The European Union (EU) and Switzerland signed a tax transparency agreement late last month that will put an end to Swiss banking secrecy for EU residents. The two sides will start sharing data on residents’ financial accounts from 2018. The data will include names, addresses, tax identification numbers and dates of birth, as well as a broad set of other financial and account balance information, according to the agreement. Work on similar deals with small princely states such as Andorra, Liechtenstein, Monaco and San Marino, some of the most favoured tax havens and parking lots for dirty funds, are also underway. Notorious current and ex-rulers can easily stash funds there without disclosing their source. Not only have members of ruling elites from Pakistan, India, most African countries and the Gulf abused the Swiss laws and off-shore companies hidden ill-gotten money, even celebrities such as Boris Becker, John McEnroe did the same, without declaring their funds at home. These Western celebrities often paid heavily for non-declaration of funds in Switzerland or in the accounts of off-shore companies because financial accountability and the rule of law hardly leaves anybody off the hook. But extremely poor law-enforcement and little accountability, say in Pakistan, kept encouraging politicians, businessmen, indenters and generals to stash huge funds in Swiss and French, or Cayman Island accounts. The infamous Cotecna cases involving former premier Benazir Bhutto were a case in point. Her family has had bank accounts in France since the mid-1970s. Similarly, a former air chief too had maintained an account in the Paris branch of a local bank since the late 1970s. This was the time when Pakistan purchased the first batch of Mirage fighter aircraft from France. But following years of criticism, Switzerland is gradually caving in to international demands for opening its banks to international scrutiny as part of a global campaign against slush funds. Until recently,...

Consider this: the total annual cost for the combined 352,000 strong Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) – comprising ministries of Defense and Interior - is $5.5 billion a year. After investing billions on the Afghan security apparatus since 2003, the US DOD has no direct oversight of Afghan National Army’s (ANA) personnel data. Neither has the Afghan MOD an electronic payroll data system. Instead, it calculates ANA salaries by hand, leaving limited assurances that personnel receive accurate salaries. This is no fiction, rather part of a testimony and regular reports from the office of John F. Sopko, US Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR). In its April 2015 Quarterly Report to Congress, SIGAR concludes that absence of electronic records means minimal oversight of US funding for ANA salaries, making it difficult to ensure the funds are being used to pay authorized ANA personnel their correct salaries. Despite over13 years of engagement with the US-led coalition forces the ANA attendance data, upon which U.S.-funding for salaries relies, is minimally controlled, inconsistently collected, and lacking direct oversight. Emma Sky, a British civilian who volunteered to help rebuild Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003 has similar tales to tell in her book, The Unraveling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq. Sky details how and why the Iraq adventure failed. In a brilliant recap of her several years of volunteerism in Iran , Sky exposes the failures of the policies of both American Republicans and Democrats, and the lessons that must be learned about the limitations of power. The book provides an eyewitness account on American efforts to transform a country which had reeled from decades of war, sanctions, and brutal dictatorship before descending into the current insurgencies and civil war. She also explains how the West-favorued corrupt political elites used sectarianism to mobilize external support for themselves in the...

Minorities in Pakistan have been under attack for years. In the months since the atrocious attack on school children in Peshawar, that left 141 dead, 132 of them children, Pakistani authorities enacted the National Action Plan (NAP), a comprehensive document of interventions designed to combat and eradicate militancy in the country. Since the NAP came into effect, however, the focus of terror attacks has increasingly and visibly shifted from the general population and civil-military infrastructure to minorities. On May 13, 2015, a bus carrying members of the Ismaili community, a Shia sub-sect, was attacked by gunmen on motorcycles, killing 45 people, and injuring another 19. The youngest victim was 16 years old. Police reports and eyewitness accounts establish that six gunmen surrounded the bus, and then boarded it. They separated very young children from the rest of the passengers, and told everyone to bow their heads. They then shot the separated passengers using 9mm pistols. The attackers managed to flee the scene. This is the worst attack against Ismailis in the history of Pakistan. The Ismailis are widely recognized as a patriotic, peaceful community, largely apolitical, middle-class, and well educated. In the past, isolated incidents have occurred, such as the bombing at Aisha Manzil in Karachi in 2013, which killed four people and injured 42 others. Flare-ups in the northern Chitral Valley and Gilgit-Baltistan regions, where a large concentration of Ismailis reside, have resulted in casualties in the past, but nothing on the scale of the May 13 attack. Within hours of the attack, several banned groups clamored to claim responsibility. The first was Jundullah, a splinter group of the proscribed Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). Initially affiliated with al-Qaeda, the group has claimed responsibility for multiple terror attacks, especially on minorities, often without any real evidence to prove their involvement. In November 2014, the group changed its...

In a bizarre though expected display of their contemptuous opposition to Pakistan, a large number of Afghans took umbrage to the recentMemorandum of Understanding (MoU) on counter-terror and security cooperation between the ISI and Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security (NDS). The head of the NDS, Rahmatullah Nabil, who refused to sign the MoU, his predecessor, Amrullah Saleh, sitting parliamentarians and former president Hamid Karzai joined the chorus against what they likened to a treasonous act. Their reaction has exposed their deep-rooted dislike, if not contempt, of Pakistan. Even Indian National Security Adviser Ajit Doval jumped into the fray to run down the ISI-NDS. The vitriolic reaction defied logic and also exposed the lobbies that are at work against any fence-mending between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The denouncement of the MoU and the calls to cancel it literally stopped short of questioning Afghan President Ashraf Ghani’s integrity and commitment to the country by running down his attempts to smooth off the fractious relationship with Pakistan. All the Afghan detractors of the MoU essentially wishfully want Pakistan to eliminate all non-state actors and snap their social support with a single click; i.e., a precondition for any cooperation deal. This desire naively overestimates their own state’s internal divisions — within the unity government as well as among insurgent groups. Their proposition also grossly underestimates the likely internal blowback in case Pakistan goes all out after the Afghan Taliban by using their businesses and families residing there to pressure them into talks. Pakistan certainly has leverage but this leverage cannot be invoked at the cost of sociopolitical sensitivities on both sides of the border. The country has already enough fires to extinguish and should not be expected to add more to its raging troubles. Recent discussions with stakeholders in Washington and Beijing also entailed a more sympathetic view of...