Asean
Pakistan’s political quandary: on the edge yet again
Author: Sajjad Ashraf, NUS
The two separate sit-ins in front of Pakistan’s parliament house are into their second week. The first is led by cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan, chairman of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party. The second is led by Tahirul Qadri of political party Pakistan Awami Tehreek (PAT). Both are seeking the ouster of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and his brother Shahbaz Sharif, the chief minister of Punjab — Pakistan’s most populous and disproportionately powerful province.
The sit-ins have rattled the Sharif-led government.
Forcing a prime minister who commands an overwhelming majority in the house to quit sets a dangerous precedent in any democracy. Not one Pakistani prime minister since independence in 1947 has completed their set parliamentary term. The question is whether Nawaz Sharif’s departure could save the current dispensation or if this gridlock will lead to an extra-constitutional arrangement to get Pakistan back on track.
Khan and Qadri’s sit-ins represent a widely held belief that, under the present system, for the most part only people of questionable character make it into Pakistan’s parliament. They are seeking an overhaul of the system. But the beneficiaries vow to protect it.
Two further issues, separately championed by Khan and Qadri, have triggered the current standoff.
First, vote-rigging in the 2013 elections, now publicly admitted to by the senior-most officials of the election commission, led to Imran Khan’s call for an audit of four constituencies where the PTI lost. Instead, Imran offered an audit of four constituencies where PTI candidates won. Sharif’s stonewalling of this demand at multiple levels finally compelled Khan to up the ante. Khan claimed that unless Sharif resigned, entrenched interests in Pakistani politics could not be dislodged.
So why did Sharif not agree to the audit? Sharif’s party, the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), is built on patronage and power and not on ideology. The party now faces an internal meltdown and the loss of power in a repeat of its ouster in 1999. Revival of its fortunes in 2013, though questioned, was again built on its control over the Punjab through Sharif’s younger brother.
Second, Qadri’s sit-in was triggered by a callous attack on his Lahore offices by the Punjab Police killing 14 and injuring 90 on 14 June. For over two months the PAT’s attempt to get the case registered against the 23 accused — which includes the Sharif brothers and several of their henchmen — has been thwarted despite a court order. The judicial commission report on the incident has been kept secret, raising serious suspicions against the perpetrators.
Qadri seeks justice for the victims among other demands for the cleansing of the political system. Sharif resisted the filing of a police First Information Report (FIR) because he fears a similar fate to Pakistan’s most popular political leader and prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Bhutto was hanged by Sharif’s political patron General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq when the FIR included Bhutto’s name in a murder case. This should haunt any politician in Pakistan.
The very nature of Pakistani politics — rooted in exclusivity — lies at the heart of the country’s troubles.
Paranoia resulting from two previous inglorious ousters, both related to power rather than principle, makes Sharif suspicious of all except his close family and friends. The cabinet rarely meets. Sycophancy prevails. Sharif attended the National Assembly only seven times in the first parliamentary year.
Instead of providing good governance, security of life and property and basic necessities, the Sharif brothers remain obsessed with launching high visibility road and bridge projects. Risky and expensive schemes of distributing free laptops only bring momentary respite and are no substitute for effective governance.
The power shortages that contributed to the downfall of the Asif Ali Zardari regime (who though president, controlled power as party head) are back with a vengeance after a temporary respite. Power rates have doubled in the 14 months since Sharif took over. Inflation is rampant. Not one power thief, tax evader or land grabber (key constituencies) has been arrested. This is also a source of the public anger articulated by PTI and PAT.
Broken commitments on releasing former general Pervez Musharraf and public condemnation of the former army chief by Sharif’s closest confidants has incensed the rank and file of the army.
Civilian governments since 2008 have sought to weaken the army’s role in critical areas of foreign policy and security. Where Zardari was a compromiser while in power, Sharif wants unbridled control over the army, causing fissures.
Though some say that the army is behind the current unrest, the generals do not seem intent on taking over a direct administrative role, leaving Sharif to stew in his self-inflicted mess. But, if the government remains dysfunctional, the military cannot indefinitely watch from the sidelines.
Those who now claim to defend democracy must understand that democracy is not just numbers — it is accountability, transparency, effectiveness and justice in governance, all of which are strikingly absent from Sharif’s agenda. Pakistan thus remains on the edge. If the system begins to care for the common people, Pakistan may yet turn a corner.
Sajjad Ashraf is Adjunct Professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore. He was a member of the Pakistan Foreign Service 1973–2004.
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Pakistan’s political quandary: on the edge yet again
Asean
ASEAN weathering the COVID-19 typhoon
Author: Sandra Seno-Alday, Sydney University
The roughly 20 typhoons that hit Southeast Asia each year pale in comparison to the impact on the region of COVID-19 — a storm of a very different sort striking not just Southeast Asia but the world.
Just how badly is the COVID-19 typhoon thrashing the region? And what might the post-crisis recovery and reconstruction look like? To answer these questions, it is necessary to investigate the strengths and vulnerabilities of Southeast Asia’s pre-COVID-19 economic infrastructure.
Understanding the structure of the region’s economic house requires going back to 1967, when Southeast Asian countries decided to pledge friendship to one another under the ASEAN framework. While other integrated regions such as NAFTA and the European Union have aggressively broken down trade barriers and significantly boosted intra-regional trade, ASEAN regional economic integration has chugged along slower.
Southeast Asian countries have not viewed trade between each other as a top priority. The trade agreements in the region have been forged around suggestions for ASEAN countries to lower tariffs on intra-regional trade to within a certain range and across limited industries. This has lowered but not eliminated barriers to intra-regional trade. Consequently, a relatively significant share of Southeast Asian trade is with countries outside the region. This active extra-regional engagement has resulted in ASEAN countries’ successful integration into global value chain networks.
A historically outward-facing region, in 2010 around 75 per cent of Southeast Asian commodity imports and exports came from countries outside of ASEAN. This share of extra-regional trade nudged closer to 80 per cent in 2018. This indicates that ASEAN’s global value chain network embeddedness has deepened over time.
Around 40 per cent of ASEAN’s extra-regional trade is with the rest of Asia. From 2010 to 2018 Southeast Asian countries forged major trade relationships with four Asian countries: China, Japan, South Korea and India. Outside Asia, the United States is the region’s major trading partner. ASEAN’s trade focus on Asia’s largest markets is not surprising. Countries tend to establish trade relationships with large, geographically close, and culturally similar markets.
Fostering deep relationships with a few large markets, however, is a double-edged sword. While it has allowed ASEAN to benefit from integration in global value chains, it has also resulted in increased vulnerability to the shocks affecting its network connections.
ASEAN’s participation in global value chains has allowed it to transition from a net regional importer in 1990 to a net regional exporter in 2018. But the region’s deep embeddedness in a small and tightly-coupled network cluster of extra-regional global value chain partners has exposed it to disruption to any and all of its external partners. By contrast, ASEAN’s intra-regional trade network structure is much more loosely-coupled: a consequence of persistent intra-regional trade barriers and thus lower intra-regional trade intensity.
In the pre-COVID-19 period, ASEAN built for itself an economic house held up by just five extra-regional markets, while doing less to expand and diversify its intra-regional trade network. The data shows that ASEAN trade became increasingly concentrated in these few external markets between 2010 and 2018.
This dependence on a handful of markets does not bode well for risk and crisis management. All of the region’s major trading partners have been significantly affected by COVID-19 and this in turn is blowing the ASEAN economic house down.
What are the ways forward? The immediate task at hand is to get a better picture of the region’s position in global value chain networks and to get on top of managing its network risk exposure. Already there are red flags around the region’s food security arising from its position in food value chains. It is critical to look for ways to introduce flexibility into existing supply chains for greater agility in responding to crises.
It is also an opportune time for ASEAN to harness the technology transfer gains of global value chain participation and invest in innovation-driven diversification of products and markets. The region’s embeddedness in global value chain networks certainly places it in a strong position to readily access large export markets not just in Asia but also Europe and the Americas.
Over the longer term, ASEAN is faced with the question of whether it should seriously look…
Markets
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Access to the Singapore Exchange (SGX) adds to Tiger Brokers’ current menu of stock exchanges, such as the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and the Nasdaq Stock Market (NASDAQ), the world’s two largest stock exchanges, as well as the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (HKEX).
SINGAPORE (ACN Newswire) – Tiger Trade, a one-stop mobile and online trading application by Tiger Brokers, has launched access to the Singapore Exchange (SGX).
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