undernutrition for more than half a century.

Undernutrition, which is the body’s inability to meet its requirement of energy and nutrients, can
cause impaired brain development, low birthweight, weakened immune systems and premature
deaths. It also increases the risk of diabetes, cancer, stroke, hypertension, and other non-
communicable diseases. Unfortunately, this expanding burden of disease is shouldered by the most
vulnerable in our community — our children. Globally, Unicef attributes nearly half of the deaths in
children under five to undernutrition because the latter increases their risk of infection and delays
recovery.

Whatever the implementation challenges

may be, adequate nutrition for all is a cause
worth fighting for.

Despite that, undernutrition continues to receive little to no attention; it has not managed to become
a political issue for the legislature and has not been prioritised by the bureaucracy. Most importantly,

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it lacks a unified national policy that works.

Commenting on the floods, Dr Nazeer Ahmed, the focal point in Pakistan for Scaling Up Nutrition —
a global movement aimed at improving nutrition, “A country with a huge number of the population
having limited physical and economic access to diversified food is now expected to experience severe
shortage of foods which will result in a triple burden of malnutrition. Hence, an effective multi-
sectoral well-coordinated response is a must.” Interestingly, such a strategy does exist somewhere in
the shadows, but has so far failed to achieve what it set out to do.

The Pakistan Multi-Sectoral Nutrition Strategy was envisioned for 2018-2025 and aimed to enable
emergency health services to respond to urgent clinical needs, improve access to nutritious foods,
clean water, and sanitation, deliver services to high-risk populations, and build a gender-responsive
approach to fighting the various causes of malnutrition. Unfortunately, a seemingly comprehensive
policy failed to translate into action, given the severe lack of budgetary allocation for development
funds and resistance by the provinces to join forces. As a result, collaboration is low, outreach
activities are few, and community networks are weak.

Additionally, there is a lack of technical capacity, a weak understanding of nutrition, and a shortage
of front-line staff. To top it off, there are next to no systems for monitoring and evaluating progress.
All these factors combine to ensure that the policy stays only on paper.

Whatever the implementation challenges may be, adequate nutrition for all is a cause worth fighting
for. Food security is the right of every human being and protecting every human being’s right is our
collective responsibility. It is the small price we pay to live in our city, our country, our world.
Efficient food systems are social indicators of health and well-being, and a lack thereof is a public
health emergency. Optimal nutrition not only protects against disease but is necessary for physical
and cognitive development, good academic performance, improved productivity, and ultimately,
enhanced socioeconomic national growth.

As far as the flood-affected areas go, an estimated 760,000 children are fighting for their life against
diarrhoea, typhoid, respiratory infections, malaria and skin conditions, as well as experiencing a
multitude of mental health problems.

According to Abdullah Fadil, Unicef representative in Pakistan, “We are facing a nutrition emergency
that is threatening the lives of millions of children. Without urgent action, we are heading towards a
catastrophic outcome that is threatening children’s very development and survival.” What Fadil

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correctly attributes to flood victims is in fact the grave reality of more than 3.4m children who face
chronic hunger in Pakistan.

With every passing year, the economic burden of undernutrition and its health consequences totals
$7.6 billion which accounts for nearly 3pc of Pakistan’s GDP, a cost that continues to inflate by the
day. However, what is infinitely more important than money is the lives at stake. With every dying
cry, the undernourished population of Pakistan is screaming for attention. Sadly, in this age of
politically driven agendas and a hyper-sensationalised media, their desperate pleas fail to get clout.
That is why we need to step away from our current role of bystanders and demand change. We need
to advocate for an effective policy that fights this gross violation of health and human rights. We need
be aware of our power as a community to end undernutrition in Pakistan, once and for all.

The writer is studying for a Master’s degree in Public Health at the University of California at
Berkeley.

mahnoor_fatima@berkeley.edu

Published in Dawn, December 5th, 2022

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An airport death

The writer, a public health consultant, is the author of Patient Pakistan: Reforming and Fixing Healthcare for All in th

LAST month, Mehran Karimi, an Iranian refugee, died, aged 76, at Charles de Gaulle
airport in Paris where he had lived a circumscribed and stranded life for 18 years since
arriving at the airport in 1988. His celebrated story inspired Steven Spielberg’s 2004
film The Terminal, his ghost-written autobiography and aptly named documentary
Waiting for Godot at De Gaulle and a French play Lost in Transit.

All these narrative forms tell the story of a resilient but trapped life occasioned by harsh and inhuman
immigration and asylum laws. Yet the unjust and harsh asylum systems somehow do not figure
centrally in all these films and documentaries. The major thrust of the coverage pivots on his tangled

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Iranian backstory, his daily doings at the airport and his floundering and hesitant quest for his long-
sought British identity by virtue of his reportedly Scottish mother.

One strand of the media coverage also homed in on the inconsistencies regarding his past and place
of birth, apportioning blame to him for refusing to leave the airport even after the French
government’s great graciousness in granting him documents once 18 years of his productive life had
been wasted on a red bench in the airport.

The beginning of Mehran’s sorry fate can be traced to a time when the immigration and asylum
system was tightening in Europe. His story took a sad turn when, because of reportedly stolen
documents, he was refused entry into his beloved Britain where he was seeking his imagined or real
maternal roots. This led to his being deported to Paris. The practice of shuttling refugees between
different countries where they had set foot first was thus highlighted. The Terminal, the film inspired
by Mehran’s life, eludes this crucial, political/ administrative fact which caused and prolonged his
misery (Spielberg’s film shows Tom Hanks stranded at an airport because his travel papers were no
longer valid due to a coup in his native country).

There are many Mehrans rotting in the

bylanes of asylum systems.

Due to his circumscribed existence, he was also denied the option of reinventing himself in the wider
world, as many immigrants do. He was left with the single option of committing his thoughts
furiously to his notebooks, piecing together his story from a faltering memory and a deteriorating
mental state. But despite long, persisting uncertainty over his future, he managed to hold on to his
sanity through reading newspapers and having intelligent conversations with the transiting
passengers.

Although sustained media coverage of Mehran Karimi’s life shone a light on what refugees have to go
through before they are legally accepted as one, greater focus on how the dilatory immigration and
asylum system robs a person of his or her identity, a settled life and health has been notably missing.
In some sad way, Mehran was privileged in being allowed to continue living at the airport. But ever
since he got trapped in 1988, the EU immigration system has progressive­­ly become tigh­ter and more
restrictive.

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Nowadays not many refugees are lucky enough to get even with­­in a few inches of a European border,
so vigilantly policed are these areas. There are many Mehrans rotting in the bylanes of the world’s
immigration and asylum systems — whether these are located in migration detention centres or
makeshift camps at different border crossings away from media scrutiny. Many die when their rickety
boats capsize; their calls for help go unheeded.

If there is one lesson for policymakers in the tragic, wasted and mentally disturbed life of Mehran
Karimi, it is that a more humane asylum and immigration system should be devised so that such
tragedies do not recur. The need for expanded avenues for safe and legal migration as well as the
speedy disposal of stalled asylum and refugee cases and claims has never been more urgent. The last
one would go a long way in preventing refugees becoming stranded at airports and detention centres
as Mehran Karimi was.

The writer, a public health consultant, is the author of Patient Pakistan: Reforming and Fixing
Healthcare for All in the 21st Century.

drarifazad@gmail.com

Twitter: @arifazad5

Published in Dawn, December 5th, 2022

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Blood rites

The writer is a journalist.

BLOOD looms large in our collective imaginations, regardless of what culture we

belong to or what language we speak. In English, for example, ill feelings between two
people are ‘bad blood’. When you’re carried away by emotion, it means that something
has stirred your blood. When you’re angry it’s your blood that boils, and so on. Blood is
emotion, heritage and character wrapped in a viscous, scarlet mixture. Most of all, to
quote Count Dracula: blood is life.

Blood has also been considered medicine; in Ancient Rome, the blood of fallen gladiators was
considered a cure for epilepsy. Gladiator matches would often witness crowd members running onto

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the arena floor trying to bottle the blood of less-fortunate fighters. There’s an interesting parallel with
that belief and the South Asian belief that pigeon blood, being ‘hot’ can cure or ameliorate the effects
of stroke-caused paralysis.

While we can scoff at these beliefs now, do note that during the peak of the Covid pandemic, the
blood plasma of those who had recovered from Covid was in great demand, despite there being no
evidence of it being beneficial. Then there’s the rather vampiric practice of injecting blood plasma
from young people into older persons in an effort to increase vitality and longevity. Despite the FDA
warning that such practices “have no clinical benefit” companies marketing this treatment are
proliferating.

Then there’s the ‘vampire facial’, prompted by celebrities like Kim Kardashian; a gruesome skin care
treatment involving a mask made from your own blood being spread across your face in order to
rejuvenate the complexion. So yeah, before we get all smug about our ignorant ancestors, it’s
humbling to consider what future generations will think of our own blood rites.

How will our vampiric practices be viewed?

It wasn’t until much later that they thought about putting blood into the body, and the chain of
discoveries that led to this starts with Ibn al-Nafis, an Arab physician in the 13th century who first
theorised the existence of pulmonary capillaries, 400 years before they were discovered by Marcello
Malphigi. Then, in 1628, William Harvey figured out how blood circulates in the body and a few
decades later, canine-to-canine transfusions took place.

In 1667, French physician Jean-Baptiste Denis transfused the blood of a lamb into a sick boy. The boy
survived, as did Denis’ next patient. The third, however, passed away soon after and Denis was
arrested for murder. Even though he was cleared of any wrongdoing, this effectively put an end to
transfusion experiments for almost two centuries to the relief of the medical establishment which
frowned upon such procedures, perhaps influenced by the ancient belief that blood carried memory
and personality, and to thus transfuse the blood of animals or other humans into patients may have
resulted in abominations.

Here one should note that medical folklore has it that the Incas were conducting successful human-
to-human blood transfusions as early as the 1500s, and while this is a testament to their medical

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skills, it was also made possible by the fact that the Incas, being an isolated and homogenous
population, all had the same blood type, which made the chances of rejection or reaction remote.

Indeed, it wasn’t until the discovery of blood types in 1901 by Austrian physician Karl Landsteiner
that blood transfusion really took off, but even then, this discovery was hijacked by proponents of
pseudoscience and racial theory.

The Nazis, for example, were obsessed with the purity of bloodlines and thought that blood types
corresponded to different races; blood type A was the most desirable and ‘Aryan’ of the blood types,
while blood type B was said to be found in mostly “psychopaths, hysterics and alcoholics”. Thus,
having an ‘undesirable’ blood type was enough to relegate you to the ranks of the Untermenschen in
those enlightened times.

Oddly, this theory made its way to Japan, and there developed a whole pseudoscience based on
determining your personality on your blood type. Employers began asking for the blood types of
potential hires, and the Japanese army even grouped soldiers according to blood type.

Despite the passage of decades, the belief lingers on, and the Japanese actually have a word for
harassment/ discrimination based on blood types: ‘bura-hara’. But while humans will be humans,
science is certainly marching on, and clinical trials on the world’s first 100 per cent lab-grown blood
have begun. If nothing else, it’s certainly one reason to be sanguine about the future.

The writer is a journalist.

Twitter: @zarrarkhuhro

Published in Dawn, December 5th, 2022

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