Dated: Feb 3rd 2012
Contempt charges
JUST when it looked like the political skies were clearing, the NRO saga is back with a bang. Prime Minister Gilani has been summoned once more to the Supreme Court on Feb 13, this time to face charges of contempt for not implementing in totality the NRO judgment of December 2009. Uncertainty and instability have become the political currency of choice of late, but the latest crisis is perhaps both the easiest to solve and the one holding the greatest danger.
Let’s start with the solution: the government could simply write the letter to Swiss authorities to re-establish the status of the Pakistani government as a party to the Swiss cases involving President Zardari. If the government were to do so, the NRO issue would likely fade away and the government could concentrate on its agenda of holding Senate elections, getting to the budget in June and then contemplating when to hold a general election. With even the prime minister’s lawyer, Aitzaz Ahsan, claiming in previous, more candid moments that writing the Swiss letter would not materially impact Mr Zardari’s presidency, the common-sense thing for the government to do would be to oblige the court. But for a government which has long preferred to respond politically to its legal woes, whether common sense will now be listened to is an open question. If the government does decide to contest the issue in the legal domain, its options are few. Other than an intra-court appeal asking that the contempt hearing on Feb 13 be deferred or set aside, Mr Ahsan will be hard-pressed to find a loophole for the prime minister to wriggle out through. And once the contempt proceedings begin, there’s little by way of argument that can be deployed to prevent or even delay the gavel from coming crashing down on Mr Gilani’s prime ministership. With 17 justices of the SC having already declared in December 2009 that the government must write the Swiss letter, it is virtually inconceivable that any bench of the court will at this stage find the NRO judgment was flawed somehow or that it erred in its instructions.
Much as the onus has come to fall on the government for implementing the NRO judgment, the court continues to heap pressure on the government in a manner that perhaps makes a confrontation inevitable. Two years of patience when it comes to seeing the NRO judgment implemented in totality has given way to an impatience that suggests only days or weeks are now left. A judiciary perceived to be in a selective hurry does not help the cause of national political stability.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nato report
THE latest news about the Nato campaign in Afghanistan has only reinforced the pessimistic predictions of Afghan-war sceptics. Even as a leaked Nato report painted a picture of a resurgent Afghan Taliban, US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta said that American troops could end their combat role there as early as the middle of 2013. The report is, as Nato and American officials have pointed out, an aggregation of the subjective and therefore possibly calculated statements of detainees rather than an analysis of facts on the ground. But the sheer breadth of interrogations — 27,000 interviews of 4,000 captives — implies that the prisoners’ views are not without some basis. Together they indicate, contrary to official coalition optimism and the increased captures and killings of Taliban operatives, a force confident of victory. And this is now a war in which perception of relative strength is becoming increasingly important. As the Americans head into negotiations with the Taliban and the Afghan government tries to, what both parties are confronted with is an interlocutor convinced it has the upper hand. The planned withdrawal of foreign forces by 2014 obviously has something to do with this, and Mr Panetta’s announcement will only strengthen the Taliban’s perception that coming into power is simply a matter of time.
The report also paints a picture of increasing support for the Taliban within Afghanistan. There were the familiar allegations of Pakistani backing for the insurgent group, which will raise suspicions among the Pakistani leadership that the report was leaked to coincide with the foreign minister’s visit to Kabul. This doesn’t bode well for already strained relations with America. But more interesting are reportedly widespread accounts of Afghan civilians, government personnel and security forces seeking Taliban protection or providing support to the insurgents, viewing them as the camp that will be in power once foreign forces leave. All in all, the report describes a country whose inhabitants suspect, if not believe in, a rise in the Taliban’s fortunes, and calls into question the supposed gains made by foreign forces in Afghanistan.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Drug results
PHARMACISTS in London have given shocking preliminary results of tests carried out on the contaminated batch of medicine — prescribed to over 120 patients who lost their lives — dispensed by Lahore’s Punjab Institute of Cardiology. Not only was the said batch of Isotab, a common drug for treating cardiovascular conditions, found laced with an anti-malarial substance, the case study of 30 patients it killed revealed that the prescribed dosage was much higher than recommended by drug authorities internationally. It was also found that the two factors combined with the adverse reaction caused by other prescribed drugs to cause the deaths. This is more than a case of consuming a contaminated medicine; in a broader sense, it casts doubts on the medical ability of doctors who prescribe certain life-saving drugs over and above their recommended dose, which can prove fatal. This is precisely what was discovered by UK pharmacists and cardiologists who examined the case studies of the PIC victims besides running laboratory tests on the drug samples.
It is a matter of grave concern, indeed a matter of life and death as proved in this case, that the contaminated medicine should have been cleared by a number of drug-testing laboratories in Pakistan; it appears our laboratories can only verify the dosage of the listed active ingredients in a medicine without being able to trace the presence of any foreign substance in a drug. Clearly, this is inadequate in a country where the presence of spurious drugs in the market is a known problem. The federal and provincial governments must upgrade their drug-testing labs to international standards, and the Punjab government must also investigate the possibility of medical malpractice that could have
resulted in overdose prescriptions. This is absolutely necessary to avoid the recurrence of any such tragedy.
---------------------------------------------