DAWN Editorials 17th August 2026

Work in progress

THE State Bank governor’s optimistic assessment of the economy must be seen in the context of the reality hidden beneath the headline numbers. While progressing from stabilisation to sustainable growth is critical, the transition is still in its early stages.

Mr Jameel Ahmad expects GDP growth to accelerate from 3.7pc in the last fiscal to between 3.5pc and 4.5pc in the current year, with the economy benefiting from greater discipline. Yet the range itself is revealing: at the lower end, growth would be actually slow. Even 4.5pc represents only a modest recovery for an economy with a rapidly expanding population, growing underemployment and unmet investment needs. Neither has stabilisation produced the necessary conditions for durable economic expansion.

The recent improvement rests heavily on restrained demand, tighter fiscal management, subdued imports and an improved external position due to debt rollovers and borrowings. These may be essential for stability, but they do not constitute a growth strategy. Sustainable growth requires stronger productivity, more private investment, expanding exports and investor-friendly reforms.

Mr Ahmad’s reference to record remittances should be treated with caution. Remittances exceeding $41bn in FY26 and potentially reaching $44bn this year are providing crucial support to the external account. But remittances are household transfers, not a substitute for export competitiveness or FDI. An economy cannot sustainably finance its development ambitions by relying just on the earnings of its citizens abroad. Additionally, the expectation that reserves will exceed $21bn is encouraging, but accumulation must be accompanied by a stronger capacity to earn foreign exchange.

Otherwise, the cycle of reserve rebuilding followed by another external financing crunch will return. Inflation averaging 7.1pc is also an important gain. Yet keeping inflation within the 5-7pc target demands more than monetary restraint. Food, energy and administered prices remain vulnerable to supply disruptions, exchange rate pressures, global commodity shocks and regional crises. Monetary policy can contain demand-driven inflation but it cannot solve structural weaknesses in agriculture, energy or supply chains. Meanwhile, the modernisation of the digital payment system is a useful step towards financial efficiency. But the system’s infrastructure is an enabler rather than an engine of growth.

The big challenge, therefore, is to prevent stabilisation from becoming an end in itself. Pakistan has repeatedly achieved temporary macroeconomic stability, only to watch it unravel when growth accelerates through imports, fiscal slippages and external borrowing. This time, the test is whether the economy’s productive capacity can be expanded without exposure to those vulnerabilities. The journey from stabilisation to sustainable growth will be completed when repeated cycles of borrowing, harsh adjustments and crisis management become a thing of the past.

Published in Dawn, August 17th, 2026

Unfit supplies

A SYRINGE in a public hospital should be among the simplest guarantees of safety. Yet Sindh’s Public Accounts Committee has been told that 38 of 55 companies supplying syringes and drip sets to government hospitals were providing products that failed laboratory standards. When products from so many approved suppliers fail testing, scrutiny cannot stop with the manufacturers; it must extend to the procurement and quality-control systems that allowed these goods into hospitals. FIRs have been registered, but prosecution cannot be the end of the matter. The government must immediately identify the companies and affected batches, quarantine or recall suspect stocks, order independent retesting, and audit the tenders, laboratories and officials involved in clearing them. It must also establish what ‘substandard’ meant in each case and make those findings public. Complaints of syringe reuse require a parallel investigation. The two issues should not be conflated without evidence, but together they expose serious weaknesses in the chain meant to protect patients from procurement to disposal.

Sindh has been warned before — repeatedly. In Ratodero in 2019, WHO identified unsafe medical injections and poor infection control among the risk factors in an HIV outbreak in which hundreds of children tested positive. Pakistan has since recorded child-centred HIV outbreaks in Jacobabad and Shikarpur, Mirpurkhas and Taunsa, and several districts in 2025. WHO and UNAIDS have linked such episodes to unsafe injections and blood transfusions. Only recently, amid another paediatric HIV crisis at Karachi’s Valika Hospital, inspectors found needles removed from used syringes without proper sharps disposal, weak waste segregation and inadequate infection-control training. And HIV is not the only danger. WHO estimates Pakistan has the world’s heaviest hepatitis C burden, with unsafe injections and blood practices contributing to transmission. Sindh already has a law regulating disposable syringes. What it lacks is credible enforcement. The province needs safety engineered single-use syringes, batch-level traceability, rigorous waste disposal, unannounced infection-control inspections and strong penalties for suppliers, hospitals and officials who cut corners. These safeguards should be routine rather than measures adopted after another failure is exposed. Patients enter hospitals seeking treatment; no health system can tolerate becoming a source of the disease it is meant to prevent.

Published in Dawn, August 17th, 2026

Israel’s war on life

A FINANCIAL Times investigation into southern Lebanon shows how Israel’s brutal military campaign has torn civilian life apart. Nearly 85,000 housing units have been damaged or wrecked, at least 2,500km of water infrastructure has been hit, every bridge over the Litani has been rendered unusable, and more than a fifth of the south’s farmland and forests has been devastated. Schools, medical facilities and energy systems lie wrecked. Most disturbing is the finding that much of this destruction took place after Israeli forces had established control over emptied villages. Israel claims it is dismantling Hezbollah infrastructure and protecting its northern communities. But destroying the systems that make civilian life possible — water, healthcare, roads, farms and homes — raises the question: is the objective security, or making return impossible? The pattern is all too familiar. Gaza has seen neighbourhoods flattened and its water, health, education and agricultural systems shattered. In occupied West Bank, demolitions and settler violence continue to drive Palestinians from their homes and land.

The world cannot keep documenting this destruction after the fact and calling that accountability. Israel cites security concerns but no security claim can become a licence to make civilian areas uninhabitable. The US and Europe should attach real conditions to military support, suspend arms transfers where there is a risk of unlawful use, and impose targeted sanctions on officials implicated in unlawful destruction or forced displacement. International courts and UN investigators must be allowed to work without obstruction. Above all, Israel’s allies must stop treating international law as something to invoke for adversaries and negotiate around for friends. Southern Lebanon should not become another Gaza: a place where the world debates proportionality only after towns have been erased. It must serve as a warning that impunity, left unchecked, becomes policy. With each unpunished precedent, the next devastated community becomes easier to create.

Published in Dawn, August 17th, 2026