Beyond Doubt

For sometime now, I've been working on setting up a new blog. It's still under construction, but it's good enough to show my readers.

I can now start blogging there, and adding and tweaking things as I go. Therefore...

Please head over to http://doubtandbeyond.blogspot.com/.

Scroll down to the bottom of the page, and you'll see a small writeup on why I'm shifting there after almost five years of Nothing Adds Up, I'm moving.

You can leave comments either here, or on the new blog, and I look forward to reading them.

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Procrastination Device #23984752947692743967243989823476982479826

http://thereifixedit.com/

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The poverty of Pakistani newspapers

News and current affairs analysis has skyrocketed in Pakistan over the last decade with the advent of cable news channels, replacing the boring propaganda-fest that used to be 9pm news on PTV. However, TV reporting can't quite compete with the depth of reporting a newspaper can do.

In the course of working for my dissertation, I just scanned world circulation figures, and the figures in Pakistan. The standouts are Japan and India (India's figures are naturally high given just how large they are, but the Japanese figure is truly impressive). A caveat before I proceed: individual newspapers' circulation figures aren't indicative of how much a country's population reads papers. For that, we'd need total circulation of all papers divided by population. America, for example, has lower than expected circulation figures for its top papers, but this might only be because there are a large number of comparatively large papers based around metropolitan areas. (edit: it could also be because of the prevalence of the internet as a substitute news source)

Anyway, Pakistan has only one in the top 100: Jang at #72. An urdu-language paper, it's circulation was always going to be greater than the english papers, but as Pakistan's most widely read paper, it's circulation was actually very small, at 0.8 million readers. Compare that to the size of the population, over 160 million, and the fact that we don't have very popular regional papers, and the implication is devastating.

What about the others? I couldn't find circulation figures for Nawa-i-Waqt, which is almost certainly the second most circulated paper. Dawn and The News are neck and neck in terms of circulation at about 140,000. However, it is to be noted that Dawn is Pakistan's newspaper of record, and The News is wrongly, but tellingly labeled a tabloid on its Wikipedia page. I couldn't find figures for The Nation either, but it must be lower than the two leading papers. There are other noteworthy Pakistani papers: The Daily Times, Frontier Post and Business Recorder in English, and Khabrain in Urdu come to mind. However, none is large enough to detract from the larger point: newspaper readership in Pakistan is worryingly thin.

The causes and consequences of this are worth exploration at another time, but I can take a few guesses. Briefly, illiteracy (allegedly about 50.1%, probably greater) and a lack of disposable income probably make newspapers more of a luxury. The upshot of course is that it becomes easier to misinform the masses.

On a tangent, I just noticed that Pakistan is listed as a fairly equal society by the UN/CIA Gini coefficient rankings. I find this unintuitive and suspect its wrong, but can't investigate right now.

Okay, back to work.

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The Supreme Court needs an Economics Lesson

Dawn reports:

A Supreme Court judge, Justice Jawwad S. Khawaja, on Thursday expressed serious reservations over the report of the one-man commission appointed to determine the sugar industry's production cost and profit margin, branding it as non-starter.

‘We had appointed the commission to determine the cost of production and not to lecture us on economics,’ Justice Khawaja observed, saying the report had gone beyond its mandate.

The bench, comprising Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, Justice Khawaja and Justice Ghulam Rabbani, had taken up identical appeals of the Pakistan Sugar Mills Association and the Punjab Sugar Association against a verdict of the Lahore High Court requiring the sale of the sweetener at Rs40 per kilogram.

At the last hearing, Competition Commission of Pakistan chairman Khalid Mirza, in a report submitted to the Supreme Court in his capacity as head of the commission, had criticised fixing of price by the court, terming it a short-term measure which was bound to cause harm in the long term. Describing the issue as political, Justice Khawaja conceded that it was not the domain of the Supreme Court to fix sugar prices, but it had to intervene under compulsion.

It is not for judges to determine economic prices. No trained economist would have claimed to be able to calculate profit and cost margins, and it is heartening that the Competition Commission Chairman criticized this sort of price-fixing.

It is also ridiculous that Justice Khawaja resents getting lectured on economics. If you want expert testimony on a matter, you cannot protest when the expert says something you don't like.

If they're so concerned about the economy, they should tackle corruption, poverty alleviation and lawlessness

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Edhi Honored

Abdul Sattar Edhi has (jointly with Franois Houtart of Belgium) won the UNESCO-Madanjeet Singh Award for his contribution to non-violence.

Edhi is Pakistan's most famous philanthropist and success stories. Born in a poor family, he started his charity work with Rs. 5000, and has now famously built the largest private ambulance network in the world (which is a HUGE credit to him, and sad commentary on public services in Pakistan).

He also runs orphanages, clinics, burial services, education facilities, and God knows what else.

Here's more about the Edhi Foundation. And more.

Mention of the Foundation would be incomplete without recognition of the work of his wife, Bilqees, who is a great philanthropist in her own right.

Here's a San Francisco Chronicle article about how the couple saves 300 children a year, and the accompanying slideshow is worth seeing too:

Edhi represents the best side of Pakistan. My immediate reaction to Obama's Nobel Prize was wonder at how a he could be selected over a worker of the stature of Edhi. Unfortunately, Edhi is little-known outside Pakistan.

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Why haven't we ever looked into the Atrocities of 1971?

The curse, and beauty, of the internet is that one thing frequently leads to another. In this case, reading about Waziristan lead to other Pakistani wars, and then to the Independence of Bangladesh. The discussion in Pakistan focuses on Pakistan's mismanagement of that crisis, and India's uncalled-for aggression, but we seem to have amnesia when it comes to talking about the Hamood-ur-Rehman commission, and the alleged genocide by Pakistani troops (willfully covered up by the Americans because of the 'sensibilities' of the Cold War).

As my previous post suggests, I'm fairly fond of the army, certainly more so than many a Pakistani intellectual. However, unlike some Army supporters, I don't think it should escape scrutiny. For the Army uniform to be worth the sacrifices of the officers and jawaans giving up their lives in it, it needs to be cleansed of injustice.

The astonishing thing is, besides a little murmuring here and there, this has never been pursued by us citizens, nor by our alleged leaders, or by the army or judges or anyone else for that matter. There are tons of mysteries in Pakistan: Zia's death, the operation against Nawab Bugti, and the circumstances surrounding Benazir's death are up there. But this outstrips them all; this isn't about one or two deaths, but anywhere from Pakistan's lower figure of 25,000 to a high estimate of 3 million.

There's a real opportunity here for the Army, on two levels. At a deeper level, accountability of the past will build confidence amongst the provinces, and disincentivize rogue troops or commanders from repeating such atrocities. On a more cynical and deeply vulgar level this could, if handled carefully, get the critics off their backs. I'm disappointed they're not doing it for the former reason, and puzzled why they don't do it for the latter.

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Remembering our Martyrs; Praying for our Fighters

Pakistan has lost 3000 troops in our war against the Taliban, which is 3 times American casualties in Afghanistan.

This figure is roughly the same as the 1965 war, twice the number from the 1947 war and almost three times the number we've lost in the Siachen Glacier since 1984. There aren't good estimates of casualties in the Kargil war, but its probably comparable. We only lost significantly more troops in the 1971 war. All of these conflicts, of course, were against India.

Anyway, with our Army now heading into the most famously treacherous hurdle of the war, Waziristan, where we've previously defeated more than once, my prayers and thoughts are with the soldiers fighting, and with those that fought and were martyred.

Here are a couple of video tributes:

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What's happening in Balochistan?

Balochistan is a huge mystery:

• Who's carrying out the target killing of Shias? 
• Are elements of the Taliban previously supported by Pakistan hidden away there waiting for the Americans to pull out?
• What countries have carried out anti-state activities there?
• How badly has the center ruled the province? How legitimate are the Baloch rebels' demands? What does popular sentiment lean towards?

I recently read this article purportedly talking about historical intervention in Balochistan by foreign spy agencies, and this article purportedly telling the rebel side of the story.

I don't know what to believe about the subject, and if you have sources I can read up, please pass them on.

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Dawn's 'An Enemy Imagined?'

This is the first part of a documentary assessing the threat posed to Pakistan by India, by the foremost newspaper/TV group in Pakistan. They talk to a number of Pakistani thinkers on the subject.


It's worth watching for Pakistanis, its worth watching for Indians, its worth watching for anyone with an interest in South Asia.


(double-click on the video to go to the YouTube site, and watch the other parts there. YouTube has been having problems, so if it doesn't work, try again at a later time)

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