Over the next 20 years, Pakistan’s population will grow by 85 million people. This raises a multitude of questions regarding the future of Pakistan as not just a stable country—it is clearly not that already—but as a country at all.
Pakistan is already overpopulated, with 180 million people—two thirds of which are under 30. The state cannot provide adequate resources to its people in 2009—and the prospects of improvement over the next twenty years are admittedly grim. This demographic boom will exacerbate all the worst trends in Pakistan today—and some commentators have been calling it “the world’s most dangerous country” for years.
Indeed, the world needs to adopt the fierce urgency of now required to tackle the potential catastrophic results another 85 million people would mean for South Asia. There is a multiple-front process needed to stabilize the region—better democratic governance in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, the weakening of the Pakistani security establishment over the state, a solution to Kashmir, and an eventual Indo-Pakistani peace agreement. But these benchmarks are a long, long ways off.
In the Middle East, all parties know the broad outlines of a final deal. But nobody is even talking about a final deal in South Asia—with two nuclear-armed rivals, the ever looming threat of religious extremism and terrorism (this being the one year anniversary of the Mumbai attacks), and two potentially failed states (in all honesty, you could call Afghanistan and Pakistan failed states already), the possibility of catastrophic events in South Asia is much greater than in I-P.
If the parties begin to tackle these underlying problems now, a groundwork can be laid for new generations to continue and finish their work. But if nobody asks the hard questions, and demands the hard solutions, 85 million more people will be raised in an inhospitable, potentially radical environment. None of us will be thankful for that.
