Speakers in a day-long national conference on "internal threats to Pak security" have stressed the need for adopting effective measures to increase the level of awareness, preparedness and response to the internal threats to the security of Pakistan.
The national conference was arranged by Punjab University's Department of Political Science and renowned security and political analysts from all four provinces read their papers on the topic.
Addressing the inaugural session of the conference, vice-chancellor Dr Mujahid Kamran praised the Political Science Department for starting deliberations on a critically important issues. He said the world has become so compact and now everyone is closer to each other with enormous power of the ability to build or de-build something.
Dr Mujahid said Pakistan's location was important strategically, and that there were some internal problems and external pressures on the countries regarding its security issues.
He said overpopulation, poverty and unemployment are indirectly related to the security problems and the country must have to address these issues. He said that in our country 74 per cent of total population is earning less than two dollar per day. He said only two million people go for degree level studies out of 150 million.
Dr Mujahid gave some examples from science to emphasise upon the importance of life and said revolutionary measures needed to educate common people of Pakistan about the importance of his as well as others life.
Earlier, in his welcome address Professor Dr Mughees-ud Din Sheikh, Dean Faculty of Behavioural & Social Sciences said the conference would focus on practical measures to address the security issue of the country instead of only deliberating upon causes of the current security problems.
Meanwhile the Chairperson of the department, Dr Ambreen Javed, said that the objectives of the conference were to highlight the areas that were critical of Pakistan's internal security, evaluate the level of understanding of these threats and assess the effectiveness of the measure to check these threats.
Later, in the first formal session of the conference that was presided over by Dr Anwar H Syed from University Massachusetts, USA and Dr Jilles Boquerat, Dr Rashid Ahmad Khan, Zafar Nawaz Jaspal, Rana Ejaz Ahmad, Dr Nazir Ahmad and Professor Adnan Sarwar read their papers about security issues in this session.
The second session was presided over by former BZU vice-chancellor Dr Ghualm Mustafa and scholars including Professor Dr Khawja Al-Qama, Professor Dr Razia Mussarat, Ms Iram Khalid, Professor Dr Rasool Bux Rais, Rehana Saeed Hashmi and Fateh Naseeb read their papers in this session. While third and the last session was presided over by Professor Dr Masroor Akbar Kundi from Balochistan University and Mubeen Irshad, Professor Dr Ishtiq Ahmad, Dr Ambreen Javed and Gulshan Majeed gave presentation in this session.
Addressing the various sessions of the conference, experts were agreed that there were traditional as well as non-traditional threats to the survival and development of a sovereign state. They were of the view that the non traditional threats come in the form of terrorism, extremism, drug trafficking, serious communicable diseases, piracy, illegal, immigration, environmental security, economic and financial security and information security," they said.
About security threats faced by today's Pakistan, various speakers said efforts should be made to curb sectarianism, religious extremism, socio political imbalances authoritarian culture, economic instability and terrorism besides finding solutions of lack of popular legitimate governments and degeneration of legal institutions.
Majority of the scholars emphasise that media, which is a true opinion maker can play a vital role in strengthening the efforts initiated for checking the internal security threats faced by the country these days.
Mentioning the present scene of Pakistan, a number of speakers opined that the first view of current situation of the country appears quite disturbing but a careful examination would reveal that there are strong possibilities of curing the ailment. Some speakers believed the results of recent elections had given hope to tackle security threats faced by Pakistan. "Pakistani people used their vote for moderate parties besides supporting extremists and similarly, ethnic parties have been main streamed," they added.
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