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Confrontation between ex-and-current PM pushing Pakistan into civil-war-like situation

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Pakistan faces a political flash point after police have charged the country’s former Prime Minster Imran Khan under anti-terror laws. Khan is looking and making efforts day and night to make possible his return as he allegedly accused the US and the Pakistan army for removing him from office in a “dawn” conspiracy. He was ousted in April following a vote of no confidence over allegations of economic mismanagement and mishandling of the country’s foreign policy.

Apparently, rising prices of food, the country’s debt and the loss of military support have only worsened under the current government led by PM Shehbaz Sharif, and people are turning back to Khan. In July, residents of Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous state had given Khan’s party Tehreek-e-Insafa, a landmark victory in local elections.

During the time of elections, Khan said that “our camps are full of voters while opposition camps are empty.”

However, Khan is in big trouble now. He has so many inquiries to succeed. Khan, a cricketer-turned-politician, has been charged with “terrorizing and threatening” police officers and a female judge at a rally in the capital city Islamabad.

Khan said he “will not remain silent” and will sue the officials, referring to the police chief and judge involved in the case against Shahbaz Gill, his close aide and chief of staff. Gill, who faces sedition charges for inciting mutiny in the military, has allegedly been tortured in police custody.

Khan’s speech also prompted the country’s media watchdog to ban television channels from broadcasting his live addresses and also blocked Mr. Khan’s YouTube channel, a move Khan said will be challenged in court.

Khan in a tweet said, “Imported government blocked YouTube midway through my speech. This just shows the desperation of those who for their self interest are willing to push Pakistan towards political and economic chaos.”

It is no easy to arrest Khan

Things turned worse and fragile when Interior Minister Rana Sanaullah said the government was mulling over the ex-premier Khan’s arrest, yet another big trouble for Khan but a job for the police as Khan’s supporters will not allow them to take him away so simply.

Khan himself did not immediately comment, but his hundreds of supporters surrounded his home to potentially stop police from reaching him. Khan is now secured transit bail till August 25 after he filed a pre-arrest bail application in the Islamabad High Court earlier to avoid arrest in a terror case filed against him.

Political, economic and social crisis

“I believe that confrontation between Imran Khan and Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif led to coalition partners touching its peak. Registration of cases/FIR’s between the two sides now plunging the country into a civil war like situation,” Shamim Shaid, a Pakistan political expert told Harici.

Shaid said that Pakistan is ahead with multiple issues like economic crisis, growing violence and terrorism in the region, Taliban empowering in its close neighbor Afghanistan, banned TTP’s (Pakistani Taliban) demands for declaring Tribal districts as free zones, economic crisis and rising rate of poverty and unemployment.

“Pakistan is also ahead with another serious issue of debts, which is now over six hundred billion dollars. The IMF also slaps more conditions on Pakistan by passing each day – and almost Balochistan and Sindh are ahead with flood havoc. In the light of the existing internal and internal crisis Pakistan couldn’t afford political confrontation,” Shaid added.

Pakistan has been going through a political instability, and this is the matter of concern.

Accusations against Khan

“There is an open fight going on between Khan’s party, Tehreek-e-Insafa, and the federal government under Sharif’s administration, and the anti-terrorism charges related to Khan is considered one of the biggest charges in Pakistan,” Rasheed Safi, an Islamabad-based political commentator and columnists told Harici.

Safi said that the current terrorism charges, and the recent report accusing Khan’s party of receiving funds from abroad, which is illegal in Pakistan, has obviously created a new tension for Imran Khan to deal with.

Besides that, Safi said that the Pakistan Federal Investigation Agency has also launched an inquiry against Khan and his party for selling a gifted necklace. Investigation agency (FIA) claimed that Imran Khan had purchased state gifts such as cufflinks, a watch, ring and other valuables at Rs20m and sold them for Rs180m instead of depositing it to the state gift repository.

These are the three big allegations against Imran Khan and to his political party which could have proved a deterrent for him.

“If we look from the perspective of law, Imran Khan and some of key figures in Tehreek-e-Insafa are under immense pressure at the moment. The arrest of Imran Khan after 25 August is also not out of the ordinary,” Safi added.

But the arrest of Khan is not an easy task, Safi said that the government institutions in Pakistan are weak and the officials also fear implication.

Pakistan could anytime lead to a full military rule

But in a bigger picture, Pakistan could anytime lead to a full military rule in the midst of a major political and constitutional crisis, with Khan’s supporters already warned to take over Pakistan if police tried to arrest him.

It is fear that who will stop the public, a population of 220 million people if the political party strays from the path of law and constitution.

Ali Amin Khan Gandapur, Former Federal Minister for Kashmir Affairs and Minister for Revenue and Estate Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), said that if Khan is arrested they will take over Islamabad by the power of people, and called on police to stop being part of this political war anymore.

Khan’s supporters taking social media platforms said that the police must first run over them before they can reach Khan.

The Pakistani military establishment is aware of the fact that Khan can still hold mass protests, and could draw millions out to the street, not good at all for a nuclear-armed nation amid an economic crisis, exacerbated by rising global food prices due to the Russia-Ukraine war.

ASIA

The human cost of US aid suspension: Ethical and practical concerns  

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President Trump’s halt of all existing foreign assistance – with very limited exceptions – will have disastrous consequences for millions of Afghans, among many others around the world. Its approach of a 90-day freeze and stop-work may offer an opportunity for the reform of the international aid system and its bureaucracy, but its potential costs in lives and suffering will raise serious ethical questions.

While the new U.S. administration has legitimate concerns about foreign assistance, it could have taken a more compassionate and responsible approach to address them. First, two of the administration’s concerns – aid efficiency and accountability, as well as diversion by the Taliban and others – are widely shared by the Afghan people, as they undermine the generosity of U.S. taxpayers and other donor nations and divert life-saving resources away from those truly in need.

A serious assessment to enhance efficiency, effectiveness, and accountability within the aid bureaucracy, reduce its hefty overheads, and prevent diversion and misuse was long overdue.

However, linking aid to the interests of the donor – with consistency of foreign aid with U.S. policies cited as the third reason for the suspension – marks a significant departure from long-held international humanitarian principles.

These principles dictate that humanitarian aid should be provided based solely on human needs, forming a key part of the rules-based global order that the U.S. has historically championed and defended. While the international community has applied different rules to development financing as part of their foreign policy, humanitarian aid has remained distinct and often shielded from non-humanitarian considerations.

Second, the suspension of aid poses serious life-threatening risks to hundreds of millions of aid recipients whose lives and livelihoods depend on such assistance. The impact will be extensive given the scale of U.S. foreign assistance, which is the largest among global aid donors. This will be particularly painful and costly for Afghans, of whom, according to a recent UN report, about 11.6 million—roughly 25% of the population—have recently experienced acute food insecurity at “crisis” or higher levels.

Although it is reassuring that emergency food aid is one of the three exceptions—the other two being military aid to Israel and Egypt—the policy details and guidelines remain unclear. In the case of Afghanistan, even if food aid is not part of the suspension, the impact will still be enormously harmful. Millions of Afghan people, including women and children, depend not only on existing U.S. assistance for food aid but also on water, shelter, critical healthcare services, mine clearance, as well as education and agricultural recovery. Even before the uncertain outcome of the U.S. assessment, the speculative impact of the announcement has already caused a 13% depreciation in the value of the Afghan currency against the U.S. dollar, reducing the purchasing power of one of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable populations. It would have been more appropriate for the new administration, both technically and ethically, to conduct the assessment—and possibly implement reform measures—while ensuring the continuation of all life-saving and sustaining assistance. The U.S. is certainly in a better position to manage three more months of inefficiencies within the aid system than the hundreds of millions of hungry and desperate people who now face the risks of this suspension.

The article is written by the former Afghan Foreign Minister Mohammad Haneef Atmar.

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Asian, European chipmakers rebound after Nvidia, ASML earnings

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Chipmakers in Asia and Europe rebounded on Wednesday after strong corporate earnings from Dutch group ASML Holding added to industry leader Nvidia’s overnight rally.

The rebound came after US chipmaker Nvidia closed up 9 percent on Tuesday, recouping some of the heavy losses that wiped $600 billion off its market value earlier in the week as investors worried about the threat to US supremacy in artificial intelligence posed by China’s DeepSeek.

The emergence of DeepSeek, which is touted to develop AI tools at a fraction of the cost of US competitors, has been called a contemporary “Sputnik moment.”

Japan’s technology-heavy Nikkei 225 index closed up 1 percent after a recovery in semiconductor stocks and artificial intelligence investor SoftBank.

The Stoxx Europe 600 benchmark rose 0.5 percent, led by ASML Holding. The chip equipment manufacturer announced earnings that exceeded analysts’ expectations, and its shares rose 11.5 percent in Amsterdam. Nvidia shares rose another 0.6 percent in pre-market trading on Wednesday.

Futures markets pointed to further recovery in the US, with contracts tracking the Nasdaq up 0.4 percent and those tracking the S&P 500 up 0.1 percent.

Overreaction

“Markets have taken a calmer view of developments in China with AI, and perhaps it is a reflection that Monday’s moves were an overreaction,” said Mitul Kotecha, head of emerging markets macro and currency strategy at Barclays.

Goldman Sachs’ Asian market analysts said in a note on Tuesday night that “oversold high-quality stocks may also provide some investment opportunities,” adding, “We think strong companies will further strengthen.”

In Tokyo, Nvidia supplier Advantest closed up 4.4 percent, while semiconductor company Tokyo Electron rose 2.3 percent. SoftBank ended the day with an increase of 2.4 percent.

Markets in the rest of Asia were also lively on Wednesday. India’s Nifty 50 rose almost 1 percent in afternoon trading, while Australia’s ASX 200 closed up 0.6 percent. China, South Korea, and Taiwan were closed for the Lunar New Year holiday.

However, analysts warned that the recovery has yet to fully undo Monday’s panic falls as investors digest the results of US tech’s heavy investment in artificial intelligence in light of DeepSeek’s successes.

“There was no recovery as if nothing had happened. It’s just a reflection that Monday’s move was a bit overdone,” said Kotecha from Barclays.

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Alibaba unveils AI model that rivals DeepSeek

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Alibaba has released a new AI model, Qwen 2.5-Max, that it claims surpasses DeepSeek’s V3 model. This announcement comes on the first day of the Lunar New Year, a time when most Chinese people are at home with their families, suggesting the intense pressure that DeepSeek’s rapid growth has put on its competitors, both domestically and internationally.

According to Alibaba’s cloud unit, Qwen 2.5-Max “outperforms almost all GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3 and Llama-3.1-405B,” referring to the advanced AI models from OpenAI and Meta, as stated in an announcement on their official WeChat account. The launch of DeepSeek’s AI assistant, powered by the DeepSeek-V3 model on January 10 and the R1 model on January 20, caused shockwaves in Silicon Valley and a downturn in tech stocks. Investors began questioning the expensive strategies of leading U.S. AI companies due to DeepSeek’s low development and usage costs.

The rise of DeepSeek has also intensified competition among its domestic rivals, leading them to upgrade their AI models. Just two days after the release of DeepSeek-R1, ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, launched an updated version of its flagship AI model, claiming it outperformed Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s o1 model on the AIME benchmark test, which evaluates AI models’ ability to understand and respond to complex instructions. This reinforced DeepSeek’s assertion that its R1 model was comparable to OpenAI’s o1 across various performance metrics.

The predecessor to DeepSeek’s V3 model, DeepSeek-V2, triggered an AI model price war in China following its release last May. DeepSeek-V2’s open-source nature and extremely low price of 1 yuan ($0.14) per 1 million tokens prompted Alibaba’s cloud unit to significantly reduce prices on a range of its models, with cuts reaching up to 97 percent. Other Chinese tech companies such as Baidu, which launched China’s first ChatGPT equivalent in March 2023, and Tencent, the country’s most valuable internet company, followed suit.

In a rare interview with the Chinese media outlet Waves in July, DeepSeek’s founder, Liang Wenfeng, stated that the startup “doesn’t care” about price wars and that its primary focus is achieving AGI (artificial general intelligence). OpenAI defines AGI as autonomous systems that surpass human capabilities in most economically significant tasks. Unlike large Chinese tech companies like Alibaba, which employ hundreds of thousands of people, DeepSeek operates more like a research lab, primarily staffed by young graduates and PhD students from top Chinese universities.

In an interview in July, Liang Wenfeng suggested that China’s largest tech companies may not be well-suited for the future of the AI industry due to their high operational costs and rigid structures, contrasting them with DeepSeek’s streamlined operations and flexible management style. He noted that “large basic models require constant innovation, while the capabilities of tech giants have limits.”

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