Winter is still at least a couple of months away, at least in most parts of the country, yet both Sui Southern Gas Company (SSGC) and Sui Northern Gas Pipelines Limited (SNGPL) have warned of gas shortage in Sindh as well as Punjab, which puts consumers and businesses in a very tight spot. And how good did the Federal Energy Minister Omar Ayub Khan look when he forewarned about this problem as far back as August this year? Aren’t ministers supposed to solve pressing national problems in the interest of the people rather than take comfort in the fact that most people have been warned ahead of time about what is surely going to be a disastrous situation for them?
How long will Pakistan be a state that struggles to provide electricity to its consumers in the hot summer months and runs out of gas well before the onset of winter? The present government can blame previous dispensations all it wants, and it is not entirely wrong, but someone will have to take the first step towards reforms sometime. And in that the blame game will be little good for anybody, especially the common man who has grown sick and tired of one government looting them and the other blaming it for all the country’s problems.
The point is that whatever the real reform process is going to look like and whoever is going to implement it, it will have some salient features. And if the government really has worked out a reform program, it would know what steps number one, two and three, for example, are. Then why does it not take those steps instead of blaming everybody else for all the problems when everything breaks down? Now the gas shortage will not only trouble residential consumers, who will suffer to no end, it will also prove to be a big handicap for industry. Naturally, when there is power shortage a lot more input money has to be put into the production process; and that only raises the price of the end product. When such concerns spill over into products and matters related to exports, our things are just priced out of the international market. And when such issues begin to become more troublesome when they start to impact the economy, the government simply goes back to its blame game. The PTI government has been in power for almost half its term. So far it has not been able to overcome some of the people’s most basic problems. It must realise, then, that its promises of change have little time in which to come true.
Bumpy road to Afghan peace
Afghan peace negotiations have begun in Doha, but the participants seem to have run into stumbling blocks quite early on. And while disagreements between warring factions so staunchly opposed to each other are not entirely surprising, they do tend to take the initiative away from those parties that are pushing desperately for the war to end. The main enablers of the talks – countries like the US and Pakistan – are also finding out that their leverage has greatly diminished if not completely run out at this stage. For now is the time when the Afghans are going to decide on a governance system for their own country, and while they are or should be grateful to everybody who helped put together these peace talks, they would rather work it out among themselves from here.
Yet that does not change the fact that the Americans ae perhaps the most desperate party when it comes to ending the war. And that is because of the US presidential election due in just over a month. In fact, if it weren’t for this compulsion, there is nothing to suggest that Washington would have broken with almost two decades of war policy and begun sudden talks with the Taliban. But the limiting thing about American influence is that it has little say beyond the formal Afghan government, and that too because it finances everything that Kabul does or builds. So everybody is still a little confused, to put it very mildly, when it comes to making the Taliban bend to some of the demands that they don’t particularly like.
Hopefully any early disagreements will be overcome sooner rather than later. One can be sure that much tougher issues will have to be ironed out as time goes on. And if talks can break down just at the start over what are, according to press reports, very minor issues, one can only imagine what is likely to happen when the more controversial topics are addressed. Both negotiating parties must therefore keep the doors to outside counsel open. Nobody would want to be pushed into a corner because of lack of flexibility so soon in the process. No doubt the negotiators realise that a majority of Afghans have never really seen peace, and it is their responsibility now to deliver it.
