The major factor fueling corruption is that public servants dread their life after retirement. Remaining honest and depending on their meagre savings and pension means they cannot maintain the same lifestyle they had been leading. Given today’s prices and rents, they are not wrong, their abiding fear of not having a roof over their head…
Dear Readers, One of the most outstanding officers of the Pakistan, and certainly one of the bravest, Maj Gen (Retd) Naseerullah Khan Babar, SJ & Bar died in January 2011 after a prolonged illness. Some personalities are non-conformist but they always seem to make a positive difference, both in peace and war, to the Army…
The theme for the Annual Meeting 2011 of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in the beautiful ski resort of Davos-Klosters, “Shared Norms for the New Reality, very aptly mirrors the topmost concern of many leaders today. The erosion of common values is growing in a world that is increasingly becoming more complex and interconnected as…
More often than not Western analysts routinely draw their perceptions from the gossip on the cocktail circuit, mostly conforming to that reported by Embassy staffers. From time to time someone will give views contrary to that which are fashionable, these are soon drowned out by contemptuous skepticism. Only when the streets come afire are the…
Blasphemy laws in the South Asian Sub-continent are nothing new. While there is no concept of Blasphemy in Hinduism, those in practice during the Moghul Era were repealed by British colonial rule to allow Christian missionaries to proselytize. However in 1860 the Commission chaired by Lord Macaulay made the law again part of the Indian…
Art Buchwald immortalized US President Richard Nixon’s famous “I am not a crook” phrase by making the title of his article the name of one of his books. Maybe one day President Asif Ali Zardari, who is not a hypocrite and thus never uses the word “corruption” anywhere at anytime in any of his speeches…
Travelling abroad one hears a constant refrain about Pakistan, when is the anticipated change going to take place, and how is it going to happen? Even non-Pakistanis interested in Pakistan felt that something had to give and soon. Talking to the “Geneva Asia Society” in Geneva, and then at a fund-raiser for David Miliband in…
Dear Readers, Pakistan has been dubbed a ‘Failed State’ or a ‘Failing State’ especially by foreign ‘experts’ and ‘think tanks’ who more often than not do not have good insight or understanding about the intricacies, the minutiae of what makes our politics and the people of this nation tick. Pakistan faces severe challenges, but no…
Due credit must be given to US Vice-President Joseph Biden, as a US Senator he was the first high-ranking US functionary to recognise the rank injustice done to Pakistan over the years. US decision-makers, led by Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, were unanimous in recognising Pakistan’s crucial role as the centre of gravity to resolve…
The US Strategic Dialogue is taking place only because everyone and his uncle knows that the US interest in Pakistan is mainly because of their own major problems in Afghanistan. Pakistan is central to any solution in the long suffering country, the US recognises that that Pakistan’s stability and well being is vital for peace…
