.

  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...