Pakistan needs a new vision — an intra-elite war isn’t the
answer
aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/5/22/pakistans-intra-elite-war-cant-offer-the-new-vision-it-needs
Asha Amirali
OPINIONOPINION,
Opinions|Poverty and Development
Imran Khan and Shahbaz Sharif both represent a model of development
that has betrayed most Pakistanis — and will again.
Asha Amirali
Post-doctoral researcher at the University of Bath
Published On 22 May 202322 May 2023
Pakistan's former Prime Minister Imran Khan
gestures as he speaks to the members of the media
at his residence in Lahore, Pakistan, May 18, 2023
[Mohsin Raza/REUTERS]
Crisis is now passé in Pakistan. Admittedly, the current standoff
between the authoritarian populist Imran Khan and the military has an
element of novelty to it, but even in the most dramatic scenario, it will
likely end with not much more than regime change and some further
weakening — though not annihilation — of the military’s outsized
political role.
This might be significant in the long run, but only if the social forces
that move into the ceded political space do something different – and
difficult – with it. This remains highly unlikely.
There have been bigger crises in this country of 220 million people.
Long wars have been fought inside and outside its borders, prime
ministers have been hung and assassinated, and in 1971 half the
country broke away to form Bangladesh.
But one thing has never changed through all this. The vision of
development held by Pakistani elites and the international development
establishment has displayed remarkable stability from the 1960s to
now. This stability – and the corresponding lack of alternatives –
represents a much bigger crisis than the inter-elite warfare currently
underway.
For those familiar with the history and politics of the Global South, the
vision is familiar. The green pastures at the end of the rainbow are
replicas of the industrialised North. Pakistan’s Vision 2025 sets itself
the goal of making Pakistan the ‘next Asian Tiger’.
Substantively, this means increasing both the quantum and value of
production and consumption through a top-down, modernising
approach that does not brook challenge. Large infrastructure is
therefore built to extract, process and transport resources. Agriculture
is transformed into a high-productivity, low-employment, cash-cropping
sector. Production for export continues to be prioritised because of the
potential for growth and foreign exchange earnings.
All of this relies on ever-more intensive energy use enabled by burning
fossil fuels and, increasingly since the 1980s, by private capital
unaccountable to anyone. The social and ecological impact of this
trajectory has been devastating.
While average lifespans have gone up and many people now enjoy
amenities that they couldn’t dream of 100 years ago — think electric
lighting, access to motorised transport, sugar, and so on — the failures
have been much bigger. The floods of 2010 and 2022 in Pakistan are
perhaps the most dramatic examples of this.
Pakistan’s ministry of climate change and its COP27 country
delegation focussed their blame for the floods on global heating,
something that Pakistan has barely contributed to so far. Pakistan is a
victim of Western greed they say, paying the price without having eaten
the cake.
There is obviously truth to this – the last three centuries have seen
rapidly rising rates of planetary resource consumption and
concomitant environmental degradation by Northern countries. But the
evidence clearly shows that the effects of climate change have also
been significantly enhanced by the physical, social and political results
of 75 years of development.
For instance, researchers have long observed that Pakistan’s extensive
hydrological engineering works ignore centuries-old patterns, natural
flows, and local knowledge of watersheds, deltas, hill torrents and
rivers. Two large hydrological projects in particular have come under
close scrutiny for their contribution to recent flooding: Sindh’s Left
Bank Outfall Drain built in the 1990s and financed by the World Bank;
and the Asian Development Bank- (ADB) financed Chashma Right Bank
Canal in Southern Punjab, whose construction began in 1978.
In both cases, local communities filed formal claims to investigate and
redress violation of environmental and social standards. In both cases,
these violations included significantly increasing flood risks in the
project area. And in both cases, the inspection panels found many of
the claimants’ assertions valid, including those related to increased
flood risk. Chashma locals pointed out in 2002 that the canal blocked
the course of the western hill torrents channelling rainwater to the
riverbanks where they lived.
Seasonal rushing water, which previously used to irrigate fields, now
posed a threat to life and livelihoods. And indeed, when the extreme
rainfall of 2010 and 2022 swept down the hills, it breached the
embankments and destroyed a huge area that has still not recovered.
The volume of rain was such that flooding would have occurred even
without the canal, but expert and local assessment is that both in
Southern Punjab and Sindh, last year’s floods were made significantly
worse by the hydrological infrastructure.
In 2004, the ADB inspection panel found in favour of the Chashma
inspection claimants and recommended a number of measures to
correct existing faults. But it did not push Pakistan’s government to
implement them, and certainly did not impose any conditions on future
aid as it should have if it was serious about ensuring changes.
Two decades later, none of the recommendations has been taken up
and people were left to drown, lose everything they had, and suffer the
consequences of hubris and complacency. The irony in Pakistani
officials now championing the new United Nations loss and damage
fund for assistance to climate-hit developing countries is impossible to
ignore.
Making passionate appeals to the principle of justice in international
forums, the same Pakistani state plays Global North within its own
borders and engineers the futures of land and people with no thought
to loss and damage in these cases.
Critical geographer Daanish Mustafa diagnoses the broader problem
thus: “Pakistani water managers (like their counterparts in most of the
Global South) suffer from an acute case of mega-projectivitis: a deadly
disease caused by modernity and a blind commitment to colonial
thinking and practices”. ‘Mega-projectivitis’ in Pakistan began with the
construction of the most extensive canal irrigation system in the world
in the late 19th century, continued with the post-colonial construction
of large dams, barrages, canals and drains starting in the mid-1960s,
and carries on today.
This, despite the fact that the state has no money and thus has
resorted to crowdfunding new dams. It manifests in the preoccupation
with building huge roads, housing estates and sprawling, shiny, empty
airports like the new one in Islamabad. All are kickback-friendly, large,
highly-visible monuments that are supposed to perform the twin
function of leapfrogging Pakistan into an urbanised modernity and
catalysing economic growth.
Without a doubt, Pakistan needs a plan. It needs to feed, house and
nurture 220 million people without externalising – on any beings or any
things – the costs incurred.
The real crisis in Pakistan is that no one is thinking about how to
achieve this. Not those in charge, not progressive intellectuals, not
even the anticapitalist left which has a well-developed critique but no
capacity to do anything other than weakly defend against further
violence and deprivation. There are therefore no alternatives to
capitalist industrialisation, mega projects, and consuming the planet
for profit and pleasure.
It is extremely likely that there are better ways of organising and
managing large-scale societies, we just do not know what they are yet.
Latin America is ahead of others in its imagination of (and
experimentation with) alternatives.
Although concerns about scalability, replication, and the dangers of
romanticising indigenity are valid, what emerges from that experience
is the necessity of effecting a fundamental shift in how we think — with
the planet, not against it. With the knowledge and experience of local
communities, not against them.
Development as growth has brought us ecological and social
degradation so serious that sustaining decent life becomes more
difficult every year. Whether Imran Khan or Shahbaz Sharif form the
next government in Pakistan does not matter. What matters is breaking
with the idea that there is no alternative.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not
necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.