One hears that the government is currently pondering the amount of extra time General Kayani should be given as head of the army. Should it be one, two or three years?
If life were fair, the prime minister, a gaddi-nashin, would have been making a living interceding with God on behalf of devotees. Nevertheless, Mr Gilani will need his special nexus with God to get the government out of the deep hole in which it finds itself as the seemingly inevitable clash with the judiciary draws nearer. To be fair to Mr Gilani, he would prefer not to be a part of the fracas, it being entirely a matter concerning Mr Zardari, but he has no option. As he said some time ago, “We swim or sink together.”

The Swiss cases are not the only cause of friction between the government and the judiciary. If, or rather, when the Supreme Court finds out about the amount of commission, the extent of advance payment and other details of the rental power projects (RPPs), of which it has taken suo motu ....... Read more

Dialogue matters: edit in The Daily times, May 13
The recent SAARC Summit in Thimphu, Bhutan, promised many things aimed at promoting regional harmony and cooperation but the most promising development was a breaking of the ice between India and Pakistan on the sidelines. In continuation of that effort –as agreed to at the summit — the foreign ministers of both countries, Shah Mehmood Qureshi and S M Krishna, will be meeting for extended talks on July 15 this year in Islamabad to discuss the various issues that have remained contentious so far.

However, in the wake of the Mumbai attack’s subsequent conclusion — Kasab’s conviction — it is the issue of terrorism that will obtain top billing. Both countries, although extremely weary of this scourge, have nevertheless, time and again, locked horns on it. The fact that the interior ministers of both countries, P Chidambaram and Rehman Malik, will be meeting in Islamabad on June 26th to set the tone ....... Read more

By Sanaullah Baloch, a former senator.
THE situation in Balochistan has reached its lowest ebb since the military operation that began in January 2005. The entire province is besieged: the provincial government has been abandoned while the centre is directing policies according to its will with the gun and the stick, terming this ‘development’ for the people’s betterment.

The establishment has itself opened up a war inside Balochistan on all fronts. This has resulted in increasing polarisation and radicalisation of Baloch society. Though socially and economically underdeveloped, Balochistan was largely a peaceful province before Musharraf’s aggressive policy of what can only be called ‘colonisation’. Regrettably today, Balochistan is marked with nationalist, sectarian, ethnic and racial violence, which has resulted in the killings of hundreds of civilians.

Islamabad’s half-hearted efforts have failed to calm the situation. However, the....... Read more

While the prime minister was having a meeting with provincial chief ministers to review the success of the energy conservation strategy, farmers in Balochistan observed a province-wide wheel-jam strike to protest electricity load shedding on the call of the Zamindar Action Committee. Extended power cuts are adversely affecting their crops. Agricultural productivity of the province is already low due to arid terrain and inadequate investment in development of this sector.

This protest is different from what we are accustomed to hearing from Balochistan — militancy, nationalist insurgency and, recently, target killings of non-Baloch people. This is something that cuts across the political and social spectrum, because it is a question of economic survival. In the widespread protests, all the main highways serving the province were shut down. While there has been an improvement in load shedding nationally, as the prime minister triumphantly observed, it seems that it is not equall....... Read more

It is high time for ever sleeping Pakistani nation to get over from their woebegone and scanty situation. Dawn of every morning is induced with another calamity in one shape or the other. These calamities are not at all natural or inevitable but they are the aftermaths of contemptible and deplorable policies of the government. These policies were not completely erroneous from the beginning rather many of them were commendable and laudable but the only element that made these policies futile and delusive was corruption. Corruption is the fundamental element in the fiasco of Pakistan’s social fabric.
All the three pillars of the government i.e legislature, executive and judiciary are victim of it, whole of the bureaucracy and military are part of it and most of the political ulema are emblem of it. There are innumerable incidents and events in which high level extortion of funds was exposed to all but no action was taken by any democratic or military government to eradicate the n....... Read more

They must be unprofessional or badly trained and poorly armed new entrants; otherwise the dacoits in Punjab form a formidable force. They carry sophisticated weapons, and should they run into the police, in the ensuing encounter, they don’t do badly.

That eight of them were bludgeoned to death, with stones and sticks, by the villagers somewhere in the district of Toba Tek Singh, on Sunday night, is unthinkable unless one believes they must have been extraordinarily down on their luck, or they were not dacoits at all. Comprehensively covered by the media, their story is both a narrative of the deteriorating law and order in the country and an affirmation of the fact that the public would prefer to deliver its own jungle-justice than to approach the police.

According to a news report, fearful of dacoits – two of the dacoits had reportedly surveyed the area of their operation a day before as cloth vendors – the villagers were keeping a night vigil. So, as s....... Read more

By Ahmad Fraz Khan in the Dawn, May 12

Lahore, May 11: The government of Punjab has accused the Indus River System Authority (Irsa) of “playing politics and damaging provincial harmony” and asked the federal government to “reorganise the authority for better provincial representation”.

Substantiating its allegations in a letter to the federal government sent on Monday, the province maintained that distribution of water during the month of April proved the biased behaviour of Irsa and its potential negative impact on provincial harmony.

During the month, the letter said, Irsa released 4 per cent less water to Punjab than its share, which the authority itself had determined, and it released 25 per cent more water to Sindh than its allotted share. The “injudicious distribution” resulted in 44 per cent water shortage in Punjab, with Sindh’s deficit being 31 per cent.

According to the Water Accord of 1991, the letter said, Irsa shou....... Read more

The writer works for Geo TV

It was widely publicised by our interior minister, the US administration and various respectable news outlets that Hakeemullah Mehsud was killed in a US drone attack in South Waziristan. However, this scribe and two other journalists, Mushtaq Yusufzai and Samiullah Dawar, had time and again stated that the TTP leader was not dead (Jang, March 9). Independent sources have now confirmed that the TTP leader is very much alive. This recent development is an indication that many other claims by the US and Pakistani official sources regarding terrorism may be wishful thinking.

The success of the Swat and South Waziristan operations pushed the extremists out of the two areas. Consequently, extremists once holed up in the operation-hit areas slipped into the settled districts of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and big cities like Karachi and Lahore. The extremists’ dream to establish their writ in Punjab and Karachi will not come true, but they h....... Read more

The proceedings at the Deobandi ulema’s recent conference in Lahore must be studied less for its expected refusal to condemn suicide bombings and more for the insight it gives into the psyche of a large section of our powerful ulema community.

Of equal significance are the fissures that came to the fore between hardliners and harder-liners. Evidently, the latter carried the day.

It was gratifying that at least some ulema — among them Maulana Samiul Haq — were cognisant of the negative impact which acts of terrorism were having not on the nation but on the Deobandi image.

While the delegates did indeed plead with the militants to adopt peaceful and democratic means for the establishment of Sharia in Pakistan, a majority of the ulema, according to Nasir Jamal’s reportage (Dawn, May 2), said terrorism would continue to haunt Pakistan as long as “factors and causes” responsible for it continued. What was mind-boggling, however, was the principle some ulema ....... Read more

LAHORE: The water level of a landslide-triggered lake in Hunza is threateningly on the rise, with another village facing risks of a flood, a private TV channel reported on Sunday.
The artificial lake formed out of a landslide, has not only destroyed the Atta Abad village, but also completely covered the villages of Gojal, Aieenabad and Shashkat. The threatening water level may inundate Gulmit, the headquarters of Gojal tehsil, as its low-lying areas are already under water, the channel reported.
The residents of Atta Abad were given a May 15 deadline to vacate the area after experts voiced their concerns that the Atta Abad Lake dam may breach soon. Separately, residents of Hunza district are facing severe food shortages due to a shortage of fuel.
Goods laden trucks have been unable to cross the Chinar Bagh Bridge, due to which fuel cannot be delivered to boats, leaving them stranded. http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2010\05\10\story_10-5-2010_pg1_3