Sanctions: Lift 'em. (Pakistan) Pervez Hoodbhoy; Zia Mian. 

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1998 Educational Foundation for Nuclear Science 

Caught between a desire to match india's nuclear tests and the fear of devastating sanctions, Pakistan vacillated for two weeks before testing. Subsequently, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharifwent on television and declared, "This auspicious day is an historic event for us." Anticipating the price the country would have to pay, he urged "sacrifices" and added, "If the need arises be ready to go hungry." 

Now, with sanctions imposed by its international creditors and private capital scared away, the specter of Pakistan's economic collapse looms large. The currency has fallen sharply and may well go into free fall, driving up inflation and increasing the difficulty of finding resources to pay the debt. Foreign debt is around $30 billion--small by Western standards, but large for a nation like Pakistan. Debt service was set at 45 percent of government expenditures at the time of the June budget--before the collapse of the currency. 

As the economy falters, societal institutions, weak even before the tests, could collapse. Should there be a breakdown of governance, Prime Minister Sharif, as well as the current chief of the army, a moderate, may be replaced by hardliners from Islamist groups. Within the army, fire-breathers such as retired Gen. Hamid Gul, the former head of Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence Agency, stand to gain. These groups are the ones who rejoiced most loudly at Pakistan's tests. They are pathologically anti-Indian and determined to settle old scores. What this may mean in the nuclear age is terrifying. 

In the months ahead it may become difficult for any government to manage the country. When Muslim-hating Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) hard-liners in India incited and enticed Pakistan into testing--the first time a state has tried to compel an adversary to test nuclear weapons--they may have hoped for a repeat of Cold War history. The BJP would like to see Pakistan exhausted and broken by an arms race and, quite possibly, they might get their wish. 

But unlike the steel cage of the Soviet state, which insured that some crucial structures of governance survived even as everything else collapsed, Pakistan is already fractured by multiple violent ethnic and religious conflicts. Disintegration into molecular civil war with fiefdoms and warlords is a terrible possibility. Should it occur, India will have created a nuclear Somalia for a neighbor. 

The situation that pakistan finds itself in predates its debut into the nuclear world. The Pakistani state is not able to provide even the basics of education, health care, housing, or jobs for its people. For almost all of its 50 years of independence, the avarice of Pakistan's tax-dodging elite has been allied with a desperate sense of insecurity about India, insuring that the military got the lion's share of what few public resources were available. 

This fundamentally untenable situation was sustained for years largely by military and economic aid, especially from the United States in exchange for Pakistan's loyalty in the Cold War. But the collapse of the Soviet Union meant the end of Pakistan's free ride; further, in 1990 the United States imposed sanctions because of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program. 

Left to its own resources and never having been able to create institutions to manage them efficiently, Pakistan plunged deeper and deeper into debt. Debt service replaced military spending as the largest item in government spending. 

In the past few years, the need to address the economic and social crises had dawned on some in government and the military. A quiet revolution had begun. Military spending unobtrusively started tO decline both in real terms and as a fraction of government spending. 

Astonishingly, just weeks before the Indian tests, Gen. Jehangir Karamat, the head of Pakistan's army, publicly identified the state of the economy and internal problems as being more serious threats to the future of Pakistan than India was likely to be. All this changed after India's tests on May 11. 

The stock of the hard-liners has risen, India is now back as enemy number one, and the 14 percent increase in India's military budget has led Pakistan to increase its military spending by eight percent. This was only for openers. India's defense minister has promised further large increases in military spending. 

Pakistan's disintegration would have calamitous consequences for South Asia and it must be averted. But the situation may be too far gone for Pakistan's leaders to handle it alone. The international community must help. 

The first thing the international community must do is insure that the situation is not made worse. Sanctions applied for punitive ends, which take no account of political constraints and possibilities, are part of the problem. The longer they are applied, the more quickly will Pakistan's economic and social structures collapse. 

Second, the international community should realize the potential of Kashmir as a flashpoint for nuclear conflagration. Today Pakistan's leaders privately admit they can't win Kashmir but, in the same breath, they stress that they cannot be seen to give up on the issue. They are prisoners of their success in manufacturing public consent to a particular solution to Kashmir. They desperately need a fig leaf. 

What can this cover be? An excellent beginning could be to make greater use of the U.N. military observers who have been in Kashmir for almost 50 years. They could be increased in numbers and authorized to separate the two armies and keep them out of each other's artillery range, and they could prevent illegal movement across the border. 

But this is only a stop-gap. The international community must try harder to break the impasse between India and Pakistan on Kashmir. At present, the two states cannot even agree on the terms for talking about Kashmir. Pakistan believes the basis for discussion must be the 1948 and 1949 U.N. resolutions on Kashmir, agreed to by India, which envisaged the United Nations Commission for India and Pakistan supervising a settlement in Kashmir "in accordance with the will of the people," which was to be determined through a plebiscite. 

India argues the 1972 Simla Agreement must be the basis for talks. Signed after the 1971 India-Pakistan war, the agreement makes no mention of the United Nations. Instead, it commits the two states to settle their disputes "through bilateral negotiations or by any other peaceful means mutually agreed upon between them." 

An international contact group (which might be, for example, composed of judges from the International Court of Justice) may be able to help the two countries work out the legal basis for proceeding on Kashmir. 

Given their vulnerability, Pakistan's leaders also cannot afford to be seen as caving in to pressure on arms control measures such as the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, a no-first-use agreement, or a ban on the production of fissile materials. 

However, Pakistan's post-test statements about undertaking a strategic review and possibly delinking its policy from India's on these treaties can be positively interpreted as signs of a willingness to move forward. 

But the international community should not be blinded by its wish to see progress in this direction. In particular, it must resist efforts to push things along by of bring conventional weapons and dual-use technology to Pakistan or India. Such deals would amount to helping South Asia jump out of the nuclear frying pan and into the conventional-weapons fire. This fire has singed both countries three times `already. 

What Pakistan needs is the time and resources to dig itself out of the hole it is in. The back-breaking sanctions imposed by the international community must be lifted. Instead, Pakistan must be given help to create and manage the urgently needed social infrastructure of schools and hospitals, and to put its economic house in order. Social peace, something Pakistan has rarely enjoyed, can create the basis for peace with India. Nothing else has. 

Pervez Hoodbhotd is professor of physics at Quaid-i-Azam, Islamabad. Zia Mian is a research associate at the Center for Energy and Environmental Studies, Princeton University. They are involved in the peace movement and other campaigns for social justice and human rights in Pakistan.