Daily Times

It seems the government’s confidence, rather over-confidence, regarding the progress it has made with the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) is a little exaggerated. Ordinarily governments like to play up their achievements, like taking the shrinking current account deficit as a sure sign of the economy turning around, and such tactics are quite understandable. More so because the opposition, more often than not, will try to minimise the government’s gains even where it does well. But FATF is far too serious, and existential, a matter to play politics over. It is an even more urgent time bomb than the debt and very real chances of default; not the least because if, worse come to worst, the country is blacklisted it will be simply written out of the international commercial and lending regimes. And that, let’s understand this perfectly well, will mean more or less immediate default given Pakistan’s precarious debt situation.

And it shouldn’t take too much for the opposition to understand that this is a matter better left untouched even in their upcoming do-or-die standoff with the government. For its part, PTI can genuinely say that this particular problem was not of their making; and they’re doing the best they can to comply with international demands in the shortest possible time. Perhaps if they hadn’t heaped all problems on previous governments, their predicament on this occasion would’ve been a little easier to sell. Still, they should not be allowed to get away with boasting ‘substantial progress’ while the truth is that they made some progress on only five out of 27 points required by the action plan. This is, in fact, the third time Pakistan has missed a deadline to do enough to have itself removed from the grey list. So now we’ve been given one last chance, to really make substantial progress on all 27 points or be put on the black list. Really there’s very little, if anything, to celebrate in this outcome; but that’s not the feeling you get when you hear the government’s self-praise.

Islamabad must also finally realise that this is not one of those moments when some sort of subtle lobbying by one or some of our friends can get us out of the firing line. So any time, and money, seeking diplomatic solutions is better spent on implementing all required corrective measures. If we’ve only been able to ‘largely’ address concerns on five points in all this time, it will take a big effort to meet the February deadline. This is a moment of grave national importance and everybody, government and opposition, must understand its seriousness. *