Do we really need a five-year plan?

Five decades have passed and there seems to be no love lost between Pakistan and the five-year plans. Come the fast approaching fiscal year 2011 and there might another such plan, tenth of this nature in the countrys history.
With changes in the Planning Commissions top tier, one hoped that Dr. Nadeem-ul-Haq would change the mindset and that the era of centralized planning and five-year plans was over. It appears that the team which worked with Dr Ashfaq Hasan (the outgoing Chairman) wants to show the hard work put in perspective in the five-year plan not go to waste.
Whether the government would persist with a new long-term plan or just make cosmetic changes in the one prepared last year - the million dollar question remains that are such five-year plans really needed for a country such as Pakistan, which frequently undergoes political shocks and wars of one kind or another.
If learning from the past means anything, this idea should have been dropped a good twenty years back as barring the first plan in the 50s, none ever met the desired targets. But the optimists our economic managers are, they look into the future, ignoring the past. Sadly though, this never worked and is less likely to work in the future.
Continuity of government is the single largest imperative in the way of successful implementation of five-year plans. Change of regime leads to alteration in economic policies making these plans, a mere spectator with no sense of ownership.
Worse of all, planning on such a basis locks huge sums of money into proposed projects that may or may not materialize. For an economy as fiscally constrained as Pakistan, it is not the ideal situation to lock billions of rupees in sectors based on an unrealistic five year target, which hardly ever bears the desired fruit.
Its not that planning is impractical, but it has got to be taken in the right context. And that is, Pakistans economic structure and dynamics are subject to various shocks, amongst which, oil and war top the list.
Pakistan is practically at war which has an enormous economic cost limiting the effectiveness of a sustainable long-term plan.
Besides the financial burden, war also has other consequences such as foreign investment pullout, job losses and displacement of the masses - each of which ask for contingency arrangements, which such plans normally don have on offer.
Unrealistically high targets have also been a common feature of almost all previous five-year plans which often puts the policymaking on the wrong track at a wrong pace, ignoring the limitations. This approach results in improper allocation of funds to different sectors based on the ambitious targets.
Consider 6.8 percent GDP growth by 2015, with an industrial growth target of 9.2 percent. These are targets set not by India or China, but Pakistan. Sounds great! But just run a quick reality check. The growth targets are all based on the presumption that Pakistan will meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) by 2015. Growth has to be on sustainable basis in a stable framework.
In the real world, however, Pakistan is miserably off-track on most of MDG indicators with no signs of meeting the targets on time. Just how an industrial growth target of 9.2 percent would be met with depleting gas reserves, electricity shortfall, foreign investors reluctance, is anybodys guess.
It outlines the disconnect between various government functional bodies and regulators; every ministry thinks on its own wavelength which makes target achievement even more difficult.
The countrys interests may be better served if instead of going for overly ambitious plans, the policymakers address real issues, identify growth drivers, fix the brake first and then move on gradually. Yet another five-year plan will not address these issues.