It is feverish and flooded but Pakistan can yet thrive
By Mohsin Hamid
Last month, it began to rain here in Lahore. It was my baby daughter's first monsoon. I took her out on to a balcony and held her as she stared blinkingly up at the dark sky. She was delighted. She laughed and kicked and reached for the drops shattering on her bare arms. The Pakistani monsoon is an amazing and beautiful thing.
The rains continued and, after particularly heavy downpours, the city's streets were transformed into temporary canals, cars either stalling or downshifting and revving their engines to pass. But Lahore drains quickly, and inconveniences in the city were for the most part brief. From elsewhere in the country, though, reports of crop damage and swollen rivers flooded in. The prices of vegetables rose. Still the rains continued, and dikes that had held strong for decades gave way. The homes of many millions were ruined.
For me, to live in Pakistan is to know extremes of hope and despair. Hope takes many small forms. One of these is Coke Studio, a televised jam session that throws together unexpected musical combinations, such as a soulful and powerfully voiced ex-fashion model accompanying a traditional male folk singer. It is part of a vast and downloadable music scene that circumvents the security concerns of live concerts through the use of mass media, the internet and the country's 100m mobile phones. I have heard its songs as the ringtones of people ranging from bankers and shopkeepers to carpenters.
Countless individual responses to the floods also inspire hope. Massive collections are under way in Lahore. Virtually everyone I know is donating money, time or goods -- or all three -- to the relief effort. Societal safety nets, the welfare micro-systems of families and friends that bind Pakistanis together in the absence of a strong and effective state, are doing what they can to help with the unprecedented load.
Hope also comes from the rise of a powerful and independent news media, and from a judiciary that has fought for -- and won -- remarkable freedom. Pakistan's airwaves and front pages, blogs and cafes are full of the debates of a rambunctious multi-party democracy, one of precious few in the region between India and Europe.
Yet the battle against despair is a constant one. I feel it after each deadly terrorist attack, of which this year there have been half a dozen in Lahore alone, killing some 200 people. I try to shut off my novelist's imagination when I go to my barber, otherwise I might think that the glass of his window could make effective shrapnel and any of the motorcycles parked outside could be rigged with explosives. I also try not to think too much about the snipers on the rooftops of primary schools and the steel barricades at their gates, telling myself my daughter still has some years left before she has to enrol.
It is difficult, however, to ignore the fact that the electricity to my house is cut off for a third of the day, Pakistan having failed to plan for rapidly growing demand. It is also difficult to ignore a general sense of malaise, of steadily dropping official standards, brought home recently by a tragic aircraft crash and multiple aviation near-accidents in a single week.
And now there are the floods. The worst natural disaster in living memory, they have brought devastation to 14m Pakistanis, a number almost as large as the populations of New York and London combined. Pakistan normally ranks fourth in the world's production of cotton and milk, and 10th in wheat -- but this terrible year it will not.
Slowly and painfully, however, Pakistan should recover. And beyond that, its future need not be bleak. The country's assets are enormous, after all. It has the world's sixth-largest population, with more children under the age of 14 than the US. While poor, it has appreciably lower levels of hunger and child malnutrition than India.
Vitally, the country is building up its democratic institutions. This matters. For at its core, Pakistan suffers from two related ailments: a state doing too little for its people, and challengers seeking to supplant the state. Its fragile democracy holds the key to tackling both.
The first aspect of Pakistan's crisis can be boiled down to this: tax collection amounts to a paltry 10 per cent of the country's gross domestic product. Pakistan's elite has long been unwilling to pay a fair contribution to the common good. Superb private schools coexist in this country with areas that have almost no schools at all.
But the need to fund voters' expectations is creating pressures for change. If Pakistan is able to increase taxes as a proportion of GDP to India's 17 per cent or Sri Lanka's 15 per cent, the additional revenues would far exceed all foreign aid the country currently receives and make possible investments Pakistanis desperately need.
A more equitable and redistributive state would help, too, with the second aspect of Pakistan's crisis: attempts by militants to overthrow the government and subject the country's pluralistic and heterogeneous society to their tyrannical, intolerant writ.
But economic development is only part of the answer. The militants must also be fought, and the record thus far appears to be, unsurprisingly, that Pakistan's army is more effective at doing so when it operates under the umbrella of legitimacy conferred by a democratic government.
Yet the army has not, even now, committed fully to this fight, for it remains preoccupied with India. I believe this is a tragic mistake. But I also believe that it is unfair to say Pakistan should not feel threatened by its neighbour. I live 30km from a border where a million Indian soldiers recently massed in anger following an attack in the country by Pakistan-based militants. I have seen combat helicopters fly low overhead and artillery batteries dig into lawns. India and Pakistan's conflict is real, mutual and nuclear-armed.
It must urgently be resolved. Pakistan's leading democratic parties appear eager to do so; the problem is security hawks on both sides. The world needs to lend a hand, shedding the pretence that no dispute over Kashmir exists -- or that its consequences are minor. The truth is that Kashmir is a problem that destabilises a region of a 1.5bn people and makes the planet more unsafe.
Recently, I met a Pakistani woman visiting Lahore from Hong Kong. Friends of hers abroad asked why she was travelling to such a troubled country. She said it was like visiting a loved one when they were sick. No one relishes exposing themselves to illness, but when a parent or sibling is unwell, human instinct is to be with them until they recover.
Pakistan is feverish these days. But I find much to admire and to keep me here, and I hope for the sake of my daughter's generation that one day soon the fever will break.
(From: The Financial Times)
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