In a way, the challenges for Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s government are summed up in the events of last one week, related to just one news report published in Dawn. The contents of the story and the furore it caused very well capture the problems confronting the state. These essentially rest in our foreign policy concerns regarding India which in turn are rooted in Kashmir, that remains the unfinished agenda of partition for Pakistan.

The said report talked of the "diplomatic isolation" faced by the country. The civilians seemed to have addressed the message to the military. The ensuing hue and cry was expected and the denial, not one or two but three, obviously came from the side that appeared to benefit from the story. The furore is said to have come after the Indian news media picked it and sold it like hot cake.

That is the roughly the trajectory of challenges for Sharif. It begins and ends with the central plank of Pakistani politics -- the civil-military relations. In her perceptive piece, Ayesha Siddiqa contests the analyses that remain too focused on military takeovers while the military itself has decided to avoid any direct intervention. She also sees the civil-military in the larger context of the patronage system operating in this country where both civil and military elite are "extorting resources of the state".

Read also: Challenges ahead for Sharif

Then there is India, and Sharif’s reputation of attempting to maintain a peaceful relationship with it. "Normalisation of relations with India, and subsequent economic cooperation, was a big part of his plan" writes Gibran Peshimam. In this respect, Nawaz Sharif’s biggest challenge is to isolate jihadist elements in Kashmir and their supporters in Pakistan, writes Peshimam.

And this brings us back to the Dawn story and the civil-military tensions it contains. But this is not all. The Panama Leaks are there to constantly haunt the prime minister, more recently of course in Imran Khan’s proposed March to Islamabad on October 30. These challenges form the contents of our Special Report today.