LONDON: The British media turned its guns on President Asif Ali Zardari as he was holed up in his luxury Churchill Hotel Royal suite with his entourage.

The Guardian called Pakistan “a washed-out state in need of international aid” in its leader comment and feared that an inadequate civilian response to a disaster may let the Islamists back in power in areas like Swat just like they did in the aftermath of the earthquake in Kashmir five years ago.

The Times said that the concerns at the cost and purpose Mr Zardari’s European visit will not have been allayed by pictures showing the Pakistani leader “taking off in a helicopter from the 16th century Chateau de la Reine near Rouen in Normandy, which is owned by his family.”

It said that there was growing anger to the government’s flood response, especially President Zardari’s official trip to Europe. The Mirror newspaper highlighted how Pakistan was suffering very badly in a news piece titled ‘a flood of compliant’ and noted the reaction of British Pakistanis who expressed their opposition to the president’s visit. It predicted that David Cameron would give little ground over the terror row at Friday’s talks at Chequers.

The Independent said that the real, officially, for Saturday’s speech is to shore up the Pakistani leader’s support in Britain but the real reason for his appearance will be “the young man sitting beside him in a smart suit”.

The paper compared BilawalZardari with his contemporaries and said while they will be worrying, after graduation, about paying off their heavy debts, “Bilawal is stepping straight into the political limelight as a novice 21-year-old statesman and the heir apparent to a wealthy political dynasty with an unending talent for bloody internecine strife”.

The paper said that “Mr Ten Per Cent” was determined to thrust his son into global politics as he (Zardari) “is badly in need of a boost to his support among influential British Pakistanis”. The paper speculated that on Saturday afternoon, a new member of the Bhutto clan will step forward to accept “that strangest of modern political roles – the dynastic democrat”.

The Daily Telegraph published a big piece titled “Asif Ali Zardari: life and style of Pakistan’s Mr 10 Per Cent” and charted the president’s rise to power. The paper, quoting the Accountability Bureau, claimed that the president has “amassed a property empire worth billions of pounds, with a chateau in France, homes in Britain, Spain and Florida, and bank accounts in Switzerland”. http://www.thenews.com.pk/top_story_detail.asp?Id=30499

2. Prez Zardari visit makes country a laughing stock

By Muhammad Anis in the News, Aug 5

ISLAMABAD: PML-N Quaid Nawaz Sharif once again deplored the apathy of the rulers who preferred to go on a visit to Europe in all its imperial characteristics than to come to the rescue of the millions of people going through the pathetic situation owing to the widespread floods.

“The statement of UK Prime Minister David Cameroon was undoubtedly humiliating but the deplorable fact is that the rulers are visiting Great Britain and thus are making Pakistan a laughing stock around the world,” Nawaz Sharif said this while addressing party lawmakers from Rawalpindi and the federal capital at the Punjab House here on Wednesday. www.thenews.com.pk/top_story_detail.asp?Id=30504

3.No-trust motion moved against AJK speaker

MUZAFFARABAD: The Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) government moved a no-trust motion against AJK Legislative Assembly Speaker Shah Ghulam Qadir on Wednesday.

The motion was filed in the assembly’s secretariat by treasury member Murtaza Gilani, with signatures of 19 other members of the ruling party, assembly secretary Syed Ashiq Hussain told APP. The AJK president would summon the session of the house to vote on the motion within a week, but not earlier than 72 hours, he added. According to reliable sources, it is expected that the government would elect People’s Muslim League member Chaudhry Anwarul Haq as the new speaker, if the no-trust motion against the incumbent speaker succeeds, while the Friends Group member Chaudry Aziz would be assigned the portfolio of senior minister in the cabinet. http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=201085story_5-8-2010_pg7_7

4. Food shortage may spark violence in Pakistan: report

WASHINGTON: About 77 million people go hungry in Pakistan while 36 per cent of the population are afflicted by poverty, says a new report released on Wednesday.

“From small farmers to the urban masses and internally displaced persons, millions of Pakistanis are affected by the scourge of food insecurity,” warns the report by the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars, Washington.

The report notes that while the global food crisis subsisted in 2009, Pakistan continues to suffer from an acute food shortage.

The report — “Hunger Pains: Pakistan’s Food Insecurity” — warns that the food shortage may lead to widespread violence if immediate steps are not taken to feed the hungry.

Quoting figures provided by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, the report notes that in February 2010, the prices of wheat and rice — Pakistan’s two chief staple crops — were 30 to 50 per cent higher than before the global food crisis, and were on the increase.

The study links several recent incidents of violence to the food crisis, including the 2009 bombing of a World Food Programme office in Islamabad.

It also quotes WFP data from early 2010, showing that the prices of essential staples in Pakistan are nearly 40 per cent higher than five-year cumulative averages. The costs of sugar and cooking oil also escalated in the initial months of 2010.

The report notes that in early 2010, Pakistan’s food inflation registered at about 15 per cent — a far cry from the 30 per cent-plus figures several years earlier, “but still of great concern to the country’s economists, who noted that the Wholesale Price Index, a predictor of future price movements, stood at almost 20 per cent”. Such “soaring WPI-based inflation”, they said, portends further spikes in retail prices of key commodities.

“Weather, resource shortages, and conflict are exacerbating food insecurity in Pakistan,” says Michael Kugelman, who edited the report along with Robert Hathaway, director of the centre’s Asia programme.

The study notes that farmers and government authorities blamed drought-like conditions for reduced crop yields in late 2009 and early 2010. In the Swabi district, one farmer said his maize crop was “slashed” by 50 per cent. Rain-fed wheat-cropping areas have been hit particularly hard. Even the yields of irrigated areas are at risk. Meanwhile, Pakistan is burdened by devastating water shortages. The country’s per capita water availability ranks among Asia’s lowest, and is lower than that of many African nations.

At least 90 per cent of Pakistan’s dwindling water supplies are allocated to agriculture, yet inefficient irrigation and poor drainage have produced epidemics of water-logging and soil salinity across the countryside. As a result, “vast expanses” of farmland fail to produce successful harvests. Additionally, Pakistan is suffering through a chronic energy crisis with frequent electricity outages; these power failures undermine the effectiveness of energy-dependent agricultural technologies. www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/the-newspaper/front-page/19-food-shortage-may-spark-violence-in-pakistan-report-580-hh-07

5. Q Likeminded ready to hold talks with Chaudhrys

LAHORE: Information Secretary PML-Q (Likeminded) Mian Muhammad Asif claimed that they would reciprocate any goodwill gesture from Chaudhrys for the unification of all wings of the leagues.

Talking to the media at his residence here on Wednesday, Mian Asif claimed that they had kept their doors open for talks with Ch Shujaat and Ch Pervaiz Elahi. He said that the Chaudhry brothers should also realise the political situation and join hands with them without setting any conditions.

Mian Asif claimed that they were also in contact with PML-F leadership as well as Ejazul Haq and expressed hope that they would be able to bring all wings of the Pakistan Muslim League under one umbrella before election. He said that they would prove a real opposition unlike PML-N, which was more of a B team of the federal government. http://www.thenews.com.pk/top_story_detail.asp?Id=30520

6. Fake degree legislator ordered to return salary

ISLAMABAD: After weeks of silence on the issue of fake degrees, the Supreme Court, which had stirred up the controversy by ordering verification of educational certificates of parliamentarians, indicated on Wednesday how it wanted politicians who had used counterfeit degrees to be treated.

The court ordered that Haji Nasir Mehmood, a PML-N member of the Punjab assembly from Gujrat (PP-111) whose degree was found to be fake, should return the salary and allowances he had earned as a parliamentarian.

“The burden to prove a valid, genuine and bona fide qualification lies on the appellant,” the judgment, which had been reserved earlier, said.

Some observers here said the order meant that the parliamentarians accused of holding fake degrees would themselves have to prove their innocence. http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/the-newspaper/front-page/19-fake-degree-legislator-ordered-to-return-salary%2C-allowances-580-hh-04

7. Pakistan in peril of succumbing to Iran-style Islamic revolution: Study

WASHINGTON: Pakistan is in peril of succumbing to an Iranian-style Islamic revolution, an official US study has warned, saying that mushrooming fundamentalism in the nation is finding support from the army and intelligence.

Pakistan slipping into an Iranian-style Islamic revolution is described as one of the biggest threat to the world, the Quadrennial Defence Review Independent Panel has told the US Congress in its final report submitted last week.

It has expressed serious concern over increasing Islamic fundamentalism in the country that has its support in its army and the intelligence.

"Some ‘associated movements’ will pursue lesser and more local goals, with the biggest danger to Pakistan, where the ruling elite (including the army and intelligence services that helped create–continue to tolerate and aid–such groups) is vulnerable to an Iranian-style revolution that Islamists would exploit," the report said.

Appointed by the Congress, the Quadrennial Defence Review Independent Panel is charged with conducting an assessment of the assumptions, strategy, findings, and risks described in the Department of Defence’s Quadrennial Defence Review (QDR).

The QDR, a report required by law and provided by the Defence Department to Congress, is intended to assess the national security environment over the next 20 years and identify the defence strategy, forces and resources required to meet future challenges.

After the Department of Defence issued this year’s QDR on February 1, 2010, Secretary of Defence Robert Gates and Congress constituted an independent panel to review the report as part of the National Defence Authorisation Act of 2010.

Former Secretary of Defence William J Perry and former National Security Adviser Stephen J Hadley served as co-chairs on the Panel, and the Department of Defence asked US Institute of Peace to facilitate the Panel’s work.

"Salafist ‘jihadi’ movements, wedded to the use of violence and employing terror as their primary strategy, will remain both an international threat to the global system and a specific threat to America and its interests abroad.

"This remains true even as current al-Qaeda leaders age and their goal of a restored caliphate becomes ever more impractical," it said.

According to the report, some of these groups will set their sights on the United States, as recent attacks linked to Yemen prove.

"The greatest risk to the United States is that weapons of mass destruction or the materials and expertise to produce them will find their way into the hands of fanatical, murderous jihadists," it said. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/6256083.cms?prtpage=1

8. Obama, Cameron jointly scripted pincer attack on Pak?

LONDON: British PM David Cameron’s remark, that Pakistan exports terror, was calibrated and an outcome of strategy discussions between Cameron and US president Barack Obama in Washington just a week prior to UK PM’s visit to India, to impel Pakistan to give up its duplicity.

A source at 10, Downing Street confirmed that Obama and Cameron had discussed Pakistan during their talks in Washington a week before the latter’s visit to India. It may be recalled that the US had put Pakistan on a watch list of states sponsoring terrorism as far back as the early 1990s.

More, the tone of US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton during her recent trip to Pakistan was not dissimilar to Cameron’s; except she worded it differently and did not express herself in India — always sore point for Islamabad.

While the sharp, albeit predictable, Pakistani reaction has created nervousness in some circles in the UK, Cameron has stuck to his guns. Answering questions on BBC Radio on Tuesday, he maintained: "There has been and still is a problem of terror groups in Pakistan that threaten other countries." He added: "They also threaten our troops in Afghanistan, threaten India and threaten us; and they need to be dealt with."

On Friday, Cameron receives Pakistan’s president Asif Ali Zardari. The Pakistan High Commissioner in the UK, Shamsul Hasan, has been whipping up such sentiments with unusually aggressive comments about Cameron. In the past few days, in a rather unorthodox style of diplomacy, he has described the British PM as "ignorant".

In Tuesday’s edition of ‘The Guardian’ a senior Pakistan official — suspected to be Hasan — went to the extent of threatening: "We’ve to tell him (Cameron) what the reality is, to educate him about what we have suffered; and that if we are not supported now, things will get worse." That should win him several brownie points with his ultimate masters, the military. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/6254005.cms?prtpage=1