Confusion over Yemen
We are a very strange nation indeed. If someone utters something strange, in no time everyone – including the political leadership – follows and repeats the mantra. A recent example…
On the wrong side of history
The threat to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf sheikhdoms is not from Iran. It is from the Islamic State or Daesh. The conflict tearing the Islamic centre apart is not…
Glitzy projects: the new opium of the masses
Every exploitative system needs safety valves, sops to the masses that can keep them happy and distracted. The Caesars provided free bread and circuses, including gladiatorial shows for which the…
No time to avenge bustards
Societies can be consumed by emotion. But states are only meant to have interests. It is for national leaders to ensure that the nation’s emotions are in sync with its…
Climate consciousness
According to NDMA sources, the recent floods inundated 45 districts comprising 4065 villages and destroyed standing crops on 2.4 million acres of land besides affecting the lives of 2.5 million…
New Afghan opportunity
GEOGRAPHY, shared history, ethnicity, religion, culture and economic interdependence dictate that Pakistan’s relationship with Afghanistan — good or bad — will always be close and intense. Neither country can disengage…
Physician heal thyself
We are in the bad habit of pontificating to the Afghans. We have incessantly lectured them on the need for peace and stability in their country and proffered the unsolicited…
Modi and the Americans
In September every year, leaders of more than 190 nations, whether big or small, get a chance to make long speeches at the United Nations General Assembly, which are usually…
Asia’s parallel paradigms
IT is now almost a truism that Asia will be the focal point of geopolitics in the 21st century as Europe was in the last 200 years. The reasons are…
Glimpses of new Afghanistan
Growing up in the 1980s in Pakistan, my generation became acquainted with Afghanistan in the context of the war against the Soviet Union. In those early years of the war,…
