Category Archives: Current Issues

By Saeed Qureshi
Exclusive Article

During the past few weeks, scores of precious lives have perished in Karachi in the so called target killing. Continue reading →

By:M J Akbar

There is a straight connect between the knee and the tongue: Through the jerk. When a political knee jerks, it smashes into your chin, cuts your tongue and produces garble that you can regret in the luxury of time. Continue reading →

Ayaz Amir

We were making a point and we’ve made it: this from Ms Hina Khar, our winsome foreign minister, putting a paint brush job on our blocking of Nato supply routes after the American gunship attacks on our Salala check-posts. Fair point but making the point for six months and dawdling over it and then entrusting the matter to parliament, a sure recipe for turning even the moderately simple into a running farce.
Continue reading →

Ikram Sehgal

Erstwhile phone buddies Husain Haqqani and Mansoor Ijaz have amply proven each other to be dubious characters, and such people have a recurring habit of falling out. The truth about Memogate’s sponsors notwithstanding, the motivation was primarily to bring the Pakistani security establishment to heel, the ultimate goal being to “de-nuke” Pakistan. Continue reading →

Zafar Hilaly

It took the American helicopters a full two hours to kill the 24 Pakistani soldiers at the Salala (military) outpost near the Afghan border. We read they were picked off one by one inside the battered outpost by the hovering helicopters. Hence, when the subsequent American ‘inquiry’ claimed that it was the result of a mistake, no one paid any attention. Perhaps Obama too discovered the truth and hence did not apologise because that would have only compounded the evil. But he could, and did, express ‘regret,’ but that was so devoid of remorse that it savoured of hypocrisy.
Continue reading →

Khurram Husain

NOW I’ve heard everything. When the power situation hit the high water mark one more time, the government rolled out another one of its horse and cattle shows, complete with ‘briefings’ from the ministries and ‘proposals’ from the bureaucracy.
Continue reading →

By Abdullah Al Shayji

A year and a half after the outbreak of the most remarkable transformational movements in the Arab world, mainly in its republics, it is time to make an assessment of the progress so far and the impediments and challenges facing the transformational movements. Continue reading →

By Syed Talat Hussain

Pakistan is in a state of deep crisis. The top-end of this crisis is reflected in the won’t-do-would-die battle the government is fighting with the judiciary. Continue reading →

Aasim Sajjad Akhtar

AS Pakistan’s love-hate relationship with the mythical ‘rule of law’ unfolds, the very real rule of the danda continues to manifest itself in virtually every little nook and cranny of society, unnamed if not unnoticed.
Continue reading →