On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 4:14 AM, Perry E. Metzger <[email protected]> wrote: > > No country ever becomes rich through foreign aid or military > hardware. Countries become rich through improvements to trade, which > in most countries these days requires substantial reduction in > government interference in trade. Pakistan's economy will remain a > basket case until it embraces deregulation and free trade. Both of > these are unlikely events, but it doesn't make it less true that it is > what is required. >
While what you say is valid as is, it is completely vacuous when it is taken in the context of whether India should maintain trade links with Pakistan, or whether it will solve the current problems of Pakistan. Free trade is not a panacea. The economic component of the problem is far less than you are imagining it to be. There are intertwined social, cultural and religious aspects to it which cannot be addressed by economic solutions alone. > One of the saddest reports I heard after the Taliban was overthrown in > Afghanistan was of a small town where the local warlord had decreed > that no one could buy bricks for rebuilding from anyone but his > family, which would happily overcharge for them. I realized that the > latest revolution was doomed right then. This is the way countries are > lost to poverty and terrorism, but few people seem to see it. > Counterintuitive as it may sound, there is no established causal link between terrorism and economic conditions. Alan Krueger has done a lot of research on this. Refer to his book What Makes a Terrorist. I think that you are spectacularly uninformed of the geopolitical realities of the South Asian region. While your textbook economic arguments are credible, you seem to lack the insight required to apply them to the situation on the ground. I only bring that up because you have taken on the mantle of arguing for the "benefit of the audience". Until you are better informed, your efforts will not benefit your audience in any way. You chose to dismiss Shiv's statement about how : "India's success is Pakistan's failure. India has to fail for Pakistan to succeed." ; without grasping the fact that (AFAIK) this is not Shiv's personal viewpoint or something that he thinks *should* be the case. It is a mindset that permeates the psyche of the Pakistani establishment and has a big role to play in internal and external policymaking. The Indian response *must* take this into account. As Nitin Pai from The Acorn puts it [1] in referring to the Rediff article cited above: <quote> So while attempting to bring about a collapse of Pakistan is undesirable, many of Prof Vaidyanathan's prescriptions lend themselves for coercive diplomacy. They allow India to pursue a variety of punitive and coercive policies in a calibrated manner, without raising military tensions. For instance, it would be untenable for the international community to disagree that all economic aid to Pakistan must be made contingent on its government meeting concrete deliverables, like extraditing terrorists that live in the open in its territory. In fact, The Acorn has long argued that the greatest failure of the "peace process" was that it distracted attention from the important objective of creating a range of flexible policy instruments that could not only be turned on and off, but also fine-tuned and targeted. To modify B Raman's words a little, the capability to cause "a divided Pakistan, a bleeding Pakistan, a Pakistan ever on the verge of collapse without actually collapsing—-that should be our objective till it stops using terrorism against India." </quote> Regards Deepak [1] http://acorn.nationalinterest.in/2008/12/09/hurting-the-pakistani-economy/
