But what explains the reason why some developing countries possess so few independent organizations while others have a multitude?

Take Pakistan for instance. Whereas in Bangladesh, the former East Pakistan, NGOs have played such a prominent role that they have supplanted the state in some crucial areas, in Pakistan they are far less influential. Despite having 180 million people, the latter has relatively few important NGOs, think tanks, and independent monitoring organizations (IMOs), as pointed out by former ambassador to Pakistan William B. Milam in his book Bangladesh and Pakistan. Despite a generally positive government attitude (at least towards domestic organizations) and much growth in recent years, the number of important institutions pales in contrast to Bangladesh’s total.

There are some excellent organizations (such as Kashf), but there is nothing quite like BRAC, Grameen Bank, and the other huge Bangladeshi NGOs. There is also far less scale and diversity than in India.

The situation is more or less the same when it comes to think tanks, IMOs, and other entities that might monitor, advise, or pressure the government. There are just four or five respectable think tanks, all of which are pretty small. IMOs are so uncommon that members of a working group on state building in Pakistan I chaired in October could not identify a single one.

The weakness of independent organizations even extends to the political arena, where two family-based political parties dominate, and the judiciary, which is often more beholden to local clans and powerbrokers than the law.

Pakistan’s underdeveloped civil society contributes to the country’s flawed political economy and partly explains its low level of human development. Politicians and officials feel little pressure to perform because there is no organized entity able to hold them accountable. The country’s poor are worse off than Bangladesh’s across a large number of indicators even though Pakistan’s income per capita is much higher.

None of this is a reflection on the generosity of Pakistanis, who generally do well on international comparisons of giving. According to the Pakistan Center for Philanthropy, charitable contributions make up nearly 1 percent of GDP, higher than India’s 0.6 percent and not far off from totals recorded in much richer countries such as Canada and the United Kingdom. The rate of giving in Bangladesh is closer to India’s than to Pakistan’s.

But, a relatively small share of this money is going to build institutions that contribute to state building and social development. The poor may be gaining adequate relief from destitution—the streets of Pakistan have far fewer beggars than India—in ways that did little to change the situations.

It is also not a reflection on the creativity of Pakistanis. There are some very innovative and successful civil society projects and NGOs in the country, but these are generally small in size and not well known beyond their immediate area of impact. They have contributed to Pakistan’s development, but not on the same scale as their larger brethren in other countries.

What then explains the weakness of the NGO sector in Pakistan?

One possibility might be the nature of Pakistani society. As Anatol Lieven describes in Pakistan: A Hard Country:

Society is strong above all in the form of the kinship networks which are by far the most important foci of most people’s loyalty. . . . the crucial question for Pakistan . . . is whether it is possible to create loyalties and ethics which transcend those of loyalty to kin.

Societies dominated by clans are more inclined to look to personal relationships for their needs and giving, seeing all impersonal institutions as being untrustworthy. Better to depend on someone you know than an organization run by people you do not know no matter how worthy the latter may seem.

Another possibility is the nature of the institutions that do spring up. As Akbar Zaidi explains in Economic and Political Weekly (subscription required):

Due to the lack of institutional development and institutional deepening, Pakistan’s macro and micro trajectory and development are highly dependent on the whims and fancies of the individual who happens to be in charge, whether at the national/country level, or as the head of a research centre or a public institution. . . .

Dynamic individuals may create innovative projects that have a real impact in a specific area, but unless they can develop a strong organization they are unlikely to ever be able to scale up to cover a large area.

The importance of individuals instead of organizations also contributes to the fragmentation of civil society, weakening its ability to bring about change. In Pakistan’s case, civil society tends to be focused on single issues (such as certain development issues or human rights goals) whereas the country really needs a comprehensive approach to development (that would, for instance, seek to promote both development and rights in an integrated fashion).

Zaidi continues:

For civil society in Pakistan . . . the pursuit of democratic ideals is not a necessary and defining condition. . . . Many of them are the state’s partners, acquiring mutual benefits of some kind or the other. . . Development groups . . . are often co-opted by institutions of the state to become the latter’s “advisors” winning lucrative contracts and getting the publicity they need to further their credentials.

Civil society that cannot exist independent of the state, that hold values that prevent it from challenging those in power (whether for ideological or practical reasons), or that cater to the needs of the elite (as may be the case for some women’s groups in Pakistan) will be limited in its ability to promote progressive change.

A third reason might be the army’s long-standing domination of the political system. During General Zia-ul-Haq’s military dictatorship (1977-1988), for instance, the state sought to eliminate or discredit NGOs that it saw as a threat, leaving Pakistan’s civil society in a state of disarray. Men in uniform have ruled the country directly for roughly half of its existence, and indirectly for much of the rest of the time.

A fourth possibility is the heterogeneity of the country. Pakistan has much greater ethnic, religious, and linguistic diversity than Bangladesh, making it more difficult for NGOs that do well in one place to expand elsewhere. Needs (including those related to management and dealing with officials) vary between regions, and even within them. India is also very diverse, but it is in some important ways more cohesive than Pakistan, having more established norms of governance and a more integrated elite.

Whatever the cause (and I welcome reader input on the explanation), this is one area where donors should be playing an important role.

Investing much more in researching, documenting, and building up the capacity of the more successful NGOs (whether directly or through the establishment of a local organization to do so) such that they could increase their reach and scale holds much promise. The better these are at management, raising funds from non-state actors, and performing their various tasks, the more influential and independent they will become, and the more likely they will grow into nationwide organizations on the scale of BRAC or Grameen Bank.

Establishing new NGOs in a few critical areas should also be a priority.

For instance, a think tank focused on increasing economic growth (as suggested to me by Haroon Sharif of DFID) could help promote policies (through research, lobbying, media relations, etc.) to achieve this aim.

An IMO focused on gathering and analyzing information related to one aspect of government service (such as education) would shed much needed light on the performance of the state, providing Pakistanis with more tools to hold leaders accountable.

An organization focused on building institutions that cater to the poor, such as the Pakistan Poverty Alleviation Fund, could make society more inclusive.

There are also many organizational models that have worked in India and Bangladesh that could be replicated in Pakistan.

Donors must, however, remember the necessity of nurturing the independence of these organizations if they genuinely want to help them grow. NGOs dependent on donors are unlikely to ever develop the capacity and relevance to make real impacts on their societies. The focus should be on building up organizations run by Pakistanis, fully funded by Pakistanis, and geared to meeting the needs of Pakistan.

* * *

NGOs are not a panacea. Despite the presence of strong civil society actors, corruption has reached alarming proportions in Bangladesh and India, and neither state has a government that is highly responsive to the needs of citizens, especially when they are poor. In Bangladesh’s case, an overdeveloped NGO sector may actually be contributing to the country’s abysmal governance by relieving the state of many of its responsibilities.

They are, however, a crucial element in a much larger system of elements that determine how development oriented a society and state will be. And they are pretty inexpensive to fund, especially given the limited alternative ways to influence the political economy and social development of a country like Pakistan.

Promoting NGOs that were strongly rooted in Pakistan society and eventually mostly self-funding and independent of both the state and foreign actors would ensure the maximum impact at the lowest cost. A lot could be accomplished with a relatively small sum of money, especially when compared to the total budgets allocated by Western governments to aiding Pakistan. $100 million, for instance, could help launch or strengthen a series of independent institutions. This is but one-fifteenth of USAID’s annual allocation for the country.

The biggest challenge may be managerial—some aid agencies are not entrepreneurial enough for these types of projects. But groups such as International Development Research Centre are.

Donors who want to help Pakistan and other fragile states would do well to make use of the NGO sector in a strategic way.

The above is based on my work chairing the working group on State Building in Pakistan during the 2011 Global Economic Symposium.

Nancy Birdsall, CGD’s president, has also issued a series of open letters to the US government, such as the one posted recently.

CGD should be praised for undertaking such an initiative. Getting aid right in Pakistan matters a lot to US national interests, as well as to the idea that donors can contribute to state building. No fragile state is as important as Pakistan. Its governance problems have allowed terrorists to use its territory to plan attacks, and make its growing stockpile of nuclear weapons less secure. On the other hand, its strategic location and growing population (the country will be the 4th largest in a generation) ought to make it an important emerging market.

It is also rare that any think tank so closely examines aid policy in a specific country, though the importance of Pakistan means that two Washington organizations have done so in the last year (the Wilson Center issued a report in December).

But, CGD’s approach is flawed. Although the report makes sensible recommendations (on things like opening markets, promoting investment, engaging reformers, and improving USAID operations), it says almost nothing specific about Pakistan. There is no attempt to understand the drivers of its political economy, and the causes of its weak governance. There is no attempt to delve into the reasons why its leadership has consistently failed the country or why its state apparatus works so badly, especially for the country’s tens of millions of poor people. All its ideas more or less repeat verbatim what could be said about U.S. aid to almost any developing country. There is no context.

Such mistakes are unfortunately all too common in the aid business, even for an organization staffed by as many talented people as CGD has. Research has consistently shown that understanding politics and context matter tremendously for the effectiveness of aid, especially in fragile states. As a large number of reports (such as the appropriately named “The Politics of Poverty” from DFID) have consistently argued for at least a decade:

Evidence shows that in order to deliver sustainable international development we must be able to understand and work with its politics. . . . Research has shown that political context and process is central to shaping the way politicians and policy makers decide for or against progressive changes that can deliver legitimate, capable, accountable and responsive states. It has helped explain why some countries achieve economic growth and political stability, while others remain locked in conflict and poverty. . . .  We still need a better understanding of the politics of development and how to influence it for faster poverty reduction. Donors need to invest in their own capacity to address this new governance agenda.

The Wilson report does much better. Its 28 recommendations include a number that are highly specific to the Pakistan context, and show far greater understanding of the issues hampering the country’s development. It, for instance, talks about the country’s diaspora, rapidly growing urban areas, and need for vocational training. It discusses the need to catalyze small-to-medium sized businesses and to fill the government’s “most critical expertise gaps at the federal and provincial levels.” It attempts to make clear choices on priorities based on its understanding of the local situation when, for instance, it argues that money should not be spent on revamping water management systems because of the complex political and sociocultural obstacles, and that the power sector should be left to “multinational donors such as the Asian Development Bank that have more funds, expertise, and experience.” You may not agree with all its conclusions (and I disagree with how it approaches the country’s governance and leadership problems), but you must applaud its attempt to delve into the specifics in great detail.

Part of the difference in these two reports lies in how they were organized. Whereas CGD’s group is led by and filled with a large number of people who may not necessarily know Pakistan’s political economy well, Wilson’s is led by a South Asian expert and staffed by many Pakistanis and others who know the country on intimate terms. There is a real attempt to understand the country from the inside out, instead of simply using one-size-fits-all solutions. The Wilson team could have gone one step further and organized the group around people working on development issues inside Pakistan itself (something I did at the Global Economic Symposium in October), but that may be asking too much for a Washington based think tank. The latter would probably have produced results that focused more on improving how the state works and on how the intellectual climate within the country might be changed (as my group did).

If aid agencies want to contribute to state building (as opposed to just delivering aid that helps individuals), they will have to first understand the context in which they operate, and, second, come up with ideas on how to make countries actually work better. These things are much harder than building schools and vaccinating children, but they are the only ways to make countries self-sufficient–which should be the aim of all aid programs.

Although the CGD report is worth reading to understand how aid might work better in general, I cannot recommend it as a source of information for those trying to figure out how aid might work better in Pakistan. The Wilson Report, on the other hand, is well worth reading. I would also recommend studying closely Maleeha Lodhi’s edited book Pakistan: Beyond the “Crisis State.” It offers an excellent introduction to Pakistan’s most pressing problems.

Pakistan, however, bucked the overall trend. It is now projected to have 60 million fewer people at mid-century, with its population peaking at 283 million in 2075. In the 2008 data, it was projected to hit that level by 2035 – a striking difference of 40 years.

What gives? I have absolutely no idea. Pakistan has not had a census since 1998. As a result, much of the country’s data is based on extremely ropey projections over a nearly 15 year period.

But somehow the United Nations has managed to make significant changes to its data for Pakistan (oddly population figures revised downwards all the way back to 1950). What gives?

A secret military operation in early 2005 to capture senior members of Al Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal areas was aborted at the last minute after top Bush administration officials decided it was too risky and could jeopardize relations with Pakistan, according to intelligence and military officials.

The target was a meeting of Qaeda leaders that intelligence officials thought included Ayman al-Zawahri, Osama bin Laden’s top deputy and the man believed to run the terrorist group’s operations.

But the mission was called off after Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, rejected an 11th-hour appeal by Porter J. Goss, then the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, officials said. Members of a Navy Seals unit in parachute gear had already boarded C-130 cargo planes in Afghanistan when the mission was canceled, said a former senior intelligence official involved in the planning.

Rumsfeld called off that raid because he thought too many US lives were at risk. The plan started off life sounding very similar to the one that took out bin Laden – just a small team of Seals.

But as the operation moved up the military chain of command, officials said, various planners bulked up the force’s size to provide security for the Special Operations forces.

”The whole thing turned into the invasion of Pakistan,” said the former senior intelligence official involved in the planning. Still, he said he thought the mission was worth the risk. ”We were frustrated because we wanted to take a shot,” he said.

The aborted raid became politically controversial after a young American senator denounced the decision in August 2007 in an early foreign policy speech:

Let me make this clear. There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al Qaeda leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will.

Senator Obama was then on the campaign trail, and facing formidable odds, running 23 points behind Hillary Clinton in the polls. His commitment to “getting off the wrong battlefield in Iraq, and taking the fight to the terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan” didn’t go down well with the other candidates for the Democratic nomination, with Clinton chiding Obama for destabilising President Musharraf’s regime.

In 2008, Senator McCain repeatedly bashed Obama over the issue, using the speech to claim that America would be taking an unnacceptanle risk putting itself under “confused leadership of an inexperienced candidate who once suggested bombing our ally, Pakistan.”

Asked by Larry King whether he would go after bin Laden in Pakistan, McCain replied “I’m not going to go there and here’s why, because Pakistan is a sovereign nation.”

Obama is surely feeling vindicated on two counts today. First, the decision to pursue intelligence that bin Laden was indeed in Pakistan and, second, in not allowing the original plan to mushroom into something too unwieldy as it did in 2005.

Of course, if – say – one helicopter crash had turned into two and the mission had failed, we’d all be busy reaching exactly the opposite conclusion.

Back in  November, at the Pakistan Development Forum, the redoubtable Shahnaz Wazir Ali, Special Adviser to the Prime Minister on the Social Sectors (a Cabinet post), presented alarming figures suggesting that per capita caloric intake had dropped to 1650 cal/d, with a quarter of the population malnourished. I haven’t yet managed to track down the source of her data or the basis on which it is calculated, but FAO figures put the average in 2007  for least developed countries at 2157 cal/d.

In the media this morning, there are reports confirming that – in rural Sindh at least – a growing number of people are now starving:

Pakistan’s Sindh province, hit hard by last year’s floods, is suffering levels of malnutrition almost as critical as Chad and Niger, with hundreds of thousands of children at risk, Unicef said on Wednesday.

A survey conducted by the provincial government and the UN Children’s Fund revealed malnutrition rates of 23.1 per cent in northern Sindh and 21.2 per cent in the south.

Those rates are above the 15 per cent emergency threshold set by the World Health Organisation and are on a par with some of the poorest parts of sub-Saharan Africa.

Northern Sindh also had a 6.1 per cent severe acute malnutrition rate and southern Sindh had 2.9 per cent, both far above the WHO thresholds.

“We are looking at hundreds of thousands of children at risk,” Unicef chief of communication Kristen Elsby told Reuters

It’s good to hear Unicef ringing the alarm – and Ms Wazir Ali is a powerful advocate in government for the plight of the poor – but this silent emergency provides yet more evidence of how poorly equipped national governments and the international system are even to understand what is happening as the pressure of resource scarcity ratchets up.

Time for someone to join up the dots, I think.

As a corrective – and to ruin your morning – consider this attack on a school, using the novel tactic of a horse-drawn cart-bomb:

A bypasser was killed and 17 persons, including six boys and three girl students, were injured in a remote-controlled bomb explosion outside a private school here on Wednesday.

A bomb disposal unit official, Malik Shafqat, said a device containg five kilogrammes of explosives had been planted in a horse-drawn cart near the graveyard outside the Shah Faisal Public School in Nauthia Jadeed.

The device exploded when the students had just started reaching the school in the morning. The explosion was so loud that it was heard all over the city. The cart-owner was arrested and was being interrogated, a senior police official said.

Rescue teams and volunteers rushed to the spot soon after the explosion and the injured were rushed to the Lady Reading Hospital. Doctors said one body and 17 injured people had been brought to the hospital. They said the condition of two injured was serious.

The slain person was identified as Umar Aziz, son of Abdul Aziz, resident of Bara Gate. He was a bypasser caught in the explosion.

The injured included Jamshed Khan, Taimur Khan, Yousaf Khan, Ishaq Khan, Rutba, Remeen, Sidra Ishaq, Iqra Ishaq, Badshah Khan, Tahira, Nigah, Rizwanullah, Naveed, Safeena Riyaz, Sana, Shahzeb and Abdur Rahman.

Spend a second, at least, reading those names, because they’ll almost certainly never be seen in print again. These victims of terrorism are almost completely anonymous, and the families of the deceased receive little or no support, neither do the injured who lose their livelihoods.

This – by the way – is part of a systematic campaign to target Peshawar’s schools. There have been three other attacks in just the past month. Imagine the reaction if that were to happen in Birmingham, UK, or Birmingham, Alabama.

Today, for example, the papers report that the two main political parties (the ruling PPP, and its arch opponents, PML-N) have come together to try and fix an economic crisis that they admit has its main roots back in the 2008 resource price spike:

Sources said the government had told almost all parties that most of the economic pressure had built up because of carryover of huge fiscal deficit from the previous government which did not pass on energy prices to consumers even when international oil prices increased from $90 to $147 a barrel and the current government was facing a similar situation. Most public sector corporations have since been bleeding mainly because of this single factor.

Power companies are getting so desperate for fuel oil (which they are using to replace gas, whose shortage has led to an electricity crisis), that they’re signing sovereign-backed contracts for imports on deferred payments, going against the express wishes of the state-run Pakistan Oil Company, and, seemingly, without explicit permission from the government.

In Punjab, meanwhile, grain markets are grinding to a halt, as the government attempts to tax agricultural production in order to plug its yawning fiscal hole and – I suspect – to make it politically easier to raises taxes on urban consumption. Traders are on strike, accusing the government of destroying the ‘backbone’ of the economy.

The impact on ordinary people is marked. The gas shortage is pushing urban residents back towards a reliance on biofuel. “I am purchasing stove to use firewood in the 21^st century thanks to the government,” complains one resident of Rawalpindi.

Fortunately, food shortages are yet to hit one of the citizens of nearby Islamabad: President Zardari. He has his own camel in the Presidential Palace, because he thinks the milk is healthier.

The President House also has a herd of black goats. One goat is slaughtered everyday when Mr Zardari is there.

Earlier, his trusted personal servant, Bai Khan, used to buy a goat from Saidpur village every day, but now a herd has been kept in the presidency to avoid frequent visits to the animal market. The animal is touched by Mr Zardari before it is sent to his private house in F-8/2 for slaughtering.

Good to see one man, at least, taking resilience seriously.