Author: Sadanand Dhume
Publication: The Wall Street Journal
Date: September 29, 2010
URL: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703882404575519330896471058.html
Pakistan could learn about economic growth
and confronting terrorism from its former eastern province.
Not long ago, when you thought of a South
Asian country ravaged by floods, governed by bumblers and apparently teetering
on the brink of chaos, it wasn't Pakistan that came to mind. That distinction
belonged to Bangladesh.
Henry Kissinger famously dubbed it a "basket
case" at its birth in 1971, and Bangladesh appeared to work hard to live
up to the appellation. For the outside world, much of the country's history
can be summed up as a blur of political protests and natural disasters punctuated
by outbursts of jihadist violence and the occasional military coup.
No longer. At a reception Friday for world
leaders attending the United Nations General Assembly in New York, President
Barack Obama congratulated Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wazed
for receiving a prestigious U.N. award earlier in the week. Bangladesh was
one of six countries in Asia and Africa feted for its progress toward achieving
its Millennium Development Goals, a set of targets that seek to eradicate
extreme poverty and boost health, education and the status of women world-wide
by 2015.
Bangladesh has much to be proud of. Its economy
has grown at nearly 6% a year over the past three years. The country exported
$12.3 billion worth of garments last year, making it fourth in the world behind
China, the EU and Turkey. Against the odds, Bangladesh has curbed population
growth. Today the average Bangladeshi woman bears fewer than three children
in her lifetime, down from more than six in the 1970s.
The country's leading NGOs-most famously the
microcredit pioneer Grameen Bank-have earned a global reputation. Relations
with India are on a high. In August, Indian Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee
signed off on a $1 billion soft loan for Bangladeshi infrastructure development,
the largest such loan in India's history.
Perhaps most strikingly, Bangladesh-the world's
third most populous Muslim-majority country after Indonesia and Pakistan-has
shown a willingness to confront both terrorism and the radical Islamic ideology
that underpins it. Since taking office in 2009, the Awami League-led government
has arrested local members of the Pakistani terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba,
the al Qaeda affiliate Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami-Bangladesh, and Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen,
a domestic outfit responsible for a wave of bombings in 2005.
In July, the Supreme Court struck down a 31-year-old
constitutional amendment and restored Bangladesh to its founding status as
a secular republic. The government has banned the writings of the radical
Islamic ideologue Abul Ala Maududi (1903-79), founder of Jamaat-e-Islami,
the subcontinent's most influential Islamist organization. Maududi regarded
warfare for the faith as an exalted form of piety and encouraged the subjugation
of women and non-Muslims. A long-awaited war crimes tribunal will try senior
Jamaat-e-Islami figures implicated in mass murder during Bangladesh's bloody
secession from Pakistan.
Of course, it will take more than a burst
of entrepreneurial energy and political purpose before Bangladesh turns the
corner for good. The long-running feud between Prime Minister Wazed and her
main rival, Bangladesh Nationalist Party leader Khaleda Zia, makes that of
the Hatfields and McCoys look benign by comparison. The war of ideas against
the country's plethora of Islamist groups requires the kind of sustained pressure
that Dhaka has been unable to apply in the past. And garment exports notwithstanding,
the economy remains shallow.
Despite these caveats, Bangladesh ought to
be held up as a role model, especially for the subcontinent's other Muslim-majority
state. Arguably no two countries in the region share as much in common as
Pakistan and Bangladesh, two wings of the same country between 1947 and 1971.
With 171 million people and 164 million people, respectively, they are the
world's sixth and seventh most populous countries. Both have alternated between
civilian and military rule. In terms of culture, both layer Islam over an
older Indic base.
Yet when it comes to government policies and
national identity, the two countries diverge sharply. As a percentage of gross
domestic product, Islamabad spends more on its soldiers than on its school
teachers; Dhaka does the opposite. In foreign policy, Pakistan seeks to subdue
Afghanistan and wrest control of Indian Kashmir. Bangladesh, especially under
the current dispensation, prefers cooperation to confrontation with its neighbors.
Perhaps most importantly, Bangladesh appears
comfortable in its own skin: politically secular, religiously Muslim and culturally
Bengali. Bangladeshis celebrate the poetry, film and literature of Hindus
and Muslims equally. With Pakistanis it's more complicated. The man on the
street displays the same cultural openness as his Bangladeshi counterpart,
but Pakistan also houses a vast religious and military establishment that
seeks to hold the country together by using triple-distilled Islam and hatred
toward India as glue.
In a way their best known national heroes
sum up the two country's personalities. For Bangladesh, it's Grameen Bank's
Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, synonymous with small loans to village women.
For Pakistan: Abdul Qadeer Khan, the rogue nuclear scientist who peddled contraband
technology to Libya, Iran and North Korea.
Nearly 40 years ago, only the most reckless
optimist would have bet on flood-prone, war-ravaged Bangladesh over relatively
stable and prosperous Pakistan. But with a higher growth rate, a lower birth
rate, and a more internationally competitive economy, yesterday's basket case
may have the last laugh.
- Mr. Dhume, a columnist for WSJ.com, is writing
a book about the new Indian middle class.
