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Dawn, September 04, 2018 MUZAFFARABAD: A top Kashmiri militant leader has said that Indian agencies are constantly victimising his family members in India-held Kashmir to force him abandon his pro-freedom activities but added that they will not succeed. Issued on Monday, the statement of Syed Salahuddin, supreme leader of Hizbul Mujahideen, Kashmir’s largest and mainly indigenous militant outfit, came in the wake of arrest of his son Syed Shakil Ahmad by India’s National Investigation Agency (NIA) during a night raid at his residence in Rambagh area of Srinagar, last Thursday in a funding case. Ahmad, who works as a lab technician in a health facility in Srinagar, was shifted to India’s infamous Tihar jail in New Delhi. In October last year, the NIA had arrested Ahmad’s elder sibling Syed Shahid Yousuf, an employee of the agriculture department, in the same case, who has also been languishing in Tihar jail ever since. Link-  https://www.dawn.com/news/1430871/hizb-chief-says

Dawn, September 03, 2018 WASHINGTON: As the United States and the new Pakistani government prepare for their  first face-to-face talks in Islamabad  on Wednesday, the Trump administration has made it clear that Pakistan will have to back the US strategy in Afghanistan if it wants good relations with Washington. The strategy — as defined by both the State Department and the Pentagon this week — is to use a combination of military and diplomatic pressures to force the Taliban to work with Kabul for restoring peace in Afghanistan. Washington believes that a working relationship between the Taliban and Kabul can lead to an honourable withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan. Washington sent its first clear message to Islamabad last week when US Secretary of State Michael Pompeo telephoned Prime Minister Imran Khan and asked the latter to take “decisive action against all terrorists operating in Pakistan”. Initially, Islamabad disputed the US version of this conversation, but la

The Express Tribune,September 04, 2018 Pakistan’s banking sector is peculiar. It doesn’t do much lending: credit to the private sector is around 15% of GDP vs 45-50% of GDP in India and Bangladesh. It is also relatively small. According to the World Bank, Pakistani banks’ assets (as a share of GDP) are around 30% smaller than those of its South Asian peers. And, to top it off, it is relatively stagnant, with domestic banking sector assets growing at only half the pace of regional banks since 2000. Yet, the surprising fact is that Pakistani banks’ profitability regularly matches or exceeds that of banks in other South Asian countries. Measured by after-tax return on equity, the returns of Pakistani banks have been around eight percentage points higher than regional peers over the last five years. This points to a deep-rooted dysfunctionality in the financial sector. Understanding and remedying this dysfunctionality is significantly important. There is plenty of evidence sugg