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  Syed Talat Hussain -  Monday, December 07, 2015   The writer is former executive editor of The News and a senior journalist with Geo TV. Confident yet insecure. Well-established yet floundering. Unchallenged yet hobbled. In control yet struggling. The marvellous contradictions of the Sharifs are both amusing and worrying. Amusing because they yield comical sights like federal ministers’ childish in-fights over petty personal matters; worrying because the existential challenges confronting Pakistan require the federal and Punjab governments to inject immediate sense and long-term purpose into its functioning rather than act like a lost souls in lost woods protected merely by good luck and happy accidents. The Sharifs’ contradictions are not products of structural issues: a weak majority, a coup-plotting army, a motivated and ambitious judiciary, a feisty opposition with capacity to turn the tables. There is no economic meltdown looming large on the hori...

By   Baqir Sajjad Syed Updated   a day ago PM Nawaz Sharif is faced with the difficult choice of picking a new ISI chief — AFP photo/ File ISLAMABAD: Barely in his second year in office, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif is faced with the difficult choice of picking a new Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) chief — a decision that could have far-reaching consequences for the already strained civil-military relations. Director General of ISI Lt Gen Zaheerul Islam, who was appointed as the spy chief in March 2012, is set to retire on Oct 1. And for many reasons, the sit-ins and the floods have not stopped politicians, journalists and analysts from speculating on who will replace Gen Islam in this key post. Know more:  New ISI chief to be named soon: report An extension for Gen Islam is highly unlikely; while the government is not too keen on the idea. It is also evident that the military is in no mood to ask for it. No wonder then that speculation i...

Forget the chase. Cut to the crap. Unable to deliver, Nawaz Sharif has diverted the national conversation from Pakistan’s terminal problems to trying Gen. Pervez Musharraf for alleged ‘high treason’ under Article 6 of the constitution. In so doing, has Nawaz Sharif unwittingly put himself in the line of fire yet again? Bad habits die hard. But hang on. Could it be that the army chief Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani (and the army by extension) is the prime target because Musharraf is to be tried only for the November 3, 2007 emergency: the Proclamation of Emergency includes him and others whom Musharraf “consulted”. Could it be that Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry is the second target if legitimizing the October 12, 1999 countercoup comes into the fray, which it will have to? So as ‘aiders and abettors’, Kayani better keep his gun holstered and the chief justice behave. How simplistically obvious can you get? The country’s attention has been diverted, but for how long? As our terminal p...