 Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us here today at the US Institute of Peace to talk about the Pakistan's youth and elections. My name is Jamia Siddiqui. I'm a senior program officer covering the Pakistan and South Asia portfolio here at USIP. Pakistan's elections are a week away. Next Wednesday, they'll be holding elections, which we hope will be the second peaceful transition of power from one democratically elected government to a next that have completed their full five-year term. However, much of the coverage in the media has been on the growing violence, especially in the last few weeks, with respect to targeting political parties and candidates, as well as various forms of pre-poll rigging. However, I think one of the areas that has been largely neglected in the media coverage has been youth. And this is why we're here today to shine a light on how youth will play a role in the elections this year and Pakistan's democracy moving forward. We are faced with a population of 64% of the population under the age of 29. And 44% of new voters between the ages of 18 and 35, very similar to numbers that we saw in 2013. But in 2013, we didn't see the vast youth movement that we're seeing this time around, especially with organizations and groups taking to the streets and protesting on various issues. With respect to USAP, we've been working in Pakistan for a number of years in country and then on the country for decades. Related to the elections, USAP has been facilitating initiatives over the last few years to promote peaceful elections and by extension good governance with a particular focus on the youth. So this is why I think for us, this is a very important topic to discuss. And we have a very impressive panel for you today to discuss these issues. To my left is Dr. Adonajam, who is the inaugural dean of the Party School of Global Studies at Boston University. I could go on for 20 minutes about his impressive resume and the work that he's done. But he is also a professor of international relations and earth and environment. Before this, he was the vice chancellor of the Lahore University of Management Sciences in Pakistan and the director of the Boston University's Party Center for the Study of Long Range Features. On top of this, he's also been able to find time to be the author of the UNDP, Pakistan National Human Development Report, which this year focuses on youth. And it's been, I think, 10 years since, oh, sorry, to my right. I'm 10 years since I was born. You've been on the left. Yeah. Everyone else is left. 10 years since the last human development, 15. And besides also working on issues of youth and international relations, public policy, he has also been involved heavily on climate change issues both in Pakistan and around the world. Next to him is Sahara Khan, who is a visiting research fellow at the Cato Institute's Defense and Foreign Policy Department. Her research interests include militancy, counterterrorism policy, anti-terrorism legal regimes, and South Asia. Her dissertation explored state motivations for sponsoring militant groups and the role civil institutions play in state sponsorship within Pakistan. Before she received her PhD, she was the associate editor of the Washington Quarterly at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. And then Beers Abarasha is a freelance journalist currently working with the Voice of America Bustial Language Service in Washington, DC. Prior to this, he was with the New York Times in Pakistan, working in Waziristan in the tribal regions, and shared the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for his work at the New York Times and was a 2012 Nieman Fellow, as well as a 2012 Edward R. Murrow Press Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. So this afternoon, we'll start with Dr. Najam. And then Sahar and Zubair will then comment on the state with respect to elections and youth. So, Professor. Thank you. Thank you very much. If I can get the slides, I'll ask your colleague to help me with that. But it's a great pleasure to be here. It always is. I'm delighted to be here with this wonderful panel. And speaking about this topic, it's a little embarrassing always to speak about youth, especially when the sum total of the ages of the three other people is less than mine. I'm glad that there are younger people on the panel. I'm going to talk very briefly and set the context of what we have found about the youth in Pakistan. Who are they? What do they do? What do they think? And then we'll get into the elections. And I have thoughts on that, but I hold many of those for the Q&A. My colleagues know much more about that. I would usually start by talking about the human development report and the idea of human development. I won't do that beyond saying I do have a summary. We have a summary in English, a summary in Urdu, and the full report, which is about 350 pages, including about 120 of statistical index, which is all on the web. Easily found, and anyone can draw that down. So I will rush through. No, not go through that, but it is available. Everything is. We actually launched the report on Twitter, which is a wonderful thing to do. And then we did a formal launch with the concert, because who wants to listen to experts? You should try that, too. Have people come to sing. But what essentially what we did over two and a half years is we went and we asked these three questions, the human development report, trying to figure out what's happening on human development in Pakistan. One of the big things of the report is a district by district index of how each district does on human development. Human development, meaning health, wealth, and knowledge. This index that Dr. Mehboobal Haq had created. But the focus of that was particularly youth. So I'm rushing through that, because I want to come to the subject matter here. And we essentially did this. And when I say we, you will see the team. It was a large number of team people. I was the lead author, but most of them, much younger, all of them in Pakistan. And you'll see what that was about. But there were three essentially driving questions that made us excited. That made us excited about doing this. And even more excited while doing this. One, we wanted to find out, what does it mean to be young in Pakistan? Pakistan is a very young country. Everyone knows that. And I'll come to that in a minute. But what does it mean to be young in Pakistan? What does it mean? I think all of us who study these things, unfortunately, reduce this very large number of vibrant young people into whatever we study. As if being young is all about violence, or even young is all about giving a vote, or being one young is. But being young is a very important state. And I'll talk about that in a minute. Second is, is Pakistan looking at, and this is before your title also which looked at it, we pose the question is, is Pakistan looking at a demographic bump, or a demographic boom, or a demographic bust? Everyone understands the idea of the boom. Look at any country around Pakistan that has grown. And it has grown, I would argue, on the back of a youth punch. Whether it is Malaysia, whether it's Turkey, whether it's India right now, I would argue, even part of China, it's not the only factor. But essentially when you have a large number of young people entering the society, and you'll see how large it is in Pakistan, you actually get a lot of new consumers. So by definition, even if they're very poor, you see more economic activity. Now where you take that as a society is a separate issue. But that's the boom argument. The bust argument is we start this report with a story which comes not from Pakistan, but comes from Tunisia. Here is a young man, you've all heard the story, you'll recognize it in a minute. Here is a young man, he has a bit of an education, he doesn't have a job, he can't get married, he lives with his parents, doesn't get along with his parents, the police comes and bugs him, and one day he kind of loses it out there in the sun because he has this little thing, not even a shop out on the public square, and he loses it and he hits at this, he slaps this police woman who's trying to ask for a bribe and then he sets himself on fire, right? That leads to something that was cruelly called the Arab Spring, and the question we pose is not whether this can happen in Pakistan, it's not whether if this were to happen in Pakistan, anyone would be surprised, but what can you do to ensure that you can't even imagine this happening in Pakistan, right? That's the question of the boom and the bust, and the third question we ask is who will decide the future of those who will define the future of Pakistan? And this is the article of faith that I've come to in doing this work. I am now convinced without any hesitation that the future of Pakistan, good or bad, will be decided by those who are between 15 and 29 years of age today. Good or bad. So for those of you who understand, what do people like me sort of spend cartridges? Poke cartoons, they really have very little ability to do anything, let alone the willingness. And you'll see the demographic argument for this in a moment. Those are three questions that we started with, and as I rush through that, essentially, this is the big sort of number argument here. So if you look at Pakistan, 64% of Pakistan is under 30 years of age today. What does that mean? What that means is put every Pakistani in a row, two out of every three will be under 30 years of age. Those of you who know Pakistan deeply, what that means is if you had a province that was only young people, it would be bigger than Punjab. What does that mean? That means that in this coming election, the number of voters who are under 29 is greater than the sum total of voters from all three provinces except Punjab. What does it mean? It means that for every election between now and 2045, which is when the curve goes down. 2045 is when this youth bulb starts going down and Pakistan starts having an aging problem after that. But every election between now and 2045 is going to be decided essentially by young voters and predominantly by new voters. That's the demographic reality that leads me to that statement I said about the future of Pakistan. And that's a very serious sort of thing. How we did it? We did a lot of listening. We did a lot of listening. We estimate that in the process, so the task was to produce the report, but the real other task was to give issue elevation to this idea of youth. And I'm happy to say that that's week after the report, both the PML and leaders Nawaz Sharif and Imran Khan were quoting the report, quoting it wrongly. But in public gatherings, that doesn't happen. You don't court research in political statements in Pakistan. But everyone was out to do because it was. So I think we were able to do that. But we did that with a lot of listening. We estimate that in this process, we talked to about 120,000 young people. And I'll come to that. We did all sorts of things. We did focus groups. I'll come to that in a minute, but we heard a lot. And from that, we came to this framework of human development, which essentially argues, and that's how the report is structured, that there are three levers, and I won't go into all of them, but I wanted to put the three essential levers of how the potential of young people in Pakistan can or cannot, will or will not be moved. The three E's as you've got, education, employment, and engagement. And what we mean by that in answering this question of what it means, and I'm rushing, I'm sorry through this, the first is education. It's obvious, right? And I'll show you just one set of numbers on that, but you'll see it. But what's written in Urdu there is it's not just education, it's quality education. We have a serious problem of number of children in school, but that is nowhere as serious as the quality. I've been, I was vice chancellor of the university, I've been saying for the last three years that I worry not as much, not just about how many children are not in school, but I worry about the children who are in school. And the quality of education we are giving them. And I think those of you who might be in the donor community have a lot to answer for that too. I certainly do. So that was lever number one. Lever number two is what we call employment, but not just employment, but meaningful employment. We estimate, I won't show you these numbers, but you might have seen it in the political rhetoric, the parties have taken it up, we estimate in the report that Pakistan will need between 1.2 and 1.5 million new jobs every year from now to 2045, right? This is not a question of whether we can or cannot, it's just a question of who will be coming into the work stream. We also argue that's not difficult to do. Pakistan already gives between 500,000 to 700,000 new jobs. The question again is the quality of the jobs, because jobs are about dignity, right? If you think about one of the most existential questions anyone ever asks you, it is what do you do? They don't ask you how much you make, what you do is about who you are. And the challenge of Pakistan is not making new jobs, it's making jobs that are quality jobs, jobs with different dignity. What does that mean? Someone cannot kick you out of the job on a whim. Someone doesn't keep your national ID card because you won't get them good tea. Someone that gives you good health benefits and so on and so forth. So a lot of report is about that secondly. And the third is the most important one that my colleagues work on, which is what we call engagement or Hakiki Shamuliyat or meaningful engagement. And by engagement again I'm rushing here, engagement we mean do young people believe that the most important decisions that impact their lives, they have a say. I am engaged if I believe that I have a say in the decisions that impact my life, whether those are decisions of education, whether those are decisions of employment, of marriage, of politics, of government. So those were the three big ease around which we structured the report. And we did again, I'm rushing through this, I hope as an advertisement that you'll go and read the report. I had mentioned already we did a lot of listening. We did a lot of listening. This picture, by the way, was taken three days after the Peshawar APS attack in Peshawar and I happened to be there and we did one of our focus groups. We did a lot of engagement and we did these focus groups around the countries. We did 81 face to face consultations. You will see that most of them are concentrated not where the population is, but where populations are usually not talked. Right, so that's how we came to 120,000 people that we consulted. Now most of them were not at these because these were small consultations. We did a large number of them in parts of Balochistan where people don't usually go. We did a lot of them in Fata, in other remote areas. We did one inside a jail. We did these with transgender communities. We did this with mine workers in Shangla. We did these with labor brickland workers and so on and so forth. But the face to face consultation was to get a flavor of those voices that have not heard. Then we did a national survey done by Nielsen. Across the district, scientifically representative, I think probably the most comprehensive national survey on youth questions and you'll see some of the results in just a second. And then we did a lot of other things on social media, on radio. My favorite was we put these cardboard boxes in markets which had a camera like that inside it and we asked young people, they could just go into the box and say whatever they want and we would record it and we have hours and hours and hundreds of hours of these recordings. And a lot of it is sort of them abusing the world because who doesn't like to do that on a camera when no one is watching? But we had questions and that was our date. We wanted to hear, one of my favorite things in the report is that we don't have recommendations coming from us. Instead, we have something called a hundred and we have a pack of cards, 101 cards. It's called Javan ideas, young ideas. And all the recommendations come from young people themselves. And some of them might sound silly, but they're not. For example, one of my favorite recommendations is the recommendation that the prime minister, the chief of the army, the military and the provincial chief ministers have to go to a school once every month to read to children. It's funny, but it's not funny because it understands why this doesn't happen. People, one another recommendation is that people above a certain rank in government service or military service or parliament have to send their children to a government school. Half of my Pakistani students wouldn't behave if that happened or the schools would become certainly much better. They understand that. Some of them are very, very practical. One of my favorite ones. There is a law which I didn't know about that women cannot work in the third shift, the overnight shift. And supposedly this law is to keep them safe. And the argument coming from women workers in Faisalabad which is where this came from was that's actually a very good time to be working. Because it frees up the day and if you really want to keep us safe, give us safe conditions. We have about 20 pages on bathrooms, my favorite new topic. I think the single biggest lever to change Pakistan is bathrooms, particularly for female. Find me a place that employs women in Pakistan and I bet you I'll find you a place that A has a clean bathroom and B has some sort of transport facility to get them in from work. So a lot of this very practical things that came from this sort of consultation. And again, I'm rushing but here is sort of the process diagram, the snake diagram as we call it of all the various things by which we come to around 120, 130,000 people who were engaged. So this was majorly a listening exercise. So we did the listening, what did we find? Who are the young people of Pakistan? The team, as I said, I become the old fat spokesman but the team itself is much younger. And I wanted to give you a glimpse for time reasons I won't go into it. Actually I won't show you this. This is the map district by district of the Human Development Index. Then we created an index which is youth development which is regional, right? So not just the overall youth human development but of youth segment alone. And my favorite one was this was a statistical sort of nightmare in some ways but we pulled it off which is a gender corrected youth development index meaning gender equity corrected, right? It's not about, it's about how equitable each area is within gender which can sometimes be bad if everyone is doing badly but equally badly it will show up as green, right? But those are the three indices. That's not what I'm talking about today. What I do want to talk about and I'll slightly slow down here is one of the artifacts and it's a lot of this visual graphic stuff that's in the report is we did this from all of this answering the question who are the young people of Pakistan? We said, okay, let's do this. Now that we have all this information if we had the ability to put in a room 100 young Pakistanis who by some magical statistical feat are exactly precisely representative of all of Pakistan. What would that room look like, right? So if all of Pakistani young people could be statistically and here is what we found. I won't read through it all but this is absolutely fascinating at least for me. Some of these things are very simple. You know how many men and women married, unmarried. Some of them are actually very well known but when we spoke about that to Pakistanis and especially other outside, they're still surprised. 55 of them will be from the Punjab. That's not a surprise but only four will be from Balochistan, right? That's not about equity. That's just about geography and demography, right? Only four will be from Kashmir, Farta and Gilgit-Baltistan put together, right? And these create some very serious demographic concerns. A lot of our recommendations from young people is about actually mobility and mingling within the country. My favorites ones are actually out of 100 young Pakistanis if this was statistically totally representative. Only six, only six would have 12 years or more of education. Right, so there's a lot of deep data behind it but let that sink in. Only six out of those will have more than 12 or more years of education. That's your elite. If you have 12 years of education, you're elite in Pakistan. Here is the thing that makes me sleepless. Out of 100 young Pakistanis, only six will have access to a library. Access to a library does not mean you use the library but only six will have access to a library. More troubling, only seven out of 100 will have some sort of an access to a sports facility whether it's a ground at school or anything, right? This is the space to be young, right? And we, I think scholars sort of make it as if the job of young people is just to think about politics. No, it's not. If you're young, you're supposed to be making mistakes. You're supposed to be falling in love. You're supposed to be singing out of tune. You're supposed to be doing things your parents are telling you not to do. And the space to do that is not there, right? Seven out of 100 only will have sports facility. 15 will have the internet. 85 will not. However, 89 will say they feel happy, right? Not surprising for those who've seen happiness, happiness, happiness. Here is the election thing. 80 will say they intend to vote. 80 out of the 100, this is mind boggling. The amount of political engagement, and I can come to this in the question also, is mind boggling also very troubling because it's an angry engagement, right? My favorite question, this I think really came because I live in the US, it's a very US question, was we asked how many of you think your life will be better than your parents? 67 out of 100 said they're better than the parents. Wrapping up here, but the point is, they're not just saying they expect it to be better. They expect it to be better. They expect someone to make it better, right? So a lot of this type of issue, but that's the type of thing. Let me put one last slide and then I'll shut up. Just to give you a sense of what type of young people we're talking about. A lot of people, everyone in Pakistan is now a constitutional expert. Suddenly, it's amazing how many constitutional experts in Pakistan exist. And they all are fixated on 67 article. I am fixated on article 25 of the Constitution of Pakistan. Article 25 of the Constitution of Pakistan says every young child of school going age, the state has a responsibility to put in school. So everyone knows how many children are out of school. That number is repeated again and again. I told my team, let's put that number on its head. Don't tell me how many people are out of school. Tell me this. If we keep putting them in school at the rate we are, how long before every child of school going age gets to school? So Pakistan's rate of growth is actually quite good. It's 1%. 1% additional. That's high, right? So if we keep doing that, what year, by the time, that constitutional provision is met? They came back to me and said, gee, it will take 2076. Let that seep in 2076. What that means is if we keep doing what we are doing, it will take as many years as Pakistan has been around to get every child of school going age in school. That's what happens when you have new young people coming up. I said, I'm sorry, you have to go back. I'm going to be dead. My dying wish is to see this happen. I want to do the Bhangra in the streets of Boston when every child is in school. That's not a bad wish to have. It's not unreasonable. So go back and do the math again. They said, OK, we'll do the math again. They came back and said, OK, if you increase it by 60% to 1.6 enrollment growth, then we can get every child in school by 2050. I said, look at me. I'm not going to make it in 2050. Not looking like this. You go back. Give me a reasonable date. And so they went back and they said, OK, increase it four times, 400%. And maybe you will get there by 2030. Those are the challenges in which the politics of Pakistan and the questions about this happens. I won't go into this. This is about so I would like to thank you there. I know I haven't talked about the election. But here is the point about the election I want to pass on to my colleagues. Those are the youth we are talking about. It matters actually less. And in fact, I think politics and elections have become a distraction for this youth, not only in the agendas of the parties, but in the agendas of young people themselves. Actually, I won't hold on to this. When we ask young people what issues matter to them the most. If we feed them corruption in this as the answers, those come up. But when we don't feed the answers, the one that comes up, the highest anyone wants to guess, 15 to 29 young people of Pakistan, single most important concern. Marriage. Marriage. Single most important concern for women. House. House of security. Home is security. Home is independence. Single most important. So the total was single most important only for men. Job. So in some ways I would argue the elections become a distraction to the concerns of the young, both in terms of what the parties talk about and what they get the young to get excited about. Thank you very much. I apologize for taking too long. Good afternoon, everyone. It's my absolute pleasure to be here. Over the past few years, I've attended a bunch of USIP events, so it's a little surreal to be sitting at a panel doing this for the first time. So today I wanted to talk to you a little bit about how the election results may affect policies geared toward the Pakistani youth. Now, as Dr. Naja mentioned, the youth are concerned with a few things, few basic things. One of them is education. Access to education. How their education will improve their quality of life. They, as Dr. Najem also mentioned, are very concerned about marriage. This is a concern that men and women both equally have. They're also concerned with the ability to have a job and the ability to change their job if needed, which indicates their desire for having not only a strong economy but also a very diverse economy. They're also very concerned with, of course, buying a house, buying a car, improving their standard of living through various material comforts. So in this way, the Pakistani youth, I would argue, is very similar to sort of the youth bulges that we see in various countries, especially in developing countries. Now, there's also something from the report. 64% of the population is under the age of 30, which is a huge population, right? And the main thing, I think, at least when I think about the elections, the question that comes to my mind is, do Pakistan's political parties have the capacity to address the concerns of the youth? And the answer is yes and no. So the way I approach this question was to think about, well, what are the political parties saying, right? There's one thing to think about rhetoric, their rallies, the speeches, what are they talking about in the youth? I found that wholly unsatisfying. And thankfully, a lot of the parties have actually released their political manifestos. And as you know, the elections are next week. So I went through the political manifestos of the Muslim League, Noon League, Pakistan Terikin Saf, and Pakistan's People Party, which is the three major parties contesting the elections. Now, for Pakistan Muslim League, which has been in power since 2013, the way they describe the youth in their manifesto is they talk about what they've done for the youth. So they talk about, you know, they have self-employment schemes for youths that include low interest rates. They discuss how they've increased access to community banks. They discuss how they've created low to medium-skilled jobs in the agricultural sector. And they focus on three organizations that are Punjab-centric, which focus on vocational training. And those organizations, some of you may have heard of them. One is the Technical Education Vocational Training Authority in Punjab. The other one is the Punjab Skills Development Fund, which focuses primarily on rural and poor populations, vulnerable populations within Punjab. And the third is the Punjab Vocational Training Council that actually focuses on vocational training of teachers, the teachers who are going to teach various skills. PML also focuses on youth representation in democratic forums. What that means is basically how do we entice the youth to participate in local elections, to participate in their communities? So PMLN has discussed creating community, schemes, creating small organizations to get the youth enticing in their community. And they also focus on forming like national and provincial youth commissions. Now, when I was reading the manifesto, what I found interesting about PMLN's statement was that it's very Punjab focused. Now, granted, Punjab is the most populous is the most populous province in the country. But what about the youth in Sindh, Balochistan, the tribal areas, et cetera, et cetera. It doesn't seem the Muslim League is wholly concerned about that youth. When I read Baksan Terikin's soft manifesto, it was a little more nationally focused. And so it talked about doubling the size of existing skill and vocational training programs. It talked about launching a national program and developing a liaison with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where potentially Baksan youth could be placed in foreign countries, creating engagement between the Pakistani community and the rest of the world. PTI also focuses on increasing youth involvement in the community. So that would mean empowering the youth at a community level to solve problems, potentially giving them low interest loans, potentially increasing security, making them more aware of how they can participate in their villages, et cetera. But again, PTI's manifesto, though it says all the right things, it has really great goals, it doesn't talk about exactly how it's going to achieve that goal. So when they talk about increasing community policing, I want to know exactly what are they talking about? Do they mean that they're going to increase the number of guns in the community? Does it mean that they're going to increase paroles taking place within the communities? If that's the case, what is the role of the police in the community and how does the youth interact with the police? It doesn't talk about racial profiling, et cetera, et cetera. So the manifesto is very basic, PTI's manifesto, when it talks about youth engagement. When I look through PPP's manifesto, that was a little longer, a little more detailed, and it focused primarily on education. So increasing accessibility of education, increasing the quality of education, and it especially talked about increasing not just primary education, but also increasing university enrollment, and making the university level education accessible to both men and women. PPP also talks about increasing vocational training, technological training. They also talk about regulating an internship program because one of the things, one of the problems that the youth has had over the years is not being able to get that first job, and it's usually because they don't have experience. And so the goal is to create internships that would sort of get you that first job. So PPP talks about that, and it's manifesto. Now, similar to the Pakistan Tariq and Saf, Pakistan's people's party manifesto also doesn't talk about exactly how it's going to achieve the goals that it's listed. For example, when it talks about regulating internship programs, it's unclear to me, what does that regulation look like? Is it gonna have a quota system of men versus women? Is it gonna have a quota system that's provincial? Do they envision an internship program that is similar across provincial lines or is it going to be customized? Will the federal government have more control or will the provincial government have more control? So these are things, of course, that are very deep, and I understand manifestos don't always cover that. But even in the speeches, they don't really talk about these things. They talk about empowering the youth, but they don't necessarily talk about how to empower the youth. So when we go back to the elections and we go back to the rhetoric of the elections, the one thing that comes to my mind is, regardless of who wins, right, next week's election, whoever will be in power, if they don't address the youth's concerns in a concrete and fiscally responsible way, they are going to basically be unsuccessful in empowering the youth. And they're going to be unsuccessful in sort of dealing with the three E's that the report talks about, which is education, empowerment, and engagement. And so my sort of concern with political parties has been what do these large national political parties think of the youth, and also how do they want to engage the youth eventually? So I'll leave it there and I welcome your questions. I will be talking more about FATA, and which is the Federal Administrative Tribal Areas. And the only problem with FATA is there are many problems, but one problem is the data. We don't know what's the number of population, how much is the number of youth. As I was looking through all these reports, I couldn't find a single reliable data which can, and as an example, if you look at the census 2017 census, the population of North Vaziristan is 0.5 million. This is the official census report. And when you look at the FATA Disaster Management Authority, which was responsible for the displaced people who were displaced in 2014 in the wake of the Zerbe Azar operation, the population of North Vaziristan is more than a million. So there is a huge discrepancy in the numbers and there are factors why is the situation such that the problem is the bigger problem is the access to the area. And the access has been historically difficult and for many outsiders it was not even, people were not even allowed to venture into the tribal areas. And again, it has to do with the history and with the administrative setup of the region. So FATA is which is called Federal Administrative Tribal Areas. It consists of seven tribal districts and six frontier regions. And after Pakistan came into being the legal and administrative structures enacted by the British at that time, Pakistan didn't change any one of them. And it took like in 1996, the first reform, you can call it, it came in the form of adult franchise which was introduced. And people were able to vote for the first time in history on an individual basis rather than the elders who would vote for their respective tribes. So that changed and then in 2011, the Political Parties Act was extended to FATA. And recently what happened at the end of the current government, the 31st Constitutional Amendment was passed through which FATA was merged with the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province. And that's just in the papers because it will take two years before the whole process is completed and there are still a lot of administrative loopholes. And currently in the elections, like the people are supposed to be electing candidates for the provincial assemblies and for the Senate. But as the system hasn't been implemented the new amendment, so they will be still electing their own members for the National Assembly and no provincial seats yet for them. And the senators who have been already elected, they will continue. So why is, why took so long for the Pakistani government and the state to make reforms in the tribal areas, especially political administrative? So the thing here is that FATA importance is due to its geography because it's with Afghanistan. And in Afghanistan, the foreign policy is in the hands of the military. And the tribal areas are a launching pad for any policy if you're going to launch it into Afghanistan. So what happened is that there have, when this current government which just expired the PMLN government, they for the first time started a reform process for the tribal areas. And Sartaj Aziz was the head of that committee. And Abdul Qadir, who was the minister for state and frontier regions, he was also part and they visited the tribal areas, deliberated on a lot of options. So the first main, their agenda was to come up with reforms and start a reform process. But later on, the merger of the FATA with KPK also got included. It was already in the plan, but that was supposed to be the last, last step of the whole process. But what happened, it became the first step before the other reforms would take hold. Just the merger issue because it was politically so important for the political parties. So if you look at the manifestos of all these political parties, as Sartaj said, that the youth is mentioned not, there's no focus on the youth. But when it comes to FATA, there is no mention of the youth. It's just the merger and the reforms and the security situation. So that's one reason that for five years, the PMLN government, they couldn't achieve the process of reforms. But what happened at the military, they were interested. They got interested in this process. Before that, the military would go to the civilians that you need to implement reforms. And the civilians would go back to the military that you will let us to implement reforms because you are in charge of FATA and the civilians have no say in what you do and what you say. So why would the military be interested at the end that they had to call the meeting of all the assemblies? Like the whole process was wrapped up in one week. It took five years, but at the end it took only one week. On Sunday, the provincial assembly was summoned and they were asked to pass this resolution of the merger of FATA with KPK. So what happened that all these years, FATA has been in a war zone. After 9-11, Taliban and Al-Qaeda, they made sanctuaries in the tribal areas. And for the first time in its history, the Pakistani military went there and they're still there and they started counter-terrorism operations. But the people, but at the same time, so there were two types of Taliban Pakistan had to deal with. One are the local Taliban who have local agendas. They are fighting for different reasons. And then there are what is called the good Taliban. They were those who would cross over to Afghanistan and come back and rest for recreation. So Pakistan couldn't fight the ones who are the so-called bad Taliban who fight inside Pakistan because they were tied with the good Taliban. So there was a contradiction in the policy, in the approach, and in the way they were fighting various terrorist groups in FATA. So that led to a perception among the population and especially among the youth that this war is not against terrorism. This is a war against the people. Because if you look at the statistics, not a single Taliban commander has been killed in the 16 years of war by the Pakistani military. All of them have been killed by U.S. drone attacks. First, they were being killed in Pakistan. Now they are across the border in Afghanistan, including Fuzzullah, which was recently killed in Kunar. So that led to a frustration. That led to the perception that Pakistan is not really interested in eliminating militancy from this area. So in 2016, a group of 600 young boys, and most all of them were master's degree holders, they gathered and they started what was a very local group called Mahsut Tafuz movement. Their demands were that we need the military to remove the IEDs because they were killing people. And we don't know yet who have planted them. The Taliban say the military, they only say that these have been led by the Taliban. So these, and they started their demands. What happened is again, while this is going on, a lot of people got displaced from starting in 2004. And today, even today, some families are going back to Oragzei, to Qurram, to Haber and Waziristan. Still, some people are living in camps, some are back home. And there is no home as such because there has been complete destruction. There is no infrastructure left, 80,000 homes according to one estimate. Shops, schools, roads. So what happened, these people, these 600, they made this movement and they were displaced already. So the only way to connect with each other was through social media, through Facebook. And they started this social media movement and then after this one guy was killed in Karachi in a fake police encounter, that was the spark which ignited this, what I call is the Pashtun Spring, where these 15, these young guys, the group members, they started a walk towards Islamabad. And when they started this walk, they were being joined by everyone from every district because the issue was all the same. The issue was security, check posts and missing people, extrajudicial killings, targeted killings. So unlike the rest of the youth in Punjab, in Sindh, the issues mostly related to the youth is that of security. They won't be interested in jobs. They will mostly be interested in security. They want to go back to their houses, go back and get along their lives. That's not possible because Pakistan, the tribal area still under the military. Now these reforms are, as I said, it will take two years according to the regulation. In two years, the whole process will be completed and by then the FATA will be so-called streamlined. But what happened in these two years, we don't know yet because the new government will, we'll see how the new government tackles the whole issue of integration. There are still forces against the integration because there has not been an effort made to know what the people want. It was just a group of Pakistani parliamentarians, some of them parliamentarians, some technocrats who came up with the reforms process, but no one actually was exactly from that region who knows what's going on and what are the demands of the people. So these marchers who started from the Masood Tafuz movement, it turned into a Prashtun Tafuz movement because everyone joined them from Wasiristan to Baja World and from the rest of Prashtun Khwa province. People joined them because people thought that this is the only movement where we can talk and we can discuss issues which even the major political parties are reluctant, are afraid, are politically like they are hesitant to talk about the role of the military, the Pakistan counter-terrorism policies. So this thing has now, as I mentioned, in the election manifesto, there is no mention of the youth and how, what are they doing for it? But what is clear is that when this, this PTM, it needed to be neutralized. So the Pakistan, what did was that this whole FATA integration, as I mentioned, it was expedited, it was in five years, but then in one week. The main reason was not that they were really interested in integrating FATA, or the reason was to neutralize the sentiments of the Prashtun Tafuz movement who interestingly had no, like they had no stand on the merger. They didn't, they won't tell you either they are in support of the merger or against it because for them it was a politically divisive matter. Similarly, what they did was two of the main leaders of PTM. And this is another contradiction. PTM came as a response to this whole failure of parliamentary democracy, especially for the people of FATA. But now two of the main leaders of that movement are participating in the elections, which has resulted again in more divisions within the ranks of the PTM leadership. But they are going there and their point is that they want to go there and see for themselves whether they can make any difference where they can resolve the issues, which is against mostly it's related to security, it's mostly related to dignity, it's mostly related to the removal of check posts. It's not, you won't find anything like where, and it's mostly related to the missing people, the extrajudicial killings. So it's all related towards Pakistan counter-terrorism policy has been in the area. And as we talk now, PTM is now not, it was just for these, but now they're talking about bigger issues. And the bigger issue is the control over their resources, the Pashtun profiling outside of the Pashtun areas in Punjab in Karachi. So they are becoming more politically mature and in the next whoever comes into government, they have to deal with a different force, which will be the youth of the tribal areas, but they will be more politically mature and their demands will be beyond the initial demands of just the check posts and land mines. Thank you. Thank you very much to all three of you. Just a few questions before we open it up to the audience. Dr. Najemi said that 80 out of 100 say that the old votes, 80% of the youth that Pakistan said that the old vote, but are these informed voters? And I open it up to anyone who'd like to answer, but I think that's the key question. Yes, they'll vote, but are they voting against party lines or do they understand who they're voting for? I don't know and I don't know whether that is true in Pakistan or in Arizona or in Austria or even maybe Boston is the one exception, but I don't know, but politics is not meant to be informed. Politics is politics. I mean, it's not for me to say that if someone doesn't agree with me, they're not informed. I think they're engaged. I think the yardstick of politics is engagement. I will also add one thing to Zubair and then we can go into, we actually put the available data on a FATA. As far as I know, this is the first report which has a whole section on FATA. Usually when you have these reports, FATA, GB and AJK is sort of not listed. We put it with the static, we don't know how good it is, but as a scholar, my thing is if you don't start putting it in and have the debate on what is right and what is not right, you'll never get there. So, but on the engagement, on the informed, I don't know if they're informed, but it is clear that they're engaged. And it is an amazing engagement. It's a scary engagement. And what is also important is, it is clear that the political parties know that they're engaged, right? In some ways, the manifestos to me are less important because no one reads manifestos in Pakistan, not even those who write them, but if you look at the Pakistani Jalsa, it is a young Jalsa, right? There is music, there is color, there is fireworks. That is not just, it doesn't happen for no reason. You look at the political gatherings and you just have to look around and the faces are younger, right? So I think there is a youth moment for democracy. I don't know if it's good for democracy or bad for democracy, but here is a very large number of very impatient. I think the differences, young voters are by definition impatient. Call it naive, call it informed, call it whatever, but when someone promises something, they actually believe it's going to be delivered. And when it is not, they have a tendency to ask for accountability. So these YouTube videos that you see of these young people costing candidates and saying, why didn't you do this? Why didn't you do that? Or the PTM, which is now, I would argue, a national movement. In fact, that's one of the problems. It has grown national. I've been to one of the law meeting and there weren't too many Pashtuns there, right? It was that brought a lot of agendas, the agenda of people who were worried about military intervention, the agenda of people who were worried about foreign intervention, right? The missing people. Remember how they went missing in the first place? The people who were worried about police brutality. So a lot of agendas got together and what I'm getting at here is that the young voters, just by their shared numbers, sort of demand political attention. And not only do they demand political attention, they command political attention. And that is why you cannot have a political rally in Pakistan today without music, for example. I think that they actually are a lot more informed than we give them credit for. I think the issue is that the youth is really engaged, but it's also, you know, information is very hard to measure. So we don't really know exactly what they're basing their vote on. As far as jelts is that concerned? Yeah, I agree that you need music, the political parties are sort of publicly rhetorically when they talk about elections, I mean, they talk about voting and winning and policies they address the youth. But the reason why I looked at the manifestos was I thought it was so different from what they say rhetorically and what they actually officially write, which seems odd to me, right? If you're catering to the youth and you have a very engaged youth and 80% of them are gonna vote or they say that they're gonna vote, then why wouldn't you put that in the manifesto, right? Why wouldn't you make that sort of the hallmark of your sort of national call? So, but yeah, I think the Pakistan youth is a lot more informed than we give them credit for. Yeah, I mean, the tribal areas, the thing is that, as I said, in 2011, the political parties act was extended before that there was, the political activities were not allowed. And the only group which was allowed was the Mullahs, the clergy, because they had the mass, so they would go there and then also Pakistan policy of countering the territorial nationalism through Islamization. So we had a lot of Talibanization going on even before this current war during the Soviet jihad. So now after, and when the military went in, in post 9-11, the traditional structures of power were collapsed, the military became and the Taliban and the two centers of power. And after that, the youth came in. And for the youth currently, Imran Khan, for example, he says some of the things he used to say even before PTM, he's used to criticize the military role this whole war. So the youth know who this time. And before that, one of the PTM members, for example, he was elected. Everyone knew that he's the member, but through military intervention, he couldn't get the seat. And now he's again contesting. And this time it seems that he will win because there's so many youth with him that it will be difficult to rig it anyway. So I mean, the youth are very much informed, very well engaged, especially in the tribal area. As I said, the whole PTM started with the youth and it is driven by youth and it's led by youth. And it's attracting more youth from the whole of Pakistan, not only the Pristunz. And just, I think, did you have something else to add? I think on the flip side, I think you, Dr. Duterte, I mean, the report cites a lot of data points on challenges faced by youth, especially with the political participation, but also the economy and economic issues and education. So I'm asking all of you to take out your crystal balls and think about, you know, and the manifestos are very vague, we know that. But do we think that there's a turning point in discussing the data and then they actually act on the data, especially with regards to youth knowing, especially this time around and learning from 2013 that the youth are, of course, to be reckoned with in Pakistan, whether it's politically or economically. It'll depend on who wins. So if Imran Khan wins, I mean, his whole sort of nail Pakistan was based on youth engagement. So I think he might be more inclined to, you know, talk about the youth, to make policies that are geared towards the youth and in encouraging engagement and improving education and employment opportunities. And the PPP historically has been a lot more engaged with the youth, especially they've been more in tune with gender relations. But I think it's really hard to predict because a lot of it will depend on the trajectory of the economy and exactly how many jobs can be created, are created per year and how that will eventually impact the demands of the youth. Can I, and I want to listen from the audience to three very quick things. One is when we say youth, right, we kind of say it as a singular as if there's one thing called the youth. Well, that one thing is 130 million people. No group of 130 million can be homogenous anywhere. That's just a law of physics, I think, if it isn't, it should be. And what that means is Imran, where PTI, for example, wants us to makes the argument we are the youth party, right? And they have clearly done more to mobilize young voters. But that doesn't mean, and we know from the last election data, that doesn't mean that everyone who's young is going to be voting for PTI. In fact, the data suggests in the last election because of the laptop scheme of the PMLN, right? Which actually was a very good scheme, right? So you're giving laptops to people. You can have all sorts of arguments about it, but it was a very clear response to this notion that there are, there is this constituency. So I'm not sure that you can say youth will vote for this party or that party. It's 130 million people, that's one hell of a lot of people. And I think they are of all types of variations. The thing that worries me more is the one that Zubair talks about this sort of what is happening, both with the manipulation type of control that is happening pre-election and what is happening with the encouragement of some religious, and this is not even religious, extreme religious groups, like the LeBac and so on and so forth, right? For example, Asad Umar, he will be the finance, like he will be a key position holder in the new government and he joined hands with Salaman Khalil. But the thing about LeBac also is it also has a very large number of young voters, right? So if you are young, you cannot assume every other young per person is like me. That's true everywhere in the world. These extreme groups, they're following. If you look at the following of the LeBac, these are predominantly young people. So you cannot put them in one box. That's thing one. Thing two, I went into this research as an educationist. That's all I've done all my life, thinking the most important issue was education. I still think it's education. I come out of the report believing that actually the single most one is employment. There are a lot of young people here, but even those of you who are not, I assume you once were. And when you're young, there is actually that employment is one of the most important life transitions that's happening. If you have a large number in society who don't get that issue resolved. In fact, all parties understand that. Now, whether they're able to do anything or not, right? I think they all understand that time bomb of employment. And I think that's the big one. And the last one very, very quickly is what again, I think both Sahar and Zubair pointed to, there is because of this new demography, a change in this political structure of Pakistan. The PTM is one example, which has actually shaken the political structure, right? The whole political structure of the so-called FATA was elders. And now the political structure is non-elders, right? People who are by definition, not elders. And that's happening all across Pakistan. You walk into the parliament and you see far more young faces. You look at the political leadership, whether it's Maria Mnawaz, whether it is Bilal Bhattur, whether it is this 70-year-old Imran Khan wanting to be young. It's, I mean, facetious, but the point is every party's argument is a youth argument, because they understand that. And that has created a impatience in politics. That has created an anger in politics. You see that in the verbiage, the type of comments and so on and so forth. Thank you. I think we'll open it up to the audience. If you could wait for the mic and introduce yourself. This event is being webcast. My name is... If you could wait for the mic, please, sir. Part of what I came, actually, this is the second time. But my question goes... Okay, I'm calling Sadoonga. I'm finalizing my PhD in police and administration with the world and university, with emphasis on terrorism, mediation and peace. But I'm also... I did my global development in my masters. Now, there are two questions that I have and a comment. And specifically to the scholar, Dr. Adeel. I'm a little bit concerned on two things. When we talk about the youth, I think until we change the narrative, who is a youth? A youth is your son, is your daughter, is your cousin. We tend to look at a youth as somebody, a young man outside there. And I think that has been really one of the major disservice that we're doing. You gave a little good data on your research, but I'm wondering, in your research, is it just going to be part of the scholarly, good report in the libraries? Or are you engaging? Did you... Are you planning to engage the people in the policy platform with leadership at the grassroot level so that people begin to be sensitized on issues? Because when you look at the reaction of the youth, they're frustrated. You talked about manifesto. Once I've gone, I've been elected. I don't have any business listening to anybody. And that's the truth about politicians. They only listen to you at the time of election. If you cannot... If the youth cannot be part of the negotiated democracy in terms of manifesto, in terms of the vision for what those parties are going to do, I think after election, those people don't have any business with the youth. They'll just be looking at them as a conglomerate of a population. So I think this is a challenge. And the last question I have for scholars, can we be part and parcel of the change process by engaging the grassroot leadership with all this good data so that it can make a meaningful change? Thank you. My name is Shahid Khan. I'm with the Bureau of Economic Analysis. I want to say thank you all for taking your time over here. But I guess one of my questions is related to, in terms of ethnic or religious minorities in Pakistan, like what type of opportunities that they may have if there's education available for them and are there any political parties making overtures towards them or more inclusivity for them? Thank you. We'll take one more and then in the back of the corner. Hi, my name is Manna King. I'm with the Wilson Center's Environmental Change and Security Program. And I just had a question about what you think the youth's role is for the environment. And I know you're especially. And yeah, that's it. I'd like to start. I think you should start with the gentleman. Sure, very, very, very, very briefly. I'll go in reverse order. Environment, you know, I mean, that's what, as you know, I'm great friends at your institute, I work on, we did 81 focus groups all across the only, and we asked lots of questions, including on that, the only one where environment, climate, for example, came as a big issue was Gilgit up in the north. And that's a very clear, this is glacial melt and they're in the 10th consecutive year of floods. So there was, I think there is some concern, but I do not think it would be fair to say that it rises to the top. And I don't, I think that's perfectly right. There are very, very real, very existential security and other issues. Minority, I think you know the answer that you wanted, so please assume I just gave it. But I think what is happening is that there is actually something interesting. You look at the candidate here of Gibran Nasser in Karachi, right, and he's not going to win. But he starts raising issues and this is very much a youth thing. So in some ways, between these new technologies and the younger people, and you know, one of the good things about young people is that they don't know the rules. And that is just wonderful. That means they don't have to follow it. And you see that particularly in Gibran's candidate, he's certainly not going to win. But that creates a conversation and you see that. Who is youth? We define it as 15 to 29. I assume which country are you from, sir? Originally? Where are you from originally? East Africa. So the reason I say that is everything in this report is even more valid for Africa because Africa is the youngest region in the world. And Nigeria in particular, which you mentioned is one of the youngest countries that is going to have one hell of a boom hitting it just demographically. But we say in the report and otherwise, and I really believe it, youth is not a problem to be solved. I think one of the things we all have to get away from is young people are not a problem that we have to solve. They are a social force that has been unleashed. They are a potential for society. And the rhetoric very often is we as scholars or we as political parties will do something for the youth. Here is the news for all of us. When you have 64% of your people under 30, they are no longer a peripheral group. They are the society. It is the one over 30 who are a side group. So I don't think the young people will wait for schemes. The old way of politics all across the world, including Pakistan is a government will come in and we will do something for young people. We will create a ministry. We will create a program. But when you're talking the type of demography I am, that's now the center. They're not a sideshow. And even within parliament, you can look at you might like them or not like them, but you walk into the parliament of Pakistan and the faces are much more younger than when I first started as a political reporter back in Benazir's first term. It is just a demographic reality around us. Sure, to talk about your concern about sort of engaging policy, the report that Dr. Najib has co-authored and how that report would, turning the scholarship into policy, I think that's sort of a general struggle of how to marry scholarship with policymaking and that would be something, I don't think Dr. Najib suffers from this, but in general there's a big divide between academia and scholarship. And so there's several programs now in place trying to bridge this gap between it. I think one of the important things about a report like Dr. Najib's is that it's being marketed in various venues, right? So they tweeted it out first rather than having a big sort of, a scholarly thing about it. They have really cool graphics that are very easily explained and the information is easily accessible and I think that would be one of the things why this report would be distinguished from say any other report on the youth. As far as the ethnic and religious minorities and their accessibility, well the election commission of Pakistan is actually trying to make this election a lot more accessible. So they've sort of said that any people with disabilities or women who are pregnant, they won't have to stand in line to vote. They can go in the front of the line. So they're making an active sort of push to make the election a lot more inclusive. But at the end of the day, and I'm sure you're aware of this too, Black Sunday Society is a very futile, very paternalistic society and this is reflected in the political parties. I mean, you just have to look at the people's party and the noon league to see what I'm talking about, right? So elections don't change that. So that said, we'll have to see how many actually people vote, how many people with disabilities or people who are sort of not mainstream vote and like what they say in the exit polls. As far as the environment goes, unfortunately even the Pakistan does have a lot of environmental issues especially with water scarcity. I just don't think that it's the number one priority right now. No matter what happens, security issues always trump any other issue including the environment. Yeah, as you said about the environmental issues, it's like the lowest of priority because everyone is concerned with security and with the basic other, what is called the basic issues. And as far as the minorities, the ethnic minorities, like in the tribal areas again, there are no industries either manufacturing or services, there is no agriculture as such. So the only avenue for upward mobility is to join the government. Either you join it in the civil bureaucracy, military bureaucracy. So that's either you go out of the country to the Gulf or anywhere else. Otherwise, on the ground there, there are not many opportunities and also the issues as I mentioned, they are not related to jobs, they are mostly related to security and peaceful life. The round of questions. Lady with the maroon sweater. Hi, my name is Nicole Kiprilov. I'm the intern for the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs of the State Department. And I'm also a student at Duke University. And this is actually a question that's sort of a follow up to the question you asked about how informed young people are. And I think it's a very important issue to address. And my question is, and it's sort of a series of questions, but it's all essentially part of the same topic. So what does civic education look like in Pakistan? Where do young people get their information from? Do they have access to non-biased media outlets? Or are they heavily influenced by extremist groups, ideological brainwashing and polarized political parties? Thank you. I'm Sajat. I'm originally from Kuita, Balochistan. We talked about Pashtun youth registering their voice and capturing the seeds their elders held previously. And we talked also about the youth in like the major part of mainstream Pakistan. But I also want to know, what's the voice of youth like in Balochistan and with the youth bulge in Central Punjab and I've had engagements and with the confusions, political confusions, religious confusions around identity that we see. What does it mean for future of federalism in Pakistan? So is that youth bulge going to further marginalize ethnic like Baloch and these conflicts or is it going to kind of move it towards a solution? Thanks. So just a quick question. I think going on this point about 130 million not being a monolith or homogenous. So I used to play golf in college. And every time I would tell my coach that X person has a lot of potential, we should recruit him. He would say, don't use that word in front of me. It's a curse word. All you're telling me is this guy's never achieved anything in life. He will one day. All countries talk about youth as potential. That's good politics. The question is, what ultimately transforms some into Bashtun, some into Boom? And I want to see if the panel wants to, I know the conversation is on Pakistan, but I find something common happening across countries where youth essentially don't convert or transform into a boom. One, I think in societies where you have class structures determining a lot, you have empowered youth and you have disempowered youth. And youth that are empowered are no longer part of the youth. They're part of the elite who will prey on everybody including the youth to extract resources. Whether they're political actors, whether they're military actors or whatever they are. And so in that case, is it really talking about youth or one has to disaggregate this, by class, elite, non-elite, right? And the second part to that is that in Pakistan, this applies, but in a lot of other countries. One thing that Pakistani youth have in common that their elder generations did not is that all of them have grown up in abnormal times. Violence is the norm and rule of law has never existed. So their baseline for what is okay is much worse or much more abnormal than a healthy society would be. I look at my own kids, I come from Pakistan. They knew what a suicide bomber and a bombing was at three years of age because they would see it on TV. Kids in other countries talk about their pet dogs being sick and playing and whatever. Sure, I'll go ahead first. So to your question about accessibility to unbiased information, I think that's tricky. At least from the report, 52% of Pakistan's youth population has a mobile phone. And I think about the same number has access to the internet. 15% or 15% only, but both of those are rising. Right, they're both rising. So there are far more phones than internet. Right, right. So I think it depends on where you are situated, rural versus urban area, and your access to the internet. And also from my research, Urdu media, Punjabi media, sort of different language media tends to be a lot more biased, if you will. So one example that I tend to use is that Muntaz Qadri, the man who had shot and killed Governor Saman Taseer, in the English newspapers depicted him very differently from the way the Urdu newspapers depicted him. For example, in English newspapers, he was called basically a murderer of a governor, whereas in Urdu media, he was considered a martyr in the name of Islam. So I think depending on where you are and your accessibility to technology determines what kind of information you have access to. And then as far as, sorry, I forget the second question. But going to Mui's point of rule of law, I'm a child of the 90s in Pakistan, right? So it's an abnormal time to live in Karachi. And I don't know if that necessarily, I don't know if that really matters anymore considering the information we have available. Like the youth population granted it's 130 million, but I feel like they're a lot more informed than I was in the 90s about what a democracy looks like, what is expected of them, how political parties should function, how a judiciary should function. So my sense is that might dictate to some extent how they vote or how they understand the political system versus the 1990s pre-Internet era. Yeah, and the issue of civic education and education overall, and Dr. Najib will agree with you that the problem is with the syllabus too, what we teach in their kids. In some cases, you will find people who will be more educated like locally. They would not have gone to the public or the private schools in Pakistan, but they would be more rational and more understandable than those who go there. And this issue of the whole changing the syllabus, if you look at, for example, there has been surveys where people, students of Madrasas or of the so-called secular schools are as sentimental when it comes to Kashmir or Jihad as the Madrasa students. So that needs to be changed. Otherwise, in the tribal areas again, those people who have studied in the public schools, they are usually with the PTI now because it resonates more with their agenda. And the information sources, again, mostly social media and the Pakistani media, which is totally controlled. It's mushrooming, there's a lot of new channels, but they are not independent. And some of them tried to, as Don recently, they were writing, but the problem with the English press is like the whole of South of Pakistan. There used to be one copy of Don newspaper that would meant for the political agent. So the rest of the population, they read the local Urdu language press, which is, again, very much biased and it's not independent and they usually have an agenda, whatever the information they propagate. Very quickly, I'll start with the middle question in Balochistan, but not just in Balochistan. Just on a demographic note, right? This is not a political note. There's just a demographic reality that varies by region. So in general, the population is growing and will, so the proportion of Pakistan that will be Balochistan will increase, right? But it's already only 4%. So what I'm saying is that the growth rate in Punjab in general is lower than in the other provinces, Punjab and Sindh. KP in Balochistan will go up and if you see the new seat alignments, you see that. So if we keep having, but I don't think that will have an impact. I don't think it will have an impact. What will have an impact, I think, is far more whether there is economic integration or not, right, what the role of a CPAC might be. In the writing of the report, I had this long conversation with Ahsan Iqbal, who was then the head of the planning commission and I said, you need 1.5 million jobs. And he says, yeah, CPAC is coming and said, no, it's not gonna bring 1.5 million jobs because you'll build the road and that will give jobs. I actually am actually quite positive on that. The jobs that will come, for example, from building the roads, I don't care much about it because the road gets built. But if around the road, there are restaurants and there are hotels and there are truck stops and there are mechanics, that's where the million jobs comes from, right? And that's a different sort of thing. So, but demographically, frankly, Balochistan's growth rate is much higher. So you will go up, but again, it is such a small, it's only 4% of the country. Same for FATA, you know, even if the half million is wrong and one million is right, that's still in a country of 200 million becomes less of a loss, less of a thing, though I can go into it. I don't want to sound flippant. I really don't. But I think in today's world, anywhere in the world, including in Pakistan and Pakistan, actually the answer to your question is no different in Pakistan than anywhere else in the world, including here. The idea of unbiased information is a biased idea now. That's the information marketplace we live in. Information is now not a reality, it is a choice. You find me the most absurd opinion that you can think of and I will find you the 10 people on the internet who believe the same and you will immediately become their Facebook friends and believe that the whole world believes as you do, right? That's true for Pakistan, that's true for here, that's true everywhere else. So I think information, I'm not being flippant, I think that's a reality that we have to now deal with. People actually are, I think to a level of being a disease, those who can are information hungry, there is sort of this frenzy, I worry when they work because with those who can get social media, the news channels, the 24 hour news channels are far more frantic than what you will see in Pakistan. And what that means is there's a marketplace for information and whatever beliefs you want to believe, you will find those who gravitate. You know, I went on a show that many of my friends think I shouldn't have gone on, it's kind of a fairly extreme sort of view and the reason I went on the show to talk about the report is I need to get to those people. I can't choose now only to talk to people who believe like me and that's the reality of the politics of the world, every place and I think that's also the reality of Pakistan. I also think if any of you study Pakistan and read English only, please stop studying Pakistan because to the extent that it might have been relevant at another point, it no longer is. One of the things that's happened with the channels is that there's so much money and viewership there that all the good English writers are also now writing in Urdu. So the English newspapers, you can wrap fish in. But you know, I write them myself but what I'm saying is that's kind of a reality. I'm being flippant but not entirely flippant. There is a change, I'm not sure it's an entirely bad change. I just think with time, the providers of information will themselves have to sort this market out. We'll have to have some ways of quality. Part of that is education but not entirely. On Moid's question, you know, I think partly, I agree on the part that you have to disaggregate. You cannot aggregate 130 million of anything, right? That said, the first part about your golf coach, I'm glad you changed the coach because I'm not sure that's good advice. And what I mean by that is, potential doesn't mean that it hasn't been, if you look around, in some ways I think there are lessons of what can or cannot be done. And I think what those lessons are about, the conditions we will give to people to reap that potential or not. For example, the entrepreneurship argument, right? So one way is we're going to go and a lot of donors want to do this, we're going to dump money on creating entrepreneur. That's not how it happens anywhere. You create conditions in which those who want to do that can do that themselves, you know, the ease of business and so on, so forth, not easy. Last point, and I'm going to be instantly unpopular because it's going against your business model. I think security, I'll slightly disagree. One of the findings we had, and Moid has a piece in the report, so we're honest to that, but one of the things we found is, I'm not sure people in Pakistan and generally young in particular think of security the way those of us in this room do. We, just like they get obsessed on their feed on Facebook, we get obsessed with our feed on Facebook, right? I was, I showed you the photograph of I was in Peshawar three days after APS. One of the big things I found, and this gave me sleepless nights, is the guys who did the killing were no older than the guys who did the dying, right? And three days after in Karachi, in Peshawar, in one of these big tragedies, part of me was, why isn't this city going crazy? And that is the setting of that reality. I'm not saying that internalized it, but if you have to grow up in that, you don't make peace, but you make adjustments to that reality. The security problem is the following. If I can tell, we did one of our focus groups in Girls College in Pindi, which is right across the road in the old presidency from the general headquarters of the military, Fatma Jena University. And we had a group about this size and we did the whole thing and I asked a question about security and what their concerns was. And I asked if people felt unsafe and girl raised her hand and she said, yes, yes, I worry a lot about my safety. And I thought, okay, she's right across from the military headquarters. This is prime target and so on and so forth. So I asked her to tell me more about it. And I thought I was going to hear a story about bombs going off in terrorists. And essentially what she told me and got a clap from her colleagues was that she felt unsafe because she had to come from home on a van and the way men looked and layered at her. You know, I asked, actually I said something about, so you mean bombs and stuff. And she said, no, no, that I can figure out. But every day getting on that and being layered at, that is what makes me unsafe. Now that's not her saying I don't care about security. That's about saying that there are multiple ways in which people look at their safety. And unfortunately norms do develop even bad ones of dealing internalizing with that. But disaggregate, you're exactly right. You have to disaggregate. And that living in that you never make peace with it, but you accommodate that reality once it becomes a reality. I thank you so much. I think we're at the 430 mark and I apologize for those folks that I didn't get to. But I appreciate you attending this afternoon. And I want a round of applause for our speakers for you. Thank you very much.