Problems In Pakistan Essay

Pakistan

Pakistan is an illiberal democracy of 199 million people located in South Asia. A series of disasters currently beset the young nation and threaten its stability as a nation. Dislodging the Taliban is still a serious obstacle in the Federally Administrated Tribal Areas despite over ten years of intermittent warfare. With one of the highest illiteracy rates as well as the second largest out of school population in the world after Nigeria, Pakistan’s education system is in ruins. Exacerbating all of these problems is severe poverty which has been enabled by the corruption and ineptitude of the government. The feebleness of the government which has worsened all of these crises is especially prevalent

Eighty three million Pakistanis live in abject poverty. With nearly half the nation living below the poverty line a credible tax base cannot be constructed upon which to build proper infrastructure. The government’s inability to tax its citizens for basic utilities has culminated in an energy crisis. According to Pakistan’s Ministry of Water and Power, load-shedding, or rolling blackouts, have led to power outages that can reach 12 to 16 hours per day. An expensive fuel mix consisting of imported oil and natural gas coupled with power companies rarely collecting full outstanding balances from customer’s means that up to 70% of the population of Pakistan experiences a blackout daily. Frustration with the mismanagement has led to riots, roadblocks and intensified terrorist activities. People have good reason to be angered as over 4% or $9.2 billion of the nation’s GDP is lost per annum during the blackouts. This chronic and debilitating problem is going to be especially hard to correct considering that fewer than three million of Pakistan 's 175 million citizens pay any income taxes, and the country 's tax-to-GDP ratio is only 9 percent. Tax evasion means fewer resources are available for essential social services (Zaidi,

England arguably the most democratic nation in Europe at the time allowed only 2% of its population to vote in 1840. Even in the United States up until the 1820s men were not allowed to vote in most states unless they owned property. Universal suffrage is a relatively new phenomenon; the tradition of constitutional liberalism goes back centuries to the town of Runnymede where the barons forced King John to agree to their demands. The Declaration of Independence cemented the rights of the individual to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” while the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen guaranteed liberté, Égalité, Fraternité. In the West constitutional liberalism led to the implementation of democracy but in Latin America, Asia and Africa this has not been the case. Democracies are emerging all over the world but they have no tradition of liberalism. In the western hemisphere, with elections having been held in every country except Cuba, a 1993 study by scholar Larry Diamond determined that 10 of the 22 principal Latin American countries have “levels of human rights abuse that are incompatible with the implementation of liberal democracy”(Zakaria,