Where Chaos Foils Ambition
By Mohsin Hamid
Life is getting tougher in Pakistan, even for the insulated middle class. After each rainy season, my cousin tells me, the roads are a little more rutted, so you need a ruggedly priced sport utility vehicle. Phone lines can be erratic, so you need a cell phone. The police can't be trusted, so you have to get a security guard. The education system is bankrupt, so you need to study abroad.
The problem is, my cousin can't afford an S.U.V. or a cell phone or a guard. Two years in an American business school would cost him 12 times his annual salary, before taxes, which he actually pays. And he isn't even truly poor, as the vast majority of the subcontinent's people are. They watch their children die for lack of safe drinking water; he, as a banker who's been at it for a while, at least has necessities.
For the middle class in Pakistan, the state isn't delivering on its most basic responsibilities: infrastructure, security, education -- things the middle class, unlike the rich, need because they don't have the money to slip into four-wheel drive when potholes get too big.
All this is nothing new, in Pakistan or in India or many other countries. But as never before, my cousin now really knows what he's missing. An information monsoon is drenching Pakistan. Drops of what's going on in the outside world are gathering in upturned satellite dishes, falling harder and louder every day.
After my cousin's younger brother describes his new Western-style sideburns and pony tail, my cousin tells me, over a free Internet voice connection, that he would be happy to pay taxes if the government would just do something productive with the money.
That's why the military coup last year had so much popular support. My friends and family, liberal-minded Pakistanis all, weren't supporting the army or the self-appointed chief executive, Gen. Pervez Musharraf. They were desperate, and they were supporting change. But already, some of them are beginning to sense that we might be in for more of the same. Where is change going to come from?
Some hope that President Clinton can help, and that is why his coming visit to that old American friend, Pakistan, is so important.
The conflict between Pakistan and India over the territory of Kashmir is the cancer spotting the subcontinent. For 50 years, both countries have spent billions on arms and nuclear weapons instead of on things people need, like primary schools. The potential for human catastrophe is great; the world cannot just dismiss the dispute as a regional matter. Nor will the dispute be settled until outsiders intervene.
This week, as President Clinton builds friendly American relations with India and pays his quick visit to Pakistan, he is in a strong position to get the two nations talking.
The Indian government will resist international meddling in a conflict it is too big to lose. But India must now ask itself: Is it prepared to risk further weakening and isolating Pakistan?
Autonomous groups and ethnic and religious warriors, responding to the Pakistani people's frustration, are staking out their own challenges to the state.
By draining government coffers, the Kashmiri conflict opens the door to chaos and anarchy. And a desperate, nuclear-armed Pakistan poses grave risks to the people of India as well. India must realize that the defeat of Pakistan will never mean victory.
Compromises once unthinkable may now be thinkable. My cousin doesn't like India, but he really wants that M.B.A. He saw Yasir Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin shake hands.
Lobbing artillery shells over the border when children are dying of malnutrition has never made sense for either side. But now the link between the two has a new immediacy: economic prosperity has begun to flicker on millions of screens in the living rooms of the subcontinent.
Sell the dream, Mr. Clinton. America can do that so well.
(From: The New York Times) |