October 13, 1999
Coup Rocks Pakistan
Cincinnati Strikeout
See You In Seattle?
Markup For Cleanup
Coup Rocks Pakistan
A military coup has taken place in nuclear-capable Pakistan. After Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif fired Army Chief of Staff Gen. Pervaiz Musharraf after weeks of tensions between the military and the civilian government, troops took control of airports and government buildings throughout the country. Sharif has been placed under house arrest, as have Foreign Minister Sartaj Aziz and Information Minister Mushahid Hussein. Army-controlled television announced to the nation that Sharif and his cabinet had been dismissed. The capital of Islamabad is said to be calm but anxious today.
According to Cato Institute fellow Leon Hadar, the military coup in Pakistan will probably not produce any major changes in the country's foreign policy, including the relationship with the United States, Pakistan's main military and economic backer. However, one can expect to see the strengthening of the relationship between Islamabad and Beijing, Pakistan's main regional diplomatic and military ally. But the military coup does raise an interesting issue: "This would be the first time that a military regime would be in charge of a government with a nuclear-military capacity. That poses a challenge to one of the arguments of those who support the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty: Can America trust commitments made by unstable governments like that of Pakistan that can be overthrown by radical political and religious forces who may decide to withdraw from a multilateral nuclear arms-control regime?"
As the coup took place, United States politicians were squabbling over the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and the resurgent volatility on the nuclear-charged Subcontinent only underscored the threats of proliferation. "The goal of maintaining a safe, reliable and militarily effective offensive nuclear deterrent should be the highest priority in U.S. national security, regardless of how many warheads the United States or any potential adversaries (including rogue states) possess. That goal could be compromised by a ban on explosive testing. The administration hopes that sophisticated computer simulations of nuclear blasts being developed under the Stockpile Stewardship program will keep the U.S. stockpile of nuclear warheads safe and reliable and that those simulations can be used to design new types of nuclear weapons if a change in the threat makes them necessary. Yet such simulation technologies are unproven, and no guarantee exists that they will be an adequate substitute for explosive testing. Why not wait to ratify the treaty at least until the technologies are demonstrated? Even the slightest risk to the long-term viability of the U.S. nuclear deterrent should not be tolerated," Ivan Eland wrote in the commentary "A 'Grand Deal' on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty: A Faustian Bargain". The Cato Policy Analysis "The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty: The Costs Outweigh the Benefits" further examines the risks of the CTBT in a stormy and unstable era.
In the Cato Policy Analysis "Staying Out of Potential Nuclear Crossfires", Ted Galen Carpenter wrote, "The long-standing animosity between [India and Pakistan] combined with their growing nuclear-weapons potential creates an especially dangerous situation. Several senior Indian military leaders have explicitly cited the 'Pakistani threat' as a major reason India needs a nuclear deterrent... One Indian official, Maj. Gen. Satinder Singh, even published an article in the Indian Defense Journal providing a detailed scenario for winning a nuclear war against Pakistan… In any case, relations between India and Pakistan remain extremely tense with the ever-present possibility of another major war. CIA director R. James Woolsey, testifying before a congressional committee on July 28, 1993, warned that the continuing tension between Pakistan and India 'poses perhaps the most probable prospects for future use of weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons.'… Flirting with a nuclear entanglement in South Asia is even less justified than incurring that risk in Korea. South Korea is at least a midsized trading partner of the United States, and Washington does have significant economic and strategic interests in East Asia and the western Pacific. Those interests do not warrant risking getting caught in a nuclear crossfire between North and South Korea, but neither can they be disregarded. Washington has no similar stakes on the Indian subcontinent."
Cincinnati Strikeout
Cincinnati's lawsuit against gun manufacturers has been dismissed on the grounds that it was vague and unsupported by legal precedent, AP reports. Cincinnati had demanded reimbursement for the costs of providing police, emergency, court and prison services in connection with any shootings in the city, regardless of whether those shootings were homicidal, suicidal or accidental. The case was thrown out because the judge determined that only the legislature, not the courts, has the authority to impose regulation. In more gun suit fallout, Colt is all but ending its commercial handgun business. The Connecticut gunmaker will lay off at least 200 of its 700 union workers. Newsweek called Colt the biggest victim of lawsuits filed against the gun industry.
"So Sue Them, Sue Them", Michael I. Krauss and Robert A. Levy wrote in a June commentary. "When governments use the judiciary to recover 'damages,' the courts intrude on the regulatory and revenue responsibilities of legislatures. And when lawsuits based on tenuous legal theories impose high costs on defendants, due process gives way to a form of extortion, with public officials serving as bagmen for private contingency fee lawyers. Those lawyers, fresh from reaping billion-dollar awards representing states in their litigation against Big Tobacco, have fanned out in search of new industries to sue. Gun makers are their latest prey, and mayors their latest allies. The predictable result is growing public contempt for our legal institutions… To hold gun makers liable for selling an unsafe product, tort law requires that the product be truly defective, not merely dangerous. American case law has consistently rejected claims that firearms are inherently defective."
"The real purpose behind public nuisance lawsuits seems to be social engineering," Timothy Lynch wrote in the Regulation article "Beware of the Public Nuisance Lawsuit". "The lawsuits are filed in order to drive the owner of a business into settlement negotiations… Punishing law-abiding businesspeople is a curious way to combat crime. But the old days when the police simply sought to solve a crime, apprehend the suspect, and bring him to trial seem to be over. The modern 'war against crime' requires active citizen participation. That convenient arrangement allows the government to take credit when the war news is good and blame the citizenry for dereliction of duty when the war news is bad."
See You In Seattle?
The Clinton administration is facing intense lobbying from advisory and special interest groups on the agenda it should pursue during the upcoming meeting of World Trade Organization member nations in Seattle, AP reports. The President's Export Council, which consists of business, labor and government advisors, has asked President Clinton to pursue international core labor standards. United Steelworkers of America International President George Becker says that the goal is to prevent a "race to the bottom" on the rights of workers.
On November 17 in Washington, D.C., just over a week before the Seattle meeting begins, the Cato Institute will host the conference Seattle and Beyond: The Future of the WTO. On the agenda will be liberalizing trade in the huge and growing services sector, including banking, insurance, and telecommunications, and reducing barriers and subsidies to trade in the contentious area of agriculture.
Markup For Cleanup
The House Commerce Committee will spend the day on Superfund, going into session to mark up a bill that would reform the environmental cleanup program. Republicans do not plan to offer major changes, but Democrats will offer a series of amendments intended to eliminate provisions that they feel would hinder Environmental Protection Agency efforts, AP reports.
"Superfund is not a program devoted to the protection of public health. It is an expensive mechanism for reclaiming a limited amount of land for general use," wrote James V. DeLong in the Cato Policy Analysis "Privatizing Superfund: How to Clean Up Hazardous Waste". "The number of parcels of real estate covered by the law or otherwise needing remediation runs into the hundreds of thousands (though the level of contamination of the vast majority is probably minimal), yet federal policy is to clean up the 1,238 sites on the National Priorities List to operating-room standards and ignore the others. The effort to justify that policy results in exaggeration of the risks to public health posed by Superfund sites. Those risks are trivial and could be contained at low cost. Furthermore, the effort to 'make the polluter pay' has en-meshed over 32,000 people in a regime of injustice, waste, inefficiency, and bloated transactions costs and is discouraging the redevelopment of properties."
Jerry Taylor wrote in the Regulation article "Salting the Earth: The Case for Repealing Superfund" that "[f]ew environmental problems have stirred the kind of popular passions that are behind the concern over abandoned hazardous waste landfills. Similarly, few environmental laws have aroused the disdain and frustration that policy analysts of all stripes feel toward Superfund, the main legislative vehicle that addresses those public fears. Although by no means the most expensive or most encompassing of environmental statutes, Superfund nonetheless costs society about $4 billion annually and, according to a study by the Waste Management Research and Education Institute at the University of Tennessee, will eventually cost the nation about $400 billion. The law has done terrible economic damage to those unfortunate parties targeted by its crude attempt to 'make the polluter pay.' In fact, the statute's economic and environmental excesses are so widely acknowledged and well documented that it is curious that reform, rather than repeal, is the political currency of the day. The truth is that Superfund's problems are so systemic that only by repealing the law and starting anew can society's interest in efficient and effective remediation of hazardous waste sites be realized."