So hello, my name is Billy Phillips. I'm the communications officer for international IDU in the Asia and the Pacific region I'm joined on the sidelines of ANU's Upser Conference by Professor Andrea Carson of La Trobe University And we're here to talk about digital campaigning and democracy Professor Carson, thanks so much for joining us. What can you tell us about digital campaigning and why should democracy defenders have it on our radar? Great to be here. Thank you for the invitation. Digital campaigning is fairly broad It's any sort of political communication that occurs by political parties or by Governments or political actors and even third party campaigners About political messages during election campaigns that happens in the online space So we can think about things like Facebook could be paid advertising like Facebook ads it can be very targeted with Messages and posts that are in the free media space But it can also be the use of databases in order to do that targeting Which might also include automated behaviors such as bot activity in other countries beyond Australia It can occur in more closed spaces such as encrypted sites like WhatsApp We're sharing of messages between friends where political parties and other actors infiltrate those spaces and send out messages about the campaigns Whatever the method is and whichever platform it's used on the purpose of it is to try to persuade and to mobilize voters To be supportive of whoever's doing the messaging. Yeah, that makes sense So the title of the report you've co-authored with international idea is a new age for an old problem What does that mean exactly? Well, what we recognize is that while digital campaigning is relatively new and is a function of the internet era What isn't new is how money gets spent on political campaigns and the ways that governments deal with the way that money is spent So for example over time there's been a lack of transparency about who's spending what and how much is being spent And there's been a lack of accountability in some countries So the voters don't really get to see how much money is swirling around in politics and the reason we've called the report a New age a new age for an old problem is because these are foundational problems that are probably Amplified in the digital era. Yeah, so would it be fair to say then that perhaps a lot of voters don't even know They're being influenced by digital campaign when they're kind of living within a political campaign Oh, I think that's absolutely true to say Political actors can be really good at campaigning in ways that build on personal narratives So you might see a story about a politician talking about Their wedding or about their son's first birthday and it feels like a heartwarming story We don't necessarily as voters or citizens instantly think we're being targeted with a political message here All these stories are there to try and indeed voters towards particular Politicians and political candidates. Yeah, that makes sense. So one of the particular risks then to democracy or an election campaign period Add its transparency and legitimacy. What are those risks associated with a digital campaign versus traditional campaign? Well, there's some pros and cons on one hand digital media Can be an equalizer because it doesn't cost much. You only need an internet connection to be able to Provide these messages and send them out. So it feels like in that way it flattens the playing field However, what we also know is that political parties and some candidates for established parties have a lot More money at their disposal so they can buy databases. They can do greater targeting They can reach voters at a much higher level than those that don't have the funds And this is what this report does is look at the connection between digital campaigning and political finance Who's got the money? How's it being spent and what regulations are in place to make sure that at the end of this The voter has an understanding of how they're being targeted and who's paying for it Yeah, so in terms of then regulations which you mentioned what kind of regulations or interventions should Electoral management bodies or policy makers more broadly really be implementing or having a real conversation about implementing So that's a great question. This report looks at the Asia Pacific region So lots of different countries and of course that means that we don't have uniform regulations in place And there's obvious gaps across the region. Some companies countries are better at Providing upper limits on spending and having greater transparency of reporting measures so that political parties have to document What they're spending money on? Other countries are not so good at that. So we're seeing inconsistencies across the region What would be ideal is to have more consistency across the region and to aim for accountability and transparency So that voters get in a timely manner an idea of how much money parties are spending on targeting them And sending out these messages and that they're accountable for it that there's not loopholes where it might be filtered through a third party So that they're not obliged to report it. Yeah, so speaking of voters having access to this information Would it be fair to say that maybe media are a little bit behind the eight ball here and reporting to voters What actually is digital campaigning and how political financing can be swaying their vote? It's a really important point because professional media are a conduit to Provide a space to give information to voters most voters are pretty Well citizens are busy. They're raising families and they're doing their jobs And so they're relying on the shortcut of the media to bring this information to them And if the media is unable to perform that role for a number of reasons Which might be because the regulations are not in place to provide Measurements of how much campaign Finance is being spent on digital campaigning then they can't bring that information to voters to make an informed choice at the ballot box Yeah So we've just had a pretty contentious election here in australia Um, would it be fair to say digital campaigning was highly utilized by The two major parties and the kind of independence and third party being the greens or we're not quite sure yet to what extent It's been really adopted by parties here in australia We probably look at third parties more as trade unions rather than the greens, which is a minor party And you're right. Um, australia has a really high uptake in digital campaigning and that's been building Since probably 2007 when kevin ride was the first australian politician to get over a million followers on twitter and it's been building since by 2013 studies had shown that all federal australian politicians had a facebook presence and now It would be uncommon for them not to be putting messages out on multiple platforms instagram facebook Trying to reach different sections of voters because we know younger people tend to be on instagram or snapchat and so the Politicians want to reach those voters But they also want to reach older voters so they might go for older women Aiming through facebook because they know that's that demographic Uh, the digital uptake is really high in australia for both parties And parties are getting very good at using different types of messaging to be able to make their messages attractive So we see memes and cartoon activity. We see videos And it alternates between each election who's best at this. So for example in 2019 scott morrison and the coalition We're doing a lot more video content than what labor was And one might think that Help them with that victory in 2019 where scott morrison had a very low user base That had much greater digital reach than what bill shorten did in the 2019 election Fast forward to 2022. We saw the reverse. We saw labor doing much more video Working across the different platforms and getting greater reach than the coalition did So does digital campaigning work? Well, we need better measures on that to be able to tell But it looks from just the usage and the prevalence that those that do more of it And spend more money on it tend to have electoral success Yeah, so they tend to have electoral success But we're not quite ready to make a call yet to where there are high spend definitely results in a big impact Well part of the problem there is that we don't have Enough transparency. There's no reporting obligations for the parties to say how much The spending on their political ads or their messaging and how they're putting these messages out We do have some insights though facebook has set up an ad library Which came into play for the first time in australia in the 2022 election Where we can look at what the political parties are spending and when they're spending And what sort of messages they're putting out and that's pretty fascinating when you drill down into electorates That are highly contested like those by the independence or That's commonly become known as the teals You see this big ad spend on facebook in the last week by the former treasurer drosh friedenberg When he realized his seat was under threat So we do get some insights as researchers through those mechanisms But we need something that's more comprehensive than just one snapshot through facebook Yeah, so the report touched on four other countries. Which countries were they and can you tell us anything any takeaways from perhaps india or japan? So we tried to look at different types of countries across the asia pacific region. This included japan indonesia krakistan india austria Is it five? That's five. Yeah Got the five. And what did we find? Well, we know that some of these countries have very high social media use austria in japan or austria being one of them japan has great internet connectivity But it doesn't have the same level of engagement with digital campaigning compared to austria I spoke about how most politicians have a presence in austria We don't see that in japan and part of that is a hallmark that it was illegal to do digital campaigning up into 2013 so the culture is quite different there And it might have flow and effects for political engagement with the public voter turnouts much lower in japan compared to Other countries with voluntary voting austria, of course, is an outlier because it has not it has compulsory voting krakistan we see social media interaction It looked like at the beginning. It was a great level. It allowed political rivals to be able to put their messages out But in more recent years Some quite sinister dis information and misinformation has been penetrating that space Which has really skewed the digital campaigning messages If we look at somewhere like india and indonesia There's a preference there for their users to use encrypted sites like whatsapp And so we see more political messaging happening in those spaces This is problematic because of the nature of being encrypted. We can't see what the messages are We don't know if they're truthful messages or not if that's becoming a space for spreading disinformation during campaigns And we can't see the volume to be able to get an idea of how much is being spent on these messages In terms of political financing, how does that play into digital campaigning? Do we see parties or candidates that are perhaps using political financing or dubious political financing methods Now kind of stepping into the digital campaigning space and doing a similar thing What we find pretty much across the board with the exception of new zealand that i'll come to in a moment Is that there's no special Allocation of consideration given to digital campaigning that it's dealt with under the broad remit of how Fund money is spent in politics and different countries have different laws or regulations around that Some could caps on spending Some require Real-time declarations of what's being spent and then some like austria have what we call very laser fair laws That we don't have any limitations on how much political parties can spend Nor do we have limitations at the federal level on how much they can raise And this creates problems of an even playing field for those Political parties and actors that are able to get a lot more political donations and funding That makes it much more difficult to campaign against Say smaller political actors that don't have access to those funds So what's required is more transparency and more accountability so that the public can make judgments about who's influencing their vote And often it can be third parties. It might be mining companies or it might be other organizations that have a An agenda within a political campaign And it's useful for voters to know if they're having Undue influence in the campaign by donating large amounts of money So how would a voter be able to discern the difference between a digital campaign and a traditional campaign method?  Well, I guess in the old days where you had analog media the campaigns Would be billboards up around the streets and we need to be clear. We still have both types of campaigns. It's just that digital Puts it really on steroids all the type of campaigns were radio ads television advertising even debates such as election debates in the free space and a media commentary would constitute that the broad brush of what it was a analog campaign The difference with digital campaigning is it's not geographically limited So if you're in a city and you see a billboard, you're not going to see that if you're in another city But or you might if they're prepared to spend more money and ensure there's billboards right across the country digital campaigning can go viral and it can Not be limited to just one particular geographical area, which makes it really potent Now there's some democratic benefits for that. It's getting messages out to the public which is a positive the Things that we need to be concerned about though is when there's a lack of transparency About who's providing the messages and who's funding it and that's the area that policymakers need to focus on Yeah, and have you found that political parties? either small or large Reluctant to really engage in more transparency or accountability methods when disclosing who's funding them Yes, so what we find is that when parties are in opposition They identify this as one of the biggest challenges of the time and promise to do action and we've seen this in various countries And then if they're elected they get the benefit in competency and recognize just how powerful it is to Be able to use digital campaigning and other forms of campaign tools without having Tight regulations around how they do it So often we see in action once these political parties and politicians come into power That's what makes change so difficult And that's why this is a an old problem for a new time that it hasn't been resolved And it's not just Australia that faces this problem. It's right across the Asia Pacific region I did mention New Zealand. They have singled out digital campaigning To have separate provisions in place Which might be a way forward to look at an exemplar model of what better regulation looks like in this space So what kind of advice would you give to a voter? And how can they look out for or discern a digital campaign method being applied to them versus a traditional method being applied? Well, it's a really good question because it's difficult, isn't it? The more sophisticated campaigners become Using things like personal narrative in their political campaigning. It's difficult to tell whether that's A story that's being told by a politician or whether it's with the purpose of persuading voters I think the onus needs to come off the voter and it needs to go with Governments and policymakers so that there is regulation in place that there's transparency. This might be things like having Notices on campaigns to say when it was produced how it was produced and who's producing it The Australian electoral commission does some of that around official election campaign periods There might be avenues to do more of that level of transparency There certainly needs to be more effort put in to documenting for the public and also for the media to report How much money is spent on these campaigns? Who's providing the funding for it and and how it's being spent what sort of areas are being targeted? So would that be the key recommendation from the report as for policymakers lawmakers generally to Implement more regulation in the space. Yeah, our key recommendations are greater transparency and greater accountability and then with that also comes compliance making sure that the political parties third parties and Individual candidates are complying with regulation that's in place We don't think that digital campaigning should be have its own separate set of laws It does fall into campaigning more broadly But the regulations can be sufficiently nuanced to understand that there's some new challenges that come with digital campaigning In that it can cross boundaries Geographical boundaries really quickly and can go viral to make sure that there is the transparency around who's producing these messages Professor. Thank you so much for your time. You're welcome. Thank you


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That said, actually still very good news because we've got two of the most eminent experts on Pakistan with us. What we will do is I will introduce them briefly, talk about the topic a bit, have both of them speak. I'll have a few questions for them and then we will open it up. This is one of the occasions, again, very uncharacteristically I can tell you you have a little more time than I allowed you to begin with. So we'll have this conversation, then open it up for a Q&A. But let me just say that the reason to hold this panel was that the conversation on Pakistan in this town, Pakistan remaining a key sort of country for a number of years, oftentimes we tend to revolve around the short term and even when we talk about the long term it's about the next five days if not three. And so the idea was to talk about Pakistan and talk partly non-security issues but what are the long term opportunities and challenges for Pakistan within and then what does that ultimately mean for the US-Pakistan relationship or where this relationship may be in a decade or two. With that in mind, we have Mr. Shah Javed Burki and Adil Najam, both of whom do not require any introduction but let me briefly say that Dr. Burki is a career World Bank economist retired as the vice president in charge of Latin America and the Caribbean. He also served as Pakistan's finance minister in 1996-97, is currently a senior fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Institute and a senior visiting fellow at the National University of Singapore. Has written over two dozen books. The latest one of which is Rising Nations and Global Governance published by Palgrave McMillan in Jan this year, I believe. Dr. Adil Najam is the dean of the Frederick Party School of Global Studies at Boston University. He has also served as the vice chancellor slash president of a major university in Pakistan from 2011 to 2013. He co-authored the third and fourth assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, work for which this panel received the Nobel Prize in 2007, is on various boards and I could go on and on. He's taught at MIT, at the University of Massachusetts, at the Fletcher School and at Boston University. But the most important thing to mention is that I'll keep quiet but we have worked together for a long time and I won't share my experience on that. So, Dr. Bharki, if you could start with you and then we'll go to Professor Najam. Well, thank you very much, Mohit. You were right about this being an unusual day. It took me 25 minutes to get through the security and I almost turned back. You actually had a better time than some others who've told me it was 40. But great to be here. I'm going to talk about Pakistan's past, its present and its future. And to do this in 12 minutes is quite a feat but I'll try and do it in 12 minutes. I made a similar presentation, gave a similar presentation at SAIS a few days ago where Shireeta Akheli and I introduced the little book that we have produced for SAIS. And somebody said to me at the end of this, he said, you know, this is the first time I've heard such optimism about a country that people have written off. And why are you so optimistic about Pakistan? And I said there are two reasons. One, that I'm a development economist and by definition I have to be optimistic. You can't be pessimistic and practice development economics. Second, I think Pakistan is an extremely misunderstood country. There's not great scholarship that's been devoted to the country. SAIS, it's a large country. It is an important country and it is going to become even more important. So I'm a bit surprised that it is getting the kind of press it is. So let me just take about five minutes to talk about Pakistan's past 70 years. I don't think many people realize that Pakistan has been one of the most rapidly growing economies in the developing world. And from 1947 to 2017, its GDP has increased at an average of 4.6% a year, which means the GDP today is 20 times what it was when the country was born in 1947. But unfortunately, population has also increased quite rapidly and population has gone up from 32 million to probably 200 million. And that's eaten into what would have been increased in per capita income. But that notwithstanding, per capita income has also gone up fairly significantly about 2% a year. But what's very important is that Pakistan has been able to tackle its problem of poverty. At the time of independence in 1947, 60% of the population was living in absolute poverty, according to the World Bank definition of absolute poverty. Today it's around 18%. Now there are two ways of looking at this. 18% means something like 36 million people in poverty. At the time of independence, poverty was around 19 million. So you can say that the number of people living in poverty has doubled. So where's the success story? The success is that if the ratio had remained what it was at the time of independence, there would be 120 million people living in absolute poverty. So you can say that something like 80 million people are not poor because of the way the Pakistan economy has developed, the rate at which it has developed, and so forth. It is not recognized how difficult Pakistan's start was. I was a kid eight, nine years old when Pakistan was born and I have a vivid memory of that. My father was a reasonably senior person working in GHQ and I once visited his office and there was nothing in his office. No chairs, no tables. There was no capital city in Pakistan. There was really no government in Pakistan. There was no central bank in Pakistan. Pakistan had nothing in terms of foreign exchange and on top of that, eight million people arrived as refugees into the country which had a population of 30 million people. They were successfully absorbed. There is no other example of this in human history when a population of the size of 30 million would absorb eight million people reasonably quickly and reasonably successfully. Now you can see what's happening in Europe. One million people have gone into a continent of 500 million people and it has produced all kind of havoc. That story is not understood. Pakistan has faced a number of problems. I have written on this, I wrote a book. Moeda has mentioned that I've written two dozen books. Yes I have which means that I have been a very busy guy doing all kinds of work, but not just in Pakistan but on other countries also. But in one of these books, I looked at about a dozen crisis Pakistan has faced over the last 70 years and all of them were successfully tackled. Even I would say extremism and terrorism associated with it has been, is being or has been, I think, addressed. Just a little bit of an anecdote. I have a very dear friend, an American who used to work with me at the World Bank and whenever I go to Pakistan, he says to me, he says, Java, take care of yourself.  And he said to me, yeah, that's okay, but if you get killed in a terrorist attack, you will, and your picture will appear on the front page of New York Times.  So the difference is that every time something happens in Pakistan, this business about Islam is an enemy of the West and so on and so forth, that kind of projects a very, Pakistan in a very different light. Where is the country today? Before I talk about what's happening today, it's important to underscore one thing, that although the rate of growth, as I said, has been 4.6% a year for the last 70 years, it has not been a steady rate of growth. There have been ups and downs and all the ups, and there were three of them when the country was growing at a rate of about seven to 8% a year, which is what the World Bank associates with miracle economies as it calls them. All these three growth spurts in the 1960s, in 1980s, and in the early years of 2000, they were all produced by very large flows of capital from the United States to Pakistan. So Pakistan, whenever it got a lot of assistance that the US was giving, its rate of growth took off. When that was pulled out, it came down. So this up and down thing has been largely because of the relationship with the United States and so on, all these three things happened during military regimes. That's why it is important for the US to take a look at what's happening to the political system in Pakistan, and I'll get to that a little later. The military, when it is in control, was able to do things quickly, to align itself very quickly to US's strategic interest and then money from the US flowed in in very, very large amounts, and it's not going to happen again. I don't think there is any appetite in Washington, certainly not with the current administration in place to provide large amounts of assistance so Pakistan will have to go on its own. What are the positives in Pakistan? There are at least, I was drawing up a list this morning, what is it that I will talk about in terms of positives. There are about half a dozen of them, and some of them are very interesting. One is Pakistan has one of the youngest population in the world of any country with more than 75 million people. We are conducting a census at this point. The census probably will show that the size of the population is 200 million people, which makes it the sixth largest country in the world, but this is a very, very young population. The median age of the population is only 24 years, which means that 100 million people in Pakistan are below the age of 24. Just to give you some idea of what this means is when you talk about Syrian refugees in Germany, it's very interesting to see that the median age of Syrian refugees is also 24 years, but they are moving into a population, Germany, which has a median age of 46 years. So Germany is getting an infusion of very young people, reasonably well educated, when its own population is aging and aging very rapidly. Germany today has the highest median age of any country in the world, and therefore for them, it's a blessing that they are getting such an infusion, and I wish Mr. Trump would recognize some of what's needed by aging populations. The US is also an aging population. The second thing positive about Pakistan is its location. If you look at Pakistan's map in the context of where it sits, you will see that it sits right on top of India. Now, if India wants to do anything with countries in Central Asia, or with China, or the Middle East, and save money in terms of connectivity and so on, Pakistan has to be a player. Location of Pakistan is also important because it is part of a very troubled Muslim world, and I will make a point, which is one of the concluding points I was going to make, but let me share that with you right away, that Pakistan today is the only country in what I call the western part of the Muslim world. It's the part that I define as stretching from Morocco to Bangladesh. It is the only country in that part of the world which is developing politically, economically, and also socially. Turkey was there, but Turkey is now moving in the opposite direction. Pakistan is the only country, and if there is some country that is to be held out as an example for other parts of the Muslim world, Pakistan is one of them. One thing that I mentioned to foreign audiences, and it always comes as a surprise, one of the positives about Pakistan is Pakistani women. Pakistani women are doing extremely well. One million women are entering the workforce, better trained than men, more educated than men, and more dedicated and interested in improving their own situation at that of the country that men. I say this to Pakistani men, and they look troubled by that comment, but that is a fact. Pakistani women are doing extremely well, and in a number of sectors, I am associated with a very large information technology company called NetSol, and I visited their campus. They employ something like 1,400 engineers in Lahore. About 40% of them are women, and they tell me that women are better workers, more dedicated, more interested in what they're doing than men that they work with. Another thing about Pakistan is how rich an agricultural system it has, and this is one of the areas where we have not put the kind of attention it deserves. I, it was said in Muit's introduction that I retired after having served in the World Bank as vice president in charge of Latin America and the Caribbean, and I was taken to once by a governor of the state of Siara. He took me to see the farm of a friend of his, and we went there, we had lunch, and it was an extremely large farm, and we flew there in his helicopter. And when we arrived over there, he said to me, I asked the governor, where is my guest from? And the governor told him that he's from Pakistan. He said, I knew nothing about Pakistan. I went to the computer and I read about Pakistan, and I was very surprised. He said to learn that Pakistan has the world's largest contiguous irrigated area, and yet it is food deficit. And he said, I will show you what I am doing. And he said, I have practically no water. A little stream flows through my 10,000 acres of land that I have, and that stream has been tapped for me by Israeli engineers who are using drip irrigation with the result that a 747 from Florida lands every day on my land and transports fruit, vegetable, and flowers to Florida. If I can do this, you guys can conquer the Middle East and Central Asia and China, and that's the kind of, then there are two other things. Am I? Couple of minutes. Couple of minutes. Pakistan is in the process of entering the industrial production system in the world. That has changed remarkably over the last 10, 15 years. People don't, industries don't produce final products in one place. There's a lot of going and doing and flowing. This is the supply chain system. If you're following what's going on between the US and two other members of NAFTA, there are things that are crossing the water several times before the final product is produced. Pakistan has begun to take advantage of this. Chinese are very interested in getting Pakistan to work with them on this, and I think the supply chain development is going to be an interesting part of our future. And finally, political development. As I said earlier on, Pakistan is developing positively in terms of what it is doing to its political system. Those of you who have read what's called Panama Gate, it's a very interesting case of the Prime Minister being subjected to investigation by the country's Supreme Court. That's another sign of political development. So I would say that it is possible for Pakistan to grow at something like 8% a year in the next 10 years. And if it grows at that kind of rate, it will be one of the more prominent Asian economies than is the case at this time. So I'll stop. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Mohit. Thank you very much. Thank you to USIP for having me here. And my special thanks to the security people downstairs for not letting the other speakers come in so that we could have more time. I'm sure that was the purpose. It is a great pleasure to be here. It's a particularly great pleasure to follow Shaija with Burkisab. It is very unusual for me to find myself on a panel on Pakistan where I'm not the most optimistic person. So thank you, sir, for that. I want to throw out a few thoughts on the question that was posed. What are the key elements of stability in Pakistan or the future of stability in Pakistan? I must say, as I was getting on the flight from Boston at 10 a.m. this morning, I was a little skeptical. Stability is not my word. I work on the environment, so stability is too short. I try to think in sustainability. And as a Pakistani, those of you who are or who have dealt with Pakistanis would know that stability is a word that we kind of frown at because it is what the rest of the world wants from us, not we ourselves, because stability means just sort of, that's how military governments usually come in. If you look at the rhetoric of every non-democratic entry into Pakistan, it has come on the promise of stability. So my first reaction to that word was rather negative. So I did what we professors do, which is research, except you now do it on Twitter. So at 10 a.m. this morning, I sent out a tweet. You can see it on my account. And I said, help me prepare for my talk at USIP in four hours. What do you think is the most important, what do you think is most important for the future of Pakistan? And so I sent that, and let me just refresh that, 523 people voted. Pakistanis don't seem to have anything better to do. And I gave them four options. Tolerance, democracy, development, stability, tolerance. So I gave these four words and thought, and I was partly wrong. I thought stability would get fewer. Anyone wants to guess without looking at Twitter what was the most important thing that these 500 and now 35 people voted? Did Trump respond? I'm not sure. For that, I have to do it at 3 a.m. So the highest one is tolerance, 41% of those 530 some people thought tolerance was the most important thing for Pakistan's future. 26% thought democracy was, I had hoped for development. Unfortunately, that's the lowest at 12%, and stability was 21. I think these words have meaning. A lot of people, there's a little debate going on with those tweets on which one is important and why justice should have been there and so on and so forth. But the reason I put that up is that I do think it is, this is not scientific, of course, but it's a good little artifact into the Pakistani mind on what drives them and their thinking as they think about the future. I'm particularly heartened that tolerance is higher, that may just be sloganeering, or just maybe the people who follow me, but it's still endearing that 41%. But democracy I think is a very interesting one. I actually did not think it would be that high given what is happening in Pakistan politics right now and sort of the ISPR tweeting and then sort of what's happening on television and so on and so forth. So I wanted to put that as an artifact. The second artifact I would put is I took the question that USIP and Moid and Drew gave us about where will stability come from? And it seems to me that there are three main fonts that will impact the medium to long-term future and what happens to them. All are in flux. All can change. I do think there are very many good things happening in all of them at least too, but I also know from Pakistan's history that any of that can change at any moment given one wrong turn. And those three things in my view are what happens to the state, not to a particular government, but to the nature of the state and what has been happening in the last four or five years and what will happen in the next four or five. I think give it another four or five years. It will either cement or implode what is happening and I'll come to that in a minute. The second is what happens to society and the third is what happens to the natural environment. And that's not just because I work on it, I want to come to that. Personally, what has been the greatest surprise for me as someone who's from Pakistan, has worked on Pakistan in various ways, the biggest surprise I think of the last half decade and I hope of the next half decade is what has happened to the Pakistani state. I think that is the one we would not have predicted and I'll come to that in a minute. It's still very fragile, but I'll come to what I mean. The greatest hope that I have is in what is happening to the Pakistani society, including in some of the things that Chaita mentioned, including women in the workforce particularly, but some other things too. And my greatest fear, my single greatest fear and what I believe and have argued multiple times, the single largest security threat to Pakistan today, the one that no one is interested in, is what is going to happen and what is happening with climate change in Pakistan. Write these words down, put it in pocket, open it up, especially my friends from the National Defense University in Pakistan, open it up in 20 years and then we can talk about it again, but I'll come to those three things. So what are those three things? My greatest surprise, the state, greatest hope is society, greatest fear is environment. What I think is happening to the state is really the struggle to come to terms with democracy, but not in a slogan sense, but with the messiness of democracy. Because democracy has been sold to countries like Pakistan, which didn't have long histories of it, as the shiny package, there has been sort of this idea that you vote and whatever you think wins, because obviously what you think is right, and anyone who wins but is not like you must have somehow managed the system. And then next day, everything is okay, right? This is something we are also learning in this country, but in particular in Pakistan, I think there is a very interesting tutorial going on in the messiness of democracy and is society struggling to come to terms with that messiness, right? And again, for those of you who followed the tweet from the general and ISPR sort of shiding the prime minister and then the media jumping on him as they should have, that is the messiness of democracy and learning that this is not the perfect solution, it just happens to be the best from all the alternatives. And you see that again and again and again. Shaitzad mentioned Panama, right? It's not a question of what the right answer is, but what the important thing is that something like that goes to a Supreme Court. A Supreme Court actually the best thing I think it did gives a three to two decision that leaves the whole country confused on what they really meant, but that's the point, right? For those of you who are American and haven't followed Panama, Panama is exactly the same case as in this country, the president's tax returns. It's exactly the same thing, it's about disclosure, right? It's about offshore accounts and that became a major political thing. But the point I'm making is that institutions are struggling to figure out where those boundaries and lines are. And kind of like a drunkard going home. They keep stumbling. The good news, and this is why it's been the greatest surprise to me is I think a drunkard keeps stumbling in the right direction. And that's all I want because it's going to take some time. Something very, very interesting happened, which unfortunately was not very good for my op-ed writing career, but when the last government changed. So for about 20 years, I've been writing the same op-ed again and again, right? Because I had figured out this rather cute manifestation that there were only three and only three ways for power to shift in Pakistan. There was no fourth way. The three dreaded deeds as I called them. So I wrote the same op-ed every four years because I knew what was about to happen. And then unfortunately, someone pulled the rug. So the three ways, up till the last change, the three and only three ways to shift power, the dreaded deeds, was death, detention, and disgrace. One gentleman chose all three together. So Kharkh Ali Bhattar, right? That was the only way. Until Mr. Zardari shifted power to Nawaz Sharif, right? I'm not ready to say that there's a fourth way, the democracy way, but it was the first time, and I'm waiting for one or two times for that to happen again before I can be comfortable saying, okay, there's a fourth way. That's very, very interesting. In that five month period when that happened, something else very interesting happened. The chief of the military changed. The Supreme Court justice changed. The government changed. And they all changed, and each time there was all this bubbling, you know, now this will happen, and someone is going to do this, and the Fulana Court is going to come in, and so on and so forth. But each of them, Pakistan stumbled in the right direction. So I think that is something to be celebrated. The messiness and the noisiness of Twitter or of the media is, I don't think we are ready to celebrate, but I think it's going in the right direction. I've taken too much on that. Let me go to my greatest hope, which is society, and I do think something interesting is happening in society. And again, it can go either way, right? So how can I sit here and say something interesting is happening in society when just weeks, days ago, this young man in a university in Murdan is cornered by his class fellows and lynched. How can I possibly say that? And that's what I mean, that none of these are set yet. How can I say that when the incidents of abuse of young women, either through forced marriage or being married to a book or things like that, you hear more and not less. Well, here is what I'm talking about. I don't think any corner has been turned, except that things that weren't talked about in ways that they were talked, are being talked about, have started getting talked about. So there is a word in, Pakistanis in the audience will understand this in Punjabi called Akhjan, which means you just get so tired and fed up that you stop worrying about the consequences. And I think in society on a number of these things, a number of people who would keep quiet about things are choosing not to. Therefore, there is a battle going on. I know which side I think is right and I hope it wins. So to take the Murdan case, the lynching cannot possibly be something more horrendous.  For the first time in my life, suddenly there are serious calls for changing the blasphemy law. Not entirely there, because still everyone says, oh, but I am a great, great, great believer in the prophet. Now let me say this is wrong, because somehow, if you don't say that, as if it is fine, if you are a believer and therefore you will kill someone, right? That argument, I think still that battle has to be fought. But the point I'm making is that in a number of places, society is drawing the line. So whether if you call it Zarbayas or what's it called now? Radhul Fasad. I don't think that's the military's great success. I think the military had no option. I think they did the right thing. The credit to them is simply that they did the right thing. I think what they find because they come from society was that there was a push from society that no longer. So I think the societal debate, messy as it is, is in the right direction. Let me again, for those who followed this tweet from the ISPR head, right? And again, in a cartoon sense, it's become whether you're pro-military or not and how can you not be pro-military and if you're not, you must be a bad Pakistani, that sort of nonsense aside. The interesting thing is the society and military relations coming to a place where they can actually converse. And society pushing back and saying, there's some things you can't do. For its credit, the military saying, yes, we are sorry. Kind of to the closest that they can say they're sorry. And I think both the last chief and I hope this one retains on that. That this notion that as soon as you would say something against the military, you'll get a coup. I think is being checked. And if that happens, then I think the right balance you could stumble to it. So another case of stumbling towards. I won't go and maybe we'll come to in the question answer, but because I've taken too much. I won't go into my great hope. I think it is the working woman of Pakistan. The working woman of Pakistan has changed. I'm not talking about the ones who come to the US and then go and do sort of high level jobs. Great stuff, great stuff. But when you start seeing women on the counter in retail shops, then something is changing. And you've started seeing that. When you start seeing them driving these Vespas, then something is changing and that is happening. The single biggest I'm working right now on the Pakistan National Youth Report, I think the real shift or not will happen because of this young population, right? Here is the numbers we are coming up. We have to create a million jobs a year for the next 30 years, right? Actually, that's not very difficult. We've been kind of doing that. The question is, will they be the same million jobs, household workers, low paid, informal, or will they be a better million jobs, right? But that's, I've taken too long because I'm having too much fun, but let me stop having fun and talk about my greatest fear. My greatest fear is really what is happening to the climate. I think Pakistan's future will be determined by what happens to climate change and the environment for a very simple reason because Pakistan's past has been entirely determined by that. Pakistan's past wasn't because of a slogan. It wasn't because of a war or a here or there. This is a country defined by its environment. All countries are, but much more so. Two grand forces of nature, two grand forces of nature conspired to give you everything you call Pakistan today. One of those grand forces of nature was the Himalayas that rose and the other was the monsoon winds. That came and hit the Himalayas and gave you the monsoons. Take that away and you have no Pakistan. You have no Sasipunu. You have no irrigation system because essentially you are the soil of Pakistan. For us Pakistanis we are very proud of it. The soil of Pakistan, the average soil of Pakistan in the Punjab is about the same quality as Arizona. And Arizona is all added and desert like. Why does then that give you this food basket? It gives you because of these two forces. These two forces are now being challenged with the melting glaciers, with the monsoon winds changing. This year, write this down again, right? This year will be the 11th consecutive year of floods in Pakistan. They will not make news because they no longer make news, right? They made news when the big one came but now essentially about 200 people die every year. That doesn't make the front page because it's only 200. This year is going to be the seventh consecutive year of a drought in Pakistan as you've had a flood in Pakistan.  I think that's already happening, right? Now, none of these have a trigger with necessarily climate written on them but each of them is going to cause an instability in the actual lives of people that is going to translate into the politics of people. So I was mentioning that we are doing the National Youth Report. We did 72 focus groups all around Pakistan. My most interesting one was up in Chitral. In each one of them, we asked what is your biggest fear? Very often it was about extremism and jobs and so on and so forth. Chitral, the answer was climate change. And it shouldn't be a surprise because those 10 years of flood, each one of them have passed through Chitral. For those of you who are Pakistanis and even if you are not, go to the internet and search for Atabad Lake. Atabad Lake is this beautiful, serene lake that Pakistanis seem to be very proud of. I don't know why the hell we are proud of it because it shouldn't have been there. It wasn't a lake. There was nothing there. There was a landslide, right? And that landslide created this artificial lake in the middle of nowhere and now that everyone has a phone camera, they take beautiful pictures of it, right?  And the theater of global climate change or at least one of the major theaters of global climate change is centered right around those two forces that gave you, who is the one who doesn't cross the limit? Sasi, right? Even your love stories fail to have relevance without climate change because you know that Karachi sort of drowned in the river? There was a reason. The river was high because it was on flood, right? Otherwise, you would have just walked across. That's what you did most of the year. So the point I'm making is if something gives me fear, that's what gives me fear. If something gives me hope, it is the young of Pakistan. If something gives me surprise, it is the state of Pakistan. Sorry for taking too long. Thank you. Thank you for the enthralling presentation and thanks Dr. Burki as well. So let me, if I may, pretend to fill in for our panelists who unfortunately didn't make it. I can imagine some pushback on the optimism in terms of the conversation, especially in the security space. So let me say a few things on that and then perhaps we could have a conversation and have the audience chip in. Before that, I wanna thank whoever the 535 people are who responded as an infomercial because USIP's Pakistan program 549 now. 549 is built around the moniker of promoting tolerance for diversity. So that's exactly what we are trying to sort of work on in Pakistan. The second, let me vouch for the heat wave. I got back three days ago and Lahore was 48 degrees, which is 118.4 I checked specifically in April. So something is happening. It wasn't pleasant. Let me sort of talk to the issues that you mentioned and pushback slightly on two counts. One, Shahzab, you mentioned and both of you have mentioned demographics. And so the youth and I recognize the youth's development report that you've been part of. And the second one was location. So let me sort of narrate. I used to play golf almost for a living when I was in college. And my college coach, every time you went to him and said, we should recruit ex-golfer because he has a lot of potential. He would tell me, never use that word in front of me. That's a curse word. So I didn't quite understand what he meant till he explained one day, all you keep telling me is this person has never achieved anything in life. And one of these days he may. So I would argue both demographics and location for Pakistan may be potentials. But if you really look at what Pakistan has achieved from location, it's essentially been the proxy center for global warfare for 70 years. In the process, also lost half of its territory. So I think I would slightly push back on the data, which is really West Pakistan and post-97 Pakistan, but there is another story that happened within. And on demographics, let me just say, I've done some work, including contributing some work to this human development report. While I completely accept the proposition that this is potential and this is where the game changer is, I think any country with a lot of youth would argue that and does argue that. But at least in my reading, the next generation of Pakistanis are more educated, perhaps more Suave in terms of their presentation. They've seen the world more than their parents. And yet there is something in terms of their appreciation of civics and being a civic citizen, which bothers me a lot. Which is that this generation has grown up unlike, perhaps mine was the last one, but even before me, a generation that has seen corruption in Pakistan be the norm. They've never really seen institutions and systems that have operated without that space. So at least the conversations I have with students and youth don't see anything wrong with not working within the system. So if you add that up with your comment about democracy and the messiness, I agree with you that it's moving in that direction, but there is also not that value for institutions that I at least find used to be the case in my generation. So let me just say that. And on location, let me just make one point, which is Pakistan is in a very unique situation. And I don't know of many other historical cases. Poland in Europe used to be, but the end was never nice for Poland. If you look at the three major nodes of great power competition today, one is South China Sea, the US-China space, and that frontier in the West starts from India. So the alliance structure is essentially, as it's developing US, India, Japan, South Korea, and then China, perhaps North Korea, and then, you know, increasingly Philippines, et cetera. That's one node. So India is sort of the frontier. The second one is the Middle East, the whole sort of ISIS and terrorism issue. And the frontier for that is Iran. That's where, you know, the Iran, Saudi Arabia, everything sort of starts. And then the Russia and Russian backyard, where the US and Russia are in competition, and the Central Asian frontier of that ends at Afghanistan. So Pakistan is in a very unique situation geographically, where you've got three nodes of great power competition having borders with Pakistan. In that scenario, I do not know of any country, small country, comparatively small country in history, that has been able to isolate itself from that great power competition. So as I see it, Pakistan, quite frankly, has only two options. One is to continue being a proxy ground for everything else that happens around it, for its own policy failures. And the second is, quite frankly, to become a melting pot, where it allows the world and the great powers to benefit by interlocking their interests with Pakistan. And that could only be economic. That's the space you operate in. But that location cannot be exploited for economics unless South Asia is regionally connected. Because all of your data is absolutely correct, and I completely accept that. Except that Pakistan has artificially closed the single most potent avenue of connectivity for itself, which is the South Asian region. So let me just sort of end there, but say that it would be good to get your reaction on how we square the circle in terms of a voluntary giving up of additional connectivity. For good or bad reason is a separate debate. But to me, that increases the possibility of Pakistan remaining a proxy ground rather than becoming a positive melting pot for the world. And second, in terms of demographics, while I completely accept it's an opportunity, I just don't find that, I'm not talking about patriotism, nationalism and everything, but the importance to working within institutional systems I think is less, not more than the previous generation. Let me stop here. Okay, I'll be, these are very interesting questions you have raised, Mohit. Let me talk about location. I think what's very important is something that is not fully understood, either in Washington or in Islamabad. And this has to do with what the Chinese are up to. Chinese have decided that they are going to go in a very big way into what I would like to call land-based commerce. This is the recognition by China that it is in its interest for two reasons to develop land routes that would connect it to Europe, to the Middle East, to South Asia, if South Asia, if India plays the ball the way the Chinese would like it to. I just relate a conversation I had with a former prime minister of China. I was then working on China. And after a meeting with him and I had a bunch of World Bank people with me, he asked me, and this was 1993. So that's about 25 years ago. He said to me, can you stay back? And I want to talk to you. So I stayed back and he took me to his office, spoke a little bit of English, didn't, we didn't need an interpreter. And the Chinese almost never take you to their offices because their offices are very modest. And this was a small office with a huge map of China at the back of his chair. And he pointed at the map and he said, strange map. And I had no idea what he was talking about. So I said, Mr. Prime Minister, explain to me. And he said, we are the only large land mass country in the world, which is land locked on three sides. We are open only on one side, the East Coast. And he said to me, you work on China, you worked on China for a long time. You know that that of 1.3 billion people that we have one half is concentrated in this narrow strip of land from Dalian in the North to Guangzhou in the South. We cannot make progress that way. We've got to go to the West. We've got to develop a Western part. But developing a Western part means that we have to have land routes available to us to do that. And he said, we have been telling the Pakistani that we would like to build a corridor connecting our Western parts to the sea. And Pakistanis are taking no interest in this. So he said to me, do you know anybody senior in Pakistan? As it so happened, President of Pakistan was a guy called Ghulam Isha Khan. I knew him extremely well. So I said, I know the president. And he said, how are you going back to Washington? I said, through Tokyo, he said, can you go through Islamabad and talk to him? So I said, I'll do this. So I went to see the president. And I related this conversation to him.  And he has all the executive authority. I will pass the message on to him, but I don't think he's going to do anything. The prime minister then was the prime minister today. And he is now gone for this total commitment to develop this, he's been persuaded. Chinese have decided, and I am part of a small group that the Chinese have assembled. We meet every year in Kazakhstan. It's called the Astana Club, where we have been talking about developing how to develop these land corridors, how to connect them with China and Europe and so on and so forth. And the Chinese group asked me to make a presentation on what I had begun to call land-based commerce. So I made a presentation. There was a large contingent in this meeting of about 40 people from Japan. So the Japanese guys, who was the leader of the group, said to me, said, Mr. Burky, while you were talking about land-based commerce, I was looking at your resume. And I think you're a well-trained economist. And you've had senior positions in the World Bank. So that makes you a development economist. You certainly didn't sound like one to me. This is not good economics, what you're compounding. So I said, whatever his name was, I said, you are an island economy. England was an island economy when it conquered South Asia and large part of the rest of the world. They used the sea not only to conquer, but also to develop their economy. You are like that. However, I said, I live in a country the United States where 86% of what the US citizens consume comes by land, not by sea. And I said this despite the fact that US has sea on three sides of the border. So land-based commerce is an extremely important part of the future of the global economy. And the Chinese have understood this. They are working hard on this. They are putting 60 billion, some 65 billion now, that number keeps on increasing every day. Into Pakistan, they are putting $35 billion in Kazakhstan. They have told me that they have developed a program of $1 trillion, which they're going to invest in developing these road linkages in the next 10 years. So that's where the location aspect comes in. It is not great power rivalry. It is because the Chinese have decided correctly, I believe, that this is the way to go for them in order to reduce the dependence on the sea. They are very nervous about what the US might do, block the Malacca Strait and therefore not. But it is important if China is to develop its best, it cannot afford to bring the things it needs, oil, energy, other energy resources, and so on by sea, because that means also traveling from Shanghai to then. On demography, just a couple of things on demography. I don't think it has been recognized how important Pakistani youth has become for Pakistan's future development. We don't know that, when I say we don't know, people outside Pakistan don't know that Pakistan today is the second largest source of apps, applications. They are all developed, second largest after India. India is the largest. They are being developed by young people sitting in their homes and working on their computer and coming up with all these applications that we have become familiar with. One, I don't know exactly what percentage of the total, but a very significant part of this is now coming out of Pakistan and that's the youth. Very briefly, I want to hear from folks. On location, I do tend to agree with Moid. If there was one thing that Pakistan could give up, if I had one wish for one thing that could be taken away from Pakistan, it would be our location. It would have been such wonderful 70 years. I wish we were a small island state in the South Pacific. The reason I say that is, so we are left with the location we have, but I do think that it has created a rent-seeking attitude as it nearly always does. The Africans have a saying that when elephants fight, the grass gets trampled upon and that has been historical for everyone who's tried to use their location as rent-seeking. This goes back a thousand years. You can look at the, you know, as the Mongols were rising. You can get small transactional benefits, but I do not think you pole vault into something great by location. I think it has mostly given us, it has given us an absolutely absurd sense of strategic theory of how our defense strategy should be structured. It has given us false hopes again and again about the extent of benefit. There can be benefits, including from China, but it can't simply be the rent-seeking of someone passing through and paying you a little toll tax in the middle. That's my sense. On demography, I do think you are being unfair and I think it is because you are getting old. Thank you. And like all of us who, to whom that happens and it happens to everyone, once you get old, you start thinking that your generation was the last great generation. And after that, nothing good has happened. I believe that too, and I'm sure you thought that too. At this point, you may have two speakers and no moderators, but I think we should be fair to the young people of Pakistan. I think there are, yes, yes, you are right. They haven't seen institutions succeed. Therefore, there's an impatience. And you see that in the street action. You see that in the type of comments you will see on social media and so on, so forth. But take that away. There is a political vibe in the young people of Pakistan that I think has happened before and every time it has happened, it has brought about change. It happened in 1946, which allowed Jinnah to get Pakistan out of the young. It wouldn't have happened. It happened with ZDB, who captured it in the anti... It happened with Mujib in East Pakistan. Just listen to the music of Pakistan. I grew up with music that was entirely about how beautiful someone's eyes were. I was tired of beautiful eyes and long black hair. How much of that can you take? You listen to the music now. It is about electricity not being there. It is about institutions being bad. It is about politics being needed. So I think there is an energy in that, which if captured. Now that again doesn't mean that all is good. I think what worries me about the young is the education we've been giving them. We are producing unemployable educated young people, not just because they have a degree, but not the scale. So yes, there are many problems, but I do think we should be fair. Let's open this up for questions. And I'm sure there'll be many. Let me start with David, because I saw your hand first and then I'll come around. You'll get a mic in a second. Actually, Dr. Nujib, at the very tail end of what you said, got at what I was going to mention, which is whether or not demography and a youth bulge is a benefit or a boon to an economy is entirely related to their employability and ultimately the education system. And I was struck, I'm glad you raised it, I was struck at the amount of time that we spent talking about stability and only at the very end got to the point that I think is really the core of a big problem at Pakistan and not unique to Pakistan. It's true for much of the developing world, which is an education system that is largely not preparing the youth for the job market. So since you've just touched it at the end, I would welcome maybe a little bit more reflection on what Pakistan could or should be doing to be able to prepare its youth for a modern job market and therefore make the youth bulge a benefit for the economy and not just for the economy, but of course, unemployed youth for the ones that are more likely to be advocating and creating problems and maybe vulnerable to extremism and all the other things that we know about. Thanks. Let's collect a couple more and then Mariam back there. Thank you. To Moe's point about lack of a civic sense and to Mr. Najam's point about education, I just illustrate the point my mother's generation was taught civic studies. Subsequent generations have been taught Pakistan studies, which is essentially a focus on how Indians and by extension, Hindus are evil. And to the point about the youth being potentially a positive going forward, I have my doubts because not only are we not training them in employable skills, but more importantly, the result of the Twitter poll notwithstanding, I'm afraid that our youth is less tolerant, not more. And my fear is that we focus way too much in this country on the Madrasa system. But Mr. Najam, if I'm not wrong, you were at the Lahore University of Management Sciences, one of the most elite institutions in the country where people are walking out of classes because they were being taught evolution and there was all kinds of extremist tendencies coming from the highest institutions. So to equate a young population or a younger population with potentially the country moving in the right, in my mind, a more liberal direction, I think is maybe not as true as I would like it to be. Just a quick second point is, despite the peaceful transition of power for the first time in the country's history, I like to think that that goes to show that we're becoming a more democratic country. My fear is that we're still very much dictated in Pakistan by what the military wants us to believe. So whether it's the patriotic nationalistic youth or it's what's happening in foreign policy or the military budget and those sorts of important decisions, I'm afraid that the strings are still being pulled by military institutions. Thanks. Let's get the responses and I'll come to you. Do you want to take some more? I think let's take these two and I because they're quite a few there. So education is really important and I do think there's a crisis of creating educated unemployables. I ran a university, as you said, I was the vice-master of lumps, which is a wonderful, wonderful institution as good as any in the world I really think. I don't know if people are walking out of evolution. My gut instinct is that the people who believe in evolution at lumps is higher than at least many in many universities in this country, at least in the southern part, but I will have to do chest test that empirically. But the point I'm making is that yes, the society is divided and universities ought to be a reflection of that division, but the unemployability part is, I think we created too many universities too fast and we don't have the ability, especially in higher education, instead of focusing on good primary education. My sense is I agree on civic studies didn't make your parent generation very civic minded either and Pakistan studies didn't make my generation very Pakistani minded, and Islamic studies didn't make anyone better human beings, that I think is the empirical evidence. I would, my ideal would be that education should only be reading, writing, arithmetic. And the idea of putting ideology, whether mine or someone else's, is generally a bad one, but particularly a bad one in ideologically divided societies. And that's the problem, that the person coming out of eighth grade, and the people who are in university teaching, I don't think should be teaching, people who are in university studying, I don't think all of them should be, they're studying, they come out expecting a job, that it's not that the jobs aren't there, I'll give you a very simple example. I was like Chancellor when I first went there, I asked how many open positions we had. These were good jobs, they paid better than average, the working condition was way better than average, they were high prestige, everyone wanted them, and there was absolutely no nepotism, I can say that because that was my job, absolutely no nepotism. When I went in, we had 51 open positions. And we tried everything to hire people. When I came out, we had 48. It wasn't because the jobs weren't there, it is that if you're looking for quality, it wasn't there, and the education's there. So I think we should be, I agree with the education thing, I think, again, sort of you know, we do, I think I'm a liberal, but I'm not saying that young people of Pakistan will necessarily take Pakistan to a liberal direction, I think they will take it to a direction they want. And it's not for me to impose my values on them, just as it is not for those of an extreme is meant to do that. I would like a society where those values are debated and discussed without having to lynch someone. And that I think is where, so some of the nostalgia again we have, or at least my parents have about how great times were, I, for a living study those times, those times weren't great. The 60s Pakistan was really not, I don't know what you would say, it was a very unequal divided Pakistan. The only thing was that the rich had kept the poor so far away that they didn't even know what was happening to them. That is why you got Salafiq Ali Pardo, right? So I think we need to sort of tackle this much more sensibly than we have in the past. Let me take up your worry about education and your correct to worry about this, but I'm a trained economist. For me, what is important is dy by dx, in other words change and change is coming. In a very interesting way and I'll tell you of a study that I did while I was at Singapore. I had a Bangladeshi research assistant working for me, a very bright kid and he said to me one day, he said, you know, there's an enormous amount of data on education available with folks in Harvard University. Do you want me to tap some of that and develop some tables for you? And I said, yes. And he said, what is it I can do for you? I said, do competitive analysis for me. What's happening to girls enrollment rates and how long to girls stay once they get enrolled in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Bring those tables back to me. He brought those tables. Pakistan was doing much better than Bangladesh and not significantly but better than India. I was very surprised. So I told him, I said, no, no, this is not the narrative. This is not the story. And he said, I thought you would say this and I went back to Harvard. I sent these tables to them. They've looked them over and they say, no, it is correct interpretation of the data. I said, all right, then divide the data into two parts, public education and private education. So he did that. We were doing much poorly compared to India in public education, much better than Bangladesh in public education. In private education, we were way up. Now, what's happened in Pakistan? And Adil was talking about, he was at a university which is one of the very bright spots in Pakistan, Lums. But there is a school system in Pakistan called Beacon House School System. I don't know if you know this. This is the world's largest private sector school system. World's largest. Started by a woman, Mona Kasuri. And because it was a woman who became an educational entrepreneur and she's made an enormous amount of money out of this, other women have also come in. And women are leading this development of private sector, entrepreneurial activity in education. And that is the reason why girls are coming in very well trained because parents have no problem sending girls to schools where it's women are teachers and women are owners of facilities and so on and so forth. That's why I am making the point that change, always study change. Don't do static analysis, do dynamic analysis. And if you look at the dynamics of education in Pakistan, private sector, they are not teaching Madrasad kind of stuff. They are modern institutions. You're smiling, maybe you know more than I do. But that's where the hope is. Public sector is useless. Public sector has failed us. I was going to say something in relation to what Adil Najem was talking about climate. Why there is no recognition in Pakistan, no is a strong word, not enough recognition that climate change is such an important thing for the country is that the government has done such a poor job in making people aware of what Adil was saying, these two forces coming into clash and producing a lot of water and so on and so forth. I was very surprised when there was a very senior guy who came to Washington a few weeks ago and he and I had a conversation and I'm a warrior about what Trump is doing to this country and I expressed that worry to him. And he said, he'll be okay for us. I said, aren't you worried about climate change? And he said, that's their problem, it's not our problem. I said, their problem? My friend, have you not been reading the stuff that people have been writing about how much Pakistan is going to be affected by this? He had no awareness of it. So the government is failing the country in terms of not giving it the kind of attention. I really had to struggle hard to find out what kind of submission Pakistan had made to the Paris conference in order to qualify for being regarded as one of the participants in. So the government has failed but the private sector has stepped in it, it always happens. It happened in Bangladesh. There was no government when Bangladesh was created and private sector came in and so on and so forth. That's happening in Pakistan. One very short, on climate just because Shahid Sahib mentioned, so we did a study. I was the lead author on the study while I was at Lums on the cost of climate change for agriculture in Pakistan and the cost of adaptation. What would be the cost? So the bottom line result was a two year, very large field-based study. And so we took cotton and rice in Southern Punjab and Upper Sindh, right? So these are staples of Pakistan's economy. And what we found was that in the next 30 years, up to a loss of 15% of productivity in cotton and rice. Now 15% in an economy which depends on agriculture, this is huge, but here's the interesting thing that with proper adaptation, which is fairly actually cheap, an increase in productivity from current levels of 7%, right? Now you can turn that into economics. The reason for that is that the practices that a lot of things you have to do for climate change actually have net economic benefits. A lot of it is about infrastructure, a lot of it about removing kind of what we did with these light bulbs seven years ago. You get the new, the better system, it's depredigation and so on and so forth. So there is an opportunity underlying that if we were to take it. Thank you, Moe. I'm Anne Sweetser and I was doing, I want to have, say two things, one about climate and one about population. Working for the ADB a few years ago, I was doing consultations for a national strategy. I talked to a farmer in Dadoo, in the Western District of Dadoo. He said, as a child, I was a rich man. I had 200 acres of productive land. Now I don't have anything, no water. I had to talk to a farmer in Coata. He said, when I started farming, this is already, unfortunately, close to a decade ago. He said, 25 years ago, when I started farming, the water table was 25 feet down. Now it's 420 feet. I can see it going down inches every day. Already, there are a lot of Baluchis who are moving over into the Southern Sune around the Port Costumeria and so on and so forth. They're leaving the, well, it took a while, it's running constantly, but it's just not even, just, even when it rains because it's so cheap. My second comment about population is the consequence of having the young population, structural consequence of having such a young population. The numbers of individuals who are coming into the prime years of reproductivity are extremely, extremely large. The size of families is going down from seven or eight to four. It's not going down to the UN projections of two for zero growth. So the future growth in the population is going to be immense. And again, problems of education, problems of land, there's going to be, there already is tremendous urbanization. I think Woodrow Wilson Center, I was a member of a working group on civil development in 2011. We called this a tsunami, a combination of huge growing population, poor education and urbanization. Oh, thank you. The gentleman right here. Thank you, Mr. Mohid. For giving me a chance, I am Lieutenant Colonel Imtiaz Gilani from Pakistan Army. I'm a participant of the National Defense University. I'm a member of the group here. Just a comment and a question. Comment to a earlier research and made by one of my sister about the military calling the shots in Pakistan and the environment we have there. I think this need to be seen in a holistic manner. Though there's no denying that the military has a dominating, you know, political discourse for quite some time, but things are changing. And the way Shahid Burkis have said and others have said, things are changing in a positive direction. Democracy is taking root. And that is perhaps the developing countries, they take their time to actually reach that level where the military will stop calling the shot. And of course, the political discourse will be the superior to everything. And we also need to have a look on Mr. Donald Trump's cabinet to see the influence the military still enjoy a world of war, just a lighter part of it. But anyway, we are moving in the right direction. I'm sure we'll be there where the Marrakeis may be in 50 years time. And militaries, this thing, influence has to be seen in the context. When? Just a minute. In the context. If you have a question as well. You know, it actually bothers the western world to a great deal, but it doesn't really bother much to the populace of the Pakistan. And that you can see from the popularity the institution enjoy over there. More than in 1986, probably the highest. And second, sir, a small question to Adnan Ajamsa. I fully agree with the kind of threat we have actually identified for Pakistan that is in the term of the climate. And of course, it is going to have a very telling effect in coming years. However, not much can be done by Pakistan itself. You know, it is a danger which has to be fought by the world community together. Though Pakistan will do whatever endeavor they can do at their own end, but I think the world community has to get together to resist Pakistan in a greater way. Whereas the present protocol does not really provide the kind of platform to render that kind of assistance which is needed to a developing country to actually cope with this kind of threat. Your comments, please, sir. Thank you for those. Water, you are exactly right. Thank you for reminding me that's usually my big, big mantra. And that's not just for Pakistan. I think water is the big thing, particularly with climate. As long as we were in the age of mitigation, essentially the currency of mitigation, mitigation means what the colonel was saying just now, how to reduce the likelihood of climate, right? That's essentially an energy play. It's essentially a carbon management game. For countries like Pakistan, that's not the game. The game is the impact, and it doesn't matter, sir, who does it. The carbon molecule doesn't differentiate whether it comes from an American car or a Pakistani car or an Indian car. It just has impacts on particular geographies, and it's going to have an impact on us. That's the question. And those impacts are mostly about water. So you think about what happens because of climate change, and most of it is about water. It's about water rising, sea level rise, water melting, glaciers, water disappearing, drought, water falling from the sky like no one's business, extreme events. So the future of climate change, especially in Pakistan, but all across the world, is going to be written in the language of water. And that is the question of what Pakistan can do, right? So we can either crib about the rest of the world doing nothing. I can promise you, sir, they will do nothing, because it is quite clear that the impact is not on them. Now the question for us is that we can blame them for not doing anything, particularly in the current environment, or we can say, what is it that we can do that is in the benefit of Pakistan, irrespective of climate change? Better irrigation practices does not have to wait for climate change. Changing the way water is priced in Balochistan has got nothing to do with climate change. It has got to do with politics. It has got to do with military relations. The way water is priced in Balochistan in Kuwaita is that you just take out as much as you want. It's kind of one of those political plays that had happened, and that's what takes the water level down. So there is a bit of sensibility that has to start from this idea of what is good for Pakistan itself in climate. I think the climate battle will not be about heat. It will not be about floods, because we've kind of internalized it. I think the big thing that will, I hope it doesn't. I hope it doesn't. But I fear what will happen is about vector-borne disease. Things like dengue, the mosquito is much smarter than man. We know that. That is why the mosquito moves northwards with climatic change and gets adapted to areas. There should be no dengue in Lahore. Just climatically, it shouldn't be there, right? But it's happening in Bangladesh with the shrimp, the micro-adaptation. So I think things like that are important. Population, I think, is very, very important. But here is the thing. I think we need to also, rightly as you point out, think about what does this population growth mean? Because you are right. It's not as simplistic as more young people, it's more dividend. It's much more complex. And as the gentleman said, the single most important indicator is skill and ability to translate that youth into active activity. And we are failing them in education. My sense on education is that it's much more, I would love the narrative to be changed because I think the narrative is really the problem. But I don't think you'd change the narrative by putting out another narrative only. I think you change the narrative by changing the mind, the questioning of narratives. So here is in our youth report, if I can very briefly give you a number, we pulled the education numbers and tried to put it on our heads. The constitution of Pakistan says that every schoolgoing child has to be in school. Now, of course, the child is not, right? So I asked my team, please do the math, how long will it take? If we keep putting children in school at the rate we are doing right now, which is 1% growth rate of children going in school, which is fairly high, right? That's the growth rate of new additions to school. If we keep doing that, by what year will every child be in school? It was easy to put it in the constitution, but you have to start thinking about it. So we did the math, current enrollment growth is 1% and they said, okay, sir, it will take 2076, 2076 by which every child is in school. So you know what that means? It will take as long as Pakistan has existed into the future before that constitutional provision is met. So I said, yeah, that's too long.  I'm not going to live to 2076. Give me a date, I can see that constitutional provision being met. So what will we need to do to fast forward it? If you increase that rate to 1.6% by 60%, then you can reach it by 2050. I've seen my physician and I'm not making it 2050 either. So I had to push them again. And so what will it take? Then they came back that if you increase the enrollment rate 400%, four times, then you can reach it by 2030. That's the demographic pull because there are these new kids coming, right? So I think we need to think about this question in very, very serious fashions. And simply putting them in school is not enough. I have been quoted on this before, so I'll say it again. If I had the choice in Pakistan to build 10 more universities to build or just 10 more universities at the standard they are today, or to just improve the standard of one university to a reasonable international standard, I would do the later in a minute. A couple of points about what the state can do or should do in terms of environment, particularly management of water. The World Bank did a very interesting study and I'm sure Adel is very familiar with it. And it calculated that something like 50% of the water that we receive from rain and from snow melt, ice melt and so on is wasted. It either flows into the sea or is wasted because we are not pricing water the way we should. If you look at Pakistan's agriculture system, we are producing more water-intensive crops and we are exporting water-intensive crops than we should be given the scarcity of water. In fact, there was an article in Financial Times not too long ago, it said Pakistan is exporting water, although it's a water distressed country. So these are the kind of changes that need to be made. But what's very important for Pakistan to do is to increase its capacity to store. It is not storing water when it comes down during the monsoons or when it comes down the rivers because of glacier melting. Again, if I may refer to the World Bank, the World Bank did a study and they developed a program. They called it the Cascade Program. It is focused on Indus River and they like to see 12 storages developed along the Indus system. And they've been telling Pakistanis that this is what they need to do, but it's politics that intervenes. There are differences amongst various provinces that need to be resolved in order to implement that kind of program. Moidus have talked about regionalism and let me give you a very interesting example of what's happening with reference to India and Pakistan. Somebody, some scientists have done a very interesting study of what's happening to groundwater. And now Punjab has two parts. East Punjab was always dependent on groundwater. Wells were taking out water from the ground. Whereas West Punjab, which is now Pakistan-e-Panjab depended on surface water. The British developed it in order to feed Bangladesh, what is Bangladesh now and Bihar and Urusa. What's happened as a result is that groundwater development in Indian Punjab has increased enormously compared to Pakistan-e-Panjab. So the gradient of groundwater has changed. Now water has begun to flow because of it's been pumped out and the gradient is in favor of India. Water is flowing from Pakistani underground to India's underground. That's where regionalism comes in. That's where the two countries have to work together not just to share surface water but also to share groundwater. These are the issues that need to come up. They would if they were better understanding in regional terms. We'll take the last two questions because we're on time. Melanie here and then the gentleman there. Hi there. If you could make a short. Yes. I'm Melanie Bixby, U.S. Pakistan Women's Council, executive director. It's a partnership between our government and your government is quite a strong partner in this partnership. And we're focused on getting women into the economy as the number two reason identified by the IMF and the World Bank that along with energy is the impediment to GDP growth. And you're right, the trends are positive and we do focus on three E's. The two ways women get into the economy, entrepreneurship and greater employment. And then we focus on education. And folks are talking about education and the various options that are out there and private education. We find the same phenomenon that you had talked about at Lones, Dr. Nijam about the fact that our U.S. corporations and even Pakistani corporations say that they can't find enough qualified women and candidates to get more. So we're linking them with our U.S. Pakistan alumni network. And that's just, again, a short-term interim solution to help locate more qualified women candidates. Then on the entrepreneurship side, we're trying to bring, have our companies and Pakistani companies like Engro open their supply chains to bring women entrepreneurs in. Again, you have an education deficit that is tough to overcome. Donors have a lot of SME training programs. But again, you have a capacity gap before they can enter corporate supply chains. So that brings us to education and training. And we're talking about some short-term, medium-term fixes, and that would be vocational education, right? And I know the government is serious about this as well. But my question to you is not the what, what's needed, but how, what are the leverages in the Pakistan society and government to improve basic education that's available to all to get to that 100%? Hi, I'm Lashankar Lehmann. I have a short question from Dr. Shaija here. The Pakistan's economy and the macroeconomic indicators are very good, and they are positive for the last couple of years, but we haven't seen the trickle-down effects to the grassroots level. So with the upcoming and successful launching and implementation of CPAC, do you see the sustainability of this CPAC, the sustainability of these macroeconomic indicators along with the trickle-down effect thing? So I, because this is the last, I'm very glad you asked this question. How do we change? If, I don't think I'm ever going to become a politician, but if I did and I was offered a ministry in Pakistan, I would want to be, if I could be any minister of Pakistan, I would want to be the minister of toilets. No, I say that seriously. I think CPAC is not going to change Pakistan, but toilets might, especially for women. This is a very, very serious thing. This is women in the workplace and giving them the dignity in a workplace. When I was coming back from Pakistan, I was on television a few times and they said, what is the biggest change you found in Pakistan having come back and lived here? And my answer was always to tell the story of the Bherawali ladki, the girl from Bhera. This is very different from the girl from Ipanema. Bhera, for those of you who are familiar with Pakistan, is a pit stop in the motorway between Lahore and Islamabad right in the middle. And very often you stop there for a snack, especially if you're with kids and stuff. And when I was living there, we would stop there and I would always want to, they see their local food and my kids wanted the KFC and there was a KFC. They always won, so we went into the KFC and into this KFC in the middle of nowhere was this girl, a job very properly dressed, very professional, managing two men and running it like a KFC anywhere in the world. And they would have their KFC and I, being a professor, would look at the Bherawali ladki, the girl from Bhera. And think, where did she come from? Because I know the area around Bhera. So here is a very professional young woman, confident managing a workplace. So again being a professor, I just went to her and I said, Bhera, where do you come from? And she said, I come from this village which is about a 40 minute ride from here. And I said, so I smiled and I said, there has to be a bathroom here that was built for you. And she said, yes, there's a changing room at the back because that's what had happened with all the McDonald's. And here is the more interesting thing. The guy who has the franchise bought a motorcycle for her brother. And the deal was that if she stayed at the job for three years and he brought her every day on the motorcycle, he gets to keep the motorcycle. Very good investment. What is the point of this? The point of this is you have to create the conditions. In which it is dignified and respectable and reasonable for women to be in that workplace. So I have been on this toilet crusade and it's one of the biggest findings of our youth report is one is mobility and the other is toilets. I went to Jinnah Super for those of you who are familiar with Pakistan and I would go into a shop and I say, I want to see your toilet. And they would look at me and they would smirk and they say, Naisab, it's not for customers. I said, no, no, I don't want to go there. I just want to see it. And then they would look at me even more odd. But you try to look at it. If someone is going to work a 14, 12, 8, 10 hour day, amongst the single largest reasons why women, why girls drop out of school is because at a certain age, there just isn't the facility to ensure the privacy of a young woman, right? So it is things like that that we have to think about. And I do think you lever that change and big change can come. So last word. Yeah, one thing related to poverty, income distribution and so on, we haven't talked about Pakistani diaspora. Again, this is something that needs to be understood. Pakistan has the second largest proportion of population outside the country, after the Philippines. Something like 5% of Pakistani population is sitting outside. He has done some very interesting work on diaspora and philanthropy associated with it. What's happening is that a very large number of Pakistanis from the lower classes have gone to the Middle East and they are sending in a lot of money back every year. And that money is going into what were poor people and they are now becoming lower middle class people. And this thing is happening. No government involvement, just simple money transfer from outside to folks in Pakistan, their families. Pakistan also, and when I go to Pakistan, I meet with people and I ask them, do you have anybody outside? I have not come across a single middle class, upper middle class family in Pakistan that does not have somebody in the United States. And exposure to the US on the part of this particular segment of the population is amazing. There are, according to the Pakistan embassy, there are about 1.2 million Pakistanis in the United States. Per capita income of around $60,000, multiply one by the other, you get something like how much $12 billion, which is a significant proportion of Pakistan's GDP. And that's also going back to a certain class of people. So these kinds of things are changing the structure of the society. The poor are becoming middle class and the upper middle class people are acquiring sort of westernization through remittances and through contacts with the world outside. Thank you. You'll agree with me that we did not need any more panelists. This was as good as it gets. One of the things in DC panels is you always are short of time. So I'm glad actually that we've managed to have a conversation. Please join me in thanking the panelists and thank you all for coming. And once again, my apologies for the security and the nightmare outside, but I had nothing to do with it. Thanks. Thank you, sir. Thank you. Thank you.