Predictions on Pakistan in 2011- Khaled Ahmed

In the coming months, Pakistan will see the consequences of not passing on the cost of importing oil and non-enforcement of the RGST, while the inflationary effects of these two non-acts will be sought to be offset with more religious frenzy. Sectarian strife will widen among the majority Muslims while Al Qaeda and Taliban win without fighting too much. Xenophobia growing out of religious emotions will convince the world that helping Pakistan will actually harm it, which in turn will destroy Pakistan Army’s thesis that the world needs Pakistan more than Pakistan needs the world.

Predicting the coming year is an annual ritual of repeating clichés about Pakistan. No coming year has been better than the past year and that has happened over the past six decades. This pattern is embedded in Pakistan’s ‘certainty’ about its pre-modern ideology and its inability to suit it to modern times. But some immediate economic fallout from our dishonest internecine politicians – led by the big party PMLN who knows better – will ruin the first half of the year for us. The rest will be ruined by our religion with more judges passing religious verdicts and the clergy growling at the state for not taking on the world which sustains it through trade and handouts.

Want hara-kiri? Go for economic populism: Adjusting fuel prices has never been popular. Anywhere in the world price hikes are unpopular and unseat governments. (But in France and the UK, oppositions have been voting with the government for ‘tough decisions’.) In Pakistan too the PPP government has been forced to take back the price hike by the opposition which threatened to unseat it. Earlier the opposition did the same sort of thing with the RGST. Both times the PPP has dug its own grave by kowtowing. It will disembowel itself in the coming months through economics, which is what the opposition wants.

The government took back a 9 percent rise in oil price, triggering the budget deficit about which the State Bank has been crying itself hoarse. The oil will be subsidised to the tune of Rs 5 billion a month, setting the country on the path of building another circular debt, making it economically unviable for a purblind PMLN when it comes to power with its testicles in the inflationary grinder. The budget deficit will cross 8 percent of the GDP and no amount of cosmetic cutting down of ministries will bring employment in a landscape where the employer is shutting shop and preparing to leave for the UAE.

Year of French Revolution or ‘bloody revolution’? The 2008 decision to peg domestic oil prices to the international ones has been overturned by political parties stricken blind by fate. The mullah hates the economy but the PMLN knew what it was doing while putting the muffler on Ishaq Dar who knew that Mian Sahib was putting the blade to the party’s midriff by going along with illiterate Altaf Hussain ordering his MQM to stage a French Revolution. Shahbaz Sharif has been seeing a less outlandish ‘bloody revolution’ on the cards. He may want it to come in 2011 with Al Qaeda making him go to South Punjab and bend the knee to that destroyer of all economies, and a seller of religious Viagra to the masses, Aiman Al Zawahiri.

The politician has taken revenge on the economy additionally by not letting the government enforce the RGST it had promised the IMF. He takes an evil pleasure in spiting the US, Pakistan’s biggest trading partner and biggest sheller-out of assistance bucks, and thumbing his nose at the IMF, the only source of cheap money with which to buy Pakistan’s imports and maintain its credit-rating. The clergy grows tumescent seeing the politicians go through this routine of self-evisceration. Last time we went through this ritual was when the nation got a collective tumescence testing the nuclear device in 1998. The following day the economy was belly-up.

Print money and die: If the opposition wants the PPP government out because there is too much inflation, wait till the recall of the RGST and oil subsidy have their effect. Pakistan had entered a 25-month $11.3 billion Stand-by Arrangement (SBA) with IMF in November 2008. The arrangement was supposed to end in January 2011, but the IMF postponed the disbursement of the 6th tranche worth $1.7 billion in August because Islamabad did not impose the RGST. Now we are on a nine-month reprieve but the year 2011 will see Pakistan once again flat-footed in the face of street threats.

Pakistan will print more money and the rupee will go through the floor. The revenue estimate in Pakistan is Rs 700 billion but the government has already borrowed Rs 15,000 billion and the first months of 2011 will see the State Bank struggling to keep the rupee from collapsing, forcing the common man to buy a paan for Rs 500. The inflation may have been officially 14 percent and unofficially over 22 percent but the year 2011 might see it rise to close to 30 percent. That will be time for us to line up the politicians and the clergy against the wall with their backs bared for what the Taliban did to the women of Swat.

Ban the word ‘allallay-tallallay’! We say inflation comes from ‘allallay-tallallay’ – a hateful Urdu term which covers our lack of economic literacy and is on the lips of most TV anchors. But the truth is that inflation comes, not from allowing the prices to remain unsubsidised, but from subsidising them in favour of the well-heeled. The well-heeled today are the past-corrupt and prospective-corrupt opposition politicians and the Arab-funded clergy. Inflation is simply printing of money when a contracting economy produces little. Keynesianism will not work in Pakistan anyway because the state projects all end up looking like the ‘ghost schools’ of Punjab and Sindh.

The year of 2011 will see the peak of Pakistan’s only growth industry: extremism. This means that Pakistanis will kill some more Pakistanis while spouting hatred for Hindus, Jews and Christians – all somehow encapsulated in the identity of Americans. Al Qaeda and Taliban will lean back and rest while the country, shrinking like a bashful Muslim bride before being deflowered, gets itself ready for a takeover by them. Some more poor Christians will be immolated to the false gods of the Blasphemy Law.

Year of the unviable state: Pakistan in the year 2011 will get a little looser in the hinges. The Baloch and the Pakhtun dreaming of their separate states – one under the sardars who live in Karachi and the other under the Taliban who live in North Waziristan – should be reminded that when in 1947 the enthusiasts of the Pakistan Movement were told that the state they were dreaming of was unviable, they did not listen. Maybe the Baloch and the Pakhtun can be forewarned against tracing the same kind of trajectory. The outside world will tire of Pakistan in the months to come and start thinking of alternatives to Pakistan as an ally in the war against terrorism.

China will watch this happen, hardly able to cover up for all the follies of a state sick with unguided religious fervour. Pakistan will pass another year without trying to understand what makes China tick. This is a love affair where too much examination will only expose the fact that it is China which Pakistan’s extremism will target next. Our submission to Al Qaeda and our friendship with China do not make for a good chemistry of relations in the future.