A real feel-good story.

AFTER weeks of doom and gloom, this Friday brought some good news in that the international terror-financing and money-laundering watchdog, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), has been finally satisfied with Pakistan's progress on compliance with a 34-point action plan.

This means that Pakistan has safely put some distance between international financial isolation and may be headed off the 'grey list' now, where it has languished since the summer of 2018, with prospects brightening of improving its credit rating and being seen more favourably as a destination for foreign investment.

It would be premature to celebrate success at this stage, as Pakistan remains on the grey list until an 'on-site' visit and inspection by a FATF team is conducted to physically verify that all the action points have been indeed implemented. At that point, Islamabad will be likely removed from the grey list. Nonetheless, it is safe to say a huge step has been taken in the right direction.

Most of the work on the compliance criteria was done during the tenure of the PTI government and there can be no denying credit to it. Kudos to it. Many of its leaders, most notably Imran Khan, have come forward with self-congratulatory messages. Deservedly so.

In this moment of relief for Pakistan, for which credit was being claimed by one and all, one irony was lost somewhere along the way.

Mr Khan did not share credit with anybody else, like his party did for the handling of the pandemic when it credited the National Command and Control Centre, NCOC, jointly headed by Asad Umar and a serving three-star general with the success.

Read: 'Many fathers' of FATF success

Equally, in another example of how far things have moved from the same-page harmony with the PTI, since the military's 'neutrality' commitment, the army's chief spokesman lauded the efforts of the 'core cell' at GHQ (under the DGMO) which 'steered the civil and military effort' for bearing fruit.

In this moment of relief for Pakistan, for which credit was being claimed by one and all, one irony was lost somewhere along the way. It was former prime minister Nawaz Sharif who first raised the issue of global isolation on account of Pakistan's support to militant groups in a meeting with the former DG ISI Lt-Gen Rizwan Akhtar in 2016, two years before the country was put on the grey list.

What followed the publication of a report about that meeting in Dawn is public knowledge. Nawaz Sharif's government was...