Muhammad Asif Raza (PAS)

If Pakistan desires to remain economically violable and respected in the region and the world, only defeating the Taliban or other extremist forces is not enough: the whole structure of privileges, feudal or state-sanctioned, has to go While Pakistan may have a sufficient defence deterrent, when it comes to the economy it is no match for India or even Iran. The Soviet Union was more than capable of destroying the US and all of Europe many times over with its nukes, but no weaponry could save it from colossal collapse. If a superpower could not avert disaster by strengthening defence and neglecting the economy, how can small countries like Pakistan avoid such an ill fate? The balance of military capabilities between India and Pakistan has not changed drastically in the last three decades. Pakistan’s ultimate deterrent was and remains its nuclear arsenal. Pakistan cannot prevail over India in any conventional war no matter how much it tries to match its arsenal with India’s. Therefore, i...

PAKISTAN’s yo-yo food security situation – years of plenty followed by years of extreme shortages – is the consequence of a combination of several factors. Some of these originate inside the country; some are from the outside. Over some, policy makers have some control; over several others they have to react to external developments. Over the short term, the availability of food supply within the country is affected by weather, by decisions made by farmers in response to prices they anticipate for their produce, and by price changes in the external markets. Over the long-run, however, food security will be influenced by some of the trends over which policy makers don’t have much control. I will begin with demography. After having become sanguine about anticipated increase in population, experts have once again begun to focus on the problems created by the unrelenting increase in global population. Several decades ago when population increase was a concern, it was based on the pros...

TERRORISM can have deep and long-term economic effects. Productivity and growth decline in areas where the threat of terrorism escalates, suggests a research paper on the economic costs of terrorism written for the Australian government a few years ago. Another paper underscores that a heightened threat of terrorism creates uncertainty, increases costs of doing business and slows down growth. This is precisely what is happening in today’s Pakistan as the unrelenting wave of terrorism buffets the national economy, making people feel far less bullish on the prospects of an early economic turnaround. When terrorists strike consumer and business confidence weakens. “Sales slump, production tumbles and investment stops,” says Ashfaque Hasan Khan, a former special finance secretary. Exports also decline, he adds. Some of these things are already taking place. Exports have plunged 19 per cent to $4.635 billion in the first quarter to September of the current fiscal from $5.711 billion a...

Desire is a subject upon which, if I am not mistaken, true views can only be arrived at by an almost complete reversal of the ordinary unreflecting opinion. It is natural to regard desire as in its essence an attitude towards something which is imagined, not actual; this something is called the END or OBJECT of the desire, and is said to be the PURPOSE of any action resulting from the desire. We think of the content of the desire as being just like the content of a belief, while the attitude taken up towards the content is different. According to this theory, when we say: “I hope it will rain,” or “I expect it will rain,” we express, in the first case, a desire, and in the second, a belief, with an identical content, namely, the image of rain. It would be easy to say that, just as belief is one kind of feeling in relation to this content, so desire is another kind. According to this view, what comes first in desire is something imagined, with a specific feeling related to it, namely, ...

It should not be surprising that the consistent lack of economic development and the resulting deprivation in these areas enables easy recruitment of militants. The US capitalised on this fact in the 1980s when vast amounts of funds were pumped into this region to create a staging ground for cross-border attacks into Soviet-occupied Afghanistan The civilian exodus from South Waziristan is escalating as the military operation there continues. While the adverse impact of the ensuing conflict on local residents seems hard to avoid, it is however vital to ease the displacement of the local residents as much as possible. Officials are estimating that 100,000 people have already fled the area, while a similar number is probably going to leave as the operation continues. Yet, it is believed that the Waziristan refugee situation will not be as severe as the one witnessed earlier in Malakand division, where nearly two million people were displaced. A repeat of a similarly large challenge is c...

Vice President Joe Biden has proposed the idea of “Pakistan First”, according to which the road to victory in Afghanistan lies through the targeting of the Taliban in Pakistan rather than those in Afghanistan Pakistan is in the eye of storm because of the Kerry-Lugar Bill. Initially, the government took the view that the aid bill was the best thing that ever happened to Pakistan and the Interior Minister reportedly tried to get the federal cabinet adopt a resolution lauding it. The opponents of the bill, especially the army, took a different view. The army believed that some of its clauses posed a threat to Pakistan’s security and expressed its reservations through the media. The government not only utterly disagreed with the assessment but was also not pleased with the army’s use of a public forum to express it. President Zardari was so convinced of his viewpoint that he asked his ministers to go out and defend the bill with full force. At one point, the controversy became so inten...

Countries facing an impending food crisis need a major shift in perspective, whereby food is first considered the fundamental right of all the citizens and thereafter as a profitable commodity Given current population trends, it is vital that our part of the world boosts its agricultural yields despite the increasingly adverse impacts of climate on crop production and on water availability. Massive hunger poses a threat to the stability of governments, societies and borders. There have been food riots in over 60 countries since 2007. Moreover, hunger is identified as the gravest single threat to public health in the world by the World Health Organisation. Widespread malnourishment among the rural and urban poor across South Asia, including Pakistan, glaringly illustrates the reality of this threat. The need for a greater investment in agriculture within countries like our own can hardly be doubted. Even the controversial Kerry-Lugar Bill is said to have allocated a substantial amount...