A lot has undoubtedly changed in the world in the past five years and Pakistan is no exception. What has not changed, however, is Pakistans official stance and its strategy to deal with the socio-economic and humanitarian issues - at least thats what the Foreign Ministers speech at the United Nations General Assembly meeting on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) suggests.
What Shah Mehmood Qureshi told the MDG summit was literally similar to what had already been written in the earlier reports prepared by the IMF on Pakistans approach towards the MDG 2015 and an official statement delivered in the 2008 summit. No wonder the laid back and complacent attitude almost always (mis)guides Pakistan to the bottom of every good list.
Needless to say Pakistan expectedly performed horribly bad on almost all counts for the third year running. Things have, in fact, worsened since 2006 as the poverty reduction indicator shows that Pakistan is lagging miserably behind the annual targets rolled out till 2015.
Other indicators that let down are the familiar territories of health and education. It goes without saying that Pakistan lags in meeting even one of the umpteen targets in the two sectors - what is worse is the non-serious attitude of the government towards health and education spending. Pakistan will achieve the target of 100 percent literacy rate by 2015, if the Foreign Ministers words are to be believed - though only he knows how, with less than 2 percent of annual budget being spent on education.
Agreed, these are tough times for the donor countries and agencies which play a vital role in the success of development programmes of the MDG. But if anybody in Islamabad thinks that the donors will continue doling out development money regardless of continuous ever-deteriorating progress he is living in a fools paradise.
A major reason for the under-par performance is the unrealistically high growth projections made at the time of initially setting up the targets. It could be argued that the global recession was not expected, but even then the growth predictions were based on the service-led growth model in an agriculture economy like Pakistan. Funnier is the fact that the strategy to meet the MDG targets describes the real sector growth as the pinnacle of success.
It will be sooner rather than later that the international donors will have a second thought before contributing towards Pakistans development plans if the laggard performance continues. And unfortunately, nothing suggests a quick change in fortune as the FM stressed to continue the good work in this regard on the principles of good economic management, macroeconomic stability and better fiscal discipline - all of which are arguably non-existent at present.
It has to be said that Pakistan stands on the brink of losing whatever little trust the international aid agencies have in it - and that - can have graver consequences than just missing the MDG targets.