Daily Times Editorials 10th August 2026

Rebuilding Policies

There is something almost absurd about factories cutting production beside an almost full reservoir. Yet that is the predicament confronting Hub, where locals say inadequate water supplies have persisted for two months, forcing units below capacity and prompting an SOS to Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif.

The Hub Chamber of Commerce and Industry warns that prolonged shortages could eventually threaten thousands of jobs.

Hub Dam was completed in 1981 as an inter-provincial asset serving Karachi and Lasbela. WAPDA’s design provides 63.3 per cent of reservoir releases to Sindh and 36.7 per cent to Balochistan, including 100 million gallons a day for Karachi, 15 MGD for local industries and another 44 MGD for irrigation.

HCCI says the Hub of roughly 20,000 people in the 1980s has become a city of around 300 industries, with more than 25,000 cultivated acres and a population said to be above one million

Indeed, the growth is partly evidence that earlier state investment worked. Hub Industrial Trading Estate now spreads over 1,226 acres and accommodates textiles, engineering, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, food processing, steel and other industries. Meanwhile, Islamabad is facilitating a proposed $4.5 billion deep-conversion refinery at Hub that its sponsors say could create around 2,000 jobs. All said and done, the federal government cannot spend diplomatic capital persuading investors to build the next generation of industry while existing production lines ration one of industry’s most elementary inputs.

Since Karachi also depends heavily on Hub Dam, a wiser intervention could be an updated demand and infrastructure audit: how much water actually reaches each user, how much is lost between reservoir and factory gate, whether present industrial allocations bear any resemblance to current production needs, how much treated wastewater can be reused and what additional storage or supply Hub will require as its economic footprint expands.

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif therefore has an opportunity larger than settling an allocation dispute. His government has tied Pakistan’s economic recovery to investment, exports, and import substitution. Hub sits at the meeting point of all three and therefore, federal coordination can demonstrate the kind of responsive federalism that development requires– by protecting Karachi’s legitimate needs while ensuring that Balochistan’s most important industrial concentration is not punished for having outgrown yesterday’s assumptions.

Cruel Irony

Pakistan was right on Sunday to dismiss as frivolous and baseless the Afghan Taliban’s latest attempt to portray weapons allegedly entering Afghanistan from Pakistan as evidence of “subversive activities.”

Kabul has made similar claims in the past without an iota of evidence: Paktia police said in May, June and July that consignments of rifles, pistols and ammunition had been smuggled across the border from Pakistan.

Quite expectedly, Afghanistan’s Ministry of Defence did not even pretend to acknowledge that when the republic had collapsed in August 2021, the Pentagon estimated at least $7.12 billion worth of US-funded equipment, supplied to the former Afghan security forces, remained in the country; much of it subsequently seized by the Taliban. Afghanistan had hardly been short of weapons before then. Soviet arms, civil-war stockpiles, Kalashnikovs accumulated through four decades of conflict and the NATO-pattern arsenal of the post-2001 state had already made the country one of the region’s great repositories of military hardware.Geographic Reference

Kabul’s own record makes its new morality tale harder to sustain. Small Arms Survey researchers found functioning weapons markets in Afghan border provinces, with thriving informal trading and trafficking networks rooted in old relationships among fighters, armed groups and smugglers. Taliban intelligence has itself seized hundreds of weapons in door-to-door searches of civilian and former Afghan security-force homes. The Taliban may now be trying to bring that sprawling armoury under tighter control, yet the very scale of its confiscation campaigns tells us how widely those weapons had dispersed.

Only three weeks ago, Kabul announced the arrest of 16 people allegedly trying to smuggle weapons, ammunition and narcotics out of Afghanistan.

Pakistan has more reason than most countries to resent this rewriting of the ledger. International thinktanks and peacekeeping bodies have now joined its reservations against Taliban-allied groups, especially the TTP, which continue to enjoy access to US-origin weaponry. US-made rifles, night-vision equipment and thermal sights have repeatedly surfaced among militants fighting Pakistani forces.

For five years, the Taliban authorities have presided over a security order in which terrorist organisations have retained room to operate, regroup and acquire increasingly sophisticated weaponry. Pakistan has heavily paid for that permissiveness with thousands os soldiers, policemen and civilians. Hollow accusations cannot alter uncomfortable facts on the ground. Before Kabul lectures Pakistan about weapons entering its house, it would do well to account for the armoury already inside it.