Muhammad Asif Raza (PAS)

IT was democracy at work with stakeholders sitting round a table, bargaining, accommodating, and reconciling divergent views to achieve the common goal of inclusive development by a more appropriate sharing of resources in the next NFC award. The presumption, however, about the growing size of the pie that could ensure much more resources in real terms for everyone appeared unrealistic. It demonstrated the tendency of political leaders to confuse reality with hope. After a lapse of 19 years, a consensus National Finance Commission Award is in sight. The agreement on multiple criteria for resource distribution has created goodwill that is raising hopes among NFC members that the issues will be resolved before the turn of the current year. Shaukat Tareen, the federal finance minister told a press conference, after the conclusion of the two-day Karachi session on Thursday that a multiple criteria based on four factors — inverse density of population, poverty, backwardness and revenue...

India and Pakistan, the only two countries in the world that are not tired of fighting, continue to be confrontational. As we approach the first anniversary of the reprehensible terrorist attacks in India's largest metropolitan port-city Mumbai (November 26, 2008), Indian leadership seems unwilling to come out of the Mumbai syndrome. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, now on a high-profile state visit to the US, is making every effort to keep Pakistan under intense pressure by playing up what he described as the "haunting trauma" of the Mumbai attacks. He wants the world "to press Pakistan to stop supporting terrorists who continue to target India." He is using the familiar do-more US dictum in asking Pakistan "to bring to book all those people who are responsible" for the Mumbai attacks. As it gets a sympathetic ear in the US and elsewhere in the world on the issue of what it alleges is "Pakistan-sponsored terrorism," India smells blood thinking...

The twin bacilli of strategic depth and jihadism have soured our ties with our neighbours, nay with the whole international community. Our body politic should be cleansed of this disease if the president’s vision is to see the light of day Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) Information Secretary Fauzia Wahab’s reported revelation of differences between the president and the Chief of Army Staff (COAS) on the “threat perception” from India is disturbing. The India factor and overall civil-military relations have played crucial roles in determining the destiny of our benighted nation. This is evident from our history. ‘Operation Gibraltar’ in 1965 plunged the country into an all-out war with India, producing serious negative implications. Refusal by the Chief Martial Law Administrator (CMLA) in 1971 to transfer power to the elected representatives of the people led to the disintegration of Pakistan. The Kargil adventure by the then COAS caused political instability and an international furore,...

No one has any idea how the NRO is going to play out in the courts. But everyone knows that corruption is rampant in Pakistan and there are no effective means to check it. Ousting Zardari will neither fix the system nor validate the continuation of democracy in Pakistan The system of democracy is a little dirty game based half on calculations and half on blind faith. Most of the time the leaders, after winning the elections, are proven to be very different from what they appeared before going to the polls. Most of the election promises are quickly broken and the new leaders are perceived to be a replica of the old ones. And yet the voting public, despite collectively rejecting the policies of the serving elected leaders, waits for a new election to choose better leaders. No extra-constitutional force or activist judiciary tries to oust the sitting leaders. This is the way the system of democracy, as we know it, has worked and will continue working. However, the meaning of democracy is...

In Pakistan, even gender itself is often portrayed through a security lens. For feminists, the killing of an NGO worker might be a direct proof of the stifling of women’s emancipation. Unfortunately, the very presence of pro-women NGOs has been denounced by many as aiming to control the country The other day, a group of NGOs announced that they will march for ten days starting on November 25, the international day of violence against women. It would come as no surprise if the news is missed by many readers. Although gender, for its pervasiveness, is an important issue, it is least addressed in Pakistan. On this, reasons from feminist literature might range from the presence of “male chauvinism” to the patriarchal structure of state institutions. Deliberate or not, largely, it is the state’s own goals that influence institutions. Since Pakistan has remained obsessed with security at all times, it is reasonable to assume that even if the intention is not to stifle social issues including...

Superior courts around the world avoid interfering in political matters despite having jurisdiction over such issues under the ‘political question doctrine’. The purpose of this self-imposed restriction is to distinguish the role of the judiciary from those of the legislature and the executive A study of the transformation from military dictatorship to democracy around the world would reveal that there are two possible ways. Either it is achieved through a popular revolution or by negotiations between political forces and dictators. The former invariably demolishes the entire system and mostly involves bloodshed putting a new system in place while the latter allows the change to happen within the prevailing system based upon certain negotiated terms. These terms might not necessarily meet international laws and judicial norms, as it is always a middle path. The return of democracy in Pakistan after a long period of military dictatorship is a unique example of such ‘negotiated change’....

PAKISTAN is not Afghanistan. By coupling the two countries together and calling it ‘AfPak’, the United States’ intention was to make policymaking simpler. It may have had the opposite effect. The idea was that by lumping Afghanistan and Pakistan into one analytical framework, Washington and its allies would be able to focus on one geographic entity and would be able to use the same strategy to counter the threat posed to the West by the rise of Islamic extremism. Looking at the threat from the prism of 9/11, Washington and other western capitals worried about the launch of another attack perhaps even more lethal than that of Sept 11, 2001. But there are a number of flaws in the unfolding strategy aimed at the AfPak region. The first, of course, is the enormous difference between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Afghanistan was not colonised. This meant that it did not develop what the West knows as the ‘state’. It did not develop a strong central authority that could manage disparate regions...

Islamic terrorism is a maliciously motivated misnomer used by those opposed to Islam for religious or political reasons. But the fact that many Muslims do have a tendency to think of the Muslims as a unified ‘Ummah’ that crosses cultural and national boundaries has helped to solidify this idea of an international Muslim terrorist conglomerate Terrorism is a difficult thing to define. Recent history, especially that of anti-colonial struggles, is full of organisations labelled as ‘terrorist’ that when successful in ‘liberating’ their homelands went on to become respectable. Jewish groups like the Irgun and Lehi (The Stern Gang) fighting British occupation of Palestine during the late 1940s were responsible for many terrorist acts including the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem that killed scores of people including many ‘non-combatants’ and the assassination of Count Folke Bernadotte, a UN mediator. But the leaders of the Irgun and the Lehi (Begin and Shamir) went on to bec...

Success or failure in its realisation depends more upon the adoption of educational methods calculated to effect the change than upon anything else. For the change is essentially a change in the quality of mental disposition — an educative change. This does not mean that we can change character and mind by direct instruction and exhortation, apart from a change in industrial and political conditions. Such a conception contradicts our basic idea that character and mind are attitudes of participative response in social affairs. But it does mean that we may produce in schools a projection in type of the society we should like to realise, and by forming minds in accord with it gradually modify the larger and more recalcitrant features of adult society. Sentimentally, it may seem harsh to say that the greatest evil of the present regime is not found in poverty and in the suffering which it entails, but in the fact that so many persons have callings which make no appeal to them, which are ...

It must be realized that the present food crisis is not the result of a limited 'policy of miscalculation' but the indication of a long-term failure in the functioning of the world food system World Food Day was observed on October 16 and world leaders raised concerns regarding food insecurity threats compounded by the current economic crisis. Nothing is older than man’s struggle for food. It is surprising that today the situation of food availability has become very precarious amidst the scientific progress man has achieved over the past few centuries to acquire control over the forces of nature. As per the World Economic Forum, food insecurity now lies at the centre of the global nexus of risks — disaster risk, energy prices, climate change and declining water supplies. At present, according to UN estimates, almost one billion people are suffering from chronic hunger. But this number leaves out those suffering from vitamin and nutrient deficiencies and other forms of ma...

It is a nice political slogan that the nation should prefer eating grass to begging for foreign assistance. But who will eat grass? Not the leaders, at least, who are raising this slogan. They have the most luxurious lifestyle and scores of gun-toting body guards to protect them. By Hussain H. Zaidi THE recently enacted Enhanced Partnership with Pakistan Act of 2009 of the United States (Kerry-Lugar law) has come in for adverse criticism from various quarters for allegedly being a blatant attempt to undermine the sovereignty of Pakistan and to create a rift between civilian and military institutions. The opponents of the Act have called upon the government to reject it, because, according to them, the conditions for US assistance thereunder are too stringent. The government, on its part, has defended the legislation as it promises increased economic and military assistance to Pakistan at a time when the country is in dire need of foreign capital inflows. The government had also launche...

Friends are requested to share views on below analysis with reference to Pakistan . Thanks WESTERN DEMOCRACY! RIGHT PILL AT WRONG TIME? If we look upon countries trying to advance which are generally called as ‘developing countries’, specially South Asian developing countries, we will find that since inception of these countries nothing at large has been improved. Big percentage of their population lives below poverty line. Food, drinking water, health, education, housing, nothing is adequately available to common people. Since decades we are hearing that democracy is the only solution to these problems, uninterrupted democratic process will drain out dishonest politicians and socio-economic condition of common man will improve. All our thinkers, intellectuals and scholars have fed this in our minds since our childhood. Some of developing countries have had continuous democracy in their history while some also had military interventions in between. One thing amon...