South Asia Investor Review

Former Sindh Home Minister Zulfiqar Mirza's dramatic August 28 press conference with a copy of the Holy Quran in his hand has become the center of news media attention in recent days. Following this highly emotion-charged press conference which was carried live by almost all of the mainstream TV channels, Mirza has been hailed as a hero by some of the most popular TV talking heads for railing against MQM's top leadership, and for singling out Pakistan Peoples Party leader and Federal Home Minister Rehman Malik for his harshest accusations. To assess the extent of Mirza's credibility, it is important to understand the following: 1. What triggered the latest of Mirza's outbursts? Was it Malik's decision to send the Rangers in to the Lyari neighborhood of Karachi ? 2. When Mirza used a copy of the Holy Quran in the month of Ramadan to convey his sincerity, did he really tell the whole truth? or did he leave out the ugly truths about the horrific cri...

President Musharaf found a friendly crowd in Karachi during the last weekend visit which coincided with the first anniversary of the Red Mosque raid in Islamabad. As the President met with Karachi-ites, a series of bomb blasts in Pakistan's largest city served as a reminder that there is no escaping the worsening security situation that plagues the entire nation. At a gala reception in President Musharraf's honor by Karachi's business community, business leaders including Khalid Tawab, Mian Zahid Hussain, Abdul Haseeb Khan, Majyd Aziz warmly welcomed the President and reiterated their full confidence and support for him. Governor Sindh Dr. Ishartul Ibad Khan and City Nazim Mustafa Kamal also joined in the welcome, according to Karachi's Business Recorder newspaper. The President thanked the community and called upon the industrialists to help promote rapid industrialization, investment and jobs creation in the country. He met with a delegation of leading industrialists ...

The province of Sindh in southern Pakistan is a rural region of dusty mudbrick villages, of white-domed blue-tiled Sufi shrines, and of salty desert scrublands broken, quite suddenly, by floodplains of wonderful fecundity. These thin, fertile belts of green—cotton fields, rice paddies, cane breaks, and miles of checkerboard mango orchards—snake along the banks of the Indus River as it meanders its sluggish, silted, café-au-lait way through the plains of Pakistan down to the shores of the Arabian Sea. In many ways the landscape here with its harsh juxtaposition of dry horizons of sand and narrow strips of intensely fertile cultivation more closely resembles upper Egypt than the well-irrigated Punjab to its north. But it is poorer than either—in fact, it is one of the most backward areas in all of Asia. Whatever index of development you choose to dwell on—literacy, health care provision, daily income, or numbers living below the poverty line—rural Sindh comes bumping along close to the b...

The business community in Karachi welcomed the support of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement for the new prime minister Mr. Gillani. Good relations between Pakistan People’s Party and the MQM are considered vital for the business community in Pakistan. According to Pakistan's Dawn newspaper, Shamim A. Shamsi, president of the Karachi Chamber of Commerce and Industry, urged the new team to revisit economic policy issues and resolve them for the good of the people. “It was wise of the PPP to take the MQM on board as it is an integral part of the current reality of the province. The decision bodes well for Karachi and therefore the country,” Majyd Aziz, a senior leader of the business community, said. Peace in Karachi is considered crucial for Pakistan's economic growth and prosperity. According to Wikipedia, Karachi is the financial capital of Pakistan and the biggest port city; it accounts for the lion's share of GDP and revenue. It generates over 65% of the total national revenue...

Pakistan is responsible for almost total blackout of YouTube, the popular video site, around the world. The BBC is reporting that the hour-long global outage was almost certainly connected to Pakistan Telecom and Asian internet service provider PCCW. The BBC News website's technology editor, Darren Waters, says that to block Pakistan's citizens from accessing YouTube it is believed Pakistan Telecom "hijacked" the web server address of the popular video site. In the last couple of days, the Pakistan Telecom Authority was being attacked by the bloggers and others in Pakistan for attempting to block anti-government video content. Some believed it had to with alleged "election rigging" by MQM. In fact, the motivation was to block access to material deemed offensive to Muslims. It is thought that, unlike the filters in China and Saudi Arabia, Pakistani filters lack the ability to stop content selectively and block the entire domains instead. A leading net profes...