The incursion said to have been launched by militants from across the Afghan border into Bajaur Agency on Thursday is the third of its kind in as many months, all three carried out by fairly large packs fully equipped with sophisticated weapons and clad in military uniforms. They were of course pushed back by the [...]
There are a host of factors responsible for a dismally low tax-to-GDP ratio in Pakistan. One of them is of course a very high incidence of tax evasion in the country which, like termites, is eating away the vitals of our economy. The disease is now so serious that the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) [...]
Our relationship with America gains a new level of complexity almost every day. The spokesman for the US State Department said at a press briefing on Tuesday that the aid America gives to Pakistan is in the national interest of both countries. He also said that there was no evidence of any link between our [...]
Government-run institutions such as NDFC, ICP, PICIC and now the IDBP had to be wound up on account of piled-up losses. But, no one analysed the reasons behind the closure of these bankrupt institutions. The most touted reasons, however, were the stories of their misuse by the political players at the helm. Nor did we [...]
President Hamid Karzai and Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani chaired the first meeting of this joint commission. Both are on the same page with a view to opening up appropriate channels of communication with the Taliban, drawing up a political road map and settling a conflict which has claimed thousands of civilian lives on both [...]
President Karzai’s two-day visit to us was a multilayered affair and may be the beginnings of what geopoliticians are fond of calling a ‘road map’. Pakistan and Afghanistan are going to be neighbours as long as both are nation-states. The two countries have ethnicities and languages that overlap their borders and have suffered the serial [...]
Tax mobilisation efforts in the country have been hampered by a variety of factors including the reluctance or incapacity of the provincial governments to raise resources from those sectors which strictly fall in their domain. In order to partly address this problem, the Prime Minister in a recent meeting of the Council of Common Interest [...]
The government machinery in Pakistan is notorious for overlapping of functions and assuming or shifting of responsibilities from one government department to another, causing a lot of frustration to those who have to deal with them for some reason. While the horizontal overlapping was a bitter reality of the old order, the problem could become [...]
Prime Minister Gilani may not have delivered on most of his pledges but the one he made to the people of Balochistan during his recent visit is quite easy to keep. He said he would be visiting Quetta every month to oversee implementation of each and every project initiated under the Aghaz-e-Haqooq-e-Balochistan package. After all [...]
After successive increases over the last few months, the government on 31st May decided to reduce petroleum products’ prices by up to Rs 5.05 per litre in line with the reduction in global oil prices with effect from 1st June 2011. The price of petrol was lowered by Rs 1.70 to Rs 86.71 per litre, [...]
