Reforming the Security Council Without Entrenching…

July 26th marks the birthday of an political prisoner who spend 1.5 decade in prison without conviction meaning he was innocent but was kept in prison unlawfully. But from prison torture cell he stood by the state. He is son of soil. His non-violent legacy is worth following by all political prisoners of world. This is the beauty of the modern world era that you can not hide anything from anyone. Welcome to present world best known as modern world era. This s all about technology and methods of gathering information compiling it and ultimately relaying it in more authenticated way. It took decades to evolve technology from computing, internet, gadgets and mobile revolution to the present world modern world era of artificial intelligence. Gen Z and Gen Alpha highly rely on AI tools. If you go through Google and AI tools and start searching term ‘political prisoners’ then you will find incumbent President of Pakistan Asif Ali Zardari as the one and only political prisoner in the history of world, who spent fourteen years and eight months in prison without any conviction. His tongue was cut and botched attempt was made to cut his neck and throat to kill him. He faced worst third degree torture in prison. He never gave a single call to his party workers to protest or attack the institutes. In 1990s and onwards United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (UNCAT) and Tokyo declaration were in place for necessary remedial but kudos to Asif Ali Zardari, he never opt for agitation. Asif Ali Zardari faced all kinds of tortures with patience and bravery and stood by the state of Pakistan under any circumstances, even when his wife two-times prime minister of Pakistan was assassinated in broad daylight in Rawalpindi on December 27, 2007, he gave he hope to nation ‘Pakistan Khappay’ Pakistan Zindabad Pakistan long live. He pledged that He with help of people of Pakistan and state institutions will make greater and stronger Pakistan. In 2008, when Asif Ali Zardari, assumed the charge of Presidency, he forgave all of his enemies and he announced general amnesty for all, in fact he also took initiatives to stop unfair and degrading treatment and third degree torture with others which he faced during his imprisonment. In year 2010, The President of Pakistan, Asif Ali Zardari, ratified the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhumane or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT) and later it was his political party Pakistan Peoples Party which brought legislation Torture and Custodial Death (Prevention and Punishment) Act, 2022 to prohibit torture and other acts of cruel, Inhumane and degrading treatment. In year, 2023, It was also Sindh assembly/government to bring the legislation of the medico legal Act 2023. In his previous tenure of Presidency (2008-2013). He saved world from nuclear war in the wake of Mumbai attacks, strengthened ties with china and ensured revival of ties with Russia and Iran and started new era of relations with US and west on the grounds of equality as good friends. And his current tenure of Presidency is more vibrant and productive for people of Pakistan coupled with iron first lady Aseefa Bhutto Zardari’s input. Under his visionary leadership Pakistan is heading towards his dream of Greater Pakistan. May his 71st birthday bring Pakistan prosperity, peace and hub of global economy. Happy birthday Asian Nelson Mandela!

I have been watching this whole Syed Muhammad Ahmed and Fahad Sheikh episode play out for days now. Something about it will not leave my mind. Not the scandal part. Not the apology part. The part where an older actor finally said, enough, someone is treating me poorly, and I am not going to stay quiet about it. That takes courage. Most people in his position and age would have swallowed the insult and moved on. He did not. He described how a younger colleague poked fun at his baldness, his height, his years in the profession, things that make him who he is. And when a federal minister stepped in and suggested a mentorship program so senior actors could guide the younger lot, I found myself nodding along. What a simple, decent idea. But here is what really struck me. This same disease, and I do mean disease, is eating away at another profession I know far better than showbiz. I mean journalism. I do not say this lightly. Every other day, I watch our own colleagues, people who work in the same profession as me, make fun of our elder journalists. Senior reporters who spent decades building this field, who broke stories when there was no social media to amplify them, who trained half the newsroom without ever asking for credit, these people now get mocked online. If a television channel calls someone a senior journalist, a certain crowd pounces immediately. They roll their eyes. They make jokes. They act as if age and experience are things to be embarrassed about, rather than things to be respected. I want to be fair here. Every journalist has the right to hold an ideology. I believe that with my whole heart. Disagreement is healthy. A newsroom full of people who think alike produces boring, lazy journalism. I have no complaint against anyone who looks at the news differently than I do. My complaint is about the tools some young journalists use to express that disagreement. Instead of writing a thoughtful counterargument, instead of picking apart an idea with facts and logic, they reach for personal insults. They mock a senior’s age. They mock his voice, his mannerisms, his old fashioned turns of phrase. This is not disagreement. This is low intellect wearing the mask of wit. I have seen young reporters who cannot form three coherent sentences about a policy issue, yet they can produce an entire thread mocking a veteran’s appearance within minutes. That imbalance tells you everything. When you lack the words to counter an argument, you attack the person instead. It is the oldest trick in the book, and it is a lazy one. Bushra Ansari said something in this whole controversy that stuck with me too. She said mistakes happen, tongues slip, and when someone apologises, we should accept it and move forward. I agree with her, mostly. Forgiveness matters. Nobody should lose their career over a single lapse in judgment. But forgiveness for a mistake is different from tolerating a pattern. If the mockery becomes routine, if senior professionals become an easy punchline every single week, then something in our culture needs fixing, not just the individual joke. I keep thinking about Syed Muhammad Ahmed’s words. He said he stayed quiet before because he knew a phone camera could turn any reaction into a headline. That fear alone tells you how normal this kind of disrespect has become. He finally spoke, and people listened. Good. I hope people in newsrooms find their own version of that moment soon. I hope young reporters learn to challenge ideas without demeaning the people who hold them. Our senior colleagues gave this profession its backbone. The least we owe them is an argument built on reason, not ridicule.

Some things become part of your identity long before you understand why.   My love for Kashmir is one of them.   I have never had to convince myself that Kashmir mattered. It simply did. I suspect most Pakistanis would say the same. We grew up believing that Kashmiris were not strangers separated by a Line of Control, but brothers and sisters separated by circumstance.   Over time, that state narrative became something far more personal. It became brotherhood.   And brotherhood, if it means anything at all, means respecting the other’s right to make decisions for themselves.   That is why I find myself standing with the people of Azad Jammu and Kashmir today.   Not because I oppose Pakistan.   But because I support Kashmir.   The public conversation has been reduced to “twelve seats,” as though the protesters have suddenly developed an irrational dislike for a number.   They haven’t.   This has never been about twelve seats.   It is about who gets to decide the political future of Azad Jammu and Kashmir.   For those unfamiliar with the issue, the Legislative Assembly of Azad Jammu and Kashmir consists of forty-five directly elected seats. Twelve additional seats are reserved for refugees from Indian-occupied Jammu and Kashmir who now reside in Pakistan.   On paper, the idea is understandable. Pakistan’s position has always been that the people displaced from their homes remain Kashmiris and should not lose their political voice merely because conflict forced them across the border.   No reasonable person would dispute that displaced Kashmiris deserve representation.   But representation is one thing.   Control is another.   Of those twelve refugee constituencies, nine are elected from Punjab and three from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. In practical terms, this means that more than a quarter of the directly elected Assembly is chosen by voters living outside Azad Jammu and Kashmir.   The question almost asks itself.   How can the government of a people be decided, in such significant part, by those who do not live under its administration?   Imagine if overseas Pakistanis not only voted in Pakistan’s general elections, but their constituencies alone regularly decided who became Prime Minister. Imagine if governments in Lahore or Karachi depended upon votes cast by people who did not live there. We would immediately recognise the democratic tension.   So why is it unreasonable for Kashmiris to ask the very same question?   Supporting that question does not weaken Pakistan’s position on Kashmir.   If anything, it strengthens it.   For decades, Pakistan has argued before the international community that Kashmiris possess the right to determine their own political future. Self-determination has been the moral foundation of our case.   That principle cannot stop at the Line of Control.   If we genuinely believe Kashmir belongs to the Kashmiris, then we must also believe that Kashmiris deserve the greatest possible ownership over their own democratic institutions.   Yet the debate does not end there.   Many voices now demand the immediate abolition of the refugee seats.   The law, however, is more complicated than the slogans.   In June 2026, the Supreme Court of Azad Jammu and Kashmir reaffirmed that these seats are entrenched within Article 22 of the Interim Constitution. The Court described any alteration to the Assembly’s composition as a solemn constitutional act, not something to be extracted through political pressure. Moreover, Article 33 requires prior approval from the Government of Pakistan before amendments affecting core constitutional structures may even be introduced in the Assembly.   And perhaps that raises an even bigger question than the twelve seats themselves.   Why should a legislature elected by the people of Azad Jammu and Kashmir require Islamabad’s permission before debating changes to its own constitutional structure?   If our answer is that Pakistan has always stood by Kashmir, then I ask another question.   Since when has standing beside someone entitled us to stand over them?   Brotherhood is not guardianship.   Solidarity is not supervision.   Support is not control.   Pakistan has sacrificed diplomatically, politically and morally for the Kashmiri cause. That history deserves recognition. But history cannot become a perpetual licence to decide what is best for Kashmiris without listening to Kashmiris themselves.   The protests are not asking Pakistan to abandon Kashmir.   They are asking Pakistan to trust Kashmir.   Those are two very different things.   Whether the present constitutional arrangement ultimately changes is a matter for constitutional process, not street pressure. But constitutional process should never become an excuse to avoid constitutional questions.   The protesters have asked one.   It deserves an answer.   Because this was never about twelve seats.   It was always about whether we truly believe that the future of Kashmir should be written by Kashmiris themselves.

The third part of this series demonstrated that tax policy is never politically neutral. Every exemption, rate differential, withholding provision and collection mechanism determines who will bear the burden, who will receive protection and who will remain outside effective enforcement. The next question is unavoidable. Why do reforms that appear technically sound on paper repeatedly fail in Pakistan? The usual explanation is weak implementation. Successive governments announce that the policy was correct, while administrative capacity, political resistance or taxpayer behaviour prevented its success. This distinction between sound design and deficient execution is comforting because it preserves confidence in the original prescription. It also conceals an important reality: implementation is not external to policy. It is part of policy. A reform designed without considering the incentives of legislators, administrators, affected sectors and enforcement institutions is not technically sound. It is technically incomplete. Pakistan’s fiscal history is filled with such incompleteness. Broad-based taxation is announced, followed by exemptions. Documentation is promised, followed by presumptive and final taxation. Value added taxation is introduced, followed by reduced rates, fixed taxes, special procedures and restrictions on input adjustment. Taxpayer facilitation is proclaimed, followed by additional withholding obligations, automated demands, coercive recovery and delayed refunds. Each deviation is described as temporary. Temporary arrangements acquire permanent beneficiaries and eventually become defining features of the system. The problem cannot be explained simply by lack of expertise. Pakistan has received technical assistance from the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, Asian Development Bank and other institutions for decades. Numerous committees, commissions and task forces have recommended broadening the base, reducing exemptions, simplifying rates, improving audits, integrating data and strengthening administration. The present IMF programme again calls for base broadening, rationalisation of tax expenditures, digital invoicing, risk-based audits and improved revenue administration. The prescriptions remain familiar because the institutional incentives producing the original distortions remain largely unchanged. Consider value added taxation. A genuine VAT is collected at successive stages of production and distribution, with tax paid on inputs allowed against tax charged on outputs. The mechanism creates a documentary chain because each registered purchaser has an interest in obtaining an invoice. Exemptions, fixed regimes and blocked input credits break that chain. Pakistan has retained the name of sales tax while repeatedly undermining its value added character. Multiple schedules, special rates, exemptions, extra taxes, further taxes, minimum value addition requirements and restrictions on input adjustment have converted a potentially coherent instrument into an intricate system of revenue extraction. The resulting complexity is then blamed upon taxpayers. Pakistan’s “innovation” has been to combine high statutory rates with a fragmented base, extensive concessions and aggressive collection from those already documented. The system punishes formalisation while expecting formalisation to expand voluntarily. The Tax Expenditure Report 2026 estimates revenue forgone during fiscal year 2024–25 through income tax, sales tax and customs concessions at approximately Rs. 2.353 trillion. This figure excludes the larger constitutional controversy created by keeping petroleum products outside the sales tax chain and collecting petroleum levy instead since March 2024. Sales tax concessions accounted for about Rs. 1.274 trillion, income tax concessions for Rs. 579.70 billion and customs concessions for Rs. 499.14 billion. The treatment of petroleum products reveals how implementation can defeat both tax design and constitutional distribution. Sales tax forms part of the divisible pool under Article 160 of the Constitution. Petroleum levy is a non-tax federal receipt outside that pool. Replacing sales tax on petroleum products with an ever-increasing levy therefore does more than alter the method of collection. It changes the distribution of fiscal resources between the Federation and provinces. A measure presented as revenue policy consequently modifies the federal bargain without formally amending the Constitution. Income taxation displays the same institutional pattern. A normal income tax determines taxable income after allowing legitimate expenses and then applies the appropriate rate. Pakistan increasingly taxes transactions, turnover and gross receipts without establishing real income. Withholding taxes, advance taxes, minimum taxes, final taxes and presumptive liabilities were initially justified as responses to weak enforcement. They gradually became substitutes for enforcement. The Revenue Division Year Book 2024–25 confirms the continuing centrality of withholding and advance collection within direct taxes. This model is administratively attractive. Revenue is collected through banks, employers, utility companies, registrars, import authorities and businesses without requiring the tax administration to investigate actual income. It also creates impressive collection figures before returns are filed and liabilities determined. The constitutional cost is rarely measured. Taxpayers become liable because they undertake transactions rather than because they earn taxable income. Private persons become unpaid collection agents. Refunds and adjustments remain blocked or delayed. Documented businesses carry the state’s administrative burden, while powerful informal sectors continue bargaining for concessions. Pakistan has even institutionalised the category of the “non-filer”. Instead of identifying income, making assessments and enforcing payment, the law imposes higher transaction-based rates upon persons whose names do not appear on the Active Taxpayers’ List. Non-compliance is monetised rather than eliminated. This is presented as behavioural taxation: higher deductions will supposedly encourage return filing. The state simultaneously acquires a fiscal interest in retaining non-filers because they yield higher collections. The instrument designed to eliminate a category becomes dependent upon its continued existence. No conventional textbook could have anticipated such an innovation. Retailer taxation provides another illustration. Every government announces that traders will be brought into the tax net. Every scheme begins with declarations of equality and documentation. Political resistance follows, negotiations commence, liability is diluted, and the final arrangement bears little relationship to actual income or turnover. The administration then turns to those who cannot collectively bargain: salaried persons, incorporated businesses, importers, banks, telecom users and consumers of electricity, fuel and essential goods. Agricultural income taxation has travelled a similar path. The Constitution assigns this field to the provinces. Provincial laws exist, returns may be filed and declarations may be recorded. Effective collection, verification and enforcement remain modest in comparison with the sector’s economic and political significance. The failure is not the absence of legal authority. It reflects the distribution of political power within provincial

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that sets in when a war refuses to end on schedule. Five months into the conflict between the United States and Iran, we are living through it. Ceasefires are announced and collapse within weeks. Strikes are billed as decisive and are followed, days later, by more strikes. Each side insists the other will soon come to its senses, and each side is wrong. What we are watching is not a war moving toward resolution. It is a war that has become self-sustaining, and the longer it runs, the more countries get pulled into its logic whether they wanted a role in it or not. Saudi Arabia is the clearest example. For nearly four years, Riyadh had quietly extracted itself from the Yemen war, treating the 2022 ceasefire with the Houthis as one of the few unambiguous foreign policy wins of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s tenure. That restraint is now gone. When the Houthis resumed missile fire at Israel in solidarity with Tehran, and then began striking Saudi oil infrastructure directly, Riyadh had no real choice but to respond. It bombed Hodeidah. The Houthis retaliated against Aramco facilities in Yanbu and Jizan. A conflict Saudi Arabia spent years trying to bury is now, again, live on its border, not because Riyadh chose it but because a war between Washington and Tehran left no room for neutrality. This is the pattern worth naming plainly: nobody in this conflict is fighting the war they intended to fight. Washington launched its campaign framed around Iran’s nuclear program, wagering that decisive strikes would force capitulation or collapse. Instead it has strikes running past the two-week mark with no clear terminus, American service members killed in Jordan and Iraq, and a president publicly conceding that the exit could be “diplomatic or military” — which is another way of saying nobody currently knows how this ends. Iran, for its part, has responded to devastating strikes on its cities not with capitulation but with exactly the kind of asymmetric, proxy-driven defiance its doctrine was built for, activating fronts in Iraq, the Gulf, and now Yemen that cost it little and cost everyone else a great deal. The Strait of Hormuz tells the same story in economic terms. Daily vessel traffic through one of the world’s most important oil chokepoints has fallen to a small fraction of its prewar level. That is not an abstraction. It shows up in tanker insurance premiums in Piraeus and London, in fuel costs in Mumbai and Rotterdam, in the balance sheets of countries that have precisely nothing to do with this fight. War aims that once seemed narrowly bilateral — Washington versus Tehran, over centrifuges and missile stockpiles — have metastasized into a tax on global trade that nobody voted for and nobody can opt out of. It is tempting, watching this unfold, to look for a single culprit. Commentators sympathetic to Washington will point to Iran’s decades of proxy warfare, its nuclear ambiguity, its crackdown on its own protesters, and argue the current campaign is simply overdue accountability. Commentators sympathetic to Tehran will point to a US-Israeli strike that killed Iran’s Supreme Leader and ask what state, faced with the assassination of its head of state, would not treat that as an act of war demanding a response. Both arguments contain real grievances. Neither survives contact with what has actually happened since: a conflict that both sides insist is about narrow, defensible aims but that neither side has been able to keep narrow. Wars rarely stay the size their architects intend. What should worry observers most is not any single strike or retaliation but the absence of an exit ramp anyone believes in. Ceasefires here have not functioned as steps toward peace; they have functioned as pauses for rearmament, evidenced by how quickly each one has collapsed back into nightly bombing. That is the signature of a conflict without a theory of victory — one where both governments can inflict real pain on the other indefinitely, but where neither can convert that pain into a settlement it can sell to its own public. In that kind of war, the fighting does not stop because someone wins. It stops, if it stops, because the costs finally exceed what either government’s domestic politics can absorb — and on the evidence of the past five months, that threshold keeps receding rather than approaching. Saudi Arabia’s reluctant return to the Yemen battlefield should be read as an early warning rather than a footnote. It shows how a conflict that both Washington and Tehran describe as fundamentally about themselves keeps finding new participants who never agreed to join. If this war continues on its current trajectory, the question worth asking is not which superpower prevails, but how many other countries, currencies, and shipping lanes get quietly conscripted before it does.

We Were Forewarned, Then Why Are We Drowning, and What Lies Ahead In March, when the glaciers were shedding their winter whites too early and the northern valleys stood bare against a sky that should have held snow, I wrote that the coming monsoon would test us. The National Disaster Management Authority had foreseen rains twenty-two to twenty-six percent heavier than the floods that killed more than a thousand souls the year before. Our embankments were still broken. Our protocols were still asleep. It is late July now. The test has begun. Riverine area dwellers stand at the edge of swollen rivers, watching the water turn from brown to something near black, carrying the upstream soil. There is that familiar murmur of disbelief from government corridors—the same soft gasp that follows every flood, as if the water had not been whispering its arrival for months. But the water does not whisper to those who will not bend their ear. It speaks in the language of saturated earth, and we have heard it before. We have simply chosen, again and again, not to listen. We were forewarned by the agencies. We were forewarned by the science. And we were forewarned by the very land beneath our feet—the old, patient land that absorbed until it could absorb no more, and is now quietly drowning. Yet when the skies opened, we were caught unprepared. And the heavy heart of Bhadoon is still to come. What the Old Farmers Knew For generations, the farmers of the Indus Basin have spoken of Sawan and Bhadoon not as months, but as temperaments. Sawan, the early monsoon of July and mid-August, is the gentle guest who fills the earthen pot. Bhadoon, the late monsoon of August and September, is the guest who arrives heavy with sorrow, and finds the door already swollen shut. There is an old understanding in the villages of Punjab and Sindh: if Sawan has been generous—if the rains have fallen day after day without rest—then Bhadoon must be received with care. Not because Bhadoon brings more rain, but because the earth, by the time Bhadoon arrives, has already absorbed all it can hold. The soil is no longer soil. It is a clay pot filled to the lip, trembling at the brim. The next drop does not nourish. It overflows. Modern science calls this Antecedent Moisture Condition. During a gentle Sawan, the land breathes; the rivers rise slowly, politely. But when the early rains come without pause, the land stops breathing. Its lungs fill with water. What was once a sponge becomes something heavy, something waiting. In dry years, only a fraction of rainfall becomes dangerous runoff. But once the soil is saturated, eighty to ninety-five percent of every new drop becomes immediate floodwater. The sponge has no choice. It must release what it cannot hold. It weeps. Nature does not betray us. It simply does what it has always done. It is we who forget the earth, who build our homes upon its floodplains and then feign surprise when the water remembers its ancient path home. The Water Remembers This is not a new story. The water has told it before, and it has told it gently, and we have not listened. In 1955, the Ravi rose with a roar that split the embankments of Lahore’s periphery. The river had been primed for weeks—day after day of July and August rain had filled the soil until the ground could no longer hold the September deluge. The peak at Madhopur was the highest ever recorded. The city woke to find its edges softened, dissolved, gone. In 1992, the same priming filled Mangla and Tarbela to their brims by mid-August. When the early September rains came, Tarbela’s flood-peak reduction capacity collapsed from thirty percent to two percent. The rest surged into the lower plains, uninvited and sorrowful. The engineers knew what was coming. The farmers had only the sound of the river changing pitch—a sound every old farmer knows, a sound that means it is time to gather the children and climb. In 2022, Sindh became an inland sea. Nearly a meter of rain fell on ground that was already thirty percent wetter than it should have been. The water had nowhere to go but into homes, into fields, into the places where people had built their lives on the quiet assumption that the land would always absorb their troubles. The years that followed did not forgive us. In 2023, the Chenab and Jhelum catchments drank until they were full, and when Bhadoon came heavy in September, communities that had barely recovered from 2022 found themselves underwater again. In 2024, the same quiet sorrow played across Sindh and Balochistan—early rains primed the soil, late rains broke the banks, and the katcha communities woke to find their world softened and dissolved. These were not catastrophes on the scale of 2022, but gentle, persistent reminders that the mechanism does not rest, and that a loaded sponge does not care whether the year is famous or forgotten. Then came 2025. The NDMA’s own reports confirmed what the old farmers could have recited without a single instrument: the rain fell on ground that was already wet. The system had no buffer, no forgiveness, no room for error. One thousand and thirty-seven people died. More than two hundred and seventy-five of them were children. Nearly seven million were affected. Three million displaced. Two hundred and twenty-nine thousand, seven hundred and sixty-three homes damaged or destroyed. These are not estimates. These are the quiet names and numbers of a nation that has grown accustomed to forgetting. Now, in 2026, the NDMA warns of an even more intense monsoon. The early snowmelt has already fed the rivers before the clouds even gathered. The reservoirs are high. The soil is full. The sponge is loaded. And Bhadoon has not yet arrived. The Quiet After the Warning The tragedy of this year is not that we did not know. It is that