Separated at Birth?

Pakistan and Egypt are so full of potential but are condemned to struggle along, says Dr Bhaskar Dasgupta.

Over the past few months, I have written several columns relating to Pakistan, which arose from thoughts generated from reading Stephen Cohen's book on the Idea of Pakistan. In an interesting aside, he compares Egypt with Pakistan and in here; I explore this relationship in greater depth.

In particular, he says that the state has spectacularly failed to satisfy the needs of its citizens, but others can prop it up almost indefinitely. We then asked, "Shades of negotiating with a gun pointed at one's own head, but for how long?" Frankly, I hadn't ever considered this comparison, but the more I thought about it, the more similarities I found and those are rather interesting.

First the history has some interesting parallels, then the role of the army is quite similar, minority problems, problems with extremist groups and terrorism, exporting state backed terror, wars with neighbours who have defined their own existence, human development, and perhaps most importantly, the huge role of USA in their polity. Lets take a look at these two client states of the USA, shall we?

Without going into their individual histories, I am sure we all can find out reasons for the differences, but it's the similarities, which are, as I said, very interesting. Let's start with geography. Both the countries are riverine countries, their agriculture and economy are driven by their main rivers, the Nile and Indus. Secondly, both countries are lower riparian countries, in other words, the two rivers arise from another country. In both cases, the upper riparian country isn't something, which we can call as brotherly or friendly neighbour.

India is, of course, mortal enemy of Pakistan, while Sudan has had, let's say, cool relations with Egypt. In fact, Egypt has had wars with Sudan going back to Pharaonic times and couple of years ago, the Egyptian President threatened war against Sudan over water issues. Similarly, if the Indus Water Treaty wasn't there between India and Pakistan, I am sure there would have already been more wars (besides the others).

This water factor has immense implications on both. Water is critical for their economies. Most of their industry is thickly clustered around the river basin and the amount of water available is crucial up and down the country. Back in the 1960's, both countries embarked on a series of huge dam building projects (the Assuan High Dam, Tarbela Dam and Mangla Dam), which initially helped the water situation, but it is now crumbling under significant population pressures and demands from industry.

The dams had significant impact downstream (mind you, for Pakistan downstream is down south while for Egypt, downstream is up north). Many times, the Indus even fails to reach the sea, thereby devastating the seaboard fishing and local economies, while because of the dams in Egypt, the downstream land became salinated heavily and lost fertility as the silt no longer came down with the annual floods.

It also doesn't help that both countries are heavily dependent upon cotton farming, a very water intensive industry. Add to this the problem of removal of textile quotas in the western world from January 1, 2005 and you have the making of a disaster. The cotton and textile industry is one of the big employers in both countries and this will definitely have a bad impact.

Both countries rely heavily and significantly on remittances from its nationals working mainly in the gulf and elsewhere. This inflow is usually quite stable, since it is aimed at family expenditure and that is usually not affected that much by changes in domestic interest rates or macro-economic conditions. While saying that, most of the expatriates work in Saudi Arabia and this is one of the minor levers that Saudi Arabia has on both countries (besides being the land of the two mosques). In addition, Saudi Arabia is/was one of the largest paymasters to both Pakistan and Egypt. This has some severe implications. Not only are both states beholden to Saudi Arabia, but Saudi Arabia, either directly or indirectly, gives tons of money to both countries (and others) to establish madrassah's (Islamic schools). No prizes to be given to anybody who can guess why this is a severe issue.

Because the state sector has so many problems and with most of the money going to the military (a point to which we will return below), investment in education is sort of at the bottom of the priority list. Consequently, the rural and urban poor have no other option but to enrol their offspring at these madrassahs. With the narrow-minded view that they propagate, it is not surprising that the graduates (if they can be called that) boil out of their madrassahs and start raising slogans and protesting against the USA (again, another point to which we will revert back to).