One of the great tragedies to befall this country was the assassination of Punjab Governor Salman Taseer by Mumtaz Qadri in Islamabad on January 4, 2011, bringing into sharp focus one of the important aspects of security that does not get the attention it should, fidelity. A policeman in the security detail provided to Taseer…
Macro-security being the business of the State, micro-security remains the domain of the individuals or organizations. With a citizen requiring the safety and security of his life and that of his family, property and business, etc and the State increasingly engaged in macro-security because of terrorism, private security business has become as an industry in…
A decade or so ago a joint venture foreign (JV) security company was using non-armoured vehicles (known as “soft” vehicles) to transport cash alongwith their armoured vans. Cash cannot be transported in quantity except in armoured vehicles, it is against the law but it costs 4-5 times more to operate an armoured vehicle over a…
Good governance in any society requires the safety and well-being of its citizens, peace and harmony cannot be maintained in isolation by the law enforcement agencies (LEAs) alone. Personal security remains the responsibility of the individual, corporate body, establishment, etc in any country of the world. While private security has given significant support to the…
The primary responsibility of the State being to provide overall security for the life and property of its citizens, it is incumbent upon private individuals, property owners and businesses to look beyond the state to private security firms for their own protection. History records “guns for hire”, in effect mercenaries, providing security to the feudal…
ContextIn an endeavor to understand the emerging geopolitical realities, PoliTact partners with leading thought centers to understand the longitudinal multi-faceted tangents of a particular theme. One such topic is the political, security, and economic interconnections between South Asia and the Gulf States, and one of the subsets, Pakistan and Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). This relationship…
“Grand Delusion” by Steven Simon provides a timely analysis of the dynamics that shaped American foreign policy in the post-Cold War era in the Middle East. The major theme of “Grand Delusion” revolves around the notion that American policymakers suffered from a persistent delusion that military force alone can bring about sustainable change and security…
Pakistan has availed International Monetary Fund (IMF) loans on 22 occasions since 1950 in its very short history as an independent nation. The first IMF Agreement came in 1958 when Pakistan was struggling with its balance of payments; its most recent was in 2019 when economic conditions had so worsened that the Imran Khan government…
In the ongoing academic debates on nuclear weapons and their impacts on the global world politics, different writers have established their viewpoints on the presence of nuclear weapons in the international system. The possession of nuclear weapons by major powers and the creation of an international non-proliferation regime are the factors which compelled the leading…
Since the discovery of oil in the second half of the 19th century in the US, the political power of oil has been on ample display. It has been the most critical dimension in shaping international, domestic and social life. Subsequent detection of oil reserves in Russia, Latin America and Middle East meant that the…
