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National institute of Management (NIM) Quetta Jahangir’s World Times (JWT): You had served in both federal and provincial domains of bureaucracy, please tell us in the light of your experience what sort of reforms we need today in our bureaucratic setup? Mehfooz Ali Khan (MAK): Well, we, basically, don’t have a proper system of human resource development in place at …

There is a reason to be cautious. Both sides in the Syrian civil war have committed atrocities and both sides have misrepresented photos and falsified reports. But the burden appears to be on the government’s side. Médecins Sans Frontiers (MSF), which is above partisanship as well as devoted to saving lives, has reported that the hospitals, it supports in Damascus, have treated …

The United Nations was founded with the stated aim of maintaining peace among nations, but the reality is that not only has it consistently failed to thwart international conflicts, but it has also played no small part in causing them. One instructive case study was its role in its early years of helping to create the still-unresolved Israel-Palestine conflict. According …

It was not long ago when political pundits predicted a ‘new beginning’ of relationship between the US and Russia in the wake of efforts towards rapprochement. The predictions were based on interaction between the leaders of the two countries with reference to New Start Treaty. US President Barack Obama was believed to have been pursuing a policy of conciliation towards …

In the recent past, it was assumed that the age-old question of the very existence of international law has been fully settled; however, the current Syrian crisis has shaken the foundations of this assumption. The question now being posed is whether the international law is part of world order or the world order is part of the international law. The …

The G-20 Summit concluded on Sep 6 with little to show for its efforts. Leaders from over twenty countries met in St. Petersburg (Russia) for the annual meeting of the group, which includes in its membership the twenty largest economies of the world, a diverse group of countries, with little in common politically or economically. The resounding failure of the …

The Israeli-Palestinian peace talks proceed within a framework of assumptions that merit careful thought. One prevailing assumption is that there are two options: either a two-state settlement will be reached, or there will be a “shift to a nearly inevitable outcome of the one remaining reality — a state ‘from the sea to the river’,” an outcome posing “an immediate …

Unlike the determined and united response to Qaddafi in 2011 (as a result, among other things, of his attempts to physically harm Arab leaders), which included the use of force on the part of Qatar and the UAE, the Arab countries so far have not taken a firm stand, and have certainly not united against Syria. The Arab world remains …

Pakistan is tangled in the web of foreign factors and domestic conflicts. The US and its Western allies, regional countries, judiciary, media, executive, religious leadership and feudal lords or industrialists, are the stakeholders of power here. Unless a contender appeases these stakeholders, it cannot get the power. A realistic analysis of the last three decades reflects that Muslim leaders were …

From outside China, the Bo Xilai trial looks like the Chinese news event of the year, one of the preoccupations of Western media, along with corporate corruption and the clampdown on American and European companies. Yet these issues are no more than sideshows to the most important economic event of recent times; the unveiling and ratification of a major programme …