Every year, for the past four years, I have been doing something in January, I write to Pakistani banks, via their websites (online) and gauge them on their response and customer service. Whilst for the past four years I was doing it purely out of curiosity, this year I decided to test our online banks and see how responsive (or lack thereof) they are to online customer queries.

The goal is simple:

• I have three questions that I shall be asking them, during different times of the week.
• All three questions are different.
• All the emails will go out from Gmail and Yahoo (so they cannot claim, that they never received it)
• I will gauge the banks on the following:

• Average time to reply
• Was the Question answered (Yes/No)
• Was there the response adequate
• Professionalism in their reply
• and other ancillary information that I will post (but not yet). Don’t want to give the whole thing away.

The report would be placed online, here on my blog as a downloadable PDF. It would be interesting to see how this detailed experiment of mine goes.

Stay tuned.

The questions that everyone wants an answer to. I have been writing to PayPal for 10+ years to solicit a reply from them – as to why they are not here in Pakistan (you can read that correspondence onwww.faisalkhan.com)

PayPal operates in various countries but a few countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, (amongst the larger ones) are missing. When countries like Somalia, Yemen and Rwanda are included in the list of countries where PayPal is available, one begins to wonder why Pakistan is not included.

It is not primarily about market size, I am sure Pakistan’s market size is a whole lot larger than many countries (combined) where PayPayl currently operates in.

The issue is country risk. <- I cannot sum it more accurately.

A financial institution like Paypal does risk assessment in their own way to assess which country it should and should not do business with. PK, whilst a large market size (compared to say Sri Lanka or Yemen or Rwanda) still poses a high-risk due to the factors like:

• KYC (Know Your Customer)
• AML (Anti-Money Laundering)
• OFAC (Office of Foreign Assets Control)
• SAR (Suspicious Activity Report)
• Beneficiary Information

The above (IMHO) are the major issues that PayPal faces, not being able to accurately gauge the above, is a risk that PayPal does not want to take.

They, PayPal can be penalized by the financial regulator in the country they operate FROM (not To), and the risk of account freezing, etc. All these factors they have to weigh against how much money they can earn (and they have a pretty good estimator for this). The risk vs the income – makes them conclude that PK is a risk country as far as business is concerned.

In addition to this, a small group with PayPal is trying to convince their management to look into Pakistan, whilst a large portion of members within the PayPal corporate world are literally biased and oblivious towards Pakistan as well (this is not an empty statement, but the ground reality within PayPal). PayPal itself is not entirely ‘clean or fair’ in its efforts. The ruckus that Pakistan is a money laundering country, etc. fails and pales in comparison to the amount of money laundering done in the US, and Latin America. As with every Pakistan/Indian issue, there are bigoted people within PayPal who are still harboring the animosity towards each other, is also another unsaid reason why Pakistan and Bangladesh have not gotten PayPal.

There is absolutely NO written notification and/or official circular from the US Government or Federal Reserve that ‘prevents’ Pakistan from having PayPal or tells organizations PayPal to discourage the Pakistani market. This myopic stance within PayPal is biased and unfair.

As previously speculated on many forums, it has NOTHING to do with SECP, SBP, FBR, etc. – - – that is not the issue (nor ever was).

A lot many forums and discussion boards have proposed that if PayPal cannot come to Pakistan, we should have our own payment system for the world to accept and adopt.

If you track payment systems, there are currently over 250+ payment system, after discounting the top 10-15 payment system, the rest of them COMBINED together probably do not do more than say #14 or #15 on the list. Having a payment system is one thing, having it adopted and be utilized and accepted by others is another matter entirely — and in some cases the key.

Lets talk about inward micro-payment options (barring PayPal) – you have none. No other micro payment system exists currently other than Paypal (sub $1 payments notwithstanding) that is worth mentioning or worth trading or transacting on. Even if you will make one, do you actually think your buyers in the international arena will adopt it? (I dont think so). Even some famous ones are having issues adopting.

The same can be applied for outward settlement. The fees structure for settling payment outside of Pakistan is quite complex. Daily reporting on transactions, along with the KYC and AML needs to be reported to the PRI division of SBP.

Without having any a priori information on the subject matter, people can comment and propose all they want, but seriously ask your self a question, how many hours? days? week? months? or years? have you applied towards the understanding of various payment systems that exist today? Have you ever spoken to them? Understood the back-office and legal issues, met with them in a seminar, etc.

So proposing that Paypal do this or that — is frivolous, (they are way more informed than you and I – combined).

Also – proposing an alternate payment system – how will that fair, if say tomorrow Google checkout becomes a micro-payment system, or the same were to happen with Twitter, or what many consider the inevitable, that Facebook launches either itself or in partnership with someone else, launches an payment/virtual-currency, that allows cross-border settlement and micro-payments? How will you payment system work.

Also remember, Paypal does not allow external payment system to integrate with them.

I do not mean to stomp the idea, but believe me, I have spent many years reading this all and do not make a statement just on heresay, but one that is based on hard statistics, fact and a whole lot of communication.

We may be #3 or #2 on some freelancing project network site, but what are we processing in terms of real-$-value per day? Do we do $30 Million a month – if not – we’re nothing as far as the financial transaction settlement world is concerned – an average ACH in the US transaction more than the $1 Trillion per day (yes, that’s is correct 1 Trillion, and no its not a typo). US ACHs transact more than $30-$45 Trillion per day, depending on the day of the week.

So, swallow your pride and understand and live with what we have. In the fiscal world as far as income – we are NOTHING. Accept that. In the world of RISK, believe me when I say we are almost #1. If people (rather financial institutions are NOT willing to do business here), then there is nothing you can do about it – Government or No-Government Pressure!

Let me give you an analogous example, please bear with me on the humor. The mangoes export of this country is FAR greater in number ($-wise) than say the inward and outward money combined from freelancing. Yet, the US chooses that we cannot export mangoes to the US, and there is NOTHING we can do about it. This has been true for over 25 years. Now – if we cannot export mangoes to the US, then what comical sense do we bring to the table asking Paypal to come here, because we are #2 or #3 on some work portal. [Yes, as an update, I know of the recent mangoes export to the US  -  for the first time.]

CPLC (Citizen Police Liaison Committee) has published a document called “Security Measures for Family & Child Safety“.

I believe this is a must read document for everyone who lives in Karachi (or Pakistan for that matter). The document can be downloaded from here (PDF 1.85MB).

The original document can be found on CPLC’s Official Website (on the very first page/main page).

Please help spread the word.

For many years now – I have been writing to the CEO/President of PayPal and their parent company Ebay, asking then why they are not present in Pakistan. Despite all the communication via email, faxes, and letters that I dispatch every year, I have never managed to solicit a reply from them. Not even a squeak.

Today, many campaigns are afoot on the Internet in the hopes of getting PayPal’s attention and getting them to come to Pakistan.

Some people are supposedly even in touch with PayPal through their Far East office, London office or US office. Some have claimed to have met them, each vying to bring PayPal to Pakistan. In some minor cases, some of these elements are just not playing fair and present a fair picture to PayPal. They do so because they want to do business with PayPal and get paid for it (hint: law firms), others want accolades, etc. Just for the record, I want none. I just want them to be here.

Today, people fly to Singapore,Dubai, London and even the US to open a bank account just so that they can have a PayPal account.

Most of the activity that is done on PayPal on behalf of Pakistan is done so by what I call Acquaintance-PayPaling! – i.e. using the PayPal account of your brother, sister, uncle, niece, cousin, friend, relative, associate, etc.

Coming back to topic – the present situation is – we still do not have PayPal in Pakistan. Rumor mills are abound with the reasons why PayPal is not in Pakistan. I will not go there, but perhaps try to address what in my opinion I believe is stopping PayPal from coming to Pakistan.

PayPal as you know operates in quite a few countries. In our immediate region, i.e. South Asia, large economies like Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, etc. do not have PayPal, yet countries like Rwanda, Botswana, Fiji, Panama, Sierra Leone, Tonga and Zambia have access to PayPal.

Even Yemen and Somalia have access to Paypal.

Is this fair? Certainly not!

PayPal’s reluctance to operate in Pakistan is due to Anti-Money Laundering and Terrorist activities.

It is also rumored  (I cannot confirm this), that there  is a strong Indian lobby, that very tactfully yet and with sane reasoning positions Pakistan as a country which PayPal best avoids, despite the numbers that work in favor for PayPal to operate here.

No one – on their own wants to take ownership within PayPal and convince the New Business Development Department and the Legal team that Pakistan holds the potential of a very strong market for PayPal.

Having said this, there are some genuine people in PayPal who are literally fighting a case for Pakistan. I wish them good luck and request that they read on what I have written below.

So to summarize:

1. PayPal wants to do business in Pakistan, but are hesitant due to AML and for it (PayPal services) to possibly be used for terrorist activities.
2. People in Pakistan desperately want PayPal.

There are three concerning bodies in Pakistan that PayPal needs to get in touch with:

1. State Bank of Pakistan (the central bank of Pakistan)
2. Pakistan Remittance Initiative – a semi-autonomous body within SBP that is focused on inward remittances and how to legalize them, and provide better KYC, etc.
3. FMU – Financial Monitoring Unit – the AML arm of SBP.

In an unofficial capacity I can state, that all three are willing to talk to PayPal and pacify and address their concerns which prevents them from operating in Pakistan.

Especially PRI – the folks at PRI are more than willing to sit and listen to PayPal and advice them of our laws that we have in place and to correct any misconceptions that they might have with respect to Pakistan.  They can help you get PayPal services rolled out at a National level – and under a one-window operation for PayPal.

PRI is the most pertinent body that can help PayPal and will guide you if you need a banking license or a money-exchange license, how to get incorporated (if required by SECP) how to get integrated with the two ATM switch operators in Pakistan: 1Link and MNet – I’m very sure PRI will also help PayPal with any Tax related issues / consultation with the Tax Authorities (i.e. FBR).

Sitting in a cubicle in California – things are a whole lot different when Pakistan is viewed as a potential country to do business with. It would be conniving of PayPal not to get in touch with PRI / SBP / FMU – all three which operate under the auspices of Ministry of Finance and have the hurdles addressed.

Sitting in Pakistan, you cannot fathom our disbelief that we are blatantly being ignored by PayPal  -  the silence to all the communication/campaigns is deafening.

10+ years of PayPal and no service in Pakistan is just not fair to the 20 million internet users here. We are NOT a camel country! We don’t have sand dunes and people sitting in huts squatting flies. We are not running around naked in sewers begging for water. We do have almost all the conceivable luxuries and infrastructure that is prevalent out in the West. Especially digital infrastructure.

For god’s sake, stop being obtuse PayPal and open your eyes!

For good order’s sake – study us, and do your homework. We are the largest Non-Nato partner for the US in this war against terror. You really think that terrorist networks are only existing in Pakistan? they are all over the world – including UK, Germany, France, Somalia, Yemen, Rwanda, South Africa, Canada, countries where you operate. And please, do not associate the word terrorist with “Islam” or “Muslim” god knows how many home grown terrorist organizations are out there. Juxtaposing such labels on Pakistan is unfair, uncalled for and plain myopic business attitude. Radical white supremacist are gaining numbers everyday in Germany and Austria and UK, do you not consider them when you do business there? India has its own share of problems as far as terrorist organizations are concenred – including the Indian Maoist movement known as the Naxalites, but that does not stop PayPal from operating there now does it? So please think rationally when it comes to Pakistan and stop generalizing and compartmentalizing us.

Pakistani individuals and small businesses are making great strides on freelancing portals (like Elance, oDesk, RentaCoder, etc.) and other web outsourcing platforms where they deliver fantastic services.

Users here are forced to pay hefty fees associated with bank wire transfers, Western Union, 2Checkout, Liberty Reserve, Moneybookers, etc. to get paid.

The very least PayPal can do – is to get in touch with the right institutions here in Pakistan and work with them to have their issues addressed. Until and unless PayPal will not take the first step, the Government of Pakistan and its institutions are helpless, not to mention the 20 million Internet users and the nearing 100 million cellphone users. We as citizens can only do our digital protest in the hopes we get your attention – the walk you must walk!

If anyone in PayPal is reading this, please get in touch with myself, at fk (at) faisalkhan (dot) com and I shall duly put you in touch with the three institutions I mentioned. I do with without any self-servicing agenda or motive. I too like everyone else would like PayPal to be present in Pakistan.

Its been too long for us not to have PayPal and you have it within yourselves, the power, the will and determination to change that for the 20 million Internet users in Pakistan.

"Hope is not a dream but a way of making dreams become reality."

- L. J. Suenens

PIA recently introduced new livery recently.

Livery shots can be seen Here – Here and Here.

There is even the word “Pakistan” inscribed on the under-carriage. I think the new livery is much better than the Euro-White we had going before. Kudos to PIA.

This Article on General Kayani originally was published in Times of India by Indrani Bagchi. It is a very well written article and gives a rare insight to the man at the helm of affairs of this country.

GENERAL IN THE ‘HOOD’

Indrani Bagchi, TOI Crest, Mar 20, 2010, 10.33am IST

Those who know him say he is a brooder. But those who know him well will tell you that’s just one of the layers to the deeply complicated and thinking mind of Pakistan army chief Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. The bluster that marked Musharraf has been dumped for quiet gravitas as the man from Rawalpindi goes about turning friends like the US and Britain into closer allies and outmanoeuvering not-so-friendly neighbours like India and Afghanistan at international fora. In a country brought to its knees by terror, corruption and an inept political system, the former ISI chief is putting up a masterly show as he calls the shots.

Sitting with foreign minister S M Krishna this February, US defence secretary Robert Gates said he was going to Pakistan the next day. So who was he going to meet? Oh, a number of people, said Gates, but his most important conversation would be with Pakistan army chief Gen Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. “Why not Zardari?” asked Krishna, referring to the Pakistan president. “Because Kayani is the most important man out there,” Gates said matter-of-factly . And Gates should know – in Washington, he’s often described as the most powerful defence secretary Pentagon has had in a long while.

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, this low-profile general has emerged from the shadows. The obvious ineptitude of the Pakistan political establishment seems to have finally helped burnish the credentials of the Pakistan Army whose reputation was in tatters in the final days of the last military dictator, General Pervez Musharraf. And with its return has emerged its boss Kayani. Compared to Zardari’s gang that just can’t shoot straight, many in Pakistan seem to view the Army chief as a better bargain – although it’s debatable that they’ll want a return to military rule.

As boss of Pakistan’s infamous spy agency ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence), Kayani had a reputation for being slightly nervous. It would now appear that he was being circumspect rather than nervous. As the civil government got its knickers in a twist every so often, the general quietly plotted the return of the military to its position of pre-eminence in Pakistan society.

He has since quietly started calling the shots. Remember how Zardari promised to send the ISI chief Shuja Pasha to India after the 26/11 Mumbai attacks, and how Kayani vetoed him? That was just the beginning of his new assertiveness.

But who is this man really? Is he a bumbling military brass in the mould of Yahya Khan, who lost East Pakistan because of his ham-handed ways, or is he a modern-day version of the suave Ayub Khan, Pakistan’s first military dictator who introduced the army to the intoxication of political power? Or is Kayani just a product of circumstances, the man who is willy-nilly filling up the political vacuum created by the messy management of Zardari & Co?

Details about the 57-year-old Kayani are somewhat sketchy. He doesn’t have the kind of privileged background that most Pakistan military brass does. His father, Lehrasab, was a naib subedar in the army – in other words, a non-commissioned officer. Born in Rawalpindi in Punjab, Kayani came up the hard way after being commissioned in 1971, the year of the Bangladesh War.

Those who have seen him up close say Kayani is the brooding type. He was given to long, solitary walks until November 2007, when Gen Musharraf named him the army chief – thereafter, it was no longer possible for him to remain unattended. Kayani is a chain smoker – he reportedly lights up every 15 minutes – and is given to long drags on his cigarette as he engages in deep listening during briefings by his trusted commanders. It’s said he interrupts only to seek either a clarification or elucidation of a point.

Kayani’s slightly unnerving silence contrasts strongly with Musharraf’s volubility. But it would be stupid to infer from this that he has little to say. They say Kayani has a lot more going on in his head. He is also a Pakistan army “traditionalist” which means his worldview is India-centric . The eastern neighbour, India, is seen by the army as enemy No1, and policies and responses flow from that basic understanding.

UNFRIENDLY NEIGHBOUR A strategically shrewd army chief, Kayani doesn’t count India among Pakistan’s allies – something that is likely to make him appear in New Delhi to be more dangerous than someone like Musharraf. In any case, since it’s Kayani who holds the reins, New Delhi would do well to sit up and take notice of this man.

It needs to know whether Kayani’s anti-India stance is a strategic move to bind together the army at a time when political parties in Pakistan are slipping fast into an inchoate body of disparate noises, and when the people see the solidity of the army as a source of reassurance. Or is it genetically coded – that come what may, he will be hostile towards India.

Says a top Indian official, “On a scale of 1 to 10 for anti-India sentiment, if Musharraf was at 5, Kayani is at 8.” “And as he is seen increasingly to be in control, it’s bad news for us.”

Kayani started out as an apolitical army chief. Now as he is in the driving seat in Pakistan, he is showing political sense. The way he has latched on to the water issue between India and Pakistan to drum up paranoia about India “starving” Pakistan of water shows he knows how to press the emotive buttons. When India offered foreign secretary-level talks with Pakistan, Islamabad took its time to respond, allegedly because Kayani hadn’t given his nod; he wanted a composite dialogue that would include Kashmir, and not just terror. And it was Kayani who gave directions to Pakistan’s foreign secretary, Salman Bashir, when he came to New Delhi to meet Nirupama Rao.

Significantly, the day before, Kayani told the defence committee of the National Assembly that the army under him would remain “India-centric” . “India has the capability, intentions can change overnight,” he told legislators.

G Parthasarathy, who was high commissioner to Islamabad, says, “Gen Kayani represents an institutional hostility towards India because promoting it enables the army to dominate Pakistan without responsibility. Given the fact that he is the de facto ruler of Pakistan, India should be prepared for more covert and overt hostility directed at it from Pakistani soil.”

The quiet rise of Kayani hasn’t gone unnoticed in capitals around the world. US secretary of state Hillary Clinton spends more time with Kayani than with the civvies. Afghan president Hamid Karzai, who has had a testy relationship with the Pakistani army, is mending fences with it. Pakistan’s strategic outreach is being managed by Kayani: He made a much talked about power-point presentation at the NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) headquarters in Brussels on how he could help the West get out of Afghanistan; he talked turkey with the Turks on keeping control of a key conference in Istanbul on Afghanistan’s future; and he’s assumed the role of the point person on ‘reconciliation’ with Taliban.

This week, Kayani will be the pre-eminent member of the Pakistan delegation at a strategic dialogue with Washington where demand No.1 will be a nuclear deal like the one signed with India, apart from agreements on more mundane matters like trade and agriculture. In preparation for the talks, Kayani presided over a meeting of government secretaries on Tuesday, the first time that top-level bureaucrats have been called to army headquarters in a civilian regime.

WOWING THE WEST It was not always so, even as recently as in 2009. Through most of last year, Pakistan, and its army, were on the back foot. Terrorists in Swat and other parts of FATA (Federally Administered Tribal Areas) and NWFP (North-West Frontier Province) were on the rampage and inching towards Islamabad, setting off alarm bells the world over. To make matters worse, there was talk of the army playing fast and loose with the Americans as well as with the Taliban. The US media was awash with CIA leaks on how Kayani had described Afghan Taliban leader Sirajuddin Haqqani as a ‘strategic asset’.

There was little trust between the two sides.

Cut to January 2010, and the scenario had changed dramatically. Pakistan had ‘fixed’ the trust problem with the Americans. In July 2008, when Kayani and ISI chief Shuja Pasha were ‘summoned’ by General David Petraeus, head of the US Central Command, to be scolded about Islamabad’s misdemeanors, especially the attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul, it was a low point for a country which had tomtommed its “shared anxieties” with America.

By the end of 2009, Kayani was taking the US joint chief of staff chairman Mike Mullen and US commander in Afghanistan Stanley Mc-Crystal on helicopter rides in Swat and Waziristan to show progress in his battle against the Taliban. Pakistan had effectively re-established itself in the West as a part of the solution, even as it continued to be a part of the problem.

Kayani’s message to the NATO brass in January, made adroitly yet forcefully through a 62-slide presentation, was disarmingly simple: Pakistan had a strategic future in Afghanistan well beyond the US presence and should not be taken lightly. This meant the government in Kabul had to be mindful of Pakistani interests; and India had to be out of Afghanistan, or at the very least, needed to greatly reduce its presence.

Kayani scored another big victory at the January 28 London conference on the future of Afghanistan. The idea promoted by the British and backed by the US, that Pakistan would be the lead player in the Taliban ‘reconciliation’ process, was met with enthusiastic response. The army chief came out smelling of roses, confident in his belief that he had successfully outmanoeuvered India even as New Delhi fumbled in its opposition to the Taliban being accommodated.

This was quite a contrast to Musharraf’s last days, when the army stumbled from one political miscalculation to another and ended up with the disastrous storming of Islamabad’s Lal Masjid where radical imams were threatening the state. Meanwhile, the Tehreek-e-Taliban was growing in strength and firepower with a string of terror attacks throughout Pakistan, leading up to the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.

Worryingly for the hawks, Musharraf had also found a common language with Manmohan Singh and back-channel talks with India hinted at some sort of non-territorial adjustment in Kashmir. His ‘out-of-the-box’ proposals on Kashmir as well as ‘tactical restraint’ on the Kashmir jihad between 2004 and 2007 undermined the traditional mindset. As both Siachen and Sir Creek remained unresolved, there rose many voices within the Pakistan military establishment questioning the wisdom of abandoning the old position of bleeding India.

BACK TO BRASS TACKS Enter Kayani, with a 18-handicap in golf and a Plan. Admiral Mullen recently gushed in Time magazine: “Gen Kayani commands an army with troops fighting in what President Barack Obama has rightly called the ‘most dangerous place in the world.’ He’s lost more than 1,000 soldiers in that fight. He knows the stakes. He’s got a plan.”

Convinced of the centrality of the army as the bulwark of the Pakistan state, Kayani was bringing back to it its robbed glory and quintessential values. He has figured that the only way to regain influence for Pakistan would be to somehow make the Taliban a part of the power structure in Kabul and help the US pack its bags. That would force India to leave Afghanistan and help Pakistan regain control of the region.

Until that happens, Kayani knows the India bogey has to be kept alive and leveraged against Pakistan’s efforts at taming the Taliban. Against the US’s better judgment, but impelled by recession and public opinion, Washington is giving the Kayani worldview more than a nod and a wink. Washington’s approach to Islamabad is old-fashioned bribery: sophisticated military toys are winging their way to Pakistan as ‘incentive’ to fight the Taliban.

It knows full well that these weapons will actually be directed against India. As an Indian official explained, “Kayani is pegging the modernisation of the Pak army on US money.” By end-2010 , Pakistan will get an additional $3.4 billion in military aid from the US, bringing the total up to almost $12 billion since 2003.

IT’S IN HIS BLOOD Kayani cut his teeth in the army during the Bangladesh war. Thirty years later as director-general military operations (DGMO), he directed the 10-month stand-off with the Indian army. He earned his spurs with Musharraf when he conducted, with efficiency and confidentiality, the investigation into the assassination bids on Musharraf in 2003. Musharraf has himself reminisced that until Kayani took over, the investigation was a mess. It led to his appointment as DG-ISI in 2004.

POWER BROKER For all his loyalty to Musharraf, Kayani was an admirer of sorts of Benazir Bhutto, having served as military secretary to her. In 2007, when the Americans started pressuring Musharraf to work out a “reconciliation” with Benazir, he sent Kayani to do the job. On March 9, 2007 when Musharraf’s aides read out the riot act to Justice Chaudhry, demanding he step down, Kayani was part of the team. But presciently, he remained silent through the meeting and refused to present an affidavit to Chaudhry along with the others.

That paid him rich dividends later when he brokered a deal between Zardari and the judiciary during the lawyers’ Long March in 2008 and the most recent constitutional crisis with the judges’ appointment in 2009, which eroded Zardari’s credibility but enhanced Kayani’s . In 2008, Kayani compelled Zardari and Prime Minister Gilani to reinstate Chaudhry as CJ. In December 2009, Kayani once again made Zardari accept a decision by Chaudhry and the Supreme Court overturning the immunity earlier granted to Zardari from prosecution for corruption.

In a previous age, the army chief would have had ample reason by now to take over power, but Kayani seems to prefer playing puppeteer. “From the beginning, Kayani took the civilian leadership into confidence, but the onus of unifying the country was the army’s ,” says Imtiaz Gul of the Centre for Research and Security Studies, Islamabad.

When Zardari assumed office in February 2008, and Musharraf was turfed out, the new army chief declared his intention to stay apolitical even though he reportedly loathed Zardari and others in the corrupt leadership. Although he firmly believed that the army was the mainstay of Pakistan, Kayani was sensitive to the unusually strong public outrage against the army. It needed to go back to the barracks if it had to get back a modicum of its earlier prestige. In one of his early acts, Kayani withdrew hundreds of army officers from civilian jobs in the government, leaving the job of running the country to civilians.

RETURN TO GLORY With the campaign in Swat later in the year, Kayani salvaged a lot of goodwill. Mosharraf Zaidi, political commentator in Islamabad, said, “Kayani’s deft handling of the Swat crisis helped turn the tide in favour of an overarching national narrative of support for a military fighting to protect Pakistanis from the threat of Taliban thugs overrunning the country.”

In the past few weeks, Kayani has closely supervised the consensus to replace the 17th amendment of the Pakistan constitution with the 18th, effectively moving the Pakistani system back to the 1973 constitution and a parliamentary democracy. This means Zardari can’t gather any more powers , having surrendering many in the last year, including the nuclear command authority.

If the constitutional amendment goes through, Gilani will be more relevant than Zardari and Kayani will find it much easier to control the levers of Pakistan. But more significantly , because Kayani is proceeding without the hoopla that accompanied Musharraf’s actions, and is keeping the other generals in the army in the loop, his actions, though just as autocratic, have greater acceptability within Pakistan.

The US, for all its democratic avowals, was the first to read the tea leaves. In March 2008, the Americans ‘selected’ Kayani for the US Army Command and General Staff College’s International Hall of Fame. “The hall honors those officers of United States allies’ militaries who have attained the highest command positions in their national service component or within their nation’s armed forces,” the citation said.

BLEED INDIA But even as Kayani wowed the West, he turned the heat on India. The word was out: India was fair game again, particularly in Afghanistan. The Haqqani network-executed terror attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul on July 7, 2008 was a direct result of this and there was little attempt to cover the trail that led back to the Pakistan army. By the time 26/11 happened, it was clear in India that Lashkar-e-Taiba had been blessed by the army. In 2009, the embassy in Kabul was attacked again, and in 2010, Indian civilians in Afghanistan are sitting ducks for Pakistan-supported terror.

In the immediate aftermath of 26/11, when Manmohan Singh made the unprecedented request to Pakistan to send its DG-ISI , Shuja Pasha, Kayani torpedoed it, saying “The Indians will be asking me to go next.” In the present context of resumed talks, top Indian officials say Kayani is not particularly interested in exploring any new engagement; for him maintaining tension is more important.

The jury is still out on how far Kayani will go in allowing groups like LeT and HuJI to carry on their activities against India, with ISI support. Pakistan refuses to acknowledge Indian concerns on LeT, saying instead that the more India focuses on LeT, the more difficult things will get. The US and other countries have read out the riot act to Kayani several times on these groups. But as Kayani said, “Pakistan’s long-term national interests would never be sacrificed for someone else’s short-term interests”.

THE TROUBLE WITH TERROR And yet, nobody possibly knows better than he the intricate connections between these groups and how they’re spawning daily terror in Pakistan itself.

Terrorism is, and will remain, Pakistan’s weak spot, and its encouragement will always be counter-productive . Despite the campaigns against the Pakistan Taliban, the army continues to maintain an ambivalent posture of tolerance towards these groups. If Musharraf was attacked by Jaish-e-Mohammed in 2003, Kayani himself was the target of an assassination plot by Ilyas Kashmiri in May 2009. Even today, HuJI leaders, Kashmiri and Saifullah Akhtar, are operating from South Waziristan and carrying out terror attacks in Punjab with the help of Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan. But somehow, the Pak army continues to believe these groups can be controlled.

For India, it’s clear that as long as terror groups from Pakistan attack India with help from its military-intelligence complex, it will remain focused on terrorism. With virtually no official engagement between India and the Pakistan army, New Delhi’s in a bizarre situation where Kayani appears to have assumed the role of chief interlocutor for Pakistan with the rest of the world, but not India.

There’s a view that India needs to make a greater public effort to engage the Pakistan army. But the signals are mixed. On the one hand, ISI chief Shuja Pasha’s “dropping in” at the Indian high commissioner, Sharat Sabharwal’s iftaar party, was a potent invite to India. But on the other, the Pakistan army has by and large been reluctant to defreeze relations with its Indian counterparts. India had proposed polo matches between the armies about a year ago, but there was no response from Pakistan.

PLAYING THE AFGHAN CARD It’s with the Taliban that Kayani is playing a high stakes game. Given that he doesn’t want a regime in Kabul that is ‘unfriendly’ to Islamabad, it follows that he will seek to orchestrate and control reconciliation efforts with the Taliban . Karzai too was doing some “reconciliation” himself, negotiating with Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, Mullah Omar’s No. 2 in the Quetta Shura (which runs the most powerful arm of the Afghan Taliban), when the ISI “captured” him in Karachi. In the weeks since, Pakistan has captured nine of the 18 members of the Shura. One of the theories doing the rounds is that Kayani didn’t want Karzai to upstage him in negotiating with the Taliban, and the swoop on Baradar was aimed at pre-empting any deal between the Afghan president and the Taliban.

Last week Karzai and Kayani, in reciprocal visits, came to an understanding. Baradar could be handed over to Karzai with an understanding that Pakistan has first dibs at this game. Sirajuddin Haqqani of the Haqqani network is Pakistan’s favourite Taliban leader, and ideally, Kayani would like him to be part of the power sharing arrangement in Kabul. But here too, by killing off Sirajuddin’s brother, Kayani has made it clear as to who’s the boss.

Will Kayani deliver al-Qaeda to the US? And at what price? The British are content to play the Pakistan game, but the Americans are yet to be fully convinced. India is out of this one, but has a strong interest in seeing that the Taliban is not part of Kabul with their ideology intact.

HOW LONG WILL HE BE CHIEF? Kayani has many irons in the fire. But if things go as scheduled , the army chief is set to hang up his gloves in November 2010. Will he? The Obama surge in Afghanistan will be in full bloom and without Pakistani assistance, it is unlikely to work. Kayani has become Washington’s man and to make the same investment in a successor at the height of the battle might be difficult. So they may want to see him stay on.

Pakistan’s politics is notoriously fragile and unlikely to sort itself out, and even if Zardari and Nawaz Sharif stop acting like vicious boys, Kayani has emerged as something of a sheet anchor in Pakistan. Pakistan’s future relevance hangs on whether Kayani can ‘manage’ to successfully influence the Taliban reconciliation programme in Afghanistan to keep Pakistan in play there.

That will need Kayani’s combined skills as soldier and spy, along with American and British cheerleaders, to pull it off. Kayani’s chief task now is to bring about an agreement among his fellow generals that he should stay on – he’s more inclined to go down this road than take the my-way-orthe-highway approach of Musharraf.

In what is seen as a test case, ISI boss Shuja Pasha was given a year’s extension last week. Zardari has let out that he has offered Kayani a two-year extension as well. If Kayani agrees, does that also give Zardari some space? Will it be greeted with a sense of relief in Islamabad and Washington? Most important , will he be able to build some sort of ‘collegiate consensus’ in favour of his continuity, which would mean his colleagues agreeing to sacrifice their chances?

Many within the Indian establishment believe Kayani may be biding his time before he edges out Zardari and take over as president.

But if Kayani does go, who’ll take his place? The name most frequently mentioned is Khalid Shamim Wynne, commander of the Quetta-based 12th Corps, with few ties to extremists, but more experience against India. Others in the running are Mohammed Mustafa Khan, chief of general staff; Nadeem Taj, commander 30thCorps, who preceded Pasha as ISI chief but is considered too close to the Taliban; and Tahir Mehmood, head of 10th Corps.

But for the moment, Kayani-controlled Pakistan is playing a good game with very few cards in hand. India would do well to watch the moves closely

The Supreme Court of Pakistan released the NRO (National Reconciliation Ordinance) 2007 Detailed Judgement in which it struck down the controversial NRO law.

The complete judgement can be downloaded from here (NRO Detailed Judgement)  [6.2MB - PDF File]

I’ve always advocated, that the progress of any nation can be gauged by the efficiency and adaptation of technology by its shipping and courier companies. With the mobile / Internet age now at high-noon, how are our shipping companies fairing up?

Let me start reverse, the best out there is TCS, then perhaps OCS and then everyone else. But that is unfortunately where the good of it all ends.
Even in developing countries (Sri Lanka is an example, Maldives is another), the technology available at the walk-in center of any courier company would outshine its Pakistani counterpart many lumens over.

I still do not understand why consumer based packaging and labeling still not provided to the consumer. First of all, there is a ridiculous requirement at TCS (since I haven’t walked into OCS / Leopard in a long time, I cannot say, but I am assuming they are also playing follow the leader). Coming back to the stupid requirement. They need to see the envelope that I am sending ‘unsealed’ (I understand security concerns but ???)

Everything you bring there has unsealed (read: opened). Once the security guy checks it – only then will they allow you to close it.

Just to play a prank, one of these days, I will send a courier to the CEO of TCS, in a letter filled with talcum powder, which easily could have been anthrax. That would be the ultimate definition of a loophole in security.

Anyways, ask TCS for bubble-packaging sheets – and chances are they will stare blankly at you. The list is quite large…

• Security checks are a joke.
• You cannot transport a laptop – and the insurance premium is 8% (true as of 19th July, 2009, as indicated by TCS Shahrah-e-Faisal branch).
• No courier service offers tapes for sales, various sized boxes, packaging material, strong box material, tear-proof sheets, etc.
• Labeling material is not provided for.
• No courier company offers downloadable software for businesses to generate their own labels for the outgoing mail
• Bulk checking against their system is not offered, i.e. if a business has sent out 100 letters using the courier company’s software (let’s assume it is available), then there is no way to check in bulk from the software itself, the status and delivery confirmation.
• SMS based confirmations still not offered by industry. At time of booking a cell number can be taken, and you can be notified when your parcel/letter is signed for and delivered (this is such a simple application).
• 2D bar codes if generated by the client cannot be read by any courier company, albeit from what I hear Speedex is doing trials on this – rumor? I don’t know. The source is shallow.
• Peanut packaging material is not available.
• Insurance rates for high-value items is very high.
• Delivery updated are far and long.

For small industries to survive or even e-commerce based shops to thrive, sending small (volume sized) pieces of shipments in an effective manner is still something to be achieved.

I personally asked some website owners who are operating fantastic local e-commerce stores, if they had their trust in the courier service. None of them responded positively. They so much so had to rely on stocking in different part of the country and use their own runners, etc. for effective delivery services.

Another thing the courier companies can look into are mobile phone with cameras, and phone that allow 3rd party apps to be written for them. With cellphone cameras, you can take a snapshot of the bar code, have it read by the app written on the phone and then text this in a compressed manner to the central site, this is perhaps the fastest way to acknowledge that a parcel has been picked up or delivered. Even with the unreliability of SMS, apps exist to make sure the full-circle of communication takes place (for example if confirmation code is not received by the phone, it will try again) and vice-versa.

Courier services have been broken down to the basic functionality that of the post man. Try a package delivery and then see the ‘haalat’ in which it arrives at the destination. In FedEx you can get a FedEx envelope, various sizes boxes, tear-proof envelopes, tubes, etc. what does TCS or any other courier company give you in return for your postal needs?

What about 2nd day delivery or low priority delivery? None of it exists sadly. The courier companies sure need to get their act together and innovate, without which, we will see them as simply a replacement of Pakistan Postal Service.

One other point I must mention, as part of the courier companies grooming services, it must ensure that its employees wear deodorant. Because of the running around all day along in the field and sweating, wearing an anti-anti-perspirant / deodorant should be on top of their agenda.

We must realize the world in which we live in today moves two things: atoms and electrons. Atoms being the physical goods and electrons being the electronic Ones and Zeros on our digital infrastructure. We have adapted the electronic highway very well and are continuing to improve life on it. However, we still need physical goods, in order for us to become more efficient as a society on the whole, we need to remove inefficiencies and the stale-progress graphs and innovate and implement cutting edge technologies within our daily fabric. Failing to do so, will result in a totally disparate nation with two economies, the super-efficient digital economy and the super-inefficient physical economy.

For our futures sake, I hope we can hammer some sense into these courier companies, logistic companies and shipping companies.

While so much emphasis has been stressed on the bad mortgages and home-loans, another wave of bad loans is coming.

Before I elaborate, let me quickly summarize. There was excess liquidity in the market, money was made available to almost anyone, people started getting 2nd and 3rd mortgages (when they really could not afford more than one). As everyone was out hunting for properties to invest, home prices soared. Wall Street got into the action. Hedge funds, money market funds, and God knows anything that could be carved out of such a booming-liquid-money-house-based-mortgage-lending-economy, was carved. The bubble burst. Then the downfall happened of which we all know about.

I am no economist – not even close. But for over 10+ years, I’ve kept a VERY close eye on a very specific segment of commercial real-estate: data-centers.

As more and more people get laid off, companies will continue to cut down costs. As costs are cut down, office/building expansion, etc. are also cut down. When people are out of a job, credit card defaults are bound to happen. When people don’t spend money, commercial businesses will get hit… and that is the Second Wave.

Soon enough you will see a lot of commercial building loans go into default. Right now we’ve been seeing home-loans gone bad, I bet you will be seeing commercial loans go bad pretty soon.

For any reversal of fortune, the first step is the slowdown, which we have already experienced, the send step is the stopping – which we are experiencing right now. The third would be the reversal itself. This I believe has started quietly. Nothing big yet, but this commercial default snowball is now becoming bigger and bigger.

Datacenters expansion by Google and Microsoft for example have been stalled. More and more emphasis is being applied now to pack more servers/gear into the same available space (blade servers, cloud computing, etc.)

Go-green options are huge. Large datacenters can get connected to grid in excess of 50Megawatts. Some exceed 100Megawatts. All signs and indications right now in the commercial datacenter markets is of a steep slowdown. Those with a lot of liquidity, are on a buying spree to grab land which is being offered at an unprecedented low rate. As we are now an electronic economy, this commercial vertical is seeing a lot of consolidation happen. The real-world brick-and-mortar companies are shuttering down a whole lot faster than you and I can fathom. Circuit City – gone bust! More and more are coming. Coffee sales at Starbucks have gone down significantly – imagine what the neighborhood coffee shop is experiencing. Casinos are laying off people. Which in turn affects the rental market in Las Vegas, which affects the new housing projects that are coming up – when the market goes under, a commercial default is imminent.

Look at all the advertisements of all the grand-land projects that use to come out in Dawn. All gone now. No more double-full page advertisements. All gone. Come to think of it – I hardly see any new tower coming up. Those that are already in the build – have slowed down. The Centaurus in Islamabad is in trouble. So is the Grand Hyatt Project in Islamabad. By trouble – it’s always financial. Commercial office and residential projects in Karachi are equally affected. Whatever happened to Emaar’s expansion plans – on hold I bet.

Year 2009 is not going to be easy by any ways or means. For Pakistan, it will be a whole lot tougher. Water shortage will have a serious impact on agriculture this year. Note it down. I will revisit and put a “told-you-so” in the comments a few months from now. Electricity woes will be almost unbearable come this summer. A lot more projects within Pakistan will be facing serious crisis as the months progress. I wish I had some good news, but the fact of the matter is – people are just not prepared for the storm that is coming.

As we plan to have (InshahAllah) various small data-center locations all over Pakistan, there arose a question as to what to name them? In the West, datacenters have a very tech name associated with them, like Digital Realty, Equinix’s IBX (Internet Business Exchange), Datamart, Databank, etc. We wanted to be different. Not just for the sake of being different, but different as in authentic and ethnic.

So, we have decided to name our small data-centers after the Karakoram Range, in particular the peaks. The First one we are initiating is going to be called K2 (i.e Mount Godwin Austin), and henceforth as we keep naming them, we will keep assigning the names of the Karakoram peaks to them.

The reasoning behind naming them after our majestic mountain peaks is because they are one great asset of this country. They are our primary water supply, they can easily be cited as the nature’s greatest wonders, and also offer us various forms of natural protection. The same sense goes into our data-center. It’s our (i.e. our company’s) greatest asset, it’s our valued resource and in some manner, our peak.

So – with this – once the data-center is ready for business, we shall aptly christen it as K2.

Every now and then – I like to buy ‘things’ from abroad. Sometimes it is books, but most of the time it is hobby or computer parts related.

Of late we have been sourcing equipment for the data center. Having servers, routers, parts, accessories, cables, drives, processors, switches, firewalls, power plugs, etc. picked up from various countries and cities across the world. The ONLY company worth mentioning is Fedex. We initiated a Fedex corporate account a couple of months back. It has been nothing short of a lifesaver for us. For example when we were buying KVM switches, from a small distributor in Texas. We did a wire-transfer for the money, and for equipment pickup – we simply gave our Fedex number to the company. It was as simple as that. No need to make an invoice, no other details. Simply provide the Fedex number. The Fedex man arrives, picks up the goods, and labels them, etc. and delivers them to our door step in Karachi. If customs clearance is required – that too is taken care of by our local clearing agent.

The whole process is so simple. Yes, it is expensive, but Fedex today has by far the best coverage. I use to think DHL and TNT were the prevailing tigers of Asia, but that is not so true anymore. DHL, when we wanted to open a corporate account with them in Pakistan, just kept on giving us the run-around, today the sales guy is coming. Tomorrow the sales guy is coming. I mean I literally had to call up their office so many times, citing I want to become a corporate customer. I guess we were not important enough. With Fedex, – everything was SO professional. Next day their sales rep came to us. Explained to us the entire process and we were up and running within a couple of days. I haven’t looked back since. We’ve even had shipments weighing up to 250Kgs be picked up and delivered. Such is the cool efficiency of Fedex.

I wish other courier companies can also get their act together like this. A good example is to use a friend to call their own companies and initiate a sales query and see how your own team responds. I will admit one thing for sure, I NEVER was a fan of Fedex. I thought DHL was the coolest company in the world to work with, however, all that changed with one experience.

A few days ago, I embarked on my annual routine of writing to Ebay and PayPal – asking them why their services are not being offered in Pakistan? I have been doing this for a couple of years now.

This year, I decided to write a letter and write to the very top, i.e. the two CEOs of Ebay and PayPal, John Donahoe & Scott Thompson.

Rather than just email, I decided to formally send a letter and Fedex’d it to them. The letters were delivered yesterday. Now it is a wait and see – as to what they will say.