Pakistan: Will the Youth Bulge turn into a Democratic Dividend?

I argued in an earlier post that much of Pakistan’s future direction will hinge on events unfolding this year.  The first of these are the national elections scheduled for May 11, which could be decided by a large number of first-time voters.  These voters are the product of one of the world’s largest youth bulges and their electoral impact is a critical indicator to watch for.

India tends to receive most of the attention when it comes to mind-boggling demographic trends, though its western neighbor is no laggard either.  True, India is projected to overtake China as the world’s most populous country in about a decade or so.  But by some estimates, Pakistan eclipsed Brazil to move into the fifth position last year and could pass over Indonesia to take the fourth spot by 2030.  Yes, India will add the equivalent of Europe’s labor force over the next 15 years and end up supplying a full quarter of the global workforce.  But Pakistan’s population nearly doubled over the past two decades and its working-age population is growing at a faster clip than the overall population.  Pakistan also is a younger country, with a median age of 22 versus 26 in India.  And according to Forbes magazine, Karachi is the world’s fastest-growing megacity, with its population expanding 80 percent in 2000-2010.  Such dramatic growth helps to explain the city’s steady slide into chaos (see here and here).

In theory, the youth bulges in India and Pakistan are good things, since a growing proportion of workers to non-workers in a society – what is often termed the “demographic dividend” – helps propel capital accumulation and economic growth.  Youth bulges played an important role in powering the East Asian economic miracle from 1965-1990.   But it is unclear whether this pattern will be replicated in South Asia, since India and Pakistan have difficulty in generating productive employment for new entrants to their labor forces.

The Iraq Endgame and the Lessons for Afghanistan: An Update

Washington is in a rush and everyone knows it

The U.S. commentariat spent much of last month ruminating over the lessons of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq.  Left unexamined were the important lessons relating to the U.S. endgame in that country and how they should be applied to the accelerating withdrawal from Afghanistan.*  I explored these questions a few months ago and Secretary of State John F. Kerry’s recent visit to Baghdad has once more brought them into focus.

Mr. Kerry’s journey, the first by an U.S. Secretary of State since 2009, was another startling sign of how the Obama administration’s hasty exit from Iraq has brought about the marked loss of American influence with the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, along with growing Iranian clout in Baghdad.  Kerry attempted, futilely, to persuade Maliki to stop nearly daily Iranian flights ferrying weapons to the Assad regime in Syria via Iraqi airspace.  Indeed, so diminished is Washington’s pull, no Iraqi official appeared with Kerry at his Baghdad press conference and he resorted to publicly calling out the Iraqi government in an effort to gain traction.

The Desi Factor in U.S.-India Relations

According to a new Gallup survey, more than two-thirds of the U.S. public has a positive impression of India, a score that even edges out Israel’s traditionally-high favorability rating.  This is the latest indicator of how decisively American perceptions about the country have changed.  Not too long ago, India was regarded as the very epitome of what the term “Third World” meant – decrepit, destitute and pitiable.  Yet in a relatively short period of time, the popular view of India has changed in critical ways.

For many decades most Americans were inclined to the views of President Harry S. Truman, who dismissed India at its birth as an independent state as “pretty jammed with poor people and cows wandering around streets, witch doctors and people sitting on hot coals and bathing in the Ganges.”  His Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, had an even more incisive perspective: “by and large [Indians] and their country give me the creeps.”  When Daniel Patrick Moynihan was U.S. ambassador to India from 1973-75, he regularly lamented that Washington was utterly indifferent to the country’s fate; writing in his diary, he confided that it “is American practice to pay but little attention to India.”  In a cable to the State Department, he complained of dismissive attitudes, “a kind of John Birch Society contempt for the views of raggedly ass people in pajamas on the other side of the world.”

Public opinion kept close track with official attitudes in Washington.  Harold Issacs’s classic 1958 survey of U.S. elite opinion, Scratches on Our Minds, revealed that influential Americans held very negative perceptions of the country, associating it with “filth, dirt and disease,” along with debased religious beliefs.  A State Department analysis prepared in the early 1970s found that U.S. public opinion identified India more than any other nation with such attributes as disease, death and illiteracy, and school textbooks throughout this period regularly portrayed it in a most negative light.  This view was again underscored in a 1983 opinion poll, in which Americans ranked India at the bottom of a list of 22 countries on the basis of perceived importance to U.S. vital interests.

So, what accounts for the significant shift in perceptions?

Sino-Indian Relations Full of Contradictions

The following post is based on an address I delivered at the Shanghai Maritime Strategy Research Center two weeks ago.

The punditry gods were smiling when Beijing and New Delhi declared 2012 as the Year of Sino-Indian Friendship.  After all, it was a most curious designation, and not just because 2006 had received the same appellation with little to show for it.  Indeed, the Chinese that year revived their territorial claims over all of Arunachal Pradesh, a state in India’s remote northeast that lies along their long-contested Himalayan border and which Beijing now insists on calling “South Tibet.”  Even more striking was that the Chinese chose to make this an issue on the eve of President Hu Jintao’s visit to New Delhi in November 2006, the first such visit by a Chinese head of state in more than a decade and one that was meant to highlight growing bilateral cooperation.

Given this track record, the 2012 designation was all the more peculiar, especially since it coincided with the 50^th anniversary of the 1962 border war between the two countries.  The event, mostly ignored in China, reanimated bruised memories in India and two former foreign secretaries, Shyam Saran and Kanwal Singh, took to the opinion pages to warn (here and here) about China’s aggressive designs.  Representative of the media reaction was the Deccan Herald, a Bangalore-based newspaper, which cautioned its readers that “China is a hydra-headed monster with massive expansionist plans across South Asia.”

The uneasy juxtaposition of the dates neatly encapsulated the contending factors – increasing economic cooperation mixed with ulcerating historical animosities and an intensifying strategic rivalry – that tug at New Delhi’s relations with Beijing.

Obama’s Afghan Dysfunctions

Earlier posts have commented on the Obama administration’s defective foreign policy apparatus as well as its highly dysfunctional management of the war in Afghanistan (here and here).  Both problems are conjoined, a point that is that amply underscored in Vali Nasr’s forthcoming book, The Dispensable Nation.  Nasr served as a key adviser to the embattled Richard Holbrooke, President Obama’s special envoy on AfPak matters whom the White House appointed at Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s insistence but then proceeded to cut him off at the knees.  Although the book won’t be published until next month, its scathing critique of administration policy-making is already causing a stir (here and here) in Washington circles.

Nasr confesses that his “time in the Obama administration turned out to be a deeply disillusioning experience,” and judging from the book’s excerpts in the current issue of Foreign Policy magazine he engages in a good deal of bureaucratic score-settling and is filled with ire at the White House staffers who detested Holbrooke.  Even so, the points he raises are consonant with the devastating accounts recently offered by other administration insiders – such as Rosa Brooks (here and here) who served in the Pentagon’s policy planning shop – as well as respected journalists like Ahmed Rashid, Rajiv Chandrasekaran, James Mann and Thomas E. Ricks.   Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor in their new book, End Game, similarly provide an unflattering portrait of the administration’s handling of the Iraq war.

Kargil Disclosures and the Nuclear Proliferation Debate

My last post focused on the domestic implications in Pakistan of the latest revelations about the 1999 Kargil mini-war.  Since the crisis is a key point of contention – a sort of Rorschach test, really – in the debate over whether the proliferation of nuclear weapons in South Asia has stabilized or aggravated the India-Pakistan rivalry, it’s also worth taking another look at two important points regarding Kargil’s nuclear dimensions:

• Did Pakistan’s nuclear tests in May 1998 embolden the Kargil planners, especially Pervez Musharraf, the newly-appointed chief of army staff, to undertaken the ill-advised operation just a few months later?
• Did the perceived success of Pakistan’s small nuclear arsenal in deterring fulsome Indian retaliation during the crisis give Musharraf the security confidence to embark upon an intensive back-channel peace process in 2004-07 that reportedly was on the verge of defusing the perennially-inflamed dispute over Kashmir?

Pakistan: The Kargil Debate Resurfaces

My last post noted how skirmishes in the disputed Kashmir region last month have put a spanner in the promising rapprochement between India and Pakistan.  This is a familiar theme in bilateral affairs.  The exemplar of how military tussles in Kashmir can escalate into a wider confrontation and subvert important diplomatic initiatives is the 1999 Kargil mini-war.  By sheer coincidence, new revelations about the conflict emerged in Pakistan just as the recent fighting broke out.  With the country about to kick off a raucous electoral season, these disclosures have current relevance since they concern actions taken back then by Pakistani leaders who are still on the political scene.  More fundamentally, however, they touch on the very essence of the Pakistani state.