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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...

MUNIR AKRAM   —  PUBLISHED on Oct 18 2015 PRIME Minister Nawaz Sharif will be in Washington next week for a ‘working visit’. Normally, this would be a good opportunity for him to secure official and private-sector American cooperation to accelerate Pakistan’s economic development. With improved security and a relatively stable macro-economic environment, Pakistan is well placed today to promote rapid, investment-led growth. Unfortunately, after recovering from the crisis created by America’s ‘kinetic’ actions in 2011 (Raymond Davis, the Abbottabad incursion and the Salala attack), the Pakistan-US relationship appears to be headed for another showdown. The first ominous signs emerged during US National Security Adviser, Susan Rice’s visit to Islamabad several weeks ago, during which threats of halting reimbursements for Pakistani counterterrorism operations were held out unless Islamabad acted more forcefully against the Haqqani network. Simultaneously, proposa...

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...