The Virtue Of Unilateral Virtue

As the Northern Alliance takes controlof Kabul, and makes advances over the rest of Afghanistan, America and herallies must be undecided as to whether they should toast this apparent successof their war or wait to assess its ramifications. They would be wise to wait.Success or failure is not declared or decided by television networks but byhistory, long after the men who were responsible for it are dead and gone. 

This lesson must surely not have escapedMr. Brzezinski on September 11. It was early 1998. In an interviewto a French newspaper Le Nouvel Observateur, the National SecurityAdviser to President Carter, Mr. Zbigniew Brzezinski boasted about his role insponsoring the Mujaheddins in Afghanistan in the seventies. Part of the idea wasto 'invite' the then Soviet Union into the trap of Afghanistan. The trap nettedan unintended victim too – the US itself.

The planes that crashed into the WTC onSeptember 11 did not just destroy concrete structures. They demolished thedelusion that consequences that one cannot foresee are, simply, inconsequential.

The sooner this is realised, the easierit would be for the US to grasp the chain of consequences it has set in motionwith its campaign of bombing of a nation whose citizens did not participate inthe atrocities on September 11.

By sheer dint of repetition, the claimthat America won the cold war had come to be accepted and allowed the nation tostraddle the globe as the lone superpower. Think again. Did America really winthe Cold War? 

Is it possible to claim victory in a warwhen the warriors armed by the king come back to claim 6000+ lives in his ownsoil? 

Would the men and women who decided toarm the Mujaihideens in the US about 21 years ago have visualised that theirdecisions would return as fully loaded planes headed for the World Trade Centrein New York and the Pentagon and god knows where else?

It requires a certain measure ofhumility to recognise limits to human rationality. Such humility would not viewinteraction among nations as conquests to be won - either in the battlefield orin the economic arena. It would seek common elements in individual successes atdifferent points in history. 

Claims of economic invincibility basedon performances that last barely half a decade are easily reversed. They werereversed in the nineties for Japan and they might well reverse for the US thisdecade. The signs are already ominous. In any case, celebration of suchephemeral triumphs breeds only frustration. 

The keenness to declare instantvictories on (imaginary) contests that transcend time has given rise to acottage industry in indices/indicators of international competitiveness that areflourishing. They should be urgently relabelled. 

Nations do not compete. Nations prosperand allow their citizens to prosper if they have appropriate policies,institutions and infrastructure. Hence, we should have 'prosperity' indicatorsand not 'competitiveness' indicators.

Resources that nations seek from oneanother (e.g., foreign investment) are only means to the end - prosperity for themselves and their people. Competitiveness indicatorsmerely breed unhealthy (and sometimes, plain wrong) comparisons, jealousy andgloating. Irrational action - economic or military - is the inevitableconsequence. 

People already living in the fringes ofsociety find themselves completely forgotten in the resulting misery and theythen choose to remind us of their existence in their own ways. It would be toolate to regret then.

If there is one good that the murderersof September 11 did, it is to deliver the message that victories that nationsdeclare over others are not frozen in time. They are reversible. The death of6000 innocents has reversed the Pyrrhic victory of the Cold War.

Economists love to argue that a nationthat pursues unilateral trade liberalisation would still benefit. The case iseven stronger for a nation that pursues unilateral virtue.

The path to a better world is paved withmicro changes in our behaviour whose impact may not be immediately evident.Surely, just as viciousness returns in some form, virtue would too. This is thecosmic law of cause and effect. Hindus call it the law of Karma. 

But, as BillClinton talks of a nation paying a price for its past mistakes dating backthousand years and, as Pakistan fears the revenge of the child that it createdand abandoned now, the law becomes universal. If more people could relate theirpast to their present experiences and draw the right inferences, the world wouldbe a safer place for our children.

(Dr.V. Anantha-Nageswaran is an economist working for an international financialinstitution in Singapore. These are strictly his personal views)