Z. A. Bhutto and the ‘naukri-pesha’
It was amusing to hear one of our topmost leaders contemptuously referring to the entire working population of the country – from peons, clerks and constables to executives, professionals, professors,…
Surprise, surprise
Surprise, surprise, that the case of journalist Umar Cheema’s late night kidnapping from Islamabad the Beautiful, his violent beating; crudely shaving his head and eyebrows; hanging him upside down, and…
Lone rangers in the drone zone
For several months last year, I was at the receiving end of occasional emails that conformed to a particular pattern. They all began with a reasonably uncontroversial critique of the…
At a loss for words
The importance of words cannot be overemphasised. Language – the ability to speak – is what distinguishes humans from other animals. But it seems this distinction is dangerously narrowing down…
Pakistan’s foremost problem
In a feat of marksmanship that will surely enter the record books, the Frontier Corps valiantly guns down six unarmed Russians near Quetta, including a pregnant woman, and the pall…
Pakistan’s secular martyrs
The murder of professor Saba Dashtiyari in Quetta last week, coming on the heels of the killing of investigative journalist Saleem Shahzad, is yet another sign of an ongoing ‘genocide’…
For whom the bell tolls
It is a very odd situation in Siachen. How often do we see civilians attired as peaceniks, as journalists or NGOs campaigning to bail out their militaries that have landed…
The post-Osama terror factory
I must confess I was among the feckless journalists that wouldn’t believe for days after the event a year ago that Osama bin Laden was killed or could be killed…
Trade deadlines with India
An important deadline has just been missed. Pakistan had committed to itself that from Jan 1 onwards, it would remove the socalled `negative list` under which it trades with India,…
Hope is not a winning strategy
A Pakistani journalist visiting Kabul in the nineties half-jokingly asked the then-vice president of Afghanistan, Maulana Mohammad Nabi Mohammadi: “I’ve read in the British gazetteers that the only way to…
