People hate being told what to do/told that what they're doing is wrong.
Especially when the advice is unsolicited and coming from people from a different country.
I'm not saying whether that is or isn't rational.
Pakistan is and has always been run by the army. It sounds bad, but in 2024, radical populists such as Imran Khan sound even worse.
One option is to twist their arm into good economic policy using loans. Wold Bank has already attempted this and failed.
The other option is to intervene. Pakistan has nukes. You can't intervene.
Welfare states are a first world phenomenon. Can't redistribute the pie when there is nothing to go around.
The IMF (I mistakenly said world bank) gives fair loans to nations as long as they maintain sensible fiscal policy. Imran loves IMF money but doesn't keep any of his promises.
Remember, Pakistan was wealthier than both India and Bangladesh until the late 80s. Both India and Bangladesh dialed down welfarist tendencies by liberalization, disinvestment of govt from business and lax labor laws. Both have skyrocketed past Pakistan. On the other hand, Pakistan stuck to their bizarrely welfare economics, and is now flirting with national bankruptcy.
It's pretty condescending to expect a lecture from a foreign government official to be well received and to tell them something they don't already know.
Given that the trajectory has not changed, I think they don't care to fix it. South Africans also know their government is corrupt, and they consciously vote for it. Whether this is similar in Pakistan I don't know, but clearly if they cared to change trajectory it would not get worse all the time.
It's economy is stagnating (of course, because of all the legalized corruption and nepotism, the ruling elite meddling in everything, misuse of EU funds, and the usual), and we have very good data about this. We can even have a nice "natural experiment", because Hungary joined the EU in 2004, then the current regime was voted to power in 2010 with 68% of seats (by 2.7M ppl, 52% of voters)
and then again in 2014 (2.2M ppl, 45%), 2018 (2.8M ppl, 49%), 2022 (3M ppl, 54%). Every time with 67-68% of the seats.
Very methodically people were very nicely brainwashed. After 14 years in government with "absolute majority" around 3M people still think that bad things are bad because of the mystical others. Due to the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine we now have a live action 1984 black comedy where "war is peace" is basically the state motto.
Of course, my point is exactly that, there's always scapegoats, and even though 1-2 percents over long term matters a lot, and people instinctively know that folks in richer countries tend to have it better ... hence why migrants did not stop in Hungary and went straight to Germany. And similarly, people risk a lot to get to the US, even though Mexico is amazing compared to - let's say - El Salvador 5 years ago.
So those 1-2 percents.
Poland's economy has been growing roughly 3times faster over the past year than Hungary's. (And before that Poland was usually 1+ basis points above.[0])
Poland's debt-to-GDP ratio is more than than 20 basis points lower than Hungary's.
Hungary's actual individual consumption is the last in the EU. [1]
But at least Hungary had the best inflation hump. [2]
It would be good to see Hungary springing back to life, but currently things are not great.
[0] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/bookmark/cf98cf45-...
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
[2] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/bookmark/e1be8012-...
Send forth the best ye breed—
To serve your captives' need;
On fluttered folk and wild—
Half devil and half child.
- Rudyard Kipling
Trying to bring the racist card to the discussion maybe; but "they don't help us because they are racists" is a dusty and very worn out argument at this moment.
That is not what i meant when posting the poem.
When someone asks "Why is every western government not warning Pakistan...", he is basically rephrasing Kipling and asking to "Take up the White Man's burden".
This has been attempted before, didn't go so well. That might give a clue, why we are in the current state of affairs.
Pakistan running itself off a cliff is not going well either.
I mean, it's not going terribly either. For a nuclear-armed nation, that is.
Because is not the duty of governments to teach science to other governments.
Science is a whole humanity project (not just a western one), and we publish our work for free, so is available to everybody, everywhere. Anybody can adopt this knowledge without asking to western countries.
Here in the Netherlands, antibiotics usage in the meat industry was absurdly high until a bit over a decade ago, despite decades of warnings. And as a side note, I would classify the way the country has been run for all of my adult life as poorly governed, with elected officials constantly lying, government parties trying to work around the law rather than comply leading to several crises, and just general mismanagement. It's not Pakistani army bad, but it certainly warrants warnings from other countries.
As for Pakistan: If I were their leader, knowing about things like vaccination centres ran by the CIA to secretly hunt down and kill Taliban soldiers in search of Bin Laden, I'd be wary of warnings coming from the West. I wouldn't much trust foreign charities to install clean water infrastructure either, because that's far from the only time they've been used as a front.
Are your leaders listening to the warnings coming from Bejing, Brussels, Israel, the Kremlin, and Washington? Would you even trust what they say is in your interest? I wouldn't exactly put it past foreign intelligence agencies to spread typhoid in areas of interest just so they could come in and "help cure" everyone.
I don't support colonialism, I think it's morally wrong. It's not an argument about whether there is some hypothetical upside or downside, it infringes on the freedom of a people, which includes their freedom to run their country off a cliff.
That being said, if you ignore the morality of it, as is fashion in the west, I'm not sure if it went relatively worse in a material sense than it's going now.
We also had something similar in Sweden after the last two elections.
LOL? Despite variations, at least the Netherlands is one of the best run countries on this planet. When the Netherlands will collapse, everyone else will have been under water for many years, already.
Because last time they did something it was "outside interference CIA black OPS are the devil". And before that "colonialism".
So good luck to the people of those countries but the change has to come from within. And if they don't have enough people who want the change, well... Inch'Allah.
Agreed, but do they know change has to come? When was the last time this message was clearly proclaimed to them?
And after that, "two drone strikes a week, every week, for 14 years".
> do they know change has to come?
If they don't, then it doesn't. "Change is needed" is a basic sense a human being is able to feel and express by the time they turn 3.
> When was the last time this message was clearly proclaimed to them?
It's not something that needs proclaiming. Again, this is obvious to them. What's missing is motivation and coordination.
What would be useful is to have a positive example of what the changes needed would lead to. Unfortunately, modern West is doing its best to provide the opposite externally, all while spinning apart internally. Even though the life here may be objectively better to life there, oppressive regimes and rebel wannabes all get plenty of rhetorical ammunition to say otherwise.
The reality is, people there are trying as hard as they can to survive, and it’s shitty and hard, largely due to sociopolitical factors + economic factors which interrelate with their identity.
So good luck changing that without it getting much worse.
For a US comparison, check out the gun control and abortion ‘debate’.
Repeatedly voting for the most corrupt politicians imaginable that mismanage a country into crisis, as the South African electorate does, is not "trying as hard as they can to survive". It's, in fact, doing everything possible to put make surviving more difficult.
> For a US comparison, check out the gun control and abortion ‘debate’.
I'm not really talking about the US, but if Paksitan and South Africa was even 1/10th as well governed as the US it would be awesome.
That’s the sociopolitical side.
Why do you think Trump is a still a viable candidate (per the numbers)?
You can call them lazy idiots all you want, it doesn’t change what is happening.
When we can successfully pry the parasite that is what is going on with Trump from out ass, then we can be all high and mighty. Right now the only reason we aren’t literally in the same boat is momentum and capital.
I don't know why you are talking about US politics. I'm not an American, I'm not interested in the US other than for the fact that their rapidly collapsing hegemony is quickly accelerating the world into global conflicts, but even so, the world is not entitled to global peace guaranteed by an American hegemony.
The current Pakistani administration is a product of an American-backed coup on Imran Khan because he was getting cozy with China.
I think you need to look into the CIA playbook. They're doing this actively, have been doing this for decades. Even lots of allied "democratic" countries are effectively just puppet states of the US: yeah people get to elect, but their foreign policy is solidly controlled by the US. They don't have real sovereignty, and without sovereignty they don't have real democracy.
There's nothing Western governments or societies can do to steer a whole other society/culture, and I think you haven't really experienced other cultures truly if you think you can steer the voting population into better decisions.
It requires a well educated population to understand what "good governance" even means, it requires a stable, out of survival mode, society to reason about long term consequences to society vs short term individual benefits. When someone is barely surviving they will most often vote for someone who promises them a better life, without critical thinking (stemming from my 1st point on education) there's no way for the individual to understand complex issues and why a populist won't solve it.
Every western and really non-western government should publicly state that the trajectory of Pakistan, South Africa, Brazil, etc is concerning and that if these countries do not change trajectory the human toll will be catastrophic.
Instead we just have silence, and some effective pretence that what is going on in these countries is entirely acceptable merely because the people have voted for their own destruction.
I'm not saying the west should invade and replace the governments as they tried in Afghanistan, but the poor governance in Africa, Asia and South America is incredibly costly for the west. If the west has to pick up the tab when it all comes crashing down, it should have some say.
To be honest, I would have a different issue with "the civilized countries" (whatever east/west/etc.). They should be a role model, and while they are a bit better than some on the list, they are quite far from what they could be.
So, probably, rather than worry about how bad has it someone hundreds of miles away, try to improve something in the local vicinity.
The endless stream of illegal aliens put the lie to this claim.
And the level of hypocrisy in many countries is astonishing. A lot of companies in said countries take advantage of illegal immigrant labor, but nobody thinks about blaming them for the huge number of illegal immigrants.
But I think this discussion is in favor of "some elites". Rather than asking also for industrial development, redistribution, environment protection people are "encouraged" to blame everything on the immigrants. Look at UK. They wanted out of EU to "control their borders", and check how well it went for them in living standards... Probably now they complain their neighbors don't fix the problem for them.
To circle back to the start, everybody has a different opinion about what others should do, so doubt someone telling country X something will improve a lot the outcomes.
What makes you say that?
If this continues the people of Brazil will necessarily be much more at the mercy of forces of nature than if they had a stronger economy and were well governed.
Our assumption that the only valid way to happiness is a capitalist democracy, and we force it on everyone with our military strength, then thats just a crusade.
I would care less if the collapse of Pakistan did not have consequences for the west, but it does.
And Pakistan and South Africa are far from Communist utopias, and regardless, continuing as they are will have massive human toll, regardless of how much you hate capitalism.
Frankly it concerns me that so few people know that the global south is rapidly losing trust in the west because of our own hypocritical, politicized, insincere behavior. Western media pretty much never talks about this sort of stuff and so most people are still in lala land.
And China gets wide unlimited access to African raw matters for decades, all-you-can-eat style.
This is not a gift; Is African countries receiving something but losing control over their fisheries or wood. And if there is an environmental disaster, bye. The African country will keep the mess.
https://globalvoices.org/2021/06/07/belt-and-road-initiative...
The Nigerian writer Tade Ipadeola wrote on X: "The dust at the Lagos-Ibadan rail station is silica dust. Respirable and a known carcinogen. Every building within 100m of this site is currently covered"
"Jack Straw, remarked that what China was doing in Africa was much the same as what Britain had done 150 years ago.”
Is much better than American Indians receiving crystal bead collars, but the underlying system is the same. Both part benefit, but one benefits much more than the other. Is just a soft type of Early Colonialism, not really different than the European trading companies slowly eating India in the past.
Nobody is forcing Africa to give China access to minerals. China is not coming with guns. African leaders have said multiple times that when they say "no" to China, then China says "okay here's another proposal". They don't return with an army to force you to sign. If African nations signed a bad deal then they ought to take responsibility for that. These are countries that are supposed to be accountable for their own decisions, not toddlers. The onus is on them to do their homework before they enter a deal.
If you dislike the fact that Africa voluntarily makes such business deals with China, then maybe you ought to give Africa better business deals, or perhaps even gifts (as you seem to imply that only gifts are beneficial/valuable).
Unfortunately, western countries are doing neither: they keep lecturing about not working with China while also not providing any alternatives. Why do you think Africa deals with China in the first place? Because dealing with China — even if China's deals are not always problem-free — is still more beneficial than inaction and the status quo! Africa benefits more from having roads, bridges, schools and hospitals than from hoarding minerals.
https://dialogue.earth/en/pollution/741-china-s-environmenta...
The Chinese oil company Sinopec has been charged with mass pollution, dynamiting areas of a National Park in Gabon and carving roads through the forest
According to GlobalTimber.org.uk, China is sourcing huge amounts of wood from forests in Cameroon, Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon and Liberia. What is worrying is the illegal nature of this trade
Half of all wood imported from Cameroon into China is harvested illegally. In Gabon, 70% of wood exports to China are illegal. In Liberia 100% is illegal
The case of Nigeria and its Niger Delta oilfields is well known as an environmental disaster area
Put it another way: if on the whole China's business is not net positive, then why does Africa continue to do business with China? Nothing prevents them from kicking all Chinese companies out. Nothing prevents them from giving fines to companies that violate the law. Nothing prevents them from renegotiating. African leaders have been saying for years that China's contributions are still net positive despite problems existing.
I am puzzled. Why are you still pointing out problems? Why are you ignoring everything else I said? This is so non-constructive. Africa does not need the west to give another lecture (pointing out problems only). It needs the west to walk the talk: instead of smearing, offer Africans a better alternative than both China and inaction. Offer solutions, and actually deliver them.
> doesn't mean that [100%] are representative of the whole
Now stop dodging and answer the other parts. Of is that too uncomfortable?
Do you really want to establish as normal foreign governments going mucking around in local politics based on their own sense of what is right?
(1) is hopelessly naïve;
(2) is mucking around in local politics.
The "Rest of the World" can only do so much (IMF/World Bank loans etc.) but cannot take responsibility for you when you insist on digging a bigger-and-deeper hole for yourself.
If you truly want to understand how bad it is in Pakistan see "The Black Hole" Youtube channel (https://www.youtube.com/@TheBlackHoleOfficial) where Pakistani intellectuals (notably the Scientist Pervez Hoodbhoy) dissect, analyze and propose solutions to their problems none of which is being listened to and implemented.
Pakistan is one of the most poorly governed countries in the world. If the Netherlands or Japan for example was equally poorly governed, the relative human toll would be much higher than it is in Pakistan.
Why is every western government not warning Pakistan, and it's population, that if they continue to elect leaders who run the country into the ground that this will have dire consequences for their longevity and wellbeing?
I see similar problems coming in South Africa, also, it's quickly approaching crisis, but the population just keeps electing the most corrupt politicians that are not interested in good governance at all.
Who wins by letting these countries run themselves into the ground and then create problems for everyone else?