Adil Najam
Today (Monday) was supposed to be the big showdown between the Supreme Court and the Government on the question of the legality of the 18th Amendment. The date for that showdown has been pushed forward to the end of the month. Tomorrow (Tuesday) is supposed to be anther big showdown between the Supreme Court and the Government; on the issue of the NRO and its beneficiaries.
Irrespective of the questions about which way either of these should or would go (or why), one looks at the news and wonders if this tension and tussle between the Supreme Judiciary and the Government has gone too far. We thought we should ask you: is this good, bad, or outright ugly?
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Adil Najam
(Editors note: We are reposting this because ATP believes that this issue needs and deserves much more public attention than it has recieved).
For the last many days now I have been following the news from Attabad and Hunza region. The news has not been good. To get a sense of the magnitude of what is happening here, just take a look at this recent video of a landslide in Hunza:
In fact, I would argue that the Hunza landslide is the single worst news confronting Pakistan today amongst all the bad news we are bombarded with. Worse than the news of a wannabe terrorist in New York, worse than TV news-anchor scandals, worse than Presidential pardons for Rahman Malik, and certainly worse than the fuss in a teacup over some Facebook page. What has been happening with the Hunza landslide is utterly catastrophic in terms of its natural as well as human impacts. This is a real calamity with real human victims and one that has already put the lives and livelihoods of not dozens but thousands of people at real risk today and will do so into the future.
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Adil Najam
One of my all-time favorite posts on ATP was a picture similar to this and with a very similar headline (also see here). We used it as an ATP Quiz and asked people what city in Pakistan it was. Most people got it wrong (frankly, I too would have). We repeated the quiz again later; similar results.
But getting it right or wrong was not the point.
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