The Strategic Purposes of the Post-9/11 US Foreign Aid to Pakistan and Its Impacts (Published)
This paper investigates why donor countries/institutions provide foreign aid to South Asian countries, in particular, US foreign aid to Pakistan, and how foreign aids impacts on internal politics of a recipient country based on donor’s development strategy, and how US foreign aid on counterterrorism policies in Pakistan. This study also focused on examining how US foreign aid policy changed and shifted towards South Asia after 9/11 terrorist attacks on USA, and how South Asia became a primary recipient of US foreign aid. This study explored that foreign aid’s primary focus was military and security-oriented objectives instead of economic development in the recipient country. Additionally, the investigation also revealed that US foreign aid also affected Pakistan’s internal politics as it allocated more support to security-oriented purposes to strengthen military rule in the political economy to reduce the effects of terrorism in Pakistan. However, Pakistan faced greater economic destruction and human losses after joining the US alliance for “War on Terror.”
Keywords: Aid Philosophy, Pakistan, Security and economic aid, Strategic Tool, US, the war on terror
The Role of Social Media towards Political Accountability in Pakistan: A Literature Review (Published)
Democracy is globally accepted form of government, especially when the technological development going to make this world a global village. Scholars think about the ideas of global democratic government, wherein short fall of democracy is ill-fated. However, political accountability is the essential characteristics of democracy and it cannot flourish without it. This paper adopts a qualitative approach by using qualitative content analysis and observation over social networking sites (SNS), in which democracy, accountability, and freedom of expression will extensively use. The extensive literature review indicates that social media facilitates the freedom of expression, provides opportunities of direct political participation, improves the electoral process and increase political accountability in authoritarian countries and emerging democracies. However, an emerging democracy like Pakistan, where social media trend is up surging and accountability condition is destitute. It is highly justified to investigate the role of social media towards political accountability.
Keywords: Democracy, Freedom Of Expression, Pakistan, Political Accountability, Social media