Sunday, June 20, 2021
Pentagon pulls missile defense, other systems from Saudi Arabia and other Middle East countries
By Oren Liebermann
The Pentagon is pulling missile defense systems and other military hardware and personnel from Saudi Arabia and other countries in the Middle East, according to a defense official, as it realigns its mission and forces to confront China and Russia.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin instructed the commander of US Central Command, which oversees the region, to remove the forces this summer.Some of the military capabilities and platforms will be returned to the United States for much needed maintenance and repair, said Pentagon spokeswoman Cmdr. Jessica McNulty, while other assets will be redeployed to other regions."This decision was made in close coordination with host nations and with a clear eye on preserving our ability to meet our security commitments. It's about maintaining some of our high demand, low density assets so they are ready for future requirements in the event of a contingency," McNulty said in a statement, adding that the Pentagon would not disclose where the military assets would be going or when.
The Wall Street Journal was first to report the troop movements.
The US bolstered its military footprint in Saudi Arabia following a September 2019 attack on the country's oil facilities, attributed to Iran, that disrupted the global oil supply. In the wake of the attack, the US sent thousands of troops into the country, as well as two Patriot missile batteries and one Terminal High Altitude Air Defense (THAAD) system.The US also sent Patriot missile batteries into Iraq to defend US forces following the killing of Qasem Soleimani and the subsequent threats from Iran.The withdrawal of forces from the Middle East would primarily affect these and other air defense assets, the statement said, including Patriot missile batteries. The US had deployed Patriot missiles to Saudi Arabia and Iraq to counter the threat posed by Iran and its proxies in the region, including in Iraq and Yemen. Patriot missiles are effective at intercepting ballistic missiles, including the type of short-range ballistic missiles that have been fired from Yemen in recent years. But the missiles are far less effective at detecting and intercepting drones and cruise missiles flying at low altitudes.
The removal of forces from Saudi Arabia and neighboring countries comes as part of a broader drawdown in the region. The US is set to complete the withdrawal of all forces from Afghanistan before the September 11 deadline. Less than 1,500 troops remain in the country. Under the Trump administration, the number of US troops in Iraq was reduced to 2,500.The change reflects a broad shift within the Defense Department to focus its efforts on countering China and Russia as the threats of the future, moving away from the wars of the past in the Middle East.Austin is nearing the completion of a global review of US forces. Underpinning the review is the assessment that China is the "pacing challenge" to the United States military. The Pentagon's China Task Force recently completed its work and submitted its recommendations, which will influence US strategy moving forward, including the global posture review.
"These initiatives, some of which will remain classified, are designed to focus departmental processes and procedures and better help department leaders contribute to whole of government efforts to address the challenge of China," Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said last week at a press briefing.
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/06/18/politics/pentagon-remove-missile-defense-saudi-arabia-middle-east/index.html
From China: EDITORIAL - Delivery of US vaccines to Taiwan a palpable political ploy: Global Times editorial
The 2.5 million doses of Moderna COVID-19 vaccine that took off from the US on their way to Taiwan on Saturday have excited the island's authorities - and they are loudly expressing their gratitude. Taiwan Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) authorities said Washington's assistance with vaccines confirmed the "rock-solid friendship between Taiwan and the US." A senior US administration official told Reuters that "[the US is] not allocating these doses, or delivering these doses, based on political or economic conditions," while he said that: "we believe that attempts by [the Chinese mainland] to block purchases, for political purposes, are reprehensible."
Regarding the entry of these anti-epidemic supplies into Taiwan, both the US and Taiwan's statements are blatant political operation. They have given themselves away by conspicuously and hypocritically pretending their innocence.
After this latest COVID-19 outbreak, the DPP authorities' political manipulation is one of the "best" in the world. They not only divided specific anti-epidemic measures into "democratic" and "non-democratic," but added political attributes to the vaccines. They believe the vaccine produced by the mainland cannot be used in Taiwan, nor can German's BioNTech vaccine because Shanghai-based pharmaceutical giant Fosun Pharma has the exclusive rights to sell the BioNTech vaccines in the Chinese mainland, Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan. The DPP authorities approved only original vaccines from Germany, without the participation of Chinese mainland companies. The mainland has become a symbol that Taiwan authorities must eliminate from vaccines.
Such a politicalized COVID-19 fight has led to bad results. Taiwan's epidemic situation has spread beyond people's expectations. The huge shortage of vaccines has triggered people's strong dissatisfaction. A few AstraZeneca vaccines have allegedly led to the death of dozens of people, causing new anxiety. The DPP authorities have seen their support rate plummet and they are feeling a sense of crisis. Now, the US has offered Taiwan 2.5 million doses of the Moderna shot, which is like a "politically timely windfall" for Taiwan authorities.
Washington has no interest in the island's fight against the epidemic. Brent Christensen, the "director of the American Institute in Taiwan," said on May 26 that he was "confident" Taiwan could control the spike in COVID-19 cases, noting its infection numbers remained "quite low." Now the US finds that the DPP authorities are in deep trouble and that they might "have an accident" if Washington refuses to save them. So the US set aside 2.5 million doses of vaccines to help the DPP authorities with this emergency.
The current DPP authority has the most loyal politicians in the island who follow the US. Their failure to fight the epidemic was spurned by the Taiwan people and will affect the quality of their service to the US' Indo-Pacific strategy and harm the interests of the US. To help Tsai get through at this point would be to solidify the US' influence in Taiwan.
In a series of "thanks" from Tsai on Saturday, it was clear that the authorities of external affairs of the region and its representative office in the US went all out to ensure the 2.5 million doses of Moderna were sent to Taiwan. They could not have inspired the US by humanitarian appeals. The US' humanitarian response to the epidemic has been completely numbed by its own tragedy of 600,000 deaths. Washington thought the epidemic in the island was not a big deal and needed no special help. The only way officials in Taiwan could persuade Washington is to emphasize the political purpose and only political considerations can bring about change.
Politics is both the starting point and the end of the Taiwan authorities' position in the region's fight against the epidemic. Washington joined in midway, and it certainly had no intention of turning Taiwan's COVID-19 fight driven by politics into one driven by humanitarianism. The arrival of the 2.5 million doses of the Moderna vaccine in Taiwan is all well and good, but it is a drop in the ocean for the island's 23 million people. It is hoped that Washington and Taiwan authorities will not take this as a joint play to cajole the people in Taiwan, or as a prelude to promoting Taiwan's "indigenous vaccine."
No region in the world has made the process of obtaining vaccines as dramatic as the island of Taiwan, denying abundant sources of vaccines in one direction while pleading for charity in another. Such a focus on political manipulation by the DPP authorities shows that the political foundations on which Taiwan's system operates are shaking, and they are panicked.
https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202106/1226641.shtml
Opinion: The decay of American democracy is real
By Fareed Zakaria
“America is back,” Joe Biden kept repeating on his first trip abroad as president. It’s a fair description of what he accomplished — a restoration of the United States’ role as the country that can set the global agenda, encourage cooperation and deter malign behavior. So, American diplomacy is back — but is America? That’s a more complicated question. The United States’ influence has always been built on a combination of power and purpose. Biden went into this trip with two significant achievements under his belt. First, he ramped up vaccinations so far and so fast that the United States is the first major country to enter a post-pandemic world. Second, he passed a massive relief bill that will ensure that the U.S. economy has a roaring recovery. But prosperity alone is not enough to lead. President Donald Trump presided over a booming economy before the pandemic, yet polls showed that most leading nations neither respected him nor the United States under his leadership. The Biden team has led by focusing on the big issues on which U.S. allies agree: strengthening ties among free countries, combating climate change, deterring Russian aggression in various forms, stepping up to the challenge from China. It was a far cry from the behavior of Trump, who reveled in denigrating NATO and its members. The meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin was not a “superpower summit,” as some in the media described it. Russia is not a superpower. Its economy doesn’t even crack the top 10 and is in decline on many key measures. But the country, spanning 11 time zones, has one of the world’s largest arsenals of nuclear weapons, a robust military and a United Nations veto. Under Putin, it has been eager to play the role of spoiler on the international stage — annexing territory in Europe for the first time since 1945, engaging in cyberattacks on a massive scale, and pursuing and assassinating dissidents even if they live abroad. Biden handled the meeting with his Russian counterpart with professionalism and skill, prompting Putin to call Biden “a very experienced" statesman and "a balanced, professional man” (in contrast to his recent comments about Trump being a “colorful individual” who made “impulse-based” decisions). Despite Trump’s fawning behavior toward Putin, Putin might recognize that it is better to have a calm and rational U.S. president than a mercurial and unpredictable showman. For its part, Washington’s goal toward Russia should not be ceaseless hostility but rather some kind of stable relationship in which problems can be discussed, negotiated and managed. The biggest news out of the Biden-Putin meeting involves cyberspace. The problem of cyberattacks, cybercrime and ransomware has grown exponentially. And yet governments have appeared either unable or unwilling to do much about it. When North Korea launched a devastating cyberattack on Sony Pictures in 2014 to punish it for a movie satirizing Kim Jong Un, destroying 70 percent of the company’s computers, the U.S. government did little in response. Biden has moved policy in this realm significantly forward, for the first time signaling that the United States would be willing to use its considerable cyber capacities to retaliate against a Russian attack. Biden gave Putin a list of 16 critical systems that should be considered off limits, hinted that the retaliation could take the form of crippling Russia’s oil pipelines, and agreed to have U.S. and Russian experts begin discussing these issues to define some rules of the road. This a policy shift that is likely to last. It was a trip with modest but realistic goals, most of which were achieved. The United States is perceived once more as a constructive force in the world, with an astonishing rebound in its approval ratings across the globe, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey. But the story is not entirely positive. One aspect of the United States’ power remains substantially diminished: its role as a beacon of democracy. Among countries surveyed, 57 percent of people said the United States is no longer the model for democracy it used to be. Young people worldwide are even more skeptical about America’s democratic institutions. In one fundamental way, things look worse now than in prior periods of crisis. After Watergate, many were surprised that the world looked up to the United States for facing and fixing its democratic failures. It was a sign of the country’s capacity to course-correct. But imagine if after that scandal, the Republican Party, instead of condemning Nixon, had embraced him slavishly, insisted that he did absolutely nothing wrong, settled into denial and obstructionism and proposed new laws to endorse Nixon’s most egregious conduct? Imagine if the only people purged by the party had been those who criticized Nixon? The decay of American democracy is real. It’s not a messaging or image problem. Until we can repair that, I’m not sure we can truly say America is back. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/06/17/biden-american-diplomacy-vs-american-reality/Pakistan, Quo Vadis (Where Are You Going)? – Analysis
Gwadar port has been troubled for years. Completion of the port has been repeatedly delayed amid mounting resentment among the ethnic Baloch population of the Pakistan province of Balochistan, one of the country’s least developed regions. Work on a fence around the port halted late last year when local residents protested.
Building the refinery in Karachi would dent Chinese hopes of Gwadar emerging as a competitive hub at the top of the Arabian Sea. Doubts about Gwadar’s future are one reason why landlocked Tajikistan, as well as Afghanistan, are looking at Iranian ports as alternatives.
Saudi Arabia and Pakistan initially agreed on building the refinery in Gwadar in 2019 during a visit by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. A Saudi-funded feasibility study has since suggested that Gwadar lacks the pipeline and transportation infrastructure to justify a refinery. The refinery would be cut off from Karachi, Pakistan’s oil supply hub.
In a similar vein, Pakistan has been discussing a possible military base in the country from which US forces could support the government in Kabul once the Americans leave Afghanistan in September under an agreement with the Taliban.
Washington and Islamabad appear to be nowhere close to an agreement on the terms that would govern a US military presence in Pakistan but the fact that Pakistan is willing to entertain the notion will not have gone unnoticed in Beijing.
Pakistan borders on China’s troubled province of Xinjiang, home to Turkic Muslims who face a brutal Chinese attempt to squash their religious and ethnic identity.
China fears that Pakistan, one of the few countries to have witnessed protests against the crackdown in the early days of the repression, could be used by Turkic Muslim militants, including fighters that escaped Syria, as a launching pad for attacks on Chinese targets in the South Asian country or in Xinjiang itself.
The notion of Pakistan re-emerging as a breeding ground for militants is likely to gain traction in Beijing as well as Washington as Pakistan implements educational reform that would Islamicize syllabi across the board from primary schools to universities. Critics charge that religion would account for up to 30 per cent of the syllabus.
Islamization of Pakistani education rooted in conservative religious concepts contrasts starkly with moves by countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to de-emphasize religious education and ensure that it is more pluralistic. The two Gulf states have positioned themselves as proponents of moderate forms of Islam that highlight religious tolerance while supporting autocratic rule.
“Pakistan is an ideological Islamic state and we need religious education. I feel that even now our syllabus is not completely Islamized, and we need to do more Islamization of the syllabus, teaching more religious content for the moral and ideological training of our citizens,” asserted Muhammad Bashir Khan, a member of parliament for Prime Minister Imran Khan’s ruling party.
By implication, Mr. Khan, the parliamentarian, was suggesting that Pakistan was angling for a conservative leadership role in the Muslim world as various forces, including Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Turkey, Iran and Indonesia compete for religious soft power in what amounts to a battle for the soul of Islam.
The educational reform boosts Prime Minister Khan’s effort to be the spokesman for Muslim causes. The prime minister has accused French President Emmanuel Macron of peddling Islamophobia and demanded that Facebook ban expressions of anti-Muslim sentiment.
Critics warn that the curriculum will produce anything but a society that is tolerant and pluralistic.
Said education expert Rubina Saigol: “When the state aligns itself with one sect or a singular interpretation of religion, it opens the doors to sectarian conflict, which can turn violent… There is lip service to the ideas of diversity, inclusion and mutuality but, in reality, an SNC that is gender-biased, sectarian and class-based, will sharpen social differences, undermine minority religions and sects, and violate the principles of federalism.” Ms. Saigol was referring to Prime Minister Khan’s Single National Curriculum project by its initials.
Former Senator Farhatullah Babar warned that “The SNC…opens the door for… (religious) seminary teachers to enter mainstream educational institutions… It is well known that a majority of the education of seminary students is grounded in sectarianism. Imagine the consequences of…seminary teachers trained and educated in sectarian education entering the present educational institutions.”
https://www.eurasiareview.com/20062021-pakistan-quo-vadis-where-are-you-going-analysis/
#Pakistan - Lack of Communication Between Parents and Children
By Aqsa Khan
As time is moving forward and the world proceeds to develop in every possible aspect, things are not exactly the same as they used to be, per se, the olden times. Things become quite different with each passing day, this creates a rather wide generation gap between parents and children.
The era differing between parents and children constructs a lot of fusses these two mentioned generations. Parents believe the time spent on new technology is waste; we should revert to learning life through traditional ways. However, we can easily learn various things with the help of advanced technologies. Google is just a tap away for gathering information about anything or everything. Their (parents) the time was when people were more influenced by their elders and surroundings. Nowadays, children have grown more attracted to the new technologies, with curiosity to find new things along with several others. Moreover, they also ask for some personal space for themselves.
According to the research, the lack of interaction between parents and children generates a bunch of issues. Furthermore it causes harm to their bond and builds a wall with lack of trust among them. Drastically, youngsters turn themselves in a bad company or towards a wrong path which could result in harm for them and their family.
Albeit, Asian parents are prone to set bars rather high regarding their children who may allow aggression to build. Because of this, they tend to hide their personal life and other problems because they assume that parents are not interested in their life. When they share, they get blamed and accused, it crushes down the hope for the youth to share or solve their problem advised by an elderly, they think best to restrict themselves.
Parents prefer the joint family system where more than two generations are live. It is also one of the reasons of lack of communication because elders are busy in gatherings and other chores and have control their children’s behaviour by stopping them from sharing their opinion. Asian parents made it complicated to interact happily with their children and ask them how their day was spent and what kind of problems and circumstances they faced today. But they did not ask anything, and their child is so busy with Internet stuff and gaming and interestingly they did not complain about their loose bonding.
Asian parents always criticize their children for using the phone, video games and other social media platforms. Parents must understand the need for communication with their children and provide them with strength. They have to support their needs and also understand their mental health. Which are common among youngsters as most of the young boys and girls commit suicide and many are suffer from severe depression. This is all because of the lack of communication.
Furthermore, in Asia some people never allow their children to choose their own career. They imposed their wishes on them that are quite disturbing to them. Sometimes parents close the door of communication and do not allow them to openly share their circumstances. Mostly, parents do not understand the points and vision of their own children and manipulate them and erect a distance, and they are not allowed to share their ideas and opinions.
Researchers study that the effect of parents-child relation is a huge influence on child development and their mental health condition. If parents are dearth in supporting their children, it can lead them to negative and other emotional factors. Psychologist also recommends that the best way to prevent anxiety and depression is to openly communicate with their family. They also say that the parents who openly interact with their children are less involved at bad gatherings and other bad activities.
Today parents are running to earn more and more money to provide their family necessities and luxuries but forget to teach them confidence, values and moral values which cause antagonism and unable to understand each other opinion and contradiction in matters of proximity and values from the beginning as they are the their first role models who teaches them the morals values, ethics and teach them the life lessons they must talk to them in every step of their life and try to build their confidence and become the strength for their children. It is necessary for parents to understand their children and also give them confidence reliance so that they can face the world.
The world is moving so far and advanced that it is crucial for parents to understand the effective needs of their children. It is high time for parents to recognize their children’s physical and mental needs and shatter the barriers and also do not investigate them more. Some children not open easily as they want a friendly environment, so parents have to become good listener so that they open up their life in front of them and also generate a strong bond with your children and spend a good family time with them and appreciate their little achievements. It will make them happy .The act of tenderness towards their children makes their days as they need to know that they can approach their parents when they need anything.
https://en.humsub.com.pk/2649/lack-of-communication-between-parents-and-children-2/
Mullahs are supervising biology books. Imran Khan govt has put #Pakistan in reverse gear
Implementation of the PTI’s Single National Curriculum has started in Islamabad’s schools and for students the human body is to become a dark mystery, darker than ever before. Religious scholars appointed as members of the SNC Committee are supervising the content of schoolbooks in all subjects including science. In the name of Islamic morality they have warned textbook publishers not to print any diagram or sketch in biology textbooks that show human figures “sans clothes”. For the teaching of biology this surpasses existing de facto prohibitions on teaching evolution, the foundational principle of biological sciences. Illustrations are crucial to explain the digestive system (with both entrance and exit points) and human reproduction, as well as the mammary gland. Diagrams, sketches and human skeletal forms cannot be draped. Excluding these from schoolbooks reduces the teaching of biology to a farce. Inhibitions about the human body, of course, have been around for much longer than SNC. It’s just that henceforth there will be still more. I have looked at a few biology textbooks published in past years by the Punjab and Sindh Textbook Boards and could not find meaningful accounts of mammalian organs and processes needed to sustain life on earth. In one book from 1996 I did find a diagrammatised rabbit. But with essential parts fuzzed out, it is difficult to figure out whether it was male or female or the equipment that rabbits need to reproduce themselves. That someone should think an un-fuzzed diagram of this little animal would titillate students or stimulate promiscuous behaviour stumps me. When enforced, clerical interpretations of modesty — translated as sharm-o-haya — cause people to suffer grievously. For example, ex-senator Maulana Gul Naseeb Khan, former provincial secretary of the MMA, roundly condemned diagnostic devices that can look inside women’s bodies because, “We think that men could derive sexual pleasure from women’s bodies while conducting ECG or ultrasound”. Claiming that women would lure men under the pretext of medical procedures, the maulana’s party banned ECG and ultrasound for women by male technicians and doctors when in power in KP. Trained females, however, were not to be found. While sharm-o-haya applies to all, females bear the brunt. Culturally, ‘breast’ is a taboo word and so breast cancer cannot easily be called ‘breast cancer’. This makes early detection hugely difficult and accounts for Pakistan’s rate of breast cancer being the highest in South Asia. Most women feel embarrassed in coming forward; only when the pain becomes unbearable and when the cancer metastasizes does a woman finally confide in someone. By that time it is too late. Ovaries? Thousands of Pakistani women die yearly of ovarian and cervical cancer but ‘ovaries’ and ‘cervix’ are words too delicate to ever mention.With such deep social inhibitions, should women become doctors? This appears an odd question. Presently, about 70 per cent of medical students in Pakistan are female. Our brightest girls get sent to medical college by their parents but mostly to become trophy brides who never practise their profession. Nevertheless, this begs the question: can females become real doctors with their restricted medical knowledge? Would they ever be permitted to study the whole body, including the male anatomy? Or are women doctors only to treat sore throats or become midwives? Over time the clerically supervised PTI school curriculum will magnify body-related taboos. Even today no one in government dares talk openly about population planning or contraceptives except with bated breath and only after looking over their shoulder. Although Pakistan produces as many people as the state of Israel every two years, yet it abolished the ministry for population planning long ago. It was replaced with some obscure, non-functioning organisation in each province. Called the Population Welfare Department, the replacement was named to suit our ‘cultural sensitivities’. The name implicitly suggests welfare for Pakistanis is possible irrespective of how many of us there are. PWD websites have fancy graphics but no content because ways to limit conception would violate sharm-o-haya. How the human species propagates appears to be a dark national secret that must be kept under wraps. Presumably, the morals of Pakistani society will be wrecked if we discover how babies are made. Somehow it’s okay to breed like rabbits but not okay to know how rabbits breed. Denying basic anatomical knowledge keeps minds clean, say our clerics. This could not be more false. Unsated curiosity and sexual repression drove internet pornographic traffic from Pakistan so high that PTA finally blocked porn sites. Until November 2011 internet cafes were principal porn dispensers and these promptly collapsed after the ban, ruining their owners. One hears, however, that paths to proscribed materials have simply shifted elsewhere. Who knows? Sharm-o-haya makes protecting children from sexual predators much more difficult. Sometime ago, the PTI minister for human rights, Dr Shireen Mazari, declared at the launch of the Child Protection Campaign that ‘Pakistan was ranked as the country with the largest numbers of child pornography viewers’. She suggested that campaigns should be launched at the school level to sensitise students to the menace. Mazari is, of course, very correct. Her proposal would work far better at protecting children than having child killers and rapists swing from lamp posts, a popular demand. But such educational campaigns require making children aware of basic biological facts so that they can tell between proper and improper behaviour. How can that possibly square with Imran Khan’s and Shafqat Mehmood’s clerically supervised SNC? The guardians of sharm-o-haya find undraped diagrams shameful. Yet, to protect their own kind, they suppress every scandal that might implicate them. Earlier this week, unchallengeable video evidence emerged of a mufti’s sexual wrongdoing with a madressah lad. While he was stripped of his madressah teaching post after investigation, no cleric suggested Sharia punishment and all religious parties stayed mum. Saudi Arabia and the GCC countries used to be the world’s most stoutly conservative countries while Pakistan was counted among the more open, relaxed ones. This has changed. Presently, Pakistan is not just in reverse gear, it is hell-bent upon moving backward as fast as possible. The kind of mixed-up, confused and ignorant generations PTI’s curriculum changes will produce in times ahead is absolutely terrifying.
Clerics deciding PTI school curriculum will magnify body-related taboos. Pakistan is now on track to overtake Saudi Arabia as most stoutly conservative.
https://theprint.in/opinion/mullahs-are-supervising-biology-books-imran-khan-govt-has-put-pakistan-in-reverse-gear/681165/
سندھ میں فی کس آمدنی میں اضافہ ہوا اور نوزائیدہ بچوں کی اموات ملک بھر میں سب سے کم ہے، چیئرمین پی پی پی بلاول بھٹو زرداری
انہوں نے کہا کہ سندھ میں فی کس آمدنی میں اضافہ ہوا اور نوزائیدہ بچوں کی اموات ملک بھر میں سب سے کم ہے۔ سندھ میں غربت کی کم ہونے کی شرح بھی دوسرے صوبوں سے زیادہ ہے۔
انہوں نے کہا کہ ہم اپنی کامیابیوں پر ڈھول نہیں بجاتے کیونکہ اس وقت ملک بھر میں تاریخی غربت، افراط زر اور بیروزگاری ہے اور جب تک عوام ان مشکلات کا سامنا کر رہے ہیں ہم مطمئن نہیں ہو سکتے۔ ایک اور سوال کا جواب دیتے ہوئے انہوں نے کہا کہ سندھ میں صحت کا شعبہ عوام کو مفت علاج کی سہولت مہیا کرنے کے لئے بہترین کام کر رہا ہے۔ چونکہ ہمیں این ایف سی ایوارڈ کا پورا حصہ نہیں ملتا تو کچھ مشکلات درپیش ہوتی ہیں لیکن اس کے باوجود ہم عوام کے مسائل حل کرنے کی کوششیں کر رہے ہیں۔ انہوں نے کہا کہ اگر ہمیں این ایف سی سے اپنا حق مل جاتا تو ہم اس سے بھی بہتر کارکردگی دکھا سکتے تھے۔
آزاد کشمیر کے انتخابات کے بارے ایک سوال کا جواب دیتے ہوئے چیئرمین پی پی پی نے کہا کہ وفاقی اور آزاد کشمیر کی حکومت کا کردار ان انتخابات کو متنازعہ بنا رہا ہے۔ ہم کہتے ہیں کہ بھارت مقبوضہ کشمیر کے انتخابات میں دخل اندازی کرتا ہے لیکن اب آزاز کشمیر میں حکومتی اقدامات آزاد کشمیر کی حکومت کے لئے برا شگون ہوں گے۔ ایک اور سوال کا جواب دیتے ہوئے بلاول بھٹو نے کہا کہ حکومت کی جانب سے عوام کے لئے مشکلات پیدا کرنے کے خلاف حزب اختلاف متحد ہے۔