Good afternoon
Thank you for that very generous introduction Ms. Malhotra.
It is a pleasure to be back in Katmandu, it is a city I know well. And, it is a country where I have the pleasure of being many times. What I like to talk about is to frame the advantages of backwardness. In history, there are rare moments where agency, thought, ideas, strategy can overcome structure, space, geography and the weight of the past. South Asia is a region where we are, on the one hand, blessed with the weight of very important ideas, noble ideas; but on the other hand, it is a region that seventy years after partition still has not overcome the sense of the past.
If we are to have the opportunity and the imagination to grasp the openness of today, we must be willing to overcome the past, and requiring the past requires that we grasp openness, backwardness as a process; understand its underlying causes and not just deal with replication, repetition or planning, but a new sense of design, a new sense that we can reframe the problems.
In this moment, in order to allow for our conversation, I will not focus on Afghanistan, I will focus in general. What does it mean to be backward? It is a condition when poverty and inequality could be solved, but aren’t. Afghanistan is a backward country. Thirty six percent of our population lives below poverty that no human-being could endure or should endure. Backwardness is violence. As I was preparing for this talk, my young children in Paktika were blown up in a soccer field. I had to go straight from writing to the military hospital where I received bodies of eighteen children wounded in various ways and one of whom died on the flight. That night, our trauma unit performed 34 operations. Every day in South Asia, we deal with one or another form of violence; violence against women, violence against children, violence against the disabled, but the greatest violence is against the poor. Despite our phenomenal growth in this region, we are still home to the worst form of poverty imagining. And, that’s not tolerable.
South Asia is also the least economically integrated region on earth. We trade more with every other region of the earth than with ourselves. But, backwardness is also a global condition. Inequality now has become special where one is born largely has determined one’s life chances. And, within the countries special differences again are a fundamental driver of inequality. And because of it, despite the demonstration that wealth creation has no limit, we persist on reproducing poverty and inequality on a global scale. And the fundamental contradiction of our global moment is that, on the one hand, the last phase of the globalization. Because, we have had three phase of globalization; globalization 1.0 that was centered on colonials, in Asia roughly from 1850 to 1914, and Asia was forced into structural backwards. Globalization 2.0 from 1980 to 2005 which was the liberal openness with the states retreating to the background.
But, during the second moment, Asia produced its middle classes. Now both China and India thanks to their phenomenal growth have changed for the first time since 1800 the balance of global inequality. Post 2008, we are dealing with a different world. Prior to 2008, prevalent notion was that the market new best the head and hand could not be questioned. After 2008, we are finding a new balance between the market and the state. But more importantly than anything else, we are finding a new balance with citizens. All across South Asia citizens’ movements are changing history. The other side, however, is the state systems or under attack by violence and ideology, and the state systems are being judged by their weakest points, not by their strongest. And, we in Afghanistan, what it is like to become the subject of a series of confluences that daily deprive us of what is normal.
What is normal is not normal for us. What is normal is to walk to school or ride a bike and think as a young person, and think that you can return home. Two days ago, I had to greet these bodies; the week before that, I had to deal with a young woman, at fourth year of college, was again blown up by a suicide bomber. The sense of abnormality is what we need to deal with as our first challenge. Because as long as the state system in South Asia does not focus on the fundamental issue of peace and security for our citizens, pejoratively called the ordinary people. They are the extraordinary heroes, and I hope that we can all understand them.
And because of it, citizens’ movement is rejecting traditional elite bargains, and is demanding space at the table. If we are going to seize this moment, I will just articulate quickly two main propositions, so then we can have time for question. How should we focus on regional integration? The first is, if you look into the world economic forums index, economic index, of competitiveness index, you see on one column it says the factor productivity, then is transition, then is efficiency, then its innovation. They call them stages, but they are not stages because they exist simultaneously. What is the condition of all of South Asian states? Factor driven production. Not a single state in South Asia or country in South Asia is at the level efficiency or at the level of innovation. And, this is where we both see our inheritance and yet the possibility.
India’s phenomenal growth has lifted all of South Asia and opened up the possibility, but enormous amounts remained to get to the level of either China to the type of strategies of China or that of Singapore. And, here we come to the limitations of the space. You know you could. Our region is such that you could have breakfast in Delhi, lunch in Lahore, dinner in Kabul and be next day in Dushanbe or Tashkent all by road. But can you imagine how many obstacles there are? How many border points you need to cross? How many papers you need to fill? How many forms you must contend? Same. Take any direction of movement. Movement of people. Movement of goods. They are all constraint where we have freedom of course is a movement of ideas, and that means all of us can watch Bollywood. But even in movement of ideas, the nature of linkages has not focused on fundamental debates. If you look at European integration network, political party networks that will cross national and transatlantic networks were important to this.
Here, we still in movement but not fundamental shift. Because of it, the key and the future lies in market integration and prosperity. There is an immense room for enhancing market integration. In here, we need to come to two propositions; the market is underdeveloped. There is an enormous range of market instruments that can be put to work without embracing market fundamentals. Second that the market is not just national but regional. And, third that there is no contradiction between competing at the global stage and enhancing regional economic integration. The European Union trades much more sensed formation within and with the rest of the world without facing this contradiction.
So, but one of the most important parts of our disconnectivity is our infrastructure. Both in terms of its effectiveness but also in terms of its construction. If you look into the construction industry, all of south Asian countries during the last 20 years but particularly during the last ten you will find enormous fluctuations. The construction industry and poverty may look very far apart, but are actually the most important set of relationship that we can find, because it’s, the effectiveness, of the construction industry that changes space, geography and turns it into space of connectivity. And it’s here that a series of choices are open. And now I want to speak from the position of a country that is between. Afghanistan is South Asian, Central Asian, small border with China which makes us connected to the East Asia, and of course Middle Easter. What is the choice? Energy is the driver and South Asia is the largest deficit. There are 600 trillion cubic meters gas in the Caspian, it is the largest supply of gas anywhere in the world. The smallest amount of trade between South Asia as a region is now with Central Asia. And, this is the storage choice. Will South Asia as its history of 10th to 19th century and earlier shows connect to Central Asia toward networks of energy, gas, oil or South Asia be forced to reintegrate with South-east Asia and with use of old carbon fossil fuels. (South Asia), Central Asia today is in moment where it is awaiting connectivity. But when you look Europe’s energy plans, where do they focus? Central Asia. If you look at East Asia’s focus; where do they focus? Central Asia. If you focus on Russia’s energy systems, where do they focus? From South Asia, we have been dreaming, but not acting. And it is this historical opportunity that would turn a place like Afghanistan that from every perspective has been marginal in the last hundred years into a central space.
We need a different way of proceeding, a different way of looking at things in order to make a difference. And, that means, first of all, that we cannot do development in the usual manner. Project by project, small endeavor by small endeavor. If we want to realize this moment, then we need to think about region-wide projects. We need to mobilize financial resources very differently, we need to mobilize human resources differently. All of the possibilities exist, what is critical is an approach that can stitch the existing elements into a system. I hope that we have this possibility, and that we would be able to move from type of politics and type of ideas that are based on command and control to collaboration and communication. Sa’di, one of our poets, said, “Deep in the sea all reaches beyond compare, but if you seek safety it is on the shore. I lead a landlocked nation, but Afghanistan will be finding its future in that sea.
Thank you