Daily Times It’s not very often that the highest court in the land delivers an opinion on an extremely important matter and both sides, for and against the motion (ordinance in this case), claim victory. Yet that is precisely what has happened regarding the Supreme Court’s opinion on the issue of secret balloting in the upcoming Senate elections. While the honourable court maintained that the said election should be held in keeping with the constitution,…
Posts published in “Pak Media comment”
Growing up in the sixties, spending winters in Lyallpur was part of the family routine; we used to move there from Abbottabad. From the strict regime of Irish Priests of Burn Hall to pure rustic scene of Sant Singh Wala on the outskirts of the City used to be like entering another world. The family orchards were filled with different kinds of fruits mostly leased to the contractors. A cat and mouse game of pinching…
IT is a measure of the volatility of Pakistani politics that the momentum can suddenly shift between rival political forces. Recent developments have helped to revive the political fortunes of the opposition alliance while the PTI government’s credibility has been shaken and it has been put on the defensive. This however may be transient as dynamics can shift again to advantage the government if it makes the gains it is expecting in the upcoming Senate…
It finally boiled down last week to just three areas of “demonstrating” outcomes that held back Pakistan’s exit from the list of increased monitoring — the so-called grey list of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) — for another four months i.e. until the third week of June. Reaching a compliance level of 24 targets out of the 27-point action plan is no mean achievement despite missing several deadlines. It entailed a whole lot of…
Fareeha (not her real name) introduced herself as a 28-year-old, but her haggard appearance made her look older than her years. “You start looking much older than you are when your life is a struggle every day,” she herself acknowledged. She is from the Kech district in Balochistan. On the night of May 14-15, 2019, her 27-year-old fiance, then a final-year LLB student, was abducted on his way back from the Liaquat Memorial Library in…
Last year’s agreement reached between President Trump and the Taliban to withdraw all foreign troops, including US service members, from Afghanistan by May 1 seems to have met the similar fate of all such deals made in the past. In view of the recommendations made by the US congressionally appointed panel to delay the deadline, Washington is likely release information regarding whether it would honour its former President’s commitment in this regard or not. The…
How will Pakistan fare during the Joseph Biden era that began on January 20, 2021, when the 46th President of the United States moved into the White House? The question is easy to answer at one level: there is no doubt that Islamabad’s relations with Washington will be much better than they were when Donald Trump occupied the White House. In one of his first-of-the-year tweets, Trump called Pakistan all kinds of names. He may…
As the Senate elections are just round the corner, the ruling PTI and the component parties of the opposition Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM) are engaged in hectic make-or-break negotiations to make new alliances for ensuring success of their candidates. In order to win the support of MQM-Pakistan, a PPP delegation — comprising Nasir Hussain Shah, Sharjeel Memon, Murtaza Wahab and Waqar Mehdi — visited the MQM-P’s office in Bahadurabad, Karachi on Saturday and offered to…
Editorial in DawnTHE decision taken by the Financial Action Task Force to keep Pakistan on the grey list until June, despite the country making significant progress on the recommended actions, has disappointed many. There are examples where other nations were taken off the list of countries under enhanced monitoring by the global watchdog although they did far less than Islamabad which worked hard to tighten its anti-terror-financing and money-laundering controls over the last two years.…
Lesson 1: Elections in Pakistan have become an intra-elite, medieval tribal war. An election was supposed to be a “formal group decision-making process by which a population chooses an individual to hold public office.” Not in Pakistan. Abraham Lincoln defined democracy as ‘of the people, by the people and for the people’. Not in Pakistan. Our democracy is ‘of the elite and for the elite’. Democracy, around the world, had made two promises: ‘no one…
FATF: looking into crystal ball- Op-ed, Mar 2, 2021
On February 22, as Pakistani officials joined the FATF’s virtual plenary session, they probably knew in their hearts that Pakistan was still away from an exit from the grey list, yet they took comfort in knowing that Pakistan has successfully dodged the threat of blacklisting, which could have been catastrophic for the country. Only a few months ago, the concluding statement of the FATF’s October plenary session had already indicated a change of heart in…