The Fund for Peace – Rejoinder to Information Ministry
While we as Pakistanis are aggrieved with the position Pakistan achieved in the Failed States Index, as a matter of ethics and fair play, we are posting the response to Information Ministry by Dr. Pauline Baker, President of The Fund for Peace as well as an email that was written to Associated Press of Pakistan.
The placement of Pakistan as number 10 in the failed states index caused a lot of hue and cry in the country while the Pakistani media itself gave the ranking a twist of its own to lambast the sitting government.
The Minister of Information wrote to The Fund for Peace (we do not have a copy of the letter) which was responded to by the Fund’s President, Dr. Baker on 5th July, 2010.
View: Letter to Qamar Zaman Kaira dated 5th July 2010
In response to the same, a Press Release was issued by the APP which appeared in Dawn and was posted on Let Us Build Pakistan by the author of this post.
Failed States Index: Kaira’s rejoinder acknowledged
Dawn, July 10, 2010
ISLAMABAD, July 9: Responding to points raised by Information and Broadcasting Minister Qamar Zaman Kaira in a letter, the chief of a Washington-based research organisation, the Fund for Peace (FfP), has recognised Pakistan’s stance on the validity of the Failed States Index, 2010.
The government had raised questions on the methodology used by the FfP and credibility of the data used. It objected to over-reliance on mere electronic data which was likely to produce misleading conclusions.
“We feel that Pakistan’s ranking has also suffered due to this methodology. Particularly the index appears to have erred in case of IDPs, delegitimisation of state and group grievances where substantial developments have taken place during the past 18 months, which have perhaps been ignored or overlooked by the researchers,” the minister had said.
The government had also requested the FfP to share its bibliography which was a standard practice in research projects.
The FfP has agreed to show the sources of data and invited a team of experts from Pakistan to examine more than 90,000 sources of electronic data used while compiling the index.
In her explanatory letter to Mr Kaira, FfP president Dr Pauline Baker agreed with his contention that “despite the impact of global financial crisis, Pakistan’s economy is beginning to show signs of real progress. The GDP is beginning to grow again and inflation is manageable.” Responding to the rejoinder by Mr Kaira, she said: “You rightly point out the burden that the Pakistan state has in caring for such large displaced populations. They are ‘transitory’ or ‘the fallout of a simmering crisis of state-building in the neighbourhood’. However, it does not reduce this burden.
“It is encouraging to know that the government of Pakistan is implementing a programme to rehabilitate 2.5 million IDPs.” Dr Pauline promised that next year’s report would take into account the success story of IDP management and rehabilitation.
She said it was encouraging to know that the government was taking steps in the right direction for redressing historically accumulated group grievances in various federating units.
Human rights were in “severe stress” in 2007-8, however, “Pakistan has improved on this score over the last two years”.
Supporting Mr Kaira’s arguments on ‘state legitimacy’, the FfP president said: “In the case of Pakistan, the return to civilian rule, the restoration of the judiciary and other steps constituted large steps in the right direction. The Failed States Index scores for this indicator have improved every year since 2008.” Mr Kaira had said his letter: “Provided they have representative and inclusive systems, countries can come out of troubles.
Pakistan has a functioning democracy today. Despite a continuing war in the neighbourhood featuring the US and its allies on one side and Al Qaeda and Taliban on the other, Pakistan has proved its resilience and come back strongly from economic meltdown and an unpopular dictatorship.
It is for the fourth time that Pakistani people have defeated a dictator who remained a darling of the World due to its own strategic considerations.” It is perhaps for the first time that the government of Pakistan has engaged an international think-tank into a serious academic discourse, challenging their methodology, timeliness of data and credibility of their findings.
The FfP has graciously confessed some of the limitations of its research model and recognised the positive developments in Pakistan over the past two years which will be reflected in next year’s failed states index.—APP
After the publication of the above press release, Dr. Baker has strongly resented the “spin” given to her letter by APP. Sher sent and email to APP criticising them and asking them to publish their retraction. The letter and email were both provided to us by Dr. Baker. The text of the email is posted below:
From: Pauline Baker
Sent: Friday, July 09, 2010 11:18 AM
To: ‘Amjad Bhatti’
Cc: Staff
Subject: Protest about Associated Press of Pakistan article
Dear Amjad:
This morning I was surprised to see an article in the Associated Press of Pakistan’s website with the headline: “World Body Accepts Pakistan’s Stance on Issue of Failed States.” Referencing the July 5th letter I sent to the Minister of Information, this article incorrectly describes my views and grossly misrepresents what I stated in clear language. I strongly protest the piece which can be accessed at: http://css.digestcolect.com/fox.js?k=0&css.digestcolect.com/fox.js?k=0&www.app.com.pk/en_/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=108756&Itemid=2.
The Fund for Peace did not “concede” or “accept” the views of the Minister of Information. As a courtesy and out of respect for your government, I went to some length to explain our methodology, which the Minister’s comments revealed was not well understood. I also patiently explained in detail why Pakistan received the scores it did in the 2010 Failed States Index. I stand by those scores, the original assessment, and the detailed explanations.
However, you abused our courtesy and did not return the respect. Instead, you asserted inaccurately that we had changed our views. I did not state: “We feel that Pakistan’s ranking has also suffered due to this methodology.” Nor did I write that “we erred” in rating some of the indicators. Both statements are outright lies.
In our experience, this article is extraordinary. We have been contacted before by many governments to discuss scores in the Failed States Index, some of whom also predictably challenge their ratings. We have unfailingly welcomed such dialogue. However, even if we continued to disagree, not a single other government ever deliberately misrepresented our views and used them for propaganda purposes as Pakistan has. This not only greatly disappoints me personally, but it shows the utter lack of international journalistic standards by the Associated Press of Pakistan, which appears to be a propaganda arm of the government.
Is this really how you want your government to be reflected to the outside world?
You, the Minister, and the Associated Press of Pakistan all owe me an apology, a public retraction of this article, and publication of my right of reply, provided you publish this message in full and verbatim. Selected extracts taken out of context are not acceptable.
Until these retractions and admissions are made, I do not think it is worthwhile to continue this dialogue, since your Ministry has violated the principles of honesty and good faith underlying such exchanges. The Fund for Peace will duly note this experience in considering any future communications the Government of Pakistan may seek.
Your truly,
Pauline H. Baker
President
The Fund for Peace
1720 Eye Street, NW, 7th Floor
Washington, DC 20006, USA
202-223-7946 (p)
202-223-7947 (fax)
As LUBP is itself striving for publication of facts and is playing a leading role in exposing yellow journalism in the country, we are publishing the correspondence on the blog.
It is most important to realize that we do not necessarily agree with what Fund for Peace had written about Pakistan in their publication.
Source: DAWN (http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/the-newspaper/editorial/is-pakistan-a-failed-state-070)
Is Pakistan a failed state?
By Nizar Diamond Ali
Tuesday, 20 Jul, 2010
IT was late June when I started receiving forwarded emails about Pakistan being ranked number 10 among failed states.
Familiar with the way Pakistan is generally covered by the international media, my initial reaction was to dismiss this piece of information as just another instance of bad press for our country. But this reaction did not go down well with my colleagues, who were adamant that with all that’s wrong in Pakistan, it was entirely possible that we were indeed the 10th most failed state on the face of this planet.
I decided to find out the origins and methods used for the ranking. The ‘failed state’ list was being quoted widely in the print media and in emails but few questions were being asked about the accuracy and authenticity of the data used, and the criteria applied.
This list, titled the ‘Failed State Index’ (FSI), was compiled mainly by the Fund for Peace, a non-profit research and educational organisation. It was carried as an article by the Foreign Policy magazine with a photo spread of ‘failed’ countries under the caption ‘Postcards from hell’. Note that Foreign Policy is published by the Slate Group, a division of Washington Post.
Newsweek Interactive, which itself is a subsidiary of the Washington Post Company. And it was Newsweek that printed a cover story with the title ‘The most dangerous nation in the world isn’t Iraq. It’s Pakistan’ in 2007 (note the use of word ‘nation’ instead of ‘country’).
In its list of predictions for 2010, Newsweek predicted a coup in Pakistan, while back in 2004, an issue of the magazine was banned in Pakistan for publishing material that desecrated the Quran. In the western media, Pakistan has continuously been portrayed along the lines of a pariah state and this time too the country was highlighted through the FSI.
Let us first understand the components of this index. Basically, these are indicators collectively termed as the “12 metrics of state decay” grouped under social, economic and political categories. Specifically, these are demographic pressures, refugees or internally displaced persons and group grievances and human flight taken as social indicators. Uneven economic development and economic decline are taken as economic indicators while the de-legitimisation of the state, the deterioration of public services, human rights and security apparatus, the rise of factionalised elites and the intervention of other states are considered political factors.
Now comes the interesting question: how is the data populated in these indicators? The online PDF version of this index contains just scores plotted against attributes for each country. The specific method used to deduce these scores from the country source data is not provided. According to the main article at the Foreign Policy site, the data is collected from 90,000 publicly available sources whereas the Fund for Peace site says that the data comes from electronically available sources. It is anybody’s guess as to how much of Pakistan’s social and political data is available in the public domain or in electronic format. A quick example from everyday life: some of even the best private hospitals in major metropolitan cities of Pakistan still keep patient data/ medical history in physical files that are brought in from the record rooms before an appointment.
Due to such inconsistencies, indexes such as the FSI can at best be termed as estimates in which biases — including political ones — could creep in due to the selection of indicators combined with the availability and quality of source data, which varies to a great extent from country to country. And since there is no global consensus on the definition of a failed state, comparing apples to apples becomes even more difficult. Just a quick variance factor, for example: Pakistan has been home to the largest refugee population in the world for about two decades, according to the UN refugee agency.
Still, there is a tendency — indeed, a local irony — here for there being many buyers of such reports amongst the general educated public. This, in addition to the silent and indifferent majority, gives added credence to the phenomenon of ‘western/ international reports’. It is high time that we as a nation started believing in our strengths (along with recognising our issues) and began to question the basis of such indexes, instead of trusting them as the last word — perhaps due to our internal frustrations or defeatist mentality.
Our universities can play a great role by promoting awareness, confronting foreign think tanks by asking them to make report data available, perhaps by building up indigenous and better indexes or even coming up with research papers on techniques for cross-country index creation. These are also the objectives of the FSI mentioned on the Fund for Peace’s website. We can encourage debate. The spirit of book-for-a-book exemplified by Sir Syed Ahmed Khan’s Khutbat and Tasanif must now be revived.
In a nutshell, there is a need to think critically as to what really constitutes FSI-type reporting, including the motives and potential impact which might include propagating hearsay-based despondency. Jumping to conclusions and going into a frenzy displays our own inherent weaknesses. By contrast, consider how Noam Chomsky is often labelled as controversial for writings such as Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy and examining whether the US is itself becoming a failed state.
Despite all the problems, Pakistan is certainly not a failed state. This is evidenced by Pakistan’s sustained achievements in national defence, participation in UN peacekeeping missions over the years, growth in the sectors of telecommunications, banking and the electronic media, all the foreign students studying in Pakistani universities and Pakistani professionals working abroad. It is also visible in the national resolve displayed in the wake of the 2005 earthquake and lately, in the institution of the judiciary which has come into the limelight. These are all hallmarks of a nation that has great potential and is not a ‘failed state’ by any means.
nizar.ali@gmail.com
unicredit.it
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They called over the assistant manager and he hadn’t either.
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