"... Pakistan looks awful..."FIRST THE 'SOCIAL PROBLEM':
"Karachi, both Pakistan's and the province of Sind's biggest city, as well as the country's business center and source of 40 percent of federal revenues, is becoming a subcontinental version of Lagos. Its population has grown from 400,000 in 1947 to 9 million in the 1990s. This includes perhaps hundreds of thousands of heroin addicts and at least a million inhabitants of illegal squatter shanties. Less than a quarter of Karachi's 1,300 tons of daily garbage is properly disposed of. Unemployment is at 25 percent, and the city's population is growing by 6 percent annually, twice Pakistan's national average, which itself suffers one of the highest population growth rates in the world. Each year, half a million more people are added to Karachi's population, more than the entire population of the city in 1947.
"Karachi's streets are flooded for days at a time during the monsoon, its telephones silent, its homes without electricity or drinking water. Large areas are controlled by drug barons. Since the 1980s, gang warfare has been endemic and battles are fought along ethnic lines, between mohajirs (foreigners who came from India), indigenous Sindhis, Pathans from the Northwest Frontier province, and others: all Moslems. The writer Ian Buruma describes Karachi and surrounding Sind province as 'a kind of sandy Sicily.'
"Just as the plight of sub-Saharan Africa is an extreme example of what is occurring less intensely elsewhere on the planet, Karachi is a somewhat extreme example of what is occurring throughout Pakistan. Highway gangs and religious riots made Pakistan's Northwest Frontier province bordering Afghanistan dangerous in the 1980s. I often needed special permission to travel in those areas. In the 1990s it was worse - a steady deterioration of effective government had become normal there. The Northwest Frontier province was now a haven for arms dealers and disillusioned mujahidin (holy warriors) from the Afghan war. Rising crime throughout Pakistan led The Muslim, a respected nationwide daily, to write in its lead editorial on June 14,1994, that 'the country is fast moving toward anarchy.'
"Gang warfare extends in an emblematic fashion to the nation's politics. So far during the 1990s, Pakistan has been immobilized in complete political gridlock. The former prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, and his allies have, through parlimentary maneuvers, smear campaigns, collusion with local mullahs and some branches of the military, and attacks on other branches of the military, stalemated the reform program of the democratically elected prime minister, Benazir Bhutto. 'No nation is more entangled in conspiratory fantasy,' writes Washington Post correspondent Steve Coll. 'Pakistan is like an out-patient who refuses his lithium ...'
"All these fissures run along ethnic-regional lines. Sharif's allies are Punjabis; Bhutto's, Sindhis.
"Pakistan has already become what the former Soviet Union is in danger of becoming: a decomposing polity based more on criminal activities than on effective government. By 1988, illicit drugs accounted for $4 billion annually in earnings - more foreign exchange than all of Pakistan's legal exports combined. The Hundi banking system, an underground, off-the-books network of money changers in the bazaar, handles more capital than the official banks, and is a convenient means for laudering drug profits.
"Mubashir Hassan, a former finance minister, said in 1990 that the legal 'state structure in Pakistan has been rapidly collapsing ... The police are no longer the police. The magistracy is no longer the magistracy and tax collector can no longer collect taxes. The collapse of the state has given rise to kidnappers, murderers, bank robbers, drug dealers ... The whole scene has become bazaar.' The 1991 scandal involving the Bank of Commerce and Credit International, or BCCI, and its Pakistan-based founder, Agha Hasan Abedi, was a case of such bazaari business practices gone worldwide.
"The United Nations reports that
"illegal and criminal activities [in Pakistan] have been booming and while they have undoubtedly generated incomes and employment, they have also eroded traditional values ... Their destructive effect on the society must be a major cause for concern.""Meanwhile, the equivalent of another Karachi is added to the population of Pakistan every 2.3 years, while every two decades or so, the population doubles. Even were Pakistan's population growth rate to drop gradually to zero by the year 2040, its population will have increased from 130 million to several hundred million by then: perhaps more people than live in all of present-day Europe. Pakistan is one of the world's 'most serious family planning failures,' according to a report by Population Action International. While 22 percent of Iranian couples use contraceptives, only 9 percent of Pakistani couples use them. The average Pakistani woman conceives almost seven times over her lifetime. The exponential increase in young people - the five-year-old to twenty-year-old age group will grow from 35 million to 55 million during the 1990s - will make a formal education system for everyone impossible. Already by 1991, half the Pakistani population was under fifteen.
"Migration to urban shantytowns - not just in Karachi but in cities throughout Pakistan - is occurring at a faster rate than in Iran or Egypt, according to the UN and other organizations. Writes Lamb, in Waiting for Allah, about a typical day here:
"Twelve thousand more people will be born in Pakistan this day ... More of them will learn to use a gun than to speak the national language ... Only a third will have access to clean drinking water and only 15 percent will have sewerage. A quarter will go to school. Many will become heroin addicts.""THAT'S THE SOCIAL PROBLEM.
"NOW THE 'PHYSICAL':
"With 65 percent of Pakistan's land dependent on intensive irrigation, with massive deforestation, and 3 percent yearly population growth - which assures that the amount of cultivated land per rural inhabitant will be cut in half by 2020 - governing Pakistan is becoming an increasingly desperate enterprise. Now add the fact that, according to the World Bank, a quarter of all Pakistan's soil is deteriorating due to salinity and waterlogging, which in turn is caused by the madcap building of irrigation canals that lack proper drainage and are poorly maintained. 'Dams here are silting up,' explained a UN official I interviewed in Islamabad.'All local investment is in big bricks-and-mortar projects and not enough is put into maintaining what has been built, and educating people to do the maintenance.'
"Thus my dry faucet. Actually, having lived in Peshawar on the Northwest Frontier in the 1980s, I was used to water cutoffs. And Rawalpindi has been experiencing them for years. But no water in one of the wealthiest sections of the capital was 'news,' as it marked yet a further deterioration. The Muslim reported that an emergency committee had agreed to 'draw another 20 feet of water from the already heavily depleted [Simly Dam] source' to alleviate the situation. This is the environmental equivalent of using social Security pension funds to reduce budget deficits.
"The savior of Islamabad and the rest of Punjab is supposed to be the Kalabagh Dam, to be built on the Indus River in the Northwest Frontier Province. But the province's population of ethnic Pathans, as well as Sindhis in the south of the country near Karachi, vehemently oppose the project. They see it as a 'water grab by Punjabis.'
"The UN official I interviewed explained:
"The water problem is symptomatic of the population problem, which is symptomatic of the political system breaking down, since that has affected the lack of good family planning programs. And the breakdown of the political system is symptomatic of ethnic problems. Everything is interrelated and feeds off each other in a downward spiral.""According to this analysis, Benazir Bhutto, rather than a symbol of female empowerment in the male-dominated Moslem world, is a symbol of helplessness: the head of a government who can no longer cope, because overpopulation and depleted resources have reached the point of saturation, thus destabilizing the state institutions. The crisis is so severe that democracy, with its necessay compromses and half-measures, cannot mount a credible counterattack against these destructive forces, while military rule leads to only more corruption and cynicism.
"In its 1992 Summary Report, the United Nations Development Programme in Pakistan states categorically the 'economic growth in Pakistan' - which so excites that theoretical Wall Street fund manager - 'is not sustainable,' due to 'the depletion of assets in general and, most importantly, the depletion of the natural environment which resulted from economic growth.'