1. He has run the country as a one-man show…

President Zardari’s one man show includes highlights of reinstating Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudry, also signing 18th Amendment to return more power to the National Assembly, and asking for open discussions and negotiations about difficult issues. He has gone to war with the opposition by consulting them on important issues – how else was the 18th Amendment passed unanimously? And he has isolated the PM by handing over powers to him.

2. His failure to become a respected national leader with credibility, depth and vision has turned Pakistan almost into an intolerant, wayward and undependable pariah state…

Holding Zardari responsible for intolerance in the nation is shameless, especially while Sehbai’s friend Ansar Abbasi is playing the part of religious jurist for the country. Worst, though, saying Asif Zardari “has turned Pakistan almost into an intolerant, wayward and undependable pariah state” is to ignore the decades of support for extremism and militancy by dictators while placing all the blame on those left holding the bag. This is not analysis but is willful ignorance.

3. His style and pettiness in politics has earned him no new friends…internationally he has not been trusted with any aid money. Even the Kerry-Lugar dollars are tied to strings because of lack of trust.

One wonders if the second bit was added on at the insistence of an editor worried about the sheer ridiculousness of claiming that Zardari has been entrusted with no aid money. Yes, Kerry-Lugar bill includes conditionalities, but similar conditionalities were present in most US aid bills since 2001, so it would be a far cry to blame Zardari for this. One might also wonder how badly the president’s “style in pettiness in politics” can be since he has managed to hold together the coalition even during the most trying times. Even PML-N has said it wants to see the government complete its term.

4. His domestic politics is in shambles.

Again, domestic politics is messy, but despite the predictions of devastating storms from ‘journalists’ like Shaheen Sehbai, most have turned out to be storms in teacups, and all so far have resulted in strengthening the democratic process through the recognition of opposition and coalition demands. Far from being in shambles, domestic politics seems to be maturing.

5. …rule of law is being buried day by day and Asif Zardari is leading this mission to demolish the courts.

Again, far from following in the footsteps of his predecessors, Asif Zardari has not made any move to sack the Chief Justice or to ‘demolish the courts’. This hasn’t stopped certain voices in the media from incorrectly predicting an executive-judiciary death match every few months, but neither have these media predictions managed to drive a wedge into the executive-judiciary relationship.

6. His dealings with the establishment are reduced to blackmailing and threats of using the Sindh Card.

The same government that has extended appointments for both COAS and DG ISI is blackmailing the establishment? Actually, this government seems to have one of the healthier relationships with the establishment. The last time we had democratically elected governments under Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto (PPP) and Mian Nawaz Sharif (PML-N), both were overthrown by the establishment.

7. His relations with the media are rancorous and based on the policy of buying or bullying.

Shaheen Sehbai has some cheek to write this. Shaheen Sehbai himself has spent the entire duration of the Zardari government pining for the president’s failure and spreading the most ridiculous of rumours about the president. Also, let us recall the false accusations that have come from the media against the government since the past three years. Clearly there is some tension between the government and the media. This is natural. But suggesting that Zardari is the one doing bullying is a bit much.

8. His attempts to survive and avoid his own accountability have just succeeded to the point of delaying the inevitable.

The fact is that Asif Zardari has spent over a decade in prison and no court has convicted him of anything. The fact is also that Swiss prosecutor Daniel Zappelli stated that “he had no evidence to bring Zardari…to trial”.

9. His tall claims of bringing billions of dollars and generating local and foreign investment have evaporated into colourless smoke.

Exports exceeded $2 billion last month and net foreign investment rose 27 percent to $1.23 billion in the first eight months of 2010/11 fiscal year. China signed $30 billion in deals just a few months ago. Economists agree that the economy is improving, though slowly. Shaheen Sehbai is simply wrong on the facts.

10. His favours to his cronies have brought him troubles, infamy and at the end humiliation. But the irony is that these cronies will not stand by him. They will be the first to run, leaving him in the dock.

This is not even a point about the past few years, rather it seems that Shaheen Sehbai cannot help himself but must include some negative prediction in his writings.

This 10-point list of Shaheen Sehbai is not ‘analysis’ it is political attacks only. And these attacks are not even based in reality, but it Shaheen Sehbai’s own willful ignoring of facts. Just because you label something ‘analysis’ does not make it so. This column could have been used to provide analysis of some of the serious issues facing the nation and made some recommendations for how the government and opposition leaders can work together to pass solutions for the good of the country. Instead, readers of The News were presented with yet another political attack consisting of misleading accusations devoid of context and reason.

From the beginning, Shaheen Sehbai takes such a sensational tone that he threatens to discredit any legitimate argument about oversight of discussions on the mine. For example, he writes:

Before these highly enticing visits of the mining tycoons to clinch the deals, which followed intense behind-the-scene negotiations and bargaining through middle men, some highly bizarre developments have been taking place, leaving experts and the rest of the mining world stunned, amazed and confused.

These companies want that the mining licences should be issued by Pakistan immediately after their exploration licences expire soon. But there are legal hitches and pressure is now being put through the backdoor to get the target.

In recent years, so many games have been played to keep Pakistan’s share in the enormous treasure to a bare minimum, thanks to some greedy politicians and bureaucrats who sold their country’s natural wealth.

This sounds like the plot of some film, not a piece of serious investigative journalism. Why not simply provide the evidence without all the spices also?

Actually, this may be the problem – all spices and no meats. Sehbai claims to have conducted a “deep study” of documents and interviews to back his claim, but he can name none of these documents.

Reading the piles of documents, statements, interviews and legal papers available with The News, the picture that emerges is one of a grand deception, loot and plunder that never happened before on such a scale and the facts, untruths, half-truths, attempts to sabotage, frauds and backdoor bribes, are all documented.

Considering Shaheen Sehbai’s own record of “untruths, half-truths, attempts to sabotage and frauds”, perhaps he will not be so offended if readers would like a little bit more explanation of these documents. In fact, if he is correct and he has evidence of “a grand deception”, why not publish this evidence like the New York Times published The Pentagon Papers? Or, if Mr Sehbai is concerned about his confidentiality, he could send them to the Wikileaks website.

Instead, he chooses to shroud his claims in a mystery. Only he can see the evidence, and we are expected to trust him.

But there is other evidence that counters Sehbai’s claims. Only last week, APP reported that the PM was holding public talks with a delegation from Chile – public and open talks – during which time he stated that Pakistan is conducting talks to ensure the best deal is reached for the Pakistanti people.

The Prime Minister said that Pakistan really wants foreign investment and intends to encourage the best firms and companies which can give the best results. It is with the same intention that the government has prepared investor friendly policies and opened up various sectors for the interested investors, he added.

The Prime Minister said that it was an encouraging sign that the foreign companies wanted to avail the investment opportunities in the mineral sector in Pakistan for their mutual advantage.

Pakistan has a vibrant private sector best suited for public-private partnership for the good of the people of both countries, he added.

The Prime Minister assured full support and fair deal in handling the Reko-Diq project and would provide all possible cooperation for early launching of this mega project.

Shaheen Sehbai also tries to claim that there is some trick being played by the mining company named ‘Tethyan’.

An Australian mineral exploration firm originally started the exploration and invested some $30 million but in 2006 sold the company to a Canadian and Chilean joint venture for $230 million. The old company was an Australian public company Tethyan Copper Prosperity Limited and the new company was named Tethyan Copper Company (TCC) of Pakistan. A trick game is being played in these cosmetic changes. The Canadians and Chileans, according to publicly declared information to their shareholders and regulators, took 37.5 per cent share each, while Pakistan only had the remaining 25 per cent.

But this is no trick. Actually, it is public knowledge that has been reported in the press.

Tethyan Copper – jointly owned by Canada’s Barrick and Chile’s Antofagasta – holds 75% of the project and the Balochistan provincial government owns the remaining 25%.

Sehabi next tries another sleight of hand trick by quoting stories about an Afghani mining corruption which has nothing to do with the Reko Diq mine.

According to a Washington Post report on Nov 18, 2009: “The Afghan minister of mines accepted a roughly $30 million bribe to award the country’s largest development project to a Chinese mining firm.”

Quoting a US official, the Washington Post said: “The alleged payment to Mohammad Ibrahim Adel was made in Dubai within a month of December 2007, when a big Chinese metallurgical group received the contract for a $2.9 billion project to extract copper from the Aynak deposit in Logar province. Aynak is considered one of the largest unexploited copper deposits in the world.”

What does this have to do with the story of Reko Diq? Nothing. Sehbai seems only concerned with making readers angry about mining and corruption so that they will assume that any Reko Diq agreement is also tainted with corruption, even if there is no evidence of such.

Sehbai pulls another sleight of hand later by saying that a company that owns some shares of Tethyan is “being accused on the web of some strange activities”.

The Canadian company, Barrick Gold, with 29 mines all over the world, is already being accused on the web of some strange activities. These include spills of cyanide, mercury and other heavy metals, police and legalistic repression of critics, threats to water resources on four continents and even food poisoning, as well as rape.

And this should tell the reader everything he needs to know about Shaheen Sehbai’s journalistic ethics. How can someone who claims to be a professional journalist write such slander? Surely Sehbai is aware that any living person can write anything on the web with no oversight and virtually no consequences. That he would include such as his evidence shows that he is willing to stoop to any lows to write a sensational tabloid article, not serious investigative news.

Sehbai even says that CM Balochistan was asked if he is being pressurized by Zardari, only to have the CM reply that the answer is no! Why does Sehbai report the CM’s reply “as an after thought”? Is it because he is trying to influence readers not to believe the CM’s own word?

Shaheen Sehbai may not believe the word of the CM Balochistan, but he is certainly willing to believe the word of his fellow “reporter” of The News, Ahmad Noorani even though this very site has proven before that Mr Noorani includes incorrect statements in his articles.

The Reko Diq mine is a project worth billions in investment for Pakistan. Certainly such an important venture must be taken with public discussion and transparent process so that we can be sure that Pakistan gets the best possible result and the most benefit for the people of this country. But public discussion and transparent process does not include sensationalism and fictions. The people deserve the facts, not Shaheen Sehbai’s drama screenplays.

The present case refers to an article published on March 21, 2010 with no byline titled, “Inflation swings upward.” In this article, the author quotes several statistics from the Federal Bureau of Statistics’ Sensitive Price Indicator (SPI) for the Week Ended March 18, 2010 which can be downloaded here.

All of the statistics quoted by The Nation are based on week-by-week changes. While these are certainly interesting numbers, they are too micro-focused to be able to correctly identify a trend. It is as if a batsman hit a six, and his team was declared winning even though they were behind 272 overall. Better is to look at statistics over a period of time to determine what the trends are.

Monthly, Quarterly,and Half-yearly SPI statistics are published on page 3 of the FBS report, but these statistics were not quoted by The Nation.

Looking at these statistics presents a much different picture than what The Nation tries to paint for its readers. While there has been some increase over recent months, SPI has actually been fairly stable.

Also, SPI is only one metric in measuring economic growth. The Nation appears to have latched onto this as a convenient way to attempt to paint the present government as insensitive to the most vulnerable citizens. However, financial reporting by respected business media paint a very different picture of the economy at present.

BusinessWeek reported on March 11 that “Pakistan Inflation Slows in February for First Time in 4 Months.”

Pakistan’s inflation slowed in February for the first time in four months, giving the central bank room to cut interest rates and support economic growth.

The Nation also does not mention that the statistics that it quotes are for the week ending March 18th. In the weeks prior to this, there was no Finance Minister at the helm of the economy. It was only then that Abdul Hafeez Shaikh was named Finance Minister.

Inflation in the economy is a difficult problem to solve even for nations that are not suffering near-daily attacks from terrorist militants. The media should be presenting good information to the people so that they can make informed decisions and help government leaders to create the conditions for a prosperous economy that benefits everyone. Playing games with numbers and presenting misleading statistics is not only bad journalism, it’s bad for the country.

The Nation points to a drop in the KSE100 stock exchange index as a sign that the economy is on a decline. This is an old trick used to confuse people who don’t know a lot about economics. The fact is, stock markets rise and fall each day. If you select a day with a fall, you can say the economy is bad. If you a day with an increase, you can say its good. Does the increase in the KSE100 today mean that the economy is good? Actually, it is mostly meaningless.

A better way to look at a stock market index (including the KSE100) is to evaluate a long-term trend to see what it says about how institutional investors consider the risks and rewards of that market. Does the market show a long-term trend upwards? Or does it appear flat or (worse) headed down? Below is a one year chart that tracks the KSE100 generated by www.marketwatch.com:

KSE100 Over One Year Time

As you can see, the trend is actually on the increase. This is a good sign for the long term growth of the market and probably the economy as a whole. It does not mean things are perfect, but it also does not mean things are getting worse. Actually, a 100 point drop in a day is volatility that all advanced stock markets experience. Today the index is going up.

Let us look further at what The Nation‘s own Business page reported on the same day:

Listing positive trends Pakistan registered in recent months, the Fund said the exchange rate has remained stable at Rs. 84–85 per U.S. dollar and the international reserves position has strengthened (the banking system’s gross foreign exchange reserves, including the State Bank and commercial banks, reached US$14.3 billion in mid-February, of this total the State Bank held US$10.5 billion).

The early signs of recovery in some sectors and the improved external position are encouraging, although there are risks and challenges to Pakistan’s economic program.

“Economic growth in Pakistan is starting to recover; large-scale manufacturing output has started to increase, the improvement in the global economy has helped manufacturing exports, and private sector credit growth has picked up somewhat as businesses rebuild their working capital.”

As we can see, there are positive fundamental economic indicators in the Pakistani economy. Certainly, foreign direct investment (FDI) is down over the past six months. But that is only one important indicator – not the only one. Why did The Nation ignore the positive reporting in its own newspaper? Was it politically inconvenient?

The Nation is correct that a key obstacle to attracting FDI is political uncertainty and fear of instability. But The Nation presents an interesting solution for these fears:

If the government wants to attract foreign investment, it must ensure more support for its policies by aligning them to popular wishes, rather than trying to please the USA through them. Also, it must work on the specific factors which keep away foreign investors.

This shows a lack of familiarity with attitudes among the worlds economies. Let us refer to an article in today’s Financial Times – a UK financial newspaper – about security and stability in the country.

The capture on Pakistani soil of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar is evidence that the message is getting through. It will bring encouragement to those in western capitals who already viewed military campaigns in Malakand and Waziristan to root out Taliban fighters as a turning point for a military with an ingrained hatred of India, the world’s largest democracy.

After decades of supporting militant activities in neighbouring India and Afghanistan this is a big step for Islamabad. After all, the Taliban was in some measure a creation of Pakistan as it sought to expand its influence into Afghanistan at the end of the cold war.

A much bigger step, however, is what happens next. First, the arrests need to move to trials and then convictions. Arrests of militants in Pakistan seldom, if ever, lead to convictions. Pakistan’s neighbours are sceptical that the security forces have the will to do much more than round up the usual suspects and then release them. They talk of “revolving door” arrests in which militants and masterminds somehow have a Houdini-like ability to escape a law ill-equipped to prosecute terror cases.

Second, Pakistan’s army and civil society need to sustain the effort against militants. It may be tempting to answer pressure from the international community with a few arrests and strikes and then ease off. Equally, a strengthening militant threat within Pakistan itself may sap the will to dismantle their networks.

Third,the leadership of militant movements in the region has a remarkable ability to regenerate. Baitullah Mehsud, a formidable leader of the Pakistan Taliban, was quickly replaced by a clansman Hakimullah Mehsud. Hakimullah, who was killed recently by a US drone strike, will no doubt be replaced by another.

Bringing these leaders under control goes to the heart of Pakistan, created six decades ago at the end of British rule of India, becoming a modern unified state. Some analysts talk about Pakistan’s internal dynamics as clan warfare. They say a Punjabi and Muhajir (Muslim exiles from India) elite is in a clash with Pashtun and Baluch in a state still partially formed decades after the British hurriedly quit India in 1947.

The short-term goal is ending the war in Afghanistan. The longer-term ambition is to bring lasting stability to Pakistan and the region.

It is not for this blog to take any position on the wisdom of national security policies. But I will say that if The Nation thinks that abandoning the fight against militants at home and refusing to cooperate with NATO in Afghanistan is the stability that will attract foreign investment, they must be reading some international economic news that I have not seen.

One thing is for certain, though: Editorial writers at The Nation are not reading their own newspaper. If they were, they would not report one thing in the Business page, and then contradict it in their editorials.

The editorial explains this bizarre conspiracy when The Nation talks about “the real trap.”

However, the real trap the government needs to escape, is that of the IMF, which is only offering aid because Pakistan is helping the USA, which is allied to Europe, which names the IMF Managing Director, in its War on Terror. The IMF conditionalities, combined with government extravagance, are causing the unchecked growth in debt by a government which never tires of its concern for the poor. While Pakistan might need assistance to tide over the difficulties it may be facing, such assistance should not be at the cost either of the national economy, or of national honour and dignity. As the increase in the debt burden under the PPP-led government shows, turning to the IMF has meant not just the sacrifice of national honour, but a worsening of the national economic situation.

Let me see if I can sort out this tangled mess of conspiracies.

First, the IMF is only offering aid to Pakistan because the USA wants it to, and the USA only wants it to because the USA is allied to Europe and Europe names the IMF Managing Director. Apparently there are some conditionalities involved with the IMF aid (as there are with all IMF aid), though The Nation doesn’t let us know what exactly they are. The Nation also tells us that there is some government extravagance (again, undefined). These mysterious conditionalities mix with the extravagence and cause massive increases in debt because according to The Nation PPP cares too much for the poor! All of this together, of course, hurts the national honour and dignity.

If you found that hard to follow, take no worries, dear reader. I have created a chart that explains it perfectly clearly.

Did that help explain? Don’t worry, I don’t understand either.

The national economy is not only a topic of debate but an issue that affects the lives of everyone. Because it is an issue of such seriousness, it deserves to have serious discussion. Making up some fantastic conspiracy theory by throwing in every bogeyman that you can think of (IMF, USA, Europe, War on Terror, “conditionalities,” poor people) and then saying that these are all mixing together to harm the national honor is a waste of time that could be better spent discussion real solutions to such important issues.