In the civil service, the tendency now is to take orders as they come and to meet the requirements of the powerbase. That has led to many difficulties for the civil servants and they find themselves at the wrong end of the stick. The result is a growing tendency to take management concepts to a new low every time.
The end result is bureaucracy that is gutless and unable to provide the necessary ability to conceptualise the policy for better management of the country and its economic equitable rationality. Since the civil servant is unable to do so with any degree, is there another source that can do the needful.
How about the politician? Can he fill the growing void or are we far behind in economic and political thought and, therefore, unable to handle the consequences of the fallout from this kind of unhealthy rhetoric that has nothing to do with economic growth.
For sometime now, the tendency is to see those countries that do not receive Western thought as a necessary component of development. The West has always deprecated the USSR for its non-democratic attitudes and finally USSR was brought down by partially its own weight and partially by the propaganda war waged by the West and its institutions.
Which countries never received much from the West and its so-called global agencies given to development? Do they actually develop? Do the IMF and the WB and the ADB really matter in the global development and or are they merely touts in the hands of the Western countries?
I looked at five countries and try and follow their activities and these are China, Vietnam, Iran, Syria and Myanmar (Burma). All these countries were and are a part of the target of the Western propagandists. Yet they have done well by their own people.
The ideas of men like Kant, Hobbes and Machiavelli have been perverted. The modern analysts are in the lust for more money and not by the means that they have to use to achieve the goals that they may have set up for filling their own pockets and to hell with the consequences. The point of departure that they have had is significant. They have maintained their form of political government.
The West has tried to impose their form of political thought. That has been the way forward for them whether that is applicable to the country's culture or otherwise. Political thought has nothing to do with the economic welfare and happiness of the people of the country.
The fact of political thought, being superior to the democratic process, is best illustrated by the way China has gone about doing it and the way Vietnam has done it and the way Iran has transformed its economy though a period of transition from the monarchy and then to the revolution and the manner of equity practised by that country.
Syria seems to stand out for handling a terrible economic situation based on a mix of socialism-Marxism and capitalism. Myanmar, one does not know much about, but despite all the abuse of human rights, the country has not had any food security issues to handle.
To be a realist and not to be over-committed to the absolute, one must be in a policy position to handle these and other developmental issues. Is it this fetish of growth or is there any other way to increase happiness and welfare? It is necessary to get out of ideology and to be independent of making mistakes and resetting the learning process - the way Iran had the courage to do.
Chaos fallows from ideology and that means that people are being fed something that cannot deliver but that bites in the long run. There is no easy handbook that can be followed for times and method guide and predetermine the make-up of the developmental process. Pakistan's larger historical process requires that we move with care and determine what we want in a manner that is a mix of dialogue and reason not unreason.
So far as the understanding goes, the major crib is about keeping the credibility of the policy-makers. With the bureaucracy, the leadership position is very much at stake and the political system will never be full of reason because by definition, the important aspect that the electorate or constituency wants is jobs and jobs are hard to come by and require a different way to think. That different way to think is difficult and requires not so much money as other elements.
Idealism has its own strong points to consider but that means putting the work in its proper perspective for the moral issues that idealism forces are but a means to long-term chaos. Justice and humanity and or equity are poor play for developmental policy for who determines these intangibles? The realist for Balochistan and other areas is really the effort to systematically transform the contemporary issues.
The more marginal the areas and the more excluded the areas, the more important and critical the developmental process has to be in terms of quick implementation in order to have quick results. For how else do you work the developmental process to remove the current and historical shortages that were created? The developmental process does not work on the basis of modern gadgetry.
Merck's do not necessarily constitute development. The present has to be faced by a set of tools and machinery that may be time worn and may be technically not to the keeping of the modern economic systems. If one were to understand technology as apparently it is in the textile industry, one would go berserk and not be able to handle anything. It gets complicated and complex.
The product is made by technology that is controlled by the manipulators of the economic systems of the world and they can and do make life very difficult for competitors from the developing countries. A set of reliable tools, utilised today is better than sophistication of the future and there is no need for a Board of Investment [BOI]. The BoI is an institutional arrangement to get MNCs into industrial position that would eventually rule the economy of the developed country.
The crucial filter then is a mix of a mindset and technology that can transform the country rather than fix it in a manner that the country becomes a better place. The ultimate question that is to be asked is whether the country is a better place to live in. There seems to be a complete absence of leaders that could balance the external threats with the opportunities and to see how to remove these threats as best as one can.
The global physics that the historically superior leaders sought to make was different from the one that the current leaders are making. The global village that the likes of the current leadership of the developed world is in the process of creating is without any kind of morality and rules. The answers were generally provided within the folds of the ideology. The answer to obtain from current leadership is whether they are capable of building a nation that appeals to the higher instincts of mankind.
We are born in a system that has forgotten the value of simplicities. Systematic irrationalities have tipped the simple matters of life. China and the other five countries have proved that they could operate within a certain limit provided the effort is kept within the bounds of equity.
Can reason then be over-powered by power players? Not for long, whether they are generals or the most powerful of the US presidents. It seems that states and their presidents are seldom rational. As different people will see matters differently, objectivity is lost.
Pakistan and India can never see eye-to-eye no matter how rational they can be. When it comes to local requirements, a system of regular empowerment may help. It is the local people that must take this brunt. So is morality right by power or by reason?
Ask yourself the question and then see how this can be corrected. Is this the way we were concentrating only on the irrigated areas of Pakistan? Why have we excluded the peripheral areas? Why have we neglected what was and is still ours and is still our responsibility? Why, oh why? How can a nation survive this kind of meaningless blitz in which the aggressor has no stakes? A war should be fought in the countries own backyard and not in another country. The wisdom of Woodrow Wilson is missing in this current episode and the measure of the presidents has taken a big dent because of their inability to handle complex measures.
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