Opinion

Pakistan: A Country That It Never Was! (Part II)
By Mohammad A Chaudhry
Pittsburg, CA

“Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.” - Thomas Edison (1847-1931)

A COUNTRY WITHOUT LEADERSHIP: Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman of Harvard Business Review have prepared a list of “Ten Fatal Flaws” that derail leaders after scrutinizing about 1100 leaders and consulting more than 450 Fortune-500 executives. The twelve-fatal flaws that they have listed appear just tiny blemishes in comparison to what is present in the leadership of Pakistan.

The flaws they have mentioned are: Lack of energy and enthusiasm; mediocre performance and its acceptance as a virtue; poor judgment; lack of collaboration (they view others as enemies/competitors and as a result stay deprived from the insights of those who matter); don’t walk and talk (they set standards of behavior or performance that they violate themselves); resist new ideas; don’t learn from mistakes; lack interpersonal skills (commit sins of commission and omission by becoming abrasive and bullying and arrogant); fail to develop others (are ego-centric).

What the two veterans have failed to list, and what is most fatally found present in all the leaders in Pakistan and in the leaders of other developing countries, is lack of education, vision, creativity and the ability to confess that “Our time is over now”.

The most hesitant to vacate even after 42 years of rule is Qadaffi. Husni Mubarik after 31 years and Zain-Abidin of Tunisia after 19 years still wanted to drag on their feet in power except that the tide took a violent turn against them. Nobody in Pakistan or in any developing country knows the art of how to retire and enjoy life in a different way, or that people can be served in other ways too. They are dull as well as cowardly as they fail to call a spade a spade. They have even failed to en-cash in Pakistan which we have had in abundance - namely working-age population. According to the Economist, “Population” would be a key factor in the days to come. India, China and Brazil have amply proven the point. For Pakistan, population still remains a burden, a liability while the other countries have “turned the lemon into sweet lemonade”.

The Noble Prophet explained the current dilemma through an analogy. People live or die together because they are interlinked. We are like the people on the two decks of a ship. The poor are on the lower deck and the rich on the upper deck. The poor go for water to the upper deck and they get turned away as being cumbersome. The poor begin to make a hole in the bottom of the ship in order to get the water. How can then the rich on the upper deck remain un-affected? Pakistan is passing through a similar phase. All appear to be acting as fatalists - bound to harm others and get harmed in consequence. Like the religious fanatics who have tied themselves to the idea that they have to fight one enemy or another, or each other, and in the end kill or get killed. Pakistan never was like this.

The rich in Pakistan can be compared to Philip III, the King of Spain in the 1600’s who sat for too long in front of the fire and as a result, got over-heated. He did not move away from the fire because it wasn’t his royal job. The palace’s fire-attendant whose job it was to pull back his chair was off duty that day. The rich have created wall-cities within cities, gated communities; they drink bottled water, dine out daily in fancy restaurants while people outside die of thirst, hunger and disease.

Some leaders have lately chosen to talk of an imminent revolution and they often cite the examples of the French, Chinese, Russian, Iranian and the American Revolution. They do not know what they are talking about. The American Revolution succeeded because it was founded on the concept of freedom and basic rights for all people, unless the people were “women, African slaves, etc”. In this Revolution, neither side - the British or the Colonists like Franklin, Jefferson or Washington- represented the poor. Poverty or hunger was not an issue. In the rest of the revolutions, poverty and hunger mattered a lot.

In the French Revolution, during the Reign of Terror (1793-94), the victorious revolutionaries got so much obsessed with revenge that they slaughtered their own countrymen by the thousands on trifle charges. In Nantes the guillotine got so busy that it could not keep up with the volume of executions of the priests, aristocrats, government officials and of anyone else who ticked off the Tribunal. Then they packed them in ships and boats and capsized them. Eventually the river became so littered with corpses that it contaminated the water, resulting in the spread of a fatal disease throughout the city, killing the revolutionaries themselves. Remember the Hadith quoted above.

The country Pakistan virtually is close to being declared as a failed state, politically, socially as well as economically, and the country’s top leadership is embroiled in political somersaults - defections, re-alliances, one province playing against the other, and the terrorists sauntering everywhere. The murder of the Punjab governor and now of a minority Christian leader and federal minister failed to create any sense of urgency. It was so painful to hear the Punjab chief minister and the interior minister accusing each other, one negating the existence of the Punjabi Taliban and the other insisting on their presence, while the “Punjabi terrorists’ were laughing.

As this article is being written, two more suicidal attacks, one in Faisalabad and the other in Peshawar killing more than 60 innocent people, have taken place. Striking terror in the heart of the government and in the people is working as the terrorists always get away due to lack of resolve on the part of the government. Somebody will have to step in and yoke this crop of terrorists. Alibis and putting blame on others is not a solution. A strong government of highly qualified people (technocrats), backed by the army and the judiciary is the need of the hour.

Clearly neither the leadership nor the people, notwithstanding, all the killings of the innocent people by the terrorists, as yet appear to have remained un-convinced of the urgency and of the gravity of the situation. The Army stands aloof watching for the things to get messier, and so does the Judiciary. Clear and bold verdicts are not coming forth from any side. The anchors and journalists (Urdu media especially), on the other hand, are working overtime to make sure that Pakistan gets totally entrenched in a state of fatal confrontation with the United States of America. Leaders with vision, like the kind in our neighborhood, India, have turned the tables in all directions.

Politically, India has en-cashed the 9/11 tragedy to its maximum. In the field of economics, India like China and Brazil, has turned its dusty and sooty towns into the most affluent shopping centers. Ten years ago, Aurangabad was no more than a “dusty trading town in the heart of India”, somewhat like Gujarkhan or Jhelum in Pakistan. After ten years, its population has doubled because it has allured an engineering giant like Siemens and the biggest brewer like SABMiller to build their plants there. The original idea to upgrade Aurangabad came not from any economist, but from the local members of the chamber of commerce. This little town alone placed an order for 148 Mercedes Benz cars, the largest auto order of luxury cars in Asia.

The story did not end here. What Amritsar is to India, Lahore is to Pakistan. The point is: “Did any small town in Pakistan allure any world’s top marketers to come and invest there?” Even Karachi, Faisalabad and Gujranwala, the industrial hub towns of Pakistan, have come to a standstill due to shortage of power and gas. Rich Pakistanis are themselves not willing to invest in their own country. Five-day load-shedding has virtually reduced the country’s working class population to the status of unemployed. Pakistan is in the grip of hunger and starvation brought on its people by their own leaders. Prior to the French Revolution, a man served fifty years in prison for just whistling at Queen Marie Antoinette. The poor and the helpless get convicted and punished in prison for years, while the rich and corrupt are seen gloating over their ill-begotten wealth. Marie Antoinette should not have been surprised when she got beheaded. Nor should the leadership in Pakistan when the hour will strike because things cannot stay in this mode for ever.

According to Bloomberg of October 10, 2010, “Cities with fewer than 5 million residents make up 83 percent of emerging markets’ urban customers. By 2030, 1.3 billion more people will live in emerging-market cities, driving 67 percent of global gross domestic product growth. Less than a fifth of these consumers will live in mega cities such as Mexico city. The rest, who will be able to afford new cars, iPhones, and flat-screen TV’s, will be spread out among 1,100 cities with populations over 500,000, up from 717 such cities today. Some 460 million people, earning $5000 to $10,000 a year, will join the middle class in the next five years”. Not so in Pakistan.

It is an open question for people like Hamid Mir, Mujeeb Shami and Safi and all those who day and night churn out their emotionally charged analysis of the direness of the situation in Pakistan and end up stating, “Liberals in Pakistan are the leftists, the atheist-type, who are always prone to pitch every failure in Pakistan to either religion or to it being a failed state”. All discussions conclude on a note of “celebration that another super-power is about to lick dust in Afghanistan…Taliban made it happen so…hostility and confrontation with America is in the best interest of the country, etc”.

The need in Pakistan for the leadership as well as for the media pundits is not to stay focused on the “decline and fall” of America, but on the nose-dive slide of their own country. On the arrival of theater in Boston in 1790, Samuel Adams in despair for the cause of liberty in the face of such debauchery, had lamented “Alas! Will men never be free” .While combing, if one or two hair get caught in the comb, it does not mean that the person is getting bald. According to David Von Drehle in his article, “Don’t Bet Against the United States”, Time March 14, 2011, “America has survived a Civil War, two world wars and a Great Depression, not to mention immigrant hordes, alcohol, Freemasons and the ‘vast wasteland’ of network television. We have dodged the population bomb, the coming ice-age, acid rain and the domino effect…we are not inventing less; instead, others are being empowered to imagine and invent… Americans are in favor of creativity wherever it can be found”. Above all, Americans do not sit on a problem; they get up and sort it out whatever the cost.

Last summer, when the Indian conglomerate Bharti in collaboration with Wal-Mart decided to build the Arkansan retailer’s first Indian store in Amritsar, and Bharti arranged to give a tour of the site to the reporters, a traffic jam emerged, that stretched a kilometer and a half down the road as the farmers came in tractors and the Amritsaris came in BMW’s. Does any such news ever befall our ears in Pakistan except that of the blowing up of the innocent people on every inch of the country?

Mysore became a hub of technology industry; Coimbatore emerged as a center of Auto Parts industry due to the efforts of Tata; Vijaywada became a big center for food processing industry; Bhavnagar, known for diamond polishing, now became a center for ship-salvaging; and Jaipur fast emerged as a center for out-sourcing. All these towns were under 100,000 range of population.

Musharraf in his over 9 years of misrule made lofty promises of building dams and ports. He talked very loud about the building and commissioning of Gwador port, declaring it Pakistan’s Dubai. Did anyone hear anymore about it? One Indian entrepreneur Gautam Adani in collaboration with an American agricultural conglomerate Cargill bought a piece of barren, salty and marshy piece of land in Mundra in 1990. This Kutch land produced nothing but a handful of sea salt. In 1993 the American partner defected, leaving Mr. Adani to bear the total expense of $1,1000 for this 4500 acres of salty and marshy land that had its 9 miles submerged in the sea.

Seeing opportunity in the adversity, Mr. Adani turned the problem into an asset. He created a port and a beautiful port city out of it, adding multi-purpose berths for handling bulk cargo and container terminals, linking it to the national network. Mundra in about 20 years became the busiest port and a posh town. Last July Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch bought 8% of Adani’s share for $587 million. The originally $11,000 invested in 1990 are now worth over $7billion. In Pakistan the Railways and the Airways both deteriorated due to neglect, lack of foresight, corruption and nepotism.

A professor at Yale explaining the poor grade he had given to a business-class student, Fred Smith in 1966 for his research paper proposing an overnight delivery system has said, “The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better than a C the idea must be feasible”.

Pakistan is full of opportunities and full of highly enterprising people. There is immense potential for making money that is scattered everywhere - even in the delivery of supply-containers to Afghanistan, provided it all goes into the coffers of the government.

The total population of Afghanistan is a client of Pakistan. Each village and town in Pakistan can be transformed into an industrial center, only if the rich become a little patriotic and control corruption, put religion where it belongs to by taking it away from the Mullahs and Muftis; introducing a strict accountability system; sticking 100% to merit; showing zero tolerance for the sectarian discrimination; and investing heavily in education like India, Singapore, Viet Nam, Malaysia and Brazil. After all, if Bangladesh and Brazil can rebound, why can’t Pakistan.