Pakistan, Waziristan.- the descent continues

Hope Vs Reason

Najam Sethi in The Friday Times

The economy is in tatters, inflation and joblessness are stalking the landscape. Both western and eastern borders are insecure – a civil war is threatening to spill over one border while an invigorated predator is sizing up its prey on the other. Terrorism/insurgency in Balochistan is barely manageable even as another threatens to shatter the newfound peace of FATA. Hounded to the wall, the mainstream opposition is inching towards mass agitation. Yet the PTI government of the day – hanging by an arrogant and unaccountable puppeteer’s thread — is bent upon imprisoning popularly elected leaders of Sindh, Punjab and FATA, blackmailing the NAB Chairman to do its bidding, prosecuting an honourable judge who dares question the writ of the puppeteer, extinguishing a rising star from lighting the path of the opposition and gagging the media from speaking the truth. Under the circumstances, can we shut our minds to reason and hope that all will be well? Or will defiance trump logic and set things right?

The Afghan Taliban are not likely to concede core American demands. In time, the Americans will blame Pakistan for not doing more to bail them out. President Trump has already teamed up with PM Modi to contain, if not confront, Pakistan’s lifeline ally China. Before long, both will turn the screws on Pakistan, the former via the US Treasury’s manipulation of the IMF and FATF and the latter by priming its “offensive-defense” proxy war doctrine. This will transpire when the ruling Puppeteer–PTI clique stands totally alienated and isolated from most sections of state and society.

The confrontation in FATA between the “patriotic” army and “treasonous” populace may get worse. Both sides have wantonly crossed red lines. In the heat of the moment, the protestors tried to overrun a security check post. The army shot and killed several of them. Next time, the protesting crowds will be bigger. If a new insurgency is born, it will doubtless be aided and abetted on a bigger scale by hostile neighbours.

The NAB chairman was spoiling to be hoist on his own petard. But the PTI exploited his weakness to advance its anti-opposition agenda. Now, if he throws in the towel and the government is successful in empowering its hand-picked Deputy Chairman, then there will be more confrontation, more repression, more political instability, more economic chaos. It is remarkable, isn’t it, that the media managers of the government, in cahoots with a civilian intel agency, should have successfully staged such a coup? No wonder, the government is adamant in denying a proper investigation into L’Affaire Chairman!

The decision to target a Supreme Court judge and teach a suitable lesson to other wayward judges was expected. The good judge had dared to tick off the Intel Agencies and seemed inclined to read out the “democracy” sections of the constitution to them. Horror of horrors, he was also lined up in due course to rule as the chief justice of Pakistan for many years. Confronted by leaked reports of a Presidential Reference to the Supreme Judicial Council to defame him, he has demanded to know the veracity of the reports. The Additional Attorney General in Karachi has resigned in protest. If other judges don’t resist such machinations, the peoples’ struggle for an independent judiciary will be lost. Certainly, there is at least one other judge who may be on the hit-list for ruffling the untouchable feathers of certain VIP housing societies across the country.

Next in line is the Election Commission of Pakistan. Having advisedly taken a soft look at the shenanigans of the Prime Minister, it is now being pressured to take a hard stance against Mariam Nawaz Sharif. If it does the government’s bidding, it will join the queue of discredited state institutions that are paving the way for societal anarchy and states of siege.

The worrying future is already upon Pakistan. The US is gearing up India and others to confront and contain China in the Asia-Pacific and Asia-West region. China’s Road and Belt project, in general, and CPEC, in particular, will be targeted. It is also engaged, along with Saudi Arabia, UAE and others in trying to force regime change in Iran as a prelude to redrawing the map of the Middle-East. This makes Pakistan’s third southern border vulnerable. It also threatens to open deep sectarian divisions within the country.

Wiser counsel would surely advise a contrary path. A national all-parties government headed by a stolid prime minister who can disarm domestic critics, build trust with prickly neighbours, manage the economy dispassionately and herald certainty and stability would do Pakistan much good. Such a dispensation would heal the wounds between provinces, between state institutions, between political parties, between classes and ethnicities, between Pakistan and its neighbours while pulling the economy out of its current trough. A nation united and at peace with itself is bound to be a nation united and at peace with the rest of the world. More than anything else that is the need of the hour.

Will hope be rekindled at the altar of realism? Or will despair be our lot when reason is sacrificed?

Compromise dies in the age of outrage

Hardening political positions are the sclerosis that may lead to a heart attack for democracies writes Tim Harford in THE FT


I don’t often find myself agreeing with Esther McVey, but I wondered this week whether the candidate for leader of the UK Conservative party might accidentally have spoken the truth: “People saying we need a Brexit policy to bring people together are misreading the situation. That is clearly not possible.” 

The British do indeed seem in no mood to compromise. The results of elections to the European Parliament produced a thunderous endorsement of parties that proudly reject an attempt to find common ground on Brexit. The Conservatives and Labour, each caught in an awkward straddle, were slaughtered. Labour offered the slogan “let’s bring our country together”. Ha! Voters preferred the Liberal Democrats (“Bollocks to Brexit”) and the Brexit party (“they’re absolutely terrified of us”). 

Sometimes an extreme position is the correct one. When King Solomon proposed cutting the baby in half, it wasn’t because he was looking for the middle ground. Yet a capacity to find compromises is a good thing to have. Positions may differ, but whether we live in the same home or on the opposite side of the planet, we benefit when we can find a way to get along. 

If this new distaste for compromise is a problem, it is not the UK’s alone. Positions seem to be hardening everywhere, the sclerotic arteries that may lead to a heart attack for western democracies. Perhaps this is driven by personalities. For a man whose name adorns a book titled The Art of The Deal, Donald Trump is curiously uninterested in negotiating lasting agreements with anyone. Or maybe it is a function of an information ecosystem in which outrage sells. 

Perhaps the problems themselves are more intractable. Some issues do not lend themselves to compromise. Brexit is one. Splitting the difference between Remainers and hard Brexiters is less like cutting a cake and more like splattering its ingredients everywhere. Egg on my face, flour on yours, and nobody even partially satisfied. 

Abortion is another. There is a principled case to be made for a woman’s absolute right to control her body. There is also a principled case to be made for the absolute right to life of a foetus. But like the unstoppable cannonball and the immovable post, both rights cannot be absolute simultaneously. 

In contrast, other complex and emotive problems may still allow for compromise. On climate change, we can shrug and do nothing, or we can turn our economic system upside down, but there is plenty of middle ground between those options. In a trade negotiation, a mutually advantageous outcome is almost always there to be discovered. 

Roger Fisher and William Ury’s classic negotiation handbook Getting to Yes advises: focus on the problem rather than the personalities; explore underlying interests rather than explicit positions; and consider options that may open up scope for mutual benefit. 

We may find a much better way to split the cake if we discover that you scrape the icing into the bin, while I would happily eat it with a spoon. It is sometimes astonishing how far a principled negotiation can go towards giving both sides what they want. 

It is clear that we British have failed to follow this advice. Our debate is driven by a bitter focus on personalities, from Theresa May to Nigel Farage to Jeremy Corbyn to the generic “Remoaner elite”. Each side knows what the other wants but has shown very little interest in why they want it. Without sincerely exploring the underlying aims and values of warring tribes there is no chance of finding an outcome everyone can accept. 

The US debate also seems the antithesis of Fisher and Ury’s advice. Too many politically active people seek the humiliation of the other tribe. Dismissing compromise as craven appeasement seems to be a winning tactic, particularly in the primary elections that set the tone of US politics. 

Compromise, however, is often possible even in unpromising situations. On abortion, for example, it emerges with a focus not on absolute rights but on practicalities. Many people can get behind policies to minimise unwanted pregnancies, and to make abortions safe and regulated rather than dangerous and illicit. It is a middle ground that many countries manage to find. 

One can see politics as a competitive sport or a search for solutions. There’s truth in both views. However, a democratic election is far closer to a competition than to a principled negotiation. Do we not wish to see the opposite team soundly thrashed? Do we not boo their villainous antics and laugh at their mishaps? Who wants to play out a nil-nil draw? 

I would not want to venerate compromise as the supreme good in politics. Sometimes it really is true that you and I, dear reader, are absolutely right and they are absolutely wrong. (It may even be true that we are absolutely wrong and they are absolutely right.) Either way, the merits of the case must be weighed against the merits of trying to respect everyone. It feels good to win, but this isn’t a fairytale: the losers won’t stamp their feet and vanish through the floor. They — or we — aren’t going anywhere.

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A sweet tale: the son who reinvented sugar to help diabetic dad

The natural substitute helps diabetics, combats obesity and tackles climate change writes Senay Boztas in The Guardian



 

Javier Larragoiti (centre) and his Xilinat team in the lab in Mexico City. Photograph: Courtesy Xilinat


Javier Larragoiti was 18 when his father was diagnosed with diabetes. The teenager had just started a degree in chemical engineering in Mexico City. So he dedicated his studies to a side project: creating an acceptable alternative to help his father and millions of Mexicans like him avoid sugar.

“It’s only when you know someone with this sickness that you realise how common it is and how sugar intake plays a huge role,” he says. “My dad tried to use stevia and sucralose, just hated the taste, and kept cheating on his diet.”

The young chemist started dabbling with xylitol, a sweet-tasting alcohol commonly extracted from birch wood and used in products such as chewing gum.

“It has so many good properties for human health, and the same flavour as sugar, but the problem was that producing it was so expensive,” he says. “So I decided to start working on a cheaper process to make it accessible to everyone.”Quick guide
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Ten years later, Larragoiti has patented a fermentation-based process to turn wasted corn cobs from Mexico’s 27.5m-tonne annual crop into xylitol. It is thereby solving a second problem: what to do with all that agricultural waste that otherwise might be burned, adding greenhouse gases to the overladen atmosphere.

His business, Xilinat (pronounced Hill-Ee-Natt), buys waste from 13 local farmers, producing 1 tonne of the product a year. This month his invention was awarded a prestigious $310,000 Chivas Venture prize award, which will enable him to industrialise production and scale up production tenfold.

Obesity is one of the fastest-growing global health problems. One in seven people are obese and about 10% have type 2 diabetes. Since 1980 the rate of obesity has doubled in more than 70 countries.

Larragoiti says that sugary diets are a real problem in Coca-Cola-lovingMexico, which has the world’s second-highest rate of obesity and has successfully taxed sugary drinks to try to combat a main source of the issue.

Paradoxically, another corn byproduct – fructose – is part of the problem, used to make corn syrup that has been linked to increasing obesity in the US.

“It’s kind of ironic,” Larragoiti says. “High fructose corn syrup is just a bomb of carbs and concentrated sugar that makes a high peak of insulin. It’s many times sweeter than regular glucose. Companies use and pay less and that’s the issue.”

Reusing agricultural waste is rapidly emerging as a promising sector for social entrepreneurs keen to tackle global heating and make useful things at the same time.

“One corn stalk has 70% to 80% waste by weight when you get down to it,” says Stefan Mühlbauer, the chief executive of the Sustainable Projects Group Inc. His company has a pilot plant in Alsace, France, and is building another in Indiana, US, to turn corn waste into a peat moss substitute and a super-absorbent foam for filters or soil. “Farmers are excited as it gives them something that extends their harvest season and they see another source of revenue,” he adds.

In Mexico, agricultural waste is often burned, releasing greenhouse gasesand creating one of the country’s highest sources of dioxin emissions. “Burning the residue is cheap and quick and may suppress pests and diseases,” says Dr Wolter Elbersen, a crop production expert at Wageningen University & Research. “The disadvantages such as air pollution, loss of organic matter and nutrients are less appreciated apparently. Removing the material for feed or compost, or added value products such as paper pulp or fuels is often not cost-effective, or no labour is available to do all the work in a short window of time.”

But thinking in a different way about “waste products” is essential if we are going to conserve scarce resources and feed a growing population, according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. “We need to think about the principles in the past, where we had to do much with little, and at the same time apply the technology we have at hand nowadays to succeed in the challenge of feeding the world,” says Clementine Schouteden, who leads the global initiative on the circular economy for food at the campaigning organisation.

“There’s definitely a sense of urgency in making sure that we farm in a way that is regenerative, preventing waste but also [creating value from] the waste that is currently not edible, with a food industry making the right options for consumers and for the planet.”

Xilinat’s idea has huge potential, according to Sonal Shah, the founding executive director of the Beeck Center for Social Impact + Innovation at Georgetown University, and a Chivas Venture judge. “It’s not just that he’s building a sugar substitute that tastes like sugar but that it’s going to become scalable so every company that uses sugar in its food has the opportunity to rethink what kind of substitute they use,” she said.

Ebersen added, though, that “you do, however, need a solution for using the leftovers after the xylose has been extracted and the demand for xylitol is small [currently] compared with the amount of residue”.

Meanwhile, what about Javier’s father? “My dad is super-happy,” Larragoiti says. “He uses my product every day and he’s willing not to cheat on his diet any more!”

How an Economy shapes Political Consciousness - A Pakistan story

Nadeem Paracha in The Dawn


In March 1991, a few days after the US forces invaded Iraq for the first time, 90 per cent of Americans who were polled approved of President George H. Bush’s ‘job performance’. Bush’s approval ratings skyrocketed and political commentators predicted that the Republican Party would be able to retain the presidency in the 1992 election.

Republican presidents Ronald Reagan and then Bush had held the White House since 1981. And in 1991, it seemed Bush, too, would be able to win a second term just as his predecessor Reagan had.

However, by the end of 1991, Bush’s approval ratings began to plummet, surprising many political pundits. This is when the strategy team of Bush’s opponent Bill Clinton (Democratic Party) came up with the slogan, “It’s the economy, stupid.”

Clinton was able to break the winning streak of the Republican Party by attacking the Bush administration’s economic performance, knowing fully well that the struggling economy had begun to impact many Republican voters as well.

According to the famous German philosopher and political theorist Karl Marx, a person’s “political consciousness” is almost always shaped by his economic circumstances.

Let me demonstrate this through the example of an acquaintance of mine, Tahir, or rather, through the story of his dad, Baqir. I’ve known Tahir since school. His family became extremely conservative in the 1980s, but it wasn’t always so.

Tariq’s father had migrated to Pakistan from India in 1947. He was 16 at the time. In Karachi, Tahir’s paternal grandfather was a small trader who set up a shop in Karachi in 1949. Tahir’s father often visited the shop after school.

Tahir once told me that their “class status suddenly jumped from lower-middle to upper-middle” in the early 1950s, when his grandfather managed to export merchandise to the US forces stationed in Korea.

Between 1950 and 1953, the Pakistani economy witnessed a boom of sorts due to such exports to the US during armed conflict between the US military and China-backed North Korean armies.

Tahir’s father, Baqir, took over the family business in the mid-1950s and began to expand it. Tahir told me that his father led a “highly Westernised life” and befriended many industrialists, bureaucrats and politicians. Baqir fully supported Ayub Khan’s 1958 coup because he believed that political instability had begun to negatively impact his family’s economic fortunes.

And Baqir did greatly benefit from the Ayub regime’s ‘pro-business’ policies. In 1960, he married a bureaucrat’s daughter. It was a love marriage. Apart from expanding his export business, Baqir spread his economic interests by buying two cinemas in Karachi and one in Lahore. He also bought a restaurant and opened two bars in Karachi’s Saddar and Tariq Road areas.

He also built a new palatial family home in Karachi.

According to political economist Akbar Zaidi, the country’s annual growth rate during the Ayub regime (1958-69) was an impressive 6.7 per cent in GDP. But Zaidi also mentions that Ayub’s policies in this context also created economic disparities which were exploited by opposition parties, such as Z.A. Bhutto’s PPP.

Baqir was a card-carrying member of Ayub’s centrist and modernist Conventional Muslim League. In December 1971, the PPP came to power on a ‘socialist’ platform. There was an increase in Pakistan’s import bills due to the 1973 world oil price shock, a serious post-1973 global recession during 1974-77, failure of cotton crops in 1974-75, pest attacks on crops and massive floods in 1973, 1974 and 1976-77. Pakistan experienced the worst inflation during 1972-77, when prices increased by 15 per cent.

As his business nosedived, Baqir sold his cinemas and bars in 1973, and in 1975 he wrapped up his export business and moved the family to London where he opened two Pakistani restaurants. However, he returned to Karachi after the fall of the Bhutto regime in 1977. By 1980, he was able to resurrect his business in Karachi when the Gen Zia dictatorship initiated denationalisation, deregulation and privatisation policies.

Pakistan achieved a national savings/GDP ratio of 16 per cent in 1986-87 amidst massive inflows of worker remittances from the Middle East. Unprecedented financial aid from the US and Saudi Arabia (for the anti-Soviet insurgency in Afghanistan) also helped.

Baqir was successful in regenerating his export business and also became an importer after Zia lifted curbs on imports. This was the period of Zia’s ‘Islamisation’ and Baqir followed suit by shunning his ‘Westernised ways’. He became a ‘born-again Muslim’. His palatial house in Karachi also went through a transformation. Expensive paintings gave way to equally expensive calligraphy of sacred verses and water- colour paintings of Islam’s sacred sites.

He built a mosque in the area where the house stood and also one in his vast office.

He remained a Zia supporter even after the latter’s demise in 1988. He voted for Nawaz Sharif’s (then ‘Ziaist’ and pro-business) PML-N until his business once again began to go south due to international sanctions imposed on Pakistan after the country tested two nuclear devices in 1998.

In the early 2000s, Baqir handed over the reigns of the family business to Tahir. Tahir supported the Musharraf dictatorship for a while but, despite the 8.5 per cent growth rate achieved by the regime till 2005, Tahir could not revive the family business.

Out of frustration, he sold it off and joined a multinational organisation as an employee. The frustration was also vented out through supporting the anti-Musharraf movement in 2007. The economy had begun to spiral down and this also meant Tahir’s wish to revive the family business was thwarted.

He got married and moved to Qatar and then Saudi Arabia. This is when I reconnected with him through Facebook. He supported Imran Khan in 2013 and, just before the 2018 elections, he was posting statuses about the upcoming ‘Islamic welfare state’ and Riyasat-i-Madina on Facebook.

However, only recently, as the country’s economy is once again threatening to spiral down, his Facebook posts have become critical of Khan’s regime. So I inboxed him: “Tahir, it seems there is no place for you to restart the family business in Riyasat-i-Madina.”

He didn’t reply.

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It can be Hard to tell Luck from Judgment

Randomness often explains the difference between triumph and failure writes Tim Harford in The FT 


It hasn’t been a great couple of years for Neil Woodford — and it has been just as miserable for the people who have entrusted money to his investment funds. Mr Woodford was probably the most celebrated stockpicker in the UK, but recently his funds have been languishing. Piling on the woes, Morningstar, a rating agency, downgraded his flagship fund this week. What has happened to the darling of the investment community? 

Mr Woodford isn’t the only star to fade. Fund manager Anthony Bolton is an obvious parallel. He enjoyed almost three decades of superb performance, retired, then returned to blemish his record with a few miserable years investing in China. 

The story of triumph followed by disappointment is not limited to investment. Think of Arsène Wenger, for a few years the most brilliant manager in football, and then an eternal runner-up. Or all the bands who have struggled with “difficult second-album syndrome”. 

There is even a legend that athletes who appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated are doomed to suffer the “SI jinx”. The rise to the top is followed by the fall from grace. 

There are three broad explanations for these tragic career arcs. Our instinct is to blame the individual. We assume that Mr Woodford lost his touch and that Mr Wenger stopped learning. That is possible. Successful people can become overconfident, or isolated from feedback, or lazy. 

But an alternative possibility is that the world changed. Mr Wenger’s emphasis on diet, data and the global transfer market was once unusual, but when his rivals noticed and began to follow suit, his edge disappeared. In the investment world — and indeed, the business world more broadly — good ideas don’t work forever because the competition catches on. 

The third explanation is the least satisfying: that luck was at play. This seems implausible at first glance. Could luck alone have brought Mr Wenger three Premier League titles? Or that Mr Bolton was simply lucky for 28 years? Do we really live in such an impossibly random universe? 

Perhaps we do. Michael Blastland’s recent book, The Hidden Half, argues that much of the variation we see in the world around us is essentially mysterious. Mr Blastland’s opening example is the marmorkrebs, a kind of crayfish that reproduces parthenogenetically — that is, marmorkrebs lay eggs without mating and those eggs develop into clones of their mothers. 

Place two clones into two identical fish tanks and feed them identical food. These genetically identical creatures raised in apparently identical environments produce genetically identical offspring who nevertheless vary dramatically in their size, form, lifespan, fecundity, and behaviour. Sometimes things turn out very differently for no reason that we can discern. We might as well call that reason “luck” as anything else. 

This is not to say that skill doesn’t matter — merely that in a competition in which all the leaders are highly skilled, randomness may explain the difference between triumph and failure. Good luck plus skill beats bad luck plus skill any time. 

It is easy to underestimate how much chance is at play all around us. The psychologist Daniel Kahneman has recently been studying what he calls “noise”: the variability of judgments for no obvious reason. 

A wine expert blind-tasting two glasses from the same bottle will often rate them differently. Pathologists disagree with each other in their judgments of the same biopsy. More disconcertingly, they also disagree with their own prior judgments of the case. 

We rarely appreciate just how much inconsistency there is in the judgments we and others make, argues Prof Kahneman. It can hardly be a surprise, then, if past performance is no guarantee of future success. 

We should remember, too, that people often achieve outsized success by taking risks or being contrarian. When John Kay examined the forecasting record of economists in the 1990s, he noted that Patrick Minford, an idiosyncratic forecaster, would often produce the best forecast one year and the worst forecast the next. If the consensus is wrong, being an outlier gives you a high chance both of dramatic success and spectacular failure. 

We perceive all this randomness through a particular filter, too. Few people make the cover of Sports Illustrated after a run of mediocre luck. They appear after things have been going well, and if the good luck fails to hold then it seems like the SI jinx. More likely it is “regression to the mean”, or in simple terms, a return to business as usual. 

We begin paying attention only when someone is producing a remarkable performance. Genius followed by mediocrity is a story arc we all notice. Mediocrity followed by genius just looks like genius — assuming the mediocre performer gets a second chance. Not all do. 

So I wish Mr Woodford well. Perhaps he has lost his touch, perhaps the world has changed, or perhaps he has simply been unlucky. It would be nice to know which, but in such matters the world does not always satisfy our curiosity.