An "Asian Tiger" Agenda for Today"s US-Pakistan Summit

Yesterday, Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif told

the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that member companies should invest in

Pakistan, where global giants like Colgate-Palmolive and Nestlé have made

substantial profits. Today, he will meet with President Barack Obama to discuss

an economic program to spark Pakistan’s development. This is a nice

change of pace from the regular drones/terrorists/Taliban agenda — vitally

important as these issues are.

In fact, many of Pakistan’s pathologies — including Army

dominance over civilian institutions, poor governance, pervasive insecurity,

and the continuing generation and export of violent extremists — would be

mitigated if Pakistan’s political class, and the world, focused more intensely

on steepening its growth trajectory. Arguments that Pakistan cannot

successfully modernize for cultural or religious reasons should be rejected on

their face, so diverse have been the developmental success stories of emerging

economies in East Asia, Latin America, Africa, the Persian Gulf, Eastern

Europe, Southeast Asia, and South Asia.

It is not impossible to imagine Pakistan’s ultimate

emergence as an Asian tiger in its own right. In this scenario, the economic

miracle that started with postwar Japan and subsequently encompassed Singapore,

Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, Southeast Asia, China, and India would finally

make its way to Pakistan. That most of these countries are not Muslim should be

no cultural barrier; Turkey’s modernization into a middle-income country over

the past decade and Indonesia’s economic transformation into a

second-generation BRIC country demonstrate that populous Muslim democracies

outside the Arab world are well-positioned to embrace modernity. They have done

so not by relying on foreign aid, but through domestic reform and by taking

advantage of globalization’s enabling environment to welcome foreign trade and

investment.

Pakistan’s future as an Asian tiger has been predicted

before. As early as the 1950s, it was viewed in the West, including by Dwight Eisenhower’s

administration, as one of the Asian economies most likely to successfully

modernize (along with Burma!). As recently as 2005, Goldman Sachs identified

Pakistan’s then-high rate of economic growth amid the Musharraf reforms, its

growing internal market powered by a demographic boom, its advantageous

geographical position astride economic hubs in the Gulf, Central Asia, China,

and India, and other factors as reasons for global investors to put their money

into it as one of the “Next Eleven” (N-11) emerging economies or

next-generation BRICs. Goldman’s Jim O’Neill, who coined the BRIC acronym,

reiterated Pakistan’s long-term importance as a key emerging market in his 2011

book The

Growth Map.

Pakistan’s natural advantages — a vibrant civil society, a

moderate voting majority, an advantageous geographical position between

prosperous Asian and Gulf economies, geopolitical allies in the world’s

superpower and rising stars, a professional and capable armed forces, a

youthful demographic, a large internal market of nearly 200 million potential

consumers — suggest that a sustained dose of security and good governance

could put it on track toward comfortable middle-income status. This would

likely require greater economic integration with India; a diminished Army role

in public life; a rate of urbanization that fueled rising demands for reform

and economic opportunity; continued assistance from the West, the Gulf, and

China; and, critically, the rollback of domestic political violence.

In his meeting with Sharif today, Obama can launch a “new

normal” phase of U.S. relations with Pakistan — one focused not on Afghanistan

or India, as in the past, but on the future of Pakistan itself — by delivering

on American commitments to assist with the hard and soft infrastructure of

development, from energy to education. Sharif campaigned

on a modernization agenda, and America should support him. Even more

important than aid would be a trade agreement to drop U.S. tariffs on Pakistani

textile imports.

Pakistan need not remain a basket case forever. The economic

transformation of countries with Pakistan-scale Muslim populations and their

own histories as victims of terrorism, including Indonesia, India, and Turkey, show

what is possible. 

An "Asian Tiger" Agenda for Today"s US-Pakistan Summit