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1 Tough times: A Pakistani economist claims that 80% of Pakistani families are spending roughly 80% of their incomes on food. Reuters
Tilak Devasher
Member, National Security Advisory Board
Earlier this month, while responding to people’s telephone calls, Imran Khan claimed, inter alia, that Pakistan’s major economic indicators were moving in a positive direction and painted a rosy picture of the country. What overshadowed his comments were, of course, the highly misogynist comments blaming women for getting raped. The reality of Pakistan and Imran Khan’s report card so far are, however, quite different as a series of recently released reports indicate.
Daily Times
April 20, 2021
US President Joe Biden has belatedly invited Pakistan to participate in the much-touted virtual summit on global climate change that is scheduled for later this week. Some 40 world leaders had already secured their place at the table. Those from South Asia included India, Bangladesh and Bhutan. Pakistan was conspicuous by its absence. Prime Minister Imran Khan tweeted his disapproval, noting that his government’s environmental. policies are driven by sustainability and the commitment to future generations.
To be sure, this was more than mere oversight. After all, Pakistan’s “Ten Billion Tree Tsunami” initiative, launched back in September 2018, had been well received around the world. The initiative in Phase-I is a four-year (2019- 2023) project implemented across Pakistan by the Ministry of Climate Change in partnership with provincial forest and wildlife departments; at a total cost of Rs125 billon. Yet that was seemingly not sufficient to win
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Russia-Pakistan relations: embracing the bear
The Russian amity offering a “blank cheque”, and geo-economic cooperation are unprecedented
The writer is a retired major general and has an interest in International Relations and Political Sociology. He can be reached at [email protected] and tweets @20 Inam
“Let’s bury the past,” were the words of my counterpart in Moscow at the Ministry of Defence, where I was heading a tri-service military delegation some years ago. We were in Moscow coinciding with the biennial Spasskaya Tower Military Music Festival, where our military band was invited for the first time. The crowd was ecstatic to the tune of “Chandni ratein”, especially when it played for the general public outside the festival venue at Red Square and at the grounds of the sprawling Moscow university. Moscow had billboards welcoming us. The amity was surprising and unusual.
Pakistan today faces the geopolitical challenge of balancing between the US and China and choosing between Turkey and the Arab world, besides suffering from internal fault lines like the Pashtun, Baloch, and Sindhi movements amidst a highly radicalised society.
To discuss on the future of Pakistan and its impact on geopolitical dynamics, Usanas Foundation and Vivekananda International Foundation (VIF) jointly organised an in-house webinar on “Pakistan’s Future: Geopolitical Dilemmas, Economic Woes and Troubling Fault Lines” by bringing together prominent experts on Pakistan from India as well as the world.
The speakers in the event were Deputy Director of Asia Program at Woodrow Wilson Centre, Michael Kugelman; Former Bureau Chief of Reuters and Pakistan expert, Myra MacDonald; geopolitical expert Sushant Sareen; Member of the National Security Advisory Board and VIF consultant, Tilak Devasher; and the Director of Vivekananda International Foundation, Arvind Gupta.