Political Analysis and Global Affairs

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The Fake Video Is Wrong. Pakistan Still Has an India-Israel-Afghanistan Problem

A viral video claims that Israel, India and Afghanistan are coordinating against Pakistan. The evidence does not support a formal anti-Pakistan alliance, but real strategic relationships beneath the claim deserve closer scrutiny. A video arrived on my phone in Karachi with the sort of warning Pakistanis have heard for decades. A man spoke urgently about Israel and India joining Afghanistan against Pakistan, while clips of Narendra Modi and Benjamin Netanyahu appeared to provide proof. I watched it again because some parts of the story sounded familiar, and familiar claims can become dangerous when real geopolitical changes sit underneath them. Then the evidence started breaking. A Netanyahu clip carrying the same allegation had already circulated online in February 2026. It made the Israeli prime minister appear to announce support and a special aid package for Afghanistan at Modi's request, but iVerify Pakistan traced the footage to Netanyahu's original speech and conclud...

Parents Take the Money. Girls Do the Work: Pakistan’s Hidden Child Domestic Labour Market

Pakistan can count workers at brick kilns, but child domestic labour often remains hidden inside private homes, especially when wages are paid in advance to parents or guardians. Pakistan can inspect a brick kiln. It struggles to see the child worker behind a private gate, especially when her wages have already been taken by someone else. I did not have to visit a brick kiln outside Lahore to notice Pakistan’s hidden labour problem. I saw part of it much closer to home, inside a relative’s household, where a young girl worked as domestic help. Her father or guardian received her wages, and the arrangement sounded ordinary enough that nobody around it seemed especially troubled. I kept thinking about the money. Suppose a father takes six months or a full year of wages in advance, then the girl wants to leave after two months. Who returns the unpaid balance when the family has already spent it on rent, food or some emergency that could not wait? The employer may say the family has ...

Raast Hawala Monitoring: The Risk May Start Abroad

FATF’s Oman case shows why Pakistani banks must detect cross-border relationships hidden inside ordinary domestic payments . Pakistani banks need to look beyond individual Raast transfers and identify transaction patterns that may connect domestic payments with hidden cross-border hawala activity. Consider a simple monitoring scenario. At 10:17 a.m., a Pakistani account receives Rs85,000 through Raast. Nothing in the payment message says Oman. Nothing identifies a hawaladar. Raast Hawala Monitoring begins with that information gap because the transaction that gave the credit its economic meaning may have occurred hundreds of kilometres away. FATF’s September 2026 report makes the problem concrete. In an Oman case, investigators uncovered a suspected unlicensed remittance operation serving Pakistan. The network used cheaper payment channels at the destination end, including fee-free transfers through Raast. FATF did not accuse Raast of a security failure. SBP made the same disti...

America’s War With Iran Has Reached the Gas Pump

Record Labor Day gasoline prices are colliding with a strong jobs report, leaving the Federal Reserve with a problem it cannot solve with interest rates Record Labor Day gasoline prices show how the Iran conflict can reach American households through fuel costs and Federal Reserve policy. On Saturday evening in Karachi, I was reading the American economic news while traffic still growled outside. One number stopped me: $4.03 a gallon . GasBuddy expects the national average gasoline price to reach about that level on Labor Day, September 7, above the previous holiday record of $3.83 set in 2012. The actual national average had already stood near $4.13 on Thursday. I pay attention when an economic story escapes the spreadsheet and appears on a price board beside a road. American motorists do not need a Federal Reserve economist to explain four-dollar gasoline to them. They see the cost while filling a truck before work or packing the family car for a holiday drive. Yet the more int...

UBL Digital Fraud: Does Authentication Prove Authorization?

A malware complaint tests how UBL authentication and SBP's digital-fraud rules divide responsibility A UBL customer's malware complaint raises a difficult question under SBP's digital banking rules: does successful authentication prove that the customer authorized the transfer? A UBL customer says he opened his banking app with his fingerprint and then saw what looked like an update screen. According to his account, a malicious application had compromised his phone. His UBL digital fraud complaint began after money moved while he could not see what was happening inside the banking session. An OTP reportedly reached the same phone. The customer says the malicious software removed the SMS before he could read it, and he reported the disputed transfers about four hours later. UBL subsequently rejected his complaint after examining its records. One sentence in UBL's response stopped me. The bank said a fraudster added beneficiaries using the customer's device IDs an...

Pakistan Built Raast to Fight Cash. Hawala Found a Way In

FATF’s Oman case shows how an underground remittance network can use a legitimate domestic payment rail without compromising it. I stopped at Box 9 on page 35 of FATF’s September 2026 report. One sentence named Pakistan’s instant payment system. Raast and Digital Hawala suddenly met in an Oman case where suspected hawaladars exploited fee-free transfers to Pakistan through channels such as Raast. The tracked flow reached about $72,293 over one year, but the mechanism mattered more to me than the sum. ATF’s Oman case shows how a hawala network can use legitimate domestic payment rails in Pakistan, while SBP maintains that Raast itself remains a secure domestic payment system. SBP answered quickly. Its 4 September clarification rejected the claim that FATF had identified Raast itself as a money-laundering mechanism or questioned the integrity of the payment infrastructure. I agree with that narrow correction. FATF did not accuse Raast of a technical failure, yet its case still sh...