If there is democracy and people are the most important factor in a democracy then there is something seriously wrong.

There is a news story in Pakistan Today (11.1.12) about the travails of an ex soldier. This unfortunate man made the mistake of helping the police in thwarting a bomb attack on a shrine. In retaliation his son was kidnapped and delivered dead in a gunny bag when no one helped him. Then his other son was kidnapped and given such strong drugs that he died of blood cancer. No one helped him. Now his teenage daughter has been kidnapped since May 2011 and once again no law enforcing or investigative agency is willing to help him. The kidnappers have demanded a huge ransom. The family has hit rock bottom and dead end.

A few days ago a stampede after a musical concert caused the death of three young girls. The concert venue was over crowded with complete disregard for safety. Who is responsible for this tragedy?

Power outages and gas shut downs are causing unimaginable suffering to the common man. No one has an answer. Long lines of cars wait patiently for CNG at gas stations. Businesses are shutting down. Industry is closed. Unemployment is rampant. Trains run erratically if at all and the service is abominable. The national airline is a laughing stock. Poverty stalks the land. No one has any pride left-not in their work, not in themselves and not in the country.

The masses watch helplessly as trivia like the ‘memo’ and NRO take up all the time of the institutions that should be giving them governance, security and justice. No one watches the useless debates on TV—everyone is hooked on the plays even if their themes are depressing. Anything to escape reality.

Drone attacks have restarted with this years first one on January 10th– as have bomb blasts. The horrifying details of 10 soldiers mutilated, beheaded and thrown callously in a ravine did not even make it to the headlines. Bomb blasts are back with 30 killed in Jamrud in just one attack and several injured in other attacks. Surely these events are more important than the shenanigans of those jockeying for power or those trying to survive.

Democracy without the rule of law is chaos. The people matter more than anything else. The reality on the street cannot be ignored any longer. Its time to focus on real democracy and that means addressing the grievances of the people-the sooner this happens the better. The Arab Spring came when the people were driven to the street and were fed up of being ignored.

Recently, Imran Khan’s Q&A with students in Karachi was telecast in To the point on the Express channel. There were some good questions and some not-so-well-left dodges. To two questions in particular, on refusing to be critical of MQM and on articulating a succession plan for PTI, Mr Khan avoided any direct response. In the case of the latter, in fact, he digressed into the sher and geedar metaphor that he is so fond of. Mr Khan has begun to avoid assigning blame to the MQM in Karachi. He always refrained from blaming the Taliban and militant groups for the deaths of countless Pakistanis. And in spite of his apology to the Baloch in his Karachi rally, he has also shied away from questioning the role of the security agencies in violating the rights of the Baloch.

I find it curious that the PTI has been in existence for 15 years and consistently it has insisted that, unlike other parties, it draws on the expertise of professionals to formulate policy. Yet when pressed for policy prescriptions, Mr Khan gives only brief populist responses, followed by the refrain that think-tanks are working on it. If the full policy has not been unveiled in the last 15 years, what will change in the next year or so to make this possible?

Mr Khan appears sure of one thing. There is to be one system of education across Pakistan. But he has never clearly articulated which system this will be. Will the medium of instruction be Urdu or English? It would be unwise to do away with English and opt for Urdu as not only is professional education primarily available in English, but English is also rapidly becoming the lingua franca of our world. Even countries like Germany, that have advanced education available in their native tongue and are particularly renowned for their engineering, are now aggressively making English classes more readily available to their population. This would leave us with the conclusion that if we are to have one system, then the medium of instruction in our schools should be English.

There is a problem with this however. How will we ensure English-speaking teachers in rural areas far removed from the cities? Often, it is difficult to find teachers in those areas who are fluent in Urdu as Urdu is only the native tongue of a fraction of our population. Nevertheless, it is still far more possible to hire teachers who are competent in Urdu than in English. A few years ago, I visited some government schools in Sheikhupura, just an hour outside Lahore. The schools were being resuscitated by a joint collaboration between the NGOs ‘DIL’ and ‘CARE’.

Not only do we have an Urdu/English divide but we also have a Matric/GCSE divide. It will be next to impossible to find teachers for every district in Pakistan that could teach GCSE-level English and equally impossible to deny those who can afford this elite education for their children. Hence the divide will remain. Mr Khan would be wise therefore to talk about the uplift of the current education system but he is hoodwinking the people if he claims he can enforce one system of education in Pakistan.

Add to this the complication of the growing chain of madrassas which have introduced yet another system and enhanced divides among our population. Will it be possible for Mr Khan to convince the proponents of the madrassa system to dispense with their curriculum and priorities and follow those of the state? What will he do if they refuse?

Finally, Mr Khan also stated that he will double the education budget if he comes to power. This is great news but doubling the education budget means cutting down on something else as there are only so many pieces of the pie. Given that we have one of the lowest allocations to education in the world and have one of the highest allocations to defence as a percentage of our budget, it would make sense if the shortfall came out of the defence allocation. But does he have a green light from the establishment that seems close to him to go ahead with this very welcome change? If not, what prescription does he have to double the education budget? Surely, taxes must be raised on the rich and more people added to the tax net, but the effects of that will take a few years to materialise. It would be good for PTI to think through these tough questions and understand that if they make very tall claims, it will be very difficult to follow through on them.

Even the police are driving Porsches.

Chinese officials love their cars – big, fancy, expensive cars. A chocolate-colored Bentley worth $560,000 is cruising the streets of Beijing with license plates indicating it is registered to Zhongnanhai, the Communist Party headquarters. The armed police, who handle riots and crowd control, have the same model of Bentley in blue.

BMW 5 Series police cars are shown off at a delivery in Shanghai, China, in March 2010, in time for use during the World Expo.

And just in case it needs to go racing off to war, the Chinese army has a black Maserati that sells in China for $330,000.

“Corruption on wheels is an accurate description of this problem,” said Wang Yukai, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Governance in Beijing, who has been advocating restrictions on officials’ cars for years.

A remnant of a decades-old party perks system, the luxe wheels are a conspicuous target of growing public outrage over the privileges of the elite.

Armed with cellphone cameras, angry Chinese have started posting photographs of the expensive government cars – identifiable by their license plates – on a microblog site called Anti-Official Cars Extravagance that was set up in August. (Government censors shut down an earlier version of the same site.)

The Chinese government doesn’t release figures, but automobile industry analysts here say that spending for cars tops $15 billion annually, while some scholars believe the figure is many times that amount.

Even at more conservative estimates, the figure is greater than that allocated for low-income housing or for scientific research and development.

Not to speak of the funding for school buses.

Anger over fancy government cars has been piqued by a spate of tragic accidents in recent months involving overloaded school buses. In the worst of them, 21 kindergartners were killed in Gansu province in November in a van that was designed for nine passengers but was carrying 62 children.

“Every time I see a school bus accident and think about the great many government Audi A6s on the street, I shake my head and sigh,” one microblogger who uses the name Minxingdie wrote after the accident.

The Audi A6 is the semiofficial car of the Chinese Communist Party; the German automaker’s parent, Volkswagen, was an early entry in the 1980s into the Chinese market. According to industry analysts, there are more than 100,000 A6s in China, about 20% of them owned by the government. Each car costs $50,000 to $100,000, depending on engine size.

For the cops, luxury SUVs are all the rage. In the southern city of Guangzhou, police were photographed driving a Mercedes-Benz SUV, while those in the northeastern province of Jilin have another deluxe SUV, the Porsche Cayenne.

“No wonder there’s no money left for school buses!” remarked one contributor to the car-outrage website. The commentators were particularly scathing about the expensive cars with military plates. “Why does the military need sports cars? Will it help them run faster when there’s a war?”

Photographs also showed cars with government, police and military plates clearly being used on personal business: dropping off children at school, at a shopping mall, on a family vacation.

“You can’t get evidence about other kinds of corruption, such as people accepting envelopes of cash, but this you easily see for yourself,” explained the Guangzhou-based activist who started the website in response to emailed questions. He did not wish to be identified.

The high spending on cars, said Ren Jianmin, a professor at Beijing’s Tsinghua University, is the result of a system set up by the Communist Party in the 1940s to allocate perks to ranking members.

“The system dictates that once an official reaches a certain level, he must be equipped with certain things, such as cars and, in the past, houses,” Ren said. “This system led to a huge number of government cars. “

Although in theory a government car is for official business, most bureaucrats treat the car as their own to do with as they wish. Regulations that limit the use of the car to working hours are widely disregarded.

“The Chinese officials don’t distinguish between business and personal use,” Ren said.

In addition, use of the car engenders more opportunities for corruption. Once they have a car, officials will hire a chauffeur and run up large bills for gasoline and so-called repairs.

“Somebody could go to the repair shop and buy a TV for himself and get reimbursed from the government” for repairs, Ren said. “Many pay little, but they get reimbursed a lot. There are a lot of secrets in the receipts.”

Nervous about heightened sensitivity to corruption, the government is trying to rein in the most extravagant cars. New regulations being drafted this year are supposed to limit the base price of cars to $11,000 for most bureaucrats, and restrict the engine size of government cars and the ranks of those entitled to a private vehicle and driver.

“Below the rank of minister or deputy minister, they won’t be entitled to an exclusive car and will have to use a car from the fleet,” said Zhang Yu, managing director of Automotive Foresight, a Shanghai industry consulting firm.

But this isn’t the first initiative to limit government car purchases.

In 2004, municipal governments in the cities of Chengdu, Nanjing and Hangzhou sold off many of their official cars, telling bureaucrats that they could apply for reimbursements for rentals when needed. Nevertheless, spending on government cars has enjoyed double-digit growth since then.

“They have been trying to tackle this problem since the 1980s, but it never goes away,” said Wang, of the Academy of Governance.

Government officials have proved ingenious, however, at getting around the regulations. One trick is to change the metal emblems on the cars to make them look cheaper than they actually are.

“Whenever a new regulation comes out, we get customers from the government,” said Han Chao, who runs a small storefront shop selling Audi parts in a market in the south of Beijing.

Recently, he said, he sold 100 emblems for the Audi A6 2.0L (the smallest engine for the popular model) to officials from the city of Zhangbei, northwest of Beijing, so they could disguise the fact that their engines were larger than permitted.

“Most people want to buy logos to upgrade so they can save face,” Han said. “Only the government people buy emblems to downgrade the cars.”

The emblems, Han noted, cost 20 yuan each, about $3. But the officials, he said, demanded receipts saying they’d paid 120 yuan.

The Drug Enforcement Cell of Pakistan Customs claimed to have seized 17 kilograms of fine quality heroin concealed in a garment consignment booked for Nigeria and arrested two men.

According to a Customs press release, staff posted at the Export Cargo Complex, air freight unit, Jinnah International Airport, Karachi, acting on a tip-off, intercepted a consignment comprising 80 cartons, all containing bulk quantity of T-shirts being exported to a consignee in Lagos (Nigeria) by a Karachi-based exporter, Seven ‘M’ Corporation.

A detailed examination of the consignment led to the recovery of 17 kilos of fine quality heroin powder that was packed in 30 polythene packets wrapped in T-shirts in two of the 80 cartons, the press statement added.

Consequent upon the recovery and seizure of contraband narcotics, two suspects – Mehmood Ahmad and Ashraf Abbas – representing the clearing agents and the exporter, respectively, were arrested and a case under the Control of Narcotics Substances Act, 1997 was registered against them.

Earlier this month, the DEC staff had apprehended a Pakistani couple for smuggling 800 grams of heroin.

With the fall of Muammar Gaddafi’s 41-year dictatorship in Libya, the year of Arab revolutions has taken a game-changing turn, not just for the peoples of the region seeking systematic and large-scale political change – but for geopolitics at a global level. As Libya now joins Egypt and Tunsia helping their fellow sisters Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, Jordan and Palestine overthrow their dictators.

Regardless of the outcome of the Libyan Revolution, their are still important aspects and factors that need to be considered and are questionable.
Will their be a New Libya?

Will the Libyans finally achieve what they longed for?
Will the Western World involve itself and control Libya?
And Are the deaths of many really worth it?

It is time for the Libyan people to celebrate the end of a four-decade dictatorship. Once they sober up from the jubilations of their well-deserved victory, however, they will discover this is only the beginning.

Gaddafi has undermined, marginalised or obliterated many of the state institutions, including the military, and destroyed the political parties – indeed, political life in the country. There is much to restore and more to build from scratch. Security, reconstruction and political transition are only a few of the challenges they will face sooner rather than later. More importantly, they will need to manage expectations of those who have given their all for liberty, freedom and prosperity.

And judging from what we have seen over the past 10 or so months, there is much to celebrate in terms of building a steering council and creating locally based revolutionary groups from the bottom up that have been well coordinated and largely disciplined. Having said that, there is no need for alarm. Not yet any way. It’s easy, even clichéd, to be pessimistic, even negative, about the post-revolutionary challenge. What is needed is optimism anchored in reality.Western leaders need to wipe that smug look from their faces and make sure not to gloat about doing the Arabs any favours.

Western powers have much to make up for: They inserted themselves in the Libyan revolution after Gaddafi made genocidal threats against his people, but their interference was not necessarily motivated by humanitarian ends, rather more of the same geopolitics that led to befriending Gaddafi, Ben Ali and Mubarak in the first place.I believe the western world, especially America do not really care about the people, they care about the oil. Once they get their hands on Libyan oil. The rest is history. Certainly the NATO aerial bombardment did help, but this was a revolutionaries’ victory par excellence. The battle was won first and foremost in the hearts of the Libyans, just as with the Egyptians and Tunisians before them.

The World had set their eyes on the Libyans, and watched how they took city by city finally advancing into Tripoli and making History, that had shocked the world. Although I saw it coming. In my opinion Gaddafi was hopeless, even from the beginning. Once the Rebels had set their eyes on over throwing their dictator, I knew it would happen. Arresting three of Gaddafi’s sons as Libyan citizens broke into Gaddafi’s home and taking his possessions. A man was seen wearing Gaddafi’s necklace as others were climbing on buildings waving the Libyan Flag all over Libya. A rich patriotic them running through the whole country, and the Arab World.

As the Libyan Rebels had taken over Tripoli, the Yemenis were in celebration, waving the Libyan Flag and chanting slogans “Yes Libya, you have done it” in Arabic, and Libyans chanting slogans such as “Syria we will help you” and “Bashar your next”

The Arab Revolutions is slowly bringing the Arabs together. And when the Arabs stand together, nothing can stop them. The Western World still exists in countries such as Saudi Arabia & Bahrain, but only time will tell, and the outcome, is pretty evident.

Hackers targeted Stratfor, a global intelligence company, but it was unclear Sunday evening whether the breach and apparent release of credit card information was the work of the group Anonymous.

In a posting on the website Pastebin, hackers said they released Stratfor subscriber data, including information on 4,000 credit cards as well as the company’s “private client” list. The posting cited AntiSec, a Web-based collaboration with the activist hacking groups Anonymous and LulzSec.

U.S.-based Stratfor, which provides independent analysis of international affairs and security threats, sent an e-mail to subscribers on Sunday:

“On December 24th an unauthorized party disclosed personally identifiable information and related credit card data of some of our members. We have reason to believe that your personal and credit card data could have been included in the information that was illegally obtained and disclosed.”

But Stratfor also said the “private clients” disclosure was “merely a list of some of the members that have purchased our publications and does not comprise a list of individuals or entities that have a relationship with Stratfor beyond their purchase of our subscription-based publications.”

The security think tank provides intelligence reports to subscribers. A recent e-mail discussed political prospects for Iraq.

Group says it hacked 70 law enforcement sites last summer

A press release on the information-sharing website Pastebin, which said it was by Anonymous, said the group had nothing to do with the cyberattack on Stratfor.

“Stratfor is an open source intelligence agency, publishing daily reports on data collected from the open internet,” the purported posting by Anonymous said. “Hackers claiming to be Anonymous have distorted this truth in order to further their hidden agenda, and some Anons have taken the bait.”

“The leaked client list represents subscribers to a daily publication which is the primary service of Stratfor,” according to the writer. “Stratfor analysts are widely considered to be extremely unbiased. Anonymous does not attack media sources.”

Stratfor CEO George Friedman said the company is working closely with law enforcement.

“Stratfor’s relationship with its members and, in particular, the confidentiality of their subscriber information, are very important to Stratfor and me,” he wrote on the firm’s Facebook page.

“We have reason to believe that the names of our corporate subscribers have been posted on other web sites,” the Austin, Texas, company said. “We are diligently investigating the extent to which subscriber information may have been obtained.”

Asked about the hacking, Pentagon spokesman George Little on Sunday said, “Initial indications suggest that there has been no impact to the DoD (Department of Defense) grid.”

Stratfor’s website was not functioning Sunday evening. A banner read, “Site is currently undergoing maintenance. Please check back soon.”

Hackers in weekend online postings regarding the Stratfor situation mentioned Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, who served as an intelligence analyst in Iraq. He faces 22 charges in connection to the leak of nearly 750,000 U.S. military and State Department documents. Most of them ended up on the WikiLeaks website.

Hearing provides clues to possible direction of court-martial

“While the rich and powerful are enjoying themselves with all their bourgeois gifts and lavish meals, our comrade Bradley Manning is not having that great of a time in federal custody,” the hackers wrote in a Pastebin posting. “Instead of being heralded as a fighter for free information and government transparency, he is criminalized, marginalized, and incarcerated, threatened with life imprisonment.”

A violent 7.1-magnitude earthquake has struck Papua New Guinea, shaking buildings and prompting residents to run into the streets and causing panic in the highlands.

The quake, initially rated at 7.3, hit at a depth of 115 kilometres (71 miles) southwest of the coastal city of Lae and 223 kilometres from the capital Port Moresby, the US Geological Survey said.

Macklyn Timbun, who works as a receptionist at the Lae International Hotel, said she was sitting on a bus when the quake hit and it was so large the driver ran away and the vehicle almost rolled in the upheaval.

“I was like ‘Oh my god what’s happening?’ Everybody started running, people were trying to jump out of the windows, it was the biggest earthquake,” she told AFP.

“Outside the hotel everyone was running out of the building because most of the time we never experience such earthquakes in Lae.”

Geoscience Australia put the quake at a magnitude 7.2 at 0504 GMT, but said it was not expected to create a tsunami because it was not an undersea rupture.

“That’s the assessment on the basis that it’s about 20 kilometres inshore and also it’s about 120 kilometres deep and that’s too deep really to cause any tsunami problems,” said seismologist Clive Collins.

Papua New Guinea’s earthquake observatory said there were no reports yet of damage but Collins said the tremor could have caused problems for the nearest large town Wau, about 20 kilometres from the epicentre, as well as Lae.

“It’s in a mountainous area so there may be issues of landslides and things like that, that’s what’s the main problem in that particular part of Papua New Guinea,” Collins said.

In Wau, a gold mining centre located between Port Moresby and Lae, US missionary Jim Bloom described the quake as “quite a good one”.

“The floor started sort of bouncing around a little bit like when a big truck passes nearby, and then the whole building really started shaking and rattling,” he said, adding he was not aware of any damage in his area.

“Just a lot of shaking and a lot of noise from the buildings, but we very seldom have damage because most of our buildings are made from timber and steel and so they’re very flexible. But the water tanks were sloshing around for about five minutes or six minutes or so afterwards.”

Another Lae witness, reached by telephone, said there was no major destruction evident.

“I was standing outside and the buildings shook, the ground shook,” he said, adding the quake likely lasted more than a minute.

“We have quakes here regularly but not like this.”

Papua New Guinea is regularly rocked by quakes due to its proximity to the so-called “Pacific Ring of Fire”, a hotspot for seismic activity due to friction between tectonic plates.

Collins said the impoverished but sparsely populated nation of 6.6 million would likely face aftershocks in the coming hours.

“I’m sure there will be aftershocks with something that big, whether they will be significant or not… it’s unknown really,” he said.

JAFFARABAD: A transport van of Chinese engineers was attacked resulting in the death of at least five persons and eleven wounded, while the Chinese engineer remained safe, Geo News reported.

Reports said that Chinese engineers’ team was on way to inspect the Kachchi Canal, when it was attacked, which resulted in the death of five persons including three security men, while eleven persons were wounded.

The injured have been shifted to the nearby hospital.

Within a few hours of its forced landing, the straying Indian Army helicopter along with its crew members was released by Pakistan as a gesture of goodwill. The helicopter carried two pilots, Major R.G. Raja and Major G. Kapila; a junior commissioned officer, Subedar Adilesh Sharma and an engineer officer, Lieutenant Colonel S.P. Verma. The helicopter had taken off from Leh in Jammu and Kashmir’s Ladakh region and was bound for Bhimbhat in Drass sector near Kargil, on the LoC, to assist an Indian Army helicopter that got grounded there after a technical snag. The Pakistan army allowed the chopper to return to Kargil after refueling the machine and providing directions to the pilots.

Pakistan’s benevolent motion was spurned by Indians, who started their usual blame game. Indian daily, The Hindustan Times quoted unnamed Indian government officials as saying that the incident was being probed at a high level as the GPS data of the helicopter was found wiped out, along with nicknames and code signs of all the helipads in the Nemu, Leh-based 14 Corps, which is responsible for the defence of Kargil-Leh, Siachen Glacier and the Line of Actual Control (LAC) with Tibet. To start with, if the helicopter was equipped with GPS, there is no reason for its straying off course and violating Pakistani air space; secondly helicopter landing pads are hardly a classified data in this age of satellite imagery as they are visibly marked in Jeppeson navigation manual and other aviation charts, and Pakistan would have no need to steal them from the Indian helicopter.

It appears that the Pakistani gesture has been wasted on a nation which only knows the message of belligerence. Readers may recall that on August 10, 1999, Indian Air Force MiG-21 fighters scrambled from the IAF Base Naliya in Gujarat had shot down an unarmed Pakistan Navy (PN) maritime surveillance aircraft. The French-built Breguet Atlantique of PN’s 29 squadron had got airborne with 16 crew members including five officers from Mehran Air Base for a routine patrol and reconnaissance training mission in the coastal region near the Indian border. Indian air defence radars, which were tracking the PN aircraft, decided to take aggressive action although the PN aircraft was staying within the Pakistani boundary. Despite the fact that the Atlantique is an unarmed aircraft, the IAF MiGs fired an R-60 air-to-air missile and destroyed the Atlantique, killing all 16 on board. When the Indians realized that the debris was on the Pakistani side, they dispatched a helicopter to land near the crash site and drag the wreckage into the Indian border to make a case for itself. A PN helicopter escorted by PAF fighter aircraft sent to look for survivors drove the Indians away.

On September 21, 1999, Pakistan lodged a compensation claim at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague, accusing India of shooting down an unarmed aircraft. Pakistan sought $60 million in reparations from India and compensation for the victims’ families. India’s attorney general, Soli Sorabjee, argued that the court did not have jurisdiction, citing an exemption it filed in 1974 to exclude disputes between India and other Commonwealth States, and disputes covered by multi-lateral treaties.

To rub salt in the wound, the Indians awarded the prestigious Vayusena medal to Squadron Leader P.K. Bundela. The medal was also awarded to Wing Commander V.S. Sharma (the fighter controller who tracked the Atlantique, guided the pilot and ordered him to attack the plane) and Squadron Leader Pankaj Vishnoi, the helicopter pilot dispatched to steal the debris of the Atlantique. However, fate has its own plans for exacting revenge. Two and a half years after the incident, Squadron Leader P.K. Bundela, crashed in Rajasthan’s Jodhpur district on April 4, 2002, killing seven civilians on the ground in the air accident. The 16 PN personnel must have embraced shahadat instantly as the IAF R-60 missile streaked into its broadside. Squadron Leader Prashant Bundela suffering was protracted; still in his early thirties, he ejected from his MiG-21, only to land on his back. His spinal cord got crushed and he was paralyzed neck down. A series of operations did not restore his mobility; he was made to suffer for another year and a half like a virtual vegetable, till death relieved him of his pain and agony.

Pakistan military and foreign office have been magnanimous in returning the violating Indian Army helicopter, if only its government was equally magnanimous in not biting the hand of friendship extended by Pakistan.

Here the views of Maj Gen (R) Jatinder Singh published in The Hindu are also quoted for the benefit of the readers.

“BRAVO PAK ARMY BRAVO

Maj Gen (R) Jatinder Singh of Chandigarh letter in India’s Hindu:

“This refers to the report that Pakistan allowed an India helicopter with four Army personnel to return home five hours after the aircraft was forced to land in Skardu for violating Pakistani airspace. This action vindicates my long-held view that Pakistan Army is a professional institution, not a rogue Army (As claimed by our American friends) and some sections of the media, service colleagues and politicians would like to suggest. Even if Pakistan had shot down the helicopter (Like we shot Pakistan Navy un-armed maritime. The Atlantique Incident was a major international incident that occurred on 10 August 1999 when a Pakistan Naval Air Arm patrol aircraft-a Breguet Atlantique with 16 personnel on board-was shot down in the border area of the Kutch region by Indian Air Force jets. Pakistan and India both claimed the aircraft to be in their respective airspace. However, the wreckage fell well within Pakistani territory, giving credence to the Pakistani claim), and shown it as a crash, we would not have been able to ascertain the truth, considering the sparsely populated terrain of Skardu. The incident speaks volumes for the speed in decision-making, communications set-up and the maturity of the Pakistani Army hierarchy.”

The Chairman Pakistan Tehrik Insaf (PTI) Imran Khan started it. Sensing that the Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz (PML-N) had been sidelined with even their government in Pakistan’s largest province with Shahbaz Sharif as the Chief Minister under criticism and the ruling party, the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), helpless against the mounting grievances of the people, Imran announced a political meeting in Punjab’s capital Lahore for Sunday October 30th. Not only that, Imran rubbed his advantage in by predicting a massive turn out that would decisively tilt the people in his favor. Woken from their slumber and desperate not to be outdone on their home turf the PML(N) announced a political rally (as distinct from meeting) for Friday October,28th with one single agenda-to start a movement “Go Zardai Go” against the President of the country. People wondered what this meant because the PML(N) was part of the political set up, being the government in Punjab, and so far had been an ineffective opposition. Once the PML(N) rally had railed against the government in strong language the PPP’s coalition partner the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) jumped in and announced a rally in their home city Karachi to be addressed by their exiled leader from London with the objective of supporting the President and condemning the outbursts of Shahbaz Sharif that had come in for across the board criticism because of the language used.

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