2018

By: Asad Hussain Grey must not convert into black! Pakistan has been included in its grey list by the Financial Action Task Force for not stopping the ‘financing of terrorism’. Despite hectic diplomatic efforts to avoid the preordained fate, the decision was taken on June 28 at the plenary session of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) in Paris, France, …

The Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) failed to achieve the tax revenue target for the fiscal year 2017-18. According to the data released by the FBR on 9 July 2018, the provisional ax collection stood at Rs. 3,751 billion, which is Rs. 184 billion less than the revised tax revenue target of Rs. 3,935 billion. The original tax revenue target …

By: Abdul Rasool Syed Where character does not matter “How do we know who to chose?” This was a question posed to a great Greek philosopher and a political sage Plato. He answered that rulers should be chosen according to their character – their honesty, reliability, probity, disinterestedness, sense of justice and moral uprightness. “The community suffers nothing very terrible …

By: Elenoire Laudieri The best way forward to tackle Afghanistan’s never-ending plight Until the Soviet invasion in 1979, Afghanistan was little known outside Asia. In the West, it mainly attracted the interest of scholars of history and archaeologists as a landlocked country roughly coinciding with the ancient region of Central Asia called Bactria, which was invaded by Alexander the Great …

How to deal with our myriad challenges? A little more than a year ago, while addressing at the opening ceremony of the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation, Chinese President Xi Jinping termed Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as the ‘Project of the Century’.  “Over 2,000 years ago,” observed President Xi, in an attempt to provide blueprints for the …

Why is Pakistan running dry and how to manage the situation? Pakistan is approaching the scarcity threshold for water. What is even more disturbing is that groundwater supplies — the last resort of water supply — are being rapidly depleted.  And worst of all is that the authorities have given no indication that they plan to do anything about any …

We’ve all benefitted from globalization, in many ways, but it also is a double-edged sword, because people seem to have lost their identity, and a feeling of belonging. An Introduction Madeleine Albright is a Czech-born American public official who has the honour of being the first woman to hold the cabinet post of US Secretary of State (1997–2001). She has …

By: António Guterres  Terrorism is a persistent and evolving global menace. No country is immune. Social media, encrypted communications and the dark web are being used to spread propaganda, radicalize new recruits and plan atrocities. The threat ranges from the crude tactics of lone actors to sophisticated coordinated attacks and the horrific prospect of terrorists using chemical, biological or radioactive …

In Donald Trump’s parallel universe On July 11-12, the leaders of 29 member states of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) met for a summit in Brussels, the capital of Belgium. During the plenary session of the summit, President Donald Trump suddenly called on fellow alliance members to spend 4 percent of GDP on defence, rather than the agreed-upon 2 percent. …

By: Anatol Lieven  The Duty of Afghanistan’s Region In the short term, the war in Afghanistan will be chiefly not a military struggle but a test of American political stamina and of the capacity of the Afghan elites to maintain a minimally consensual state in Kabul. In the long term, it will be chiefly a test of the regional great …