Shehbaz Sharif: A proven troubleshooter steering P…

By Latif Tunio Imagine two people standing outside a bakery. One has not eaten since yesterday. The other has already had breakfast but buys every loaf on the shelf because nobody else should have one. The first person is hungry. The second is greedy. That is the difference we often forget. Human needs are surprisingly small. We need food, shelter, safety, affection and dignity. Yet somewhere along the road to modern civilization, our desires stopped listening to our needs. We no longer ask, “Do I need this?” We ask, “Will people notice if I don’t have it?” Perhaps that is why we live in an age where skyscrapers grow taller while patience grows shorter. Greed is not new. Kings fought wars for gold centuries ago. Empires swallowed nations for spices, land and power. But today greed wears expensive perfume, carries a smartphone and speaks the language of success. It no longer hides in dark corners; sometimes it sits on television panels giving motivational speeches. A hundred years ago, a respected person was often remembered for honesty, wisdom or service to the community. Today, many people first ask, “What car does he drive?” or “How much is she worth?” Character has quietly been replaced by price tags.Social media has made this worse. Every morning millions of people wake up and immediately begin comparing their ordinary lives with someone else’s carefully edited highlights. One person posts a luxury vacation. Another uploads a new phone. Someone else announces another achievement. Nobody uploads sleepless nights, unpaid bills or family arguments. We compare our behind-the-scenes life with everyone else’s movie trailer.Then we wonder why we feel poor. The market has discovered something dangerous: making people dissatisfied is excellent for business. If people become content, who will buy the next upgrade Advertisements rarely sell products anymore. They sell insecurity. Frankly They whisper, “You are incomplete without this watch.” “You are unsuccessful without this car.” “You are unattractive without this cream.” Apparently even happiness now comes with monthly installments. Yet greed is not always born from vanity. Sometimes it grows out of fear. A father worried about rising school fees saves every rupee he can. A mother fears another economic crisis. A young graduate sees unemployment everywhere and begins believing that only endless money can guarantee safety. Fear slowly changes saving into hoarding, and caution into obsession. There is an old saying often attributed to Mahatma Gandhi: “The Earth provides enough for everyone’s need, but not everyone’s greed.” The tragedy is that many people no longer know where need ends and greed begins. Another reason is that we have quietly lost the art of contentment. Previous generations owned fewer things but often worried less about owning more. Today many people possess wardrobes full of clothes while insisting they have “nothing to wear.” We buy bigger houses only to spend less time inside them. We own faster internet but have slower conversations. Modern life keeps promising that the next purchase will finally complete us. It never does. Greed also flourishes where justice is weak. When honest people struggle while corrupt people become celebrities, society learns a dangerous lesson. Bribes become “connections.” Fraud becomes “smartness.” Tax evasion becomes “good business.” Before long, honesty begins looking like a financial disability. The message becomes painfully simple: if cheating pays and integrity suffers, why remain honest? This is how corruption stops being an individual crime and becomes a social culture. The damage reaches far beyond bank accounts. Families break apart over inheritance before the funeral flowers have even dried. Lifelong friendships disappear over business deals. Brothers become strangers because land suddenly becomes more valuable than blood. Perhaps the saddest part is that greedy people rarely enjoy what they collect. They spend years protecting possessions they never truly have time to use. They own everything except peace. Nature also pays the bill. Forests disappear because cutting trees is profitable today, even if floods arrive tomorrow. Rivers become sewers because treating waste reduces corporate profits. Mountains are blasted apart, oceans filled with plastic and clean air sold back to us in expensive machines. Humanity has become astonishingly efficient at converting tomorrow’s disasters into today’s profits. Can greed be reduced? Not by preaching alone. Children should learn that success includes honesty, kindness and responsibility—not only salaries. Schools should celebrate integrity as loudly as achievement. Families should teach gratitude before ambition. We also need digital wisdom: learning that a perfect life on a screen is often nothing more than excellent lighting and careful editing. Governments have responsibilities too. Laws must punish corruption without asking whether the offender is rich, famous or politically connected. Justice loses its meaning when it becomes negotiable. Above all, we need to rediscover contentment—not laziness, but the wisdom of knowing when enough is truly enough. A society does not become civilized because it builds taller buildings or produces richer billionaires. It becomes civilized when people can trust one another, when honesty is rewarded instead of mocked, and when success does not require sacrificing conscience. The greatest poverty in the twenty-first century may not be empty pockets. It may be full wallets attached to empty hearts. The writer is a Social activist. He can be reached at tunio.latif786@gmail.com

Every August, right on schedule, my phone starts buzzing. Friends send me lists. WhatsApp group start heated debates. Neighbours stop me at the corner shop. Someone always has an opinion about who made it onto Pakistan’s civil awards list this year, and someone always has an even louder opinion about who got left off. I have seen this happen so many times now that I could almost set my watch by it. The list comes out, the arguments start, and by the time the dust settles, nobody remembers what the fuss was even about. The award list carries the names which we like the most, and unfortunately, it carries those names, which do not like. I want to tell you something I have come to believe after watching this cycle play out year after year. This debate we keep having, about who deserved a medal and who did not, is about as useful as arguing over which cloud looks more like a rabbit. It never ends, and it never really goes anywhere either. People pick their favourites, defend them like family, and forget the whole point of what an award is supposed to mean in the first place. Here is the real point, plain and simple. An award is not a popularity contest. It is not a reward for showing up. It is meant for something extraordinary. Something exceptional. A person who did work so far above the ordinary that the state felt it had to stand up and say thank you in front of everybody. Now here is where the story gets interesting, and honestly, a little strange. An economist named Zehra Farooq sat down and did something most of us never bother to do. She pulled together every single civil award given out over nine years, all 2,209 of them, and looked at the pattern. What she found should stop us all in our tracks. Back in 2018, only 73 people received awards. By 2026, that number had climbed to 372. That is five times as many people being called extraordinary in less than a decade. Think about what that actually means. If we are handing out that many more awards for exceptional service, it should follow that we have more and more exceptional people walking among us. Teachers going beyond the call. Officers solving problems nobody else could touch. Scientists, engineers, public servants, all rising to meet the moment. That is what a growing list of honourees is supposed to tell us. But here is the part that keeps me up at night. If we truly have this many extraordinary minds working for the good of the country, why does the country not feel more extraordinary? Why do our institutions still creak and groan the way they always have? Why does public service still feel, for so many ordinary citizens, like an uphill climb rather than a smooth road paved by all this supposed excellence? Something does not add up. Either the definition of extraordinary has quietly loosened over the years, or the excellence being honoured is not translating into the everyday experience of the people it is meant to serve. Farooq’s numbers also show something else worth sitting with. Women still make up only around ten to sixteen percent of recipients, a share that has barely moved in nine years, and their share shrinks even further at the highest levels of honour. So the next time the list comes out and the arguments start flying, I hope we can steer the conversation somewhere more useful. Instead of fighting over names, let us ask why the growth in awards has not translated into a more exemplary, more ideal society. That is the debate worth having. That is the one that might actually change something.

There is a moment in every negotiation when the mask slips and the real hierarchy of loyalties reveals itself. It happened again recently, in the quiet grammar of a policy condition. If a deal with Iran is good for America, if it stops a war, secures a region, spares American blood and treasure, then it should be pursued on its own terms. It should not need to be laundered through a second question, but what does Israel get out of it? The moment that second question enters the room, the first one has already been answered, and not in America’s favour. This is not a rhetorical trick. It is a structural tell. A foreign policy genuinely organised around American interests does not require the ratification of an ally before it proceeds. It calculates costs, weighs risks, and acts. The insertion of an Israeli veto, soft, implicit, but unmistakable, into decisions that are framed as being about American security is not an alliance functioning normally. It is a client relationship wearing the costume of a partnership, and increasingly, the costume does not fit. I do not say this as someone hostile to alliances. Alliances are the ordinary furniture of statecraft, and no serious analyst begrudges Washington its relationships. What I begrudge, what any honest observer of the last two decades of American foreign policy must eventually begrudge, is the peculiar one-directionality of this particular relationship, in which American strategic autonomy is perpetually available for negotiation, but Israeli strategic autonomy is not. Successive administrations, Democratic and Republican alike, have discovered that the fastest way to kill a sound policy is to let it wander anywhere near Jerusalem’s objections. The Biden administration played this game with a kind of practiced fluency, dressing subservience in the language of “shared values” and “unbreakable bonds.” That the current administration appears to be playing the identical game, merely with a different set of talking points, should trouble anyone who once believed that a change in party might also mean a change in posture. The deeper dishonesty, though, sits beneath the day-to-day theatre of negotiation. It is the elephant that everyone in the room has agreed, by unspoken consensus, not to see. Iran is treated as the singular proliferation emergency of the Middle East, the country whose enrichment levels must be monitored down to the percentage point, whose every centrifuge is a matter of international alarm, whose nuclear ambitions justify sanctions regimes, covert sabotage, and the standing threat of military strikes. And yet a few hundred kilometers away sits a state that has possessed nuclear weapons for more than half a century, has never signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty, has never submitted to an inspection regime of any kind, and whose arsenal is discussed in Western capitals only in the passive voice, if it is discussed at all. Israel’s bomb is an open secret that everyone has agreed to keep. This is not a minor inconsistency. It is the load-bearing hypocrisy of the entire non-proliferation architecture in West Asia. You cannot credibly claim to be pursuing a weapons-of-mass-destruction-free Middle East while exempting, by unspoken convention, the one state in the region that actually has the weapons in question. Every argument marshalled against Iran’s nuclear programme, that a nuclear-armed state destabilizes its neighbors, that it invites arms races, that it holds regional security hostage to the judgment of a single government, applies with at least equal force to Israel, and applies to a country that has, unlike Iran, already used overwhelming force against multiple neighbors within living memory. The asymmetry is not a technical oversight. It is a choice, made and remade by every administration that has declined to place Israel’s arsenal on the table. What this reveals, I think, is that the “Iran obsession,” as it might fairly be called, was never really about proliferation at all. If it were, the conversation would begin with disarmament architecture applied evenhandedly across the region, inspections offered and demanded in both directions, and a serious reckoning with the double standard that has calcified into policy over fifty years. Instead, the Iran file functions as a proxy for a different question entirely, whose security calculus gets to define American Middle East policy. And on that question, the answer has been remarkably consistent regardless of who occupies the Oval Office. None of this is a case for indulging Tehran’s own record, which carries its own list of grievances worth prosecuting honestly, its human rights abuses, its regional proxies, its own history of destabilizing behavior. Clear-eyed criticism of Iran is entirely compatible with clear-eyed criticism of the double standard applied to Israel; the two are not in tension, and pretending otherwise is its own kind of evasion. But a foreign policy that claims the mantle of principle while practicing this degree of selective vision is not principled. It is theatre, and increasingly unconvincing theatre, performed for a domestic audience that is growing visibly tired of the script. The unpopularity of this arrangement is no longer a fringe sentiment. It shows up in polling, in generational splits within America’s own political coalitions, in the rising discomfort even among constituencies that have historically been the most reliable defenders of the relationship. People are noticing the pattern: that policies justified as serving American interests keep bending, at the last moment, toward a different set of interests altogether. They are asking, reasonably, who is actually driving the car. There is also a historical dimension to this that deserves more attention than it usually receives. The pattern of conditioning American policy on Israeli comfort did not begin with Iran, and it will not end there. It runs through decades of vetoed resolutions at the United Nations, through arms transfers that continued uninterrupted even amid documented humanitarian catastrophe, through the quiet understanding that certain questions simply are not to be raised in polite Washington company. Each individual instance can be explained away with its own set of justifications, security concerns, historical debts, domestic political realities. But taken together, across administrations

Federal Minister for Planning Ahsan Iqbal announced that the government will place the National Flood Protection Plan IV before the Council of Common Interests for approval. The price tag is now Rs 700 billion. The same plan was approved by the CCI in 2017 at roughly half that amount. The minister was candid: the previous governments failed to implement it, and the 2022 floods forced a revision. Nearly a decade and a half after the plan was first conceived after the 2010 floods that devastated the country, we are back where we started, except the bill has grown by Rs 360 billion. But there is a problem with the numbers, and it is not a small one. In November 2025, Secretary Water Resources Syed Ali Murtaza testified before the Senate Standing Committee on Water Resources that NFPP-IV comprised 375 schemes with a total cost of Rs 824.493 billion. The provincial component alone stood at Rs 746.961 billion, while the federal share was only Rs 77.533 billion. He told the committee that provinces had refused to contribute their shares, escalating the matter to the CCI. Eight months later, the same plan is being presented at Rs 700 billion with a 50-50 federal-provincial split. The total has been trimmed by roughly Rs 124 billion despite inflation and rising cost of construction, and the provinces’ burden has been halved. A plan that shrinks by fifteen percent despite the increased costs and flips its cost-sharing formula in eight months is not rigorously costed. It is still being negotiated politically, not finalized technically. After the 2022 floods, international donors pledged $11 billion for reconstruction and flood protection. Three years later, Pakistan had utilized less than $3 billion. Finance Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb admitted that Pakistan failed to prepare a single credible, bankable project to access the funds. The money sat in files while the people sat in mud and water. It is one thing to lack funds. It is quite another to hold the funds and lack the institutional capacity to spend them. So when the government now asks for Rs 700 billion, the question is not whether we need the plan. We do. The question is whether we have earned the right to spend it, or are simply paying compound interest on a decade of negligence. In 2017, When the CCI approved the National Flood Protection Plan in 2017, the Punjab Assembly had already passed the Flood Plain Regulation Act of 2016. That Act designated flood plains, mandated annual surveys, prohibited all construction without written permission, and criminalized unauthorized building. Section 20 gave it overriding effect over all other laws. It was a good, careful law. And for ten years, we ignored it. Then came the 2022 floods, killing more than 1,700 and displacing 33 million. The 2023 Punjab Irrigation Act, strengthened the framework further. . Then came the Infrastructure Audit Programme of January 2026, promising to inspect and certify every embankment before the rains. The NDMA had warned in November 2025 that the 2026 monsoon would bring 22 to 26 percent above-normal rainfall. In May, Chairman Lt Gen Inam Haider Malik was briefed the Emergency Response Committee. The warnings were not classified. They were reported in media across the country. And still, on July 31, as the Sawan rains continue and Bhadoon approaches, we are told that a Rs 700 billion plan is about to be placed before the CCI. The human cost of this incompetence is measured in lives, not spreadsheets. Between June 26 and July 25, 2026, NDMA recorded 97 deaths and 297 injuries in rain-related incidents. House and roof collapses were the leading cause, with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa reporting the highest toll, followed by Punjab. The authority evacuated 3,841 people. These are not abstract figures. They are preventable losses and deaths in a country that had years to prepare. Meanwhile, last year’s federal budget slashed water sector allocations by 27 percent, from Rs 184.6 billion to Rs 133.4 billion for the water sector. Even the flagship Diamer-Basha Dam saw reduced priority. The message is clear: politically visible projects win funding; invisible embankments lose it. We are also building vulnerability into the landscape faster than we are building protection. The hundred-arch bridge near Shahdara was designed a century ago to let Ravi floodwater pass freely. In September 2025, the M5 motorway near Jalalpur Pirwala collapsed after the Sutlej River breached its banks, blocking natural channels with inadequate culverts. Modern infrastructure is failing where century-old engineering succeeded because hydrology is no longer part of the design brief. Every stakeholder knows what needs to be done. District officials know where encroachments choke flood channels. Engineers know where embankments need reinforcement. Satellite imagery can map floodplains with precision. Yet these tools are shelved while development authorities continue to approve new roads, schools and BHUs for permanent dwellings that should not have been there to begin with.  New high profile housing schemes are regularized in natural river basins. The National Water Policy, approved by the CCI in April 2018, promised real-time telemetry by the end of 2021 and a National Water Council chaired by the Prime Minister to meet annually. Seven years later, the Council has convened only once, in October 2018. The telemetry system is five years past its deadline. The unfinished cost of ongoing water schemes stands at approximately Rs 1.27 trillion. What would it take to believe this time will be different? Not more money. We have enough money to drown in. What we lack is accountability that lives on the riverbank. The Infrastructure Audit of 2026 must be opened to the public, if it was ever done. The names of every certifying officer who signed off on an embankment must be known, and if a structure fails, the officer must stand beside it and explain. And if not, we need to ask why not? The early warning system must learn to speak to the village, not the province. Alerts must name villages and localaties, expected water levels, and designated evacuation routes. They

Today, the world faces unprecedented challenges, including the spread of unbridled unilateralism, the weakening of the fundamental principles of the United Nations Charter, the illegal recourse to force, the imposition of unilateral and indiscriminate sanctions, and the instrumental use of economic and financial mechanisms to exert political pressure. Members of the international system, particularly states as its primary actors, must defend multilateralism, respect for national sovereignty, sovereign equality of states, and the rule of law in international relations. Since June 2025, the nation of the Islamic Republic of Iran has experienced its bitterest days. The martyrdom of the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution—as the highest political and religious authority of the Islamic Republic of Iran—the tragic attack on the Minab school resulting in the martyrdom of 168 school children, the testing of America’s latest lethal weapons and cluster missiles in the attack on the city of Lamerd in Fars Province and the indiscriminate assassination of its defenseless people, along with attacks on medical and healthcare facilities, educational environments, and universities, and the continuation of these crimes demonstrate that when a superpower turns rogue, international peace and security are put at risk. By imposing war, the U.S. government has driven several rounds of negotiations with Iran into a deadlock. The mediatory efforts of Pakistan to restore peace and tranquility to the region are commendable, and Iran has respected this vital role. It is crystal clear that wars are always initiated by one side, but ending them requires the presence and role of both warring parties. If the Americans, who imposed this war, desire to end it, they must respect the Pakistan Memorandum of Understanding and stop trying to impose peace on Iran through their own self-authored rules. However, it appears the United States seeks to dictate its demands upon Iran, whether through war or through peace. You cannot have your cake and eat it too. The Americans want everything at once and afford no standing to the opposing side. The blatant violation of the terms of the Pakistan MoU, continued attacks on transportation infrastructure, drinking water facilities, fishing boats, local commercial vessels, meteorological centers, and other civilian infrastructure are clear instances of violations of international law and international humanitarian law, as well as a stark example of the ongoing policy of resort to force and disregard for international obligations. The Islamic Republic of Iran underscores its firm resolve to defend its sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity. The U.S. government is an untrustworthy and law-defying regime that does not adhere to international rules, regulations, and agreements. For this reason, many political analysts believe that U.S. conduct regarding West Asian regional issues poses a threat to the stability of the international community. What Trump has been asserting since last year regarding a U.S. victory and the defeat of Iranian military forces is merely a strategic mirage; continuing Trump’s self-destructive policies will pull America into a deep quagmire, demonstrating that they lack a proper understanding and perception of Iran’s history and its people. Direct U.S. intervention in the implementation of security and maritime arrangements in the Strait of Hormuz, alongside the re-imposition of a naval blockade, has once again endangered the security of one of the world’s most strategic waterways and disrupted the normal flow of international commercial shipping. The principled policy of the Islamic Republic of Iran has always been grounded in dialogue, diplomacy, good-neighborliness, and regional cooperation. We firmly believe that lasting peace will only be realized when aggression, occupation, threats, and double standards give way to mutual respect, the impartial execution of international law, and genuine commitment to international obligations. Although the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding was signed by the presidents of both Iran and the United States, neighboring and regional countries—especially the Arab states of the southern Persian Gulf, acting as “Middle Eastern allies” of the U.S. government—are required under Articles 1 and 2 of this agreement to cooperate toward an immediate and permanent end to the war and the establishment and maintenance of peace. These countries must not forget that their territories were used to commit aggression against the Islamic Republic of Iran, and that such acts of aggression persist. Whether the territory of these nations was placed at the disposal of the United States, or the United States exploited their territory against Iran without their consent, makes no difference, as ultimately their facilities and capabilities were utilized against us. Consequently, these states form part of the war front against Iran, and they too must remain faithful to the Pakistan MoU. Brad Cooper, Commander of United States Central Command (CENTCOM), explicitly announced the involvement of several Persian Gulf Cooperation Council (PGCC) member states and Jordan in the United States’ military aggression against Iran. If this claim is merely a falsehood, these countries must officially and transparently refute it. The pervasive insecurity and raging fires across the region are the exclusive byproduct of continuous aggression against Iran, and regrettably, the territory of certain states serves these destabilizing actions. The Islamic Republic of Iran reserves its inherent right to self-defense to protect itself. We hope our neighboring countries reach a common understanding that the actions taken by Iran do not stem from hostility toward regional nations. We all believe that we are neighbors and will remain neighbors. Iran has repeatedly emphasized the logic of a “Strong Region,” believing that the entire region must become powerful—a region capable of resolving its own issues and challenges without relying on foreign forces, which are themselves the source of instability and insecurity. This region is a shared home; its security belongs to all its nations, and everyone must endeavor to create and maintain peace, security, and prosperity.