It’s time we realised our biggest enemies are ignorance, poverty, instability, poor health, decaying institutions.
JEDDAH: This is with reference to Ejaz Haider’s article of May 10 titled “Raiding the challenge”.
The military budget for the current fiscal year, as announced in the federal budget, is Rs540 billion. Add to this, Rs50 billion in pensions and some more billions which were sought later, and the figure is much higher.
There are countries without armies and they have peace, internally and around them. Even if half of the billions spent on defence were instead spent on human development, we will see results within a decade. It’s time we realised our biggest enemies are ignorance, poverty, instability, poor health, decaying institutions, flawed ideology, lack of expertise, unemployment and so on.
Rashed Khan
Published in The Express Tribune, May 11th, 2011.
