Lahore, Pakistan
The end of what may be the worst flooding in Pakistan’s history could soon be in sight, according to government officials. Now officials will be preoccupied with providing relief to some 17 million people — and reviving the country’s devastated economy.
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As part of that effort, In Pakistan’s major cities, a movement to cancel Pakistan’s external debt, which is set to reach some $74 billion by 2014, is now under way.
“Our annual debt servicing is on average $3 billion. That is almost three times the amount the government of Pakistan pays on health care,” says Abdul Khaliq Shah, the country’s spokesman for Committee for Abolition of Third World Debt. Mr. Shah organized a gathering of leading Pakistani intellectuals and rights activists in the eastern city of Lahore on Sunday to discuss the protesting of foreign debt. They are hoping to persuade international officials to cancel Pakistan’s debt to help flood affectees. A protest is planned to take place in front of Pakistan’s parliament house on Sept. 2.
IN PICTURES: Pakistan floods
Shah says the prevailing conditions in Pakistan after the flooding justifies the repudiation of debt under a UN Human Rights Commission resolution titled “State of Necessity,” adding that up to 70 percent of Pakistan’s external debt was accrued under the rule of dictators and should therefore be waived, just as the US refused to pay most of the external debt accrued by Saddam Hussein’s government.
The other argument for debt cancellation among participants was the precedent that countries facing similar tragedies to Pakistan’s catastrophic flooding set. As they recover, countries are often forced by international financial institutions and donor countries to mortgage their future as they borrow for relief and recovery efforts, magnifying problems for years.
Though Pakistan’s Geo News on Tuesday reported that eight more villages in the province of Sindh were inundated by the raging waters, residents were evacuated beforehand, according to Pakistan disaster management official Hadi Baksh. The worst of the flooding that originated in the country’s northwest and swept southward is over Bakhsh, according to the Associated Press. “The floodwaters are now heading to the Arabian Sea,” he said.
The flooding began some four weeks ago and has so far claimed about 1,600 lives, left more than 4 million homeless, and damaged more than 7.9 million acres of farmland, according to the UN’s food agency. Recovery is slated to take months, if not years. Agriculture accounts for almost one-quarter of Pakistan’s economy.
International aid was slow to trickle in, though as of last week, it stood at more than $800 million.
Pakistan’s talks with the International Monetary Fund in Washington continued on Monday, as IMF officials insisting Pakistan will need to continue to implement tax and energy sector reforms for an $11.3 billion loan negotiated in 2008, according to Dawn, a leading Pakistani daily.
Iraq and the Costs of War
August 31, 2010 5:46 PM
In marking the end of the combat mission in Iraq it’s worth noting how broadly unpopular the war became, and its profoundly negative impact on the presidency of George W. Bush — doing more than anything else to make him the most persistently unpopular president of our lifetimes.
Early on, with the quick fall of Baghdad and the “Mission Accomplished” banner on the USS Abraham Lincoln, as many as 70 percent of Americans said the war in Iraq was worth fighting. But as the violence continued, casualties rose and the war-justifying WMDs went unfound, that view worsened. By fall 2003 as few as 52 percent called the war worth fighting.
In June 2004, for the first time in our polling, a majority, 52 percent, said the opposite — that the war in Iraq was not worth fighting. After bouncing around the 50 percent mark that fall (leaving just enough room for Bush’s re-election) this went to a steady majority in December 2004 and has stayed there, continuously, ever since, peaking at 66 percent in April 2007. (It moderated but was still majority negative, 55 percent, in our most recent poll last month).
Bush’s approval rating moved almost precisely in tandem with this view, proving the axiom that — with the possible exception of a severe economic downturn — hath no fury like an unpopular war. President Bush spent virtually his entire second term below 50 percent approval, a record in data back to Harry Truman, until, double-teamed by the economic crisis, he fell as low as 23 percent in October 2008, a point from the record set by Truman 56 years earlier.
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