Unite Pakistan

State and security Sunday was again a day of carnage in Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Around 50 people are dead in both incidents – bomb blasts. Quetta’s Hazara Town once again saw a large number of its own, 30 at last count, die along with scores injured – nearly all of them from the Hazara Shia community. A Frontier Corps’ convoy was attacked in Peshawar, where 18 were reported dead and more than 45 injured. Police and other security personnel and women and children died in both the attacks. Yet again the terrorists have struck at a minority community. And yet again the usual words come from those in high positions – leading to nothing of substance. There also seems to be a distinct lack of unequivocal condemnation from the political parties so recently elected on the back of promises to make a positive improvement in the lives of all, no matter their sectarian adherence. It is not just a particular sect that is under attack, it is the very fabric of the st...

Forays into friendship The British Prime Minister David Cameron is the first leader of a foreign government to visit Pakistan since the election that brought the PML-N and Nawaz Sharif’s government to power. His visit comes back-to-back with a trip to Afghanistan. High on the British agenda is the nature of the relationship between Pakistan and Afghanistan, in particular the timbre of that relationship as the wind-down of foreign engagement in Afghanistan accelerates. In a more than usual anodyne press conference (at which neither leader took a single question) there were assurances about the enemies of Pakistan being the enemies of the UK, and the eternal friendship that exists between the two countries. Afghanistan got a mention too as Cameron spoke of the UK government’s support for President Karzai saying that any peace process will be Afghan-led and Afghan-owned, a mantra that is looking distinctly threadbare in the light of the debacle in diplomatic terms tha...

  Bucks stopped For years – and not just for the life of the last government – there has been what can only be described as a culture of impunity when it came to state institutions paying their dues. Thus virtually every state owned entity, from PIA to the Pakistan Steel Mills to the Pakistan Railways to provincial governments and large corporations and the power generation and distribution sector as well, were defaulters on taxes and utility bills. This was equally reflected down to the micro level where individual but powerful households failed to pay their dues, but expected the services to continue despite never being paid for. Over time the nation became massively indebted to itself. This, eventually becomes completely unsustainable and the PML-N government inherited the governance of the country at a point at which its self-indebtedness became an existential threat – and it cannot evade the consequences. The government is twisting to and fro in the tran...

Fast track Promises made on the campaign trail have an ephemeral quality about them and often fade away from political memory once power is attained. Unusually, but providentially, the promises – some of them – that the PML-N made about getting on top of the problems in the power sector are being fulfilled with quite remarkable speed. The country has yet to see any relief from the chronic loadshedding that is making life a misery for millions, but it is at least possible to see the process by which power will once again come down the wires. The country was promised a retirement of circular debt within 60 days. But, a significant portion of it will have been retired by this time next week and the rest, hopefully, by the middle of July or thereabouts – well within the 60-day target. Circular debt is a man-made monster, and has its birth in poor management and weak political appointments to jobs that required detailed technical skill sets and top-flight management ab...

  Secrets and lies Transparency, honesty and accountability have never loomed large in the national political life of Pakistan. While the law of averages compels an understanding that there must be politicians as straight as the proverbial ruler, they remain a shy and rarely-seen species. The latest revelations in the Swiss letter saga do nothing to dispel the above perception. Conspiracy theories abound but rarely have substance. However, the revelation that a letter was written to the Swiss authorities, in secret and running counter to an earlier letter to them at the behest of the Supreme Court, really does have more than a whiff of conspiracy about it. Three leading figures of the last government – former law minister Farooq Naek, former prime minister Raja Pervaiz Ashraf and the former federal law secretary Yasmin Abbasey – conspired together to deceive the judiciary and by extension the rest of the population. They were seeking to prevent the Swiss gove...

A judge survives The long arm of the TTP has reached out once again, this time in an attempt to kill a senior member of the Sindh judiciary. A device attached to a motorbike, and weighing perhaps 8kg, was detonated remotely as Justice Maqbool Baqar of the Sindh High Court was passing by in his car on his way to the court. The powerful blast killed nine and injured 15 others unfortunate enough to be in the area at the time. Shops were damaged. Justice Baqar survived and is said to be recovering in a private hospital in Karachi. The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan was quick to claim the crime, with its spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan saying that the TTP had attacked the judge because he delivered verdicts that did not comply with shariah laws and was taking decisions that were ‘harmful to the mujahideen.’ The judge was the subject of a precise hit that was based on good accurate intelligence and efficient construction of a remote-controlled device. There was a singular lapse...

High treason Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has announced in the National Assembly that former military dictator Pervez Musharraf is to be tried for high treason under Article 6 of the constitution and it is now for the law to take its course. Gen Musharraf is to face charges of abrogating the constitution of Pakistan and for illegally removing the supreme judiciary to prevent it from working through the imposition of an emergency in November 2007. The ex-dictator must be rueing the day he made the ill-advised decision to return to the country prior to the elections. He quickly discovered that umpteen thousand Facebook followers did not translate into political capital or votes. His reception was at best lukewarm and with the outcome of the election so decisively in favour of the PML-N the charges he is now called to answer were virtually a foregone conclusion. He has spent much of the last two months under house arrest at his home on the outskirts of Islamabad. Bot...

The SC can save the media Collateral damage can sometimes be totally unintentional but could, at times, turn out to be fatal. In its intervention – as well-meaning as in many other numerous matters of national importance where the superior judiciary saved losses and prevented thefts of billions upon billions – the Honourable Supreme Court of Pakistan took suo motu notice of a complaint by Transparency International over the alleged misuse of secret funds by the information ministry, and stayed the disbursement of payments to any advertising agency or media house for advertisements printed and aired by the media till the next date of hearing and directed the deputy attorney general to provide particulars of any summary approved on or after March 10, 2013. It was a perfect case to intervene in as corruption and misuse of funds were rampant. But as the nitty-gritty of the whole operation was complicated, a large part of the national media began to suffer unintended d...

Tourists’ killing In an incident that appears to be unique in the history of Pakistan, nine foreign tourists and their Pakistani guide have been murdered in an attack that by mid-afternoon on Sunday was being claimed by the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan. There have been rare instances of foreign tourists being attacked or robbed, and two or three reported murders over decades, but never a mass slaying such as this. The area the trekkers were killed is extremely remote, about 18 hours’ walk from the road. One Chinese man is reported to have survived but this is unconfirmed as yet. Their killers, according to the TTP, were the Junud-e-Hafsa faction and were acting in revenge for the killing of TTP chief Waliur Rehman Mehsud and as a protest against American drone attacks. Ehsanullah Ehsan speaking for the TTP said that ‘This will tell the international community about our feelings and sentiments against the killing of our fighters’. Such are the bald facts, and more de...

Black Fridays Fridays are a day of prayer but they have also become days of indiscriminate slaughter and untold misery for many. This Friday was no exception. An MQM member of the Sindh Assembly Sajid Qureshi and his son were gunned down as they left a mosque on Friday afternoon. A pedestrian caught in the crossfire also died. The killings could not have been easier. The policeman deputed to guard the MPA had gone for lunch; the three killers simply waited outside the mosque, fled when they had done the deed and it was quickly claimed by the TTP. The MQM immediately announced three days of mourning and shutters quickly came down amidst aerial firing, and by dusk the city was mostly silent apart from other less high-profile murders. School examinations were immediately cancelled. Saturday saw Karachi virtually deserted with most public transport off the streets. As usual a team has been constituted by the police to investigate the killings but no arrests are expec...

SC and GST The Supreme Court on Friday shot down the main plank of Ishaq Dar’s hurriedly put together federal budget by declaring the General Sales Tax unconstitutional and ordering its immediate withdrawal. A three-member bench headed by the chief justice judged in a suo motu case that the government does not possess the right to impose an additional sales tax. The court also held that the decision to impose nine percent additional sales tax on CNG is also unconstitutional and no additional tax can be imposed without passage of the finance bill. The judgement throws a big spanner in the new government’s financial workshop but – rightly and admirably – Finance Minister Dar has accepted the judgement and the FBR has slashed the prices of petrol, diesel and CNG to the June 1 level. A big question mark hangs in the air about the money collected so far, where it will be spent and how. The court has ordered that it be deposited with the Supreme Court registrar for t...

Banking on change The message was clear and unambiguous – there is no such thing as a free lunch. It comes from the visiting International Monetary Fund team led by Jeffery Franks who has said that there can be no ‘soft terms’ in the upcoming bailout package unless there are wide-ranging structural reforms that would stabilise the macro-economic indicators, which are currently well into the red. Unless those reforms are in place, the IMF is going to attach the most stringent of conditions to whatever it eventually decides for Pakistan. There have been too many broken promises in the past, and there exists a significant trust deficit between Pakistan and the global lending fraternity. In a new development, representatives of the four provincial governments have been asked to join the talks. The provinces now handle huge devolved budgets with varying degrees of skill and transparency, and have hitherto had no ‘ownership’ of the national economic problems. They a...

Forwards, but cautiously The Taliban finally have an address. It is in Doha, capital of the gulf state of Qatar and they have actually been in residence – expensively housed – for some time. Who has been picking up the tab for their extended 5-star stay is yet unknown, but it might be an agency not a million miles from Washington, DC. The formal announcement came on the Al Jazeera television channel, with the Taliban spokesman speaking in Arabic, and formal peace talks between US officials and Taliban representatives are to start today. This will be the first direct political contact between the two sides since early 2012 when the nascent peace process stumbled to yet another halt, but political imperatives are operant for both sides and talking was going to have to start at some point. It is not expected that there will be representatives of the Afghan government at the initial stages of negotiations, but it is hoped by the Americans that the process will eve...

Many a tall hurdle Mian Muhammad Nawaz Sharif, chief of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz, has made history. He becomes the first person to serve for the third time as the prime minister of Pakistan. Returning to the National Assembly after an interval of 13 years and nearly eight months, Nawaz Sharif claimed his place in the prime minister’s office with style, claiming 244 votes out of the 342 available. As he has already said, the simple majority won by his party in the lower house will make the task of governance easier than if coalition formation had been involved. But we speak only in relative terms. There can be no denying the fact that running the country will not be an easy business. In his first speech to the house after claiming the most votes, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif referred to some of the problems that lay ahead – mentioning the drone strikes, and issues of extremism and law and order. Undoubtedly, unravelling the web that entangles our country will...

In place Pakistan’s new National Assembly now has a speaker and a deputy speaker. As predicted, the PML-N’s simple majority in the house ensured its nominees won without much drama. Ayaz Sadiq, a businessman from Lahore, made it to the speaker’s chair with 258 of the 313 votes cast. The process was pulled off smoothly enough – with token resistance from the PTI and the MQM, and the PPP opting to withdraw its candidates, apparently on the PML-N’s request. Keeping with democratic tradition, outgoing speaker Dr Fehmida Mirza presided over the events – graciously welcoming her successor as he took his place. No drama, no fuss – a good start to this new government. The larger parties all seem to have learned from the experiences of the past; and the generosity of spirit seen in the National Assembly was a welcome sight. Let us hope it is a harbinger of things to come as Pakistan completes its first ever constitutional transition of government. There was a reminder, howe...