The Pakistani state and its institutions have failed to protect the Shia minority from sectarian violence that has claimed hundreds of lives this year. We examine the players behind such mayhem.
As the US has been defeated in Iraq and Afghanistan, it has shifted its focus to the Pacific region to contain the rising power of China. General Mirza Aslam Beg, former chief of the Pakistan Army, argues that countries like Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan are well-placed to assert their rights in this new architecture.
Pakistan has been wracked by sectarian violence and while the terrorists are well known to the authorities, little is being done to apprehend much less punish them.
The great hopes arouse by the Pakistan resolution when it was first passed in Lahore in March 1940—seven years before Pakistan came into existence—remain a pipe dream. Instead, for most Pakistanis it has become a nightmare.
Using terrorist outfits like Lashkar-e Jhangvi and the SSP, the Saudis want to create a permanent breach between Shias and Sunnis in order to check the influence of Islamic Iran.
The arrest of Mossad’s Pakistani spy, whose name has not been released, is a blow to Israeli attempts to destabilise Pakistan
According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, US drone strikes in Pakistan have killed nearly 5,000 people since June 2004.
The December 20 and 21 meeting in a hotel outside Paris between representatives of the Taliban, the Karzai government and members of the Northern Alliance as well as Gulbuddin Hikmatyar’s Hizb-e Islami shows that the Taliban are now firmly in control of the future agenda in Afghanistan.
Pakistan faces an existential threat not from external enemies but from its own parasitical elites that thrive on its body sucking its blood and strangling the state slowly to death.
According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which compiles figures on drone strikes, the US has killed up to 3,378 people in 350 drone strikes in the past eight years in Pakistan.
‘Get the vote out,’ was a common refrain heard by Muslims from the minbar prior to the November 6 elections. Salina Khan asks whether the same Imams would be just as eager to link up with people standing for justice and peace.
America’s drone warfare has caused thousands of innocent deaths in Pakistan. When will this nightmare end?
Malala Yousufzai has been turned into a poster child for a nefarious agenda.
The Saudis use quite sophisticated methods to finance the creation of a mindset that leads to suicide bombers, says a reader.
A study by American legal experts from Yale Law School and New York University Law School is a stinging rebuke of US Drone warfare. The study focuses on Pakistan and show that while only 2% of those targeted can be considered “militants” the rest are civilians. This, the report concludes, has led to alarming increasing in anti-Americans in Pakistan.
Pakistan is once again gripped by political and social upheavals. With rapidly deteriorating economic and law and order situations, there is real danger of an implosion.
If Pakistan only faced external enemies, it would be easy to understand its problems. The real tragedy is that its rulers are the greatest enemies the state and the people have to face.
For a state to function reasonably well, it must fulfill certain basic needs of the people: provide security of life, limb and property as well as food, water, education and health services.
A charismatic politician charming crowds throughout Pakistan. A rising crescendo of political speeches and rallies setting the nation afire, an impalpable sense of excitement building in the populace, casting the halo of destiny itself on the celebrity politician. A sense of promise, a social contract written anew; Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1973? No, rather it is Imran Khan in 2012, launching a flamboyant path to become the next prime minister of Pakistan.
Pakistan’s story is like an unending tragedy in which there are no heroes, only villains. Each tries to outdo the other in how much evil he can perpetrate. It would be worthwhile to identify the villains, both institutional and individual. At the institutional level there are the feudal lords that control vast land holdings that were granted to their ancestors by the British colonialists.
