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COMMENT: Disaster relief and development aid —Ishtiaq Ahmed

Unlike most other developing countries, Pakistan has the unenviable distinction of having a declining standard of literacy since the 1980s. We scored high in a recent study of countries perceived to be the most corrupt and were placed at No 144 — the most corrupt was placed at 158. India has improved its image

The news that Pakistan had been hit by a major earthquake was flashed immediately by all international and national television channels in the world. In Stockholm a Swedish journalist complained that the government of Pakistan was spending billions on acquiring military hardware instead of directing resources to improving the quality of life of its people. Aid to such a country, he argued, was not justified.

The F-16 purchase from the USA has been delayed for the moment, but only recently Pakistan has negotiated a deal worth more than eight billion Swedish kronas (Rs 48 billion) with Swedish SAAB which manufactures an airborne early warning system. Without doubt such deals not only bring fat profits to the manufacturers but also lucrative kickbacks and fabulous holiday trips to Pakistani dealers connected to the military establishment.

However convincing the Swedish journalist may sound, there is a major flaw in such reasoning. It presumes that if Sweden does not sell the airborne defence system to Pakistan its leaders will become good and caring rulers.

What is more likely is that some other country will replace Sweden; or else, Pakistan will go for more sophisticated nuclear weapons or try to produce its own arsenal of conventional weapons. On August 11 Pakistan fired the Babur cruise missile that our military engineers had produced (by studying a Tomahawk missile that did not explode on landing in Balochistan some years ago).

President Pervez Musharraf boasted then that it was superior to its Indian counterpart. Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed (incidentally my student at Gordon College during 1972-73, who rarely came to the classes and was nearly my age, not having passed the BA examination to continue with professional student politics) declared the successful test-firing a ‘birthday gift’ to General Musharraf. Given the attitude, we can be sure that disaster relief given by the world will be essential for helping the Pakistani people in their hour of need.

In a country where the armed forces, or rather the army, gets the major share of the national developmental budget and the generals and the top brass live a life of abundance perhaps unmatched anywhere else in the Third World it is really time to take stock of what is happening in Pakistan.

Unlike most other developing countries, Pakistan has the unenviable distinction of having a declining standard of literacy since the 1980s. We scored high in a recent study of countries perceived to be the most corrupt and were placed at No 144 — the most corrupt was placed at 158. India has improved its image and is now ranked as No 88.

If we now move away from the exceptional situation of a major natural disaster and review the overall development situation the same logic would apply. For many years I taught a course on development aid at the International Graduate School at Stockholm University. Among other things, a central concern of the course was whether development aid played a positive or a negative role in the development process. I used to encourage students to prepare a case for or against development aid and then debate it in the class.

The case for development aid was that Third World societies were deficient in capital, technology and human expertise and therefore inputs from outside were necessary to help the development process take shape and at some stage take off on its own. Additionally, it was felt that the colonial plunder in the past had left Asian and African countries in a state of poverty and backwardness so that there was a moral obligation for helping ex-colonies out of their poverty and paucity of resources.

The case against development aid was that much of the aid either returned to the donor countries, who insisted that the recipient countries should buy materials and technology from the donor; or squandered away by the corrupt bureaucracies in the recipient countries; and little or nothing ever reached the people it was meant to help.

It was further argued that governments in the Third World spent their own funds on buying arms or luxury items for the power elite while development was left to the foreign donors to take care off. Thus aid actually hindered the development process by taking the pressure for fixing their priorities correctly off the governments of the recipient countries.

The debate always ended with me as the moderator giving my own opinion. My own inclination was to support the idea of development aid when it was directed at raising literacy and alleviating poverty among the abject poor. My own experience of Pakistan told me that it was a fallacy to believe that the elite would care much for the poor if such aid was stopped.

I particularly welcomed aid that helped Pakistan develop its technological capacity and capabilities. I knew that the polytechnic institutes opened by the Swedes in Gujrat and elsewhere produced many talented technicians who later played an important role in pushing forward the growth of industry. I agreed, of course, that tied aid was bad, because much of it was kept back by the donors; and that it was necessary to develop mechanisms to disallow bureaucrats in the receiving countries to siphon off the aid into their own coffers.

In the 1990s there was a definite shift in development aid policy. Sweden abandoned tied aid making it possible for the recipients to buy cheap machinery from anywhere. There were similar changes elsewhere. Also, Western donors began to prefer giving aid to Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) and that too has been largely a positive development. Many of the NGOs acted immediately after the earthquake struck Pakistan. They are doing admirable work in the field.

For a long time to come countries like Pakistan would need both disaster relief and development aid but both external control and internal vigilance are needed to ensure that such dependence does not become permanent. In the long run only regional peace and economic prosperity through more trade and production will create conditions for Pakistan to develop into a self-propelling economy and welfare society.

The author is an associate professor of political science at Stockholm University. He is the author of two books. His email address is Ishtiaq.Ahmed@statsvet.su.se

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