How fervently one wishes that the country would at least now return to a measure of normality to be able to cope with the internal and external challenges staring it in the face so menacingly! But with the election of Raja Pervaiz Ashraf as the new prime minister, the nation seemingly has sadly fallen on more uncertainties. It is not just his controversial past as the power minister that is the problem. With the sword of the Swiss letter hanging on the head, one cannot say with any certainty about his own longevity in the office.But stability in the land is the crying need of the hour. Visibly, the nation is so precariously placed at this point in time that it can afford no convulsion or tremor in any event. Never ever before the polity stood so bitterly divided on multiple lines as is it now. It lives fractured widely on parochial, linguistic, ethnic, sectarian, confessional and ideological lines. With deeply-impaired oneness of nationhood, the polity has definitely suffered dents in its solidarity, cohesion and harmony. Furthermore, a broken national economy has inflicted enormous woes on the masses with abandon. They are in deep economic straits. On the top of it, an unrelenting, rather ever-escalating, power load-shedding has added phenomenally to their unenviable economic predicament. It is slamming shut industries, businesses and enterprises by droves day in and day out. Jobs and livelihoods are thus being wiped out in multitudes, swelling the ranks of the unemployed at an astronomical pace. Deprivation and denial are in a heady dance while ravaging poverty and want are playing playfully with the people’s unlivable lives. Worse, prowling terrorism, lawlessness and criminality have taken away all sense of safety and security from the citizens. Boiling public discontent, despondency and disenchantment are raging furiously from end to end of the land. Peace and tranquility have departed the polity as if they had never visited it ever.     But if on the domestic front the polity is being tormented direly by a sagging economy, galloping joblessness, spiraling price hikes, waltzing penury, rampaging terrorism and stalking criminality, the external front is posing grave threats to its national security, territorial sanctity and sovereignty. The principal threat on this count is coming from none else but the United States of America, our self-styled ally in their war on terror. The bellicosity of the Obama administration and the US Congress against Pakistan is gaining in stridency and rabidity phenomenally with every passing day. As if the unrelenting animosity being whipped up by various strands of the US administration, legislature, intelligence community and intelligentsia routinely over the past so many years was not enough of it, threats of hot pursuits, ground raids and stepped-up drone attacks by the US forces are now being hurled at us as if we are no sovereign state but just a colony and a slave of America. The jingoistic tones of recent utterances of their defence secretary Leon Panetta and secretary of state Hillary Clinton and blusterous talk of certain US congressmen do carry notes that are chillily disconcerting, to say the least. And since the US-led occupiers of Afghanistan are in so tight a spot in Afghanistan for nothing else but their own follies and failings and since they have latched on to Pakistan to be the scapegoat of their own collapses there, there is every chance that the American war leaders may resort to some kind of adventurism against Pakistan to save their faces. They want Pakistan to pull their chestnuts of the fire in Afghanistan, which of course Pakistan cannot do as it is beyond its capability. They therefore may not be any loath to make Pakistan a punching bag of their debacles of Afghanistan. This is not beyond the realm of possibility and a potent one at that.To meet the formidable challenges on the domestic and foreign fronts, there has to be a measure of stability in the land. But that can happen only if harmony prevails between the institutions, ruffles between various arms of the state are ironed out, and the political formations pull back from brinkmanship and adventurism. The nation certainly will be watching minutely if various quarters work to this end. The uncertainties the country has fallen on would certainly hurt it incurably if those are not doused and erased effectively and speedily.