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Why the Indus Waters Treaty must not be allowed to fail

I did not expect to leave Islamabad thinking about the future of international law. I went to speak. I came home with something harder to shake: a conviction that what is happening on the Indus river is not just a bilateral water dispute between two nuclear-armed neighbours. It is a test of whether the global architecture of treaty-based cooperation can survive the moment we are living in. On June 30, I had the honour of speaking at the Institute of Regional Studies seminar on the Indus Waters Treaty , held at the Jinnah Convention Centre in Islamabad. The high-level gathering brought together scholars, practitioners, diplomats, and policymakers from Pakistan and around the world. The expertise assembled in the room was formidable, and the sense of urgency surrounding the issue was unmistakable. My panel was asked to examine treaty-based conflict prevention, specifically, how the institutional mechanisms embedded in international river agreements keep water from becoming a cause of w...
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PM orders increase in country's strategic petroleum reserves; changes to oil refining policy approved

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif on Tuesday directed authorities to increase the country’s strategic petroleum reserves as the cabinet committee approved amendments to the Pakistan Oil Refining Policy 2023. The remarks came as he chaired a meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Energy, during which amendments to the Pakistan Oil Refining Policy 2023 were approved, according to a statement issued by the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO). The meeting was given a detailed briefing on the progress of upgradation of oil refineries in the country, reforms in the energy sector, and implementation of the policy. “The upgradation of oil refineries is an important need of the time and is a key pillar of Pakistan’s comprehensive energy security system,” PMO quoted the premier as saying. He stated that refineries aligned with modern requirements would not only better meet the country’s energy needs but would also prove helpful in reducing dependence on imported fuel and providing environment-friendly fu...
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Is that a biscuit wrapper you’re breathing?

On paper, Pakistan is a recycling success story. On plastic, not so much. Bad puns aside, the World Bank has said we beat all of South Asia with the lowest marine plastic pollution rates. Those in the business will tell you Pakistan is flipping trash so well that it now imports used gallon milk jugs from Ohio, and may teach Saudi Arabia how to turn it into street pavers. Why bother with cloth bags and paper straws if we are already recycling kings? Because of biscuit and chips packet wrappers and the question of what happens to them. And what I discovered in Shershah. Karachi’s Shershah market is a byword for recycling, but over the years, fussy power supplies have hemmed business into a corner of the neighbourhood called Paracha, named after a textile mill. What I saw at these small setups here is the part of Pakistan’s success story that no recycler brings up. You know how it works. Labourers sort household trash by colour, discard what can’t be recycl...
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I’m on an admissions committee and universities need to talk about this

I have worked on my university’s Admission Committee for 16 years, long enough to have watched several cycles of both growth and contraction. But nothing in those years prepared me for what the last three or four have looked like, and nothing about the current decline is evenly spread. It is concentrated, sharply, among girls applying to evening programmes. When I began speaking directly with hesitant applicants and their parents to understand why confirmed seats were being given up, the reasoning was strikingly consistent, and stated without much hesitation. “In this inflation, why should I spend such a heavy amount on my daughter’s education when there is no job security for her in the future?” one mother asked me plainly. With no guaranteed job waiting at the end of an evening degree, she said, that money was better saved for her daughter’s dowry and wedding than spent on tuition. She was not the only parent to put it like that. These were not abstractions to me. They were mothers,...
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Australian politician fails to overturn racial vilification ruling over telling Muslim senator to go back to Pakistan

A popular far-right Australian politician failed on Monday to overturn a racial vilification finding that was handed down after she told a Muslim senator to go back to Pakistan. Senator Pauline Hanson has emerged as one of Australia’s most popular politicians, wooing voters with calls for strict immigration curbs, mass deportations of “illegal migrants” and enhanced free speech protections. Hanson took aim at Pakistan-born Australian lawmaker Mehreen Faruqi in 2022 over comments made in the wake of Queen Elizabeth II’s death . Faruqi, a left-leaning Greens senator, said she could not mourn the “leader of a racist empire built on stolen lives, land and wealth of colonised people”. Hanson replied on social media: “When you immigrated to Australia you took every advantage of this country. You took citizenship, bought multiple homes, and a job in a parliament. It’s clear you’re not happy, so pack your bags and piss off back to Pakistan.” ...
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Situationer: Resorting to ‘encounters’: are Sindh police losing faith in legal system?

WHILE the killing of suspected criminals in alleged encounters is not a new phenomenon, it is rare in Karachi for arrested suspects to be brought to raids to arrest their accomplices and for them to end up dead “by firing from their own accomplices”. Thursday’s killing of three suspects, who were arrested recently for murdering a doctor during a robbery in Clifton, in a “shoot-out” between police and their alleged accomplices gives rise to the impression that Sindh police are now gradually moving towards the Punjab Crime Control Department’s (CCD) style of “dispensing justice”, which has been quite infamous for such encounters. Dawn reached out to several top officials for comments, but they declined to go on record. However, in background conversations, they said this was partly due to “frustration with the criminal justice system” and partly to prevent “the entry of criminals from Punjab” into Sindh, particularly Karachi. They said several suspects had fled the CCD operations in L...
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'Betrayal' after years of sacrifice: The young victims of India's exam leak scandal

Growing up with a chronically ill mother in a remote village in India, Rema Begum aspired to become a doctor until her dream was cut short by her own tragic death. After years of studying and costly coaching classes, the 20-year-old believed she had finally done enough to win a coveted seat at a government medical school. Then came news that the question paper of the medical entrance examination she sat for had been leaked, and a retest was ordered. Days later, Begum was dead. She was among at least 20 students who reportedly took their own lives after the incident, according to local media and activists. The exam paper leak, alongside a string of other irregularities, has fuelled nationwide protests and public anger over an education system many students say is stacked against them. A month after her death, Begum’s father Rajaul Islam is still struggling to understand how his “gem” of a daughter lost hope. But he believes the retest announcement changed everything. “After th...
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