Economic dystopia incentivized
Can you guess what country has the world’s worst financial inclusion statistics? It is Pakistan. With 115 million unbanked adults (adults with neither a bank account, nor a mobile money…
India’s coming of age
In 1999, when General Musharraf sprung the Kargil misadventure on the Pakistani people, India had a GDP of just over $450 billion. To contextualize this properly, one needs to clock…
Is sovereign default inevitable? – II
The first Prime Minister of India, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, said the following on the occasion of abolition of zamindari system in his country’s largest state, UP, in 1952: “I was…
Losing the Muslim World to Putin
For Vladimir Putin, the news from Ukraine is not good. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is not going particularly well, by many Western and Ukrainian accounts. As the masters of the…
Graveyard of neoliberalism
OBSERVERS will not have missed the irony when Chile’s newly elected President Gabriel Boric stood on the stage on the eve of his primary election victory and declared Chile as…
Systemic violence on local people
WHEN it comes to the coverage of terrorism in the Af-Pak region, journalists and analysts in Pakistan have one thing in common: their fixation on ideological aspects of extremism often…
The madressah riddle
THE state has yet to fully realise the sociocultural and political-economic inferences of religious education institutions or madressahs. Despite having long attempted to pursue the reform of this sector, successive…
A way out
What has gone wrong with recent predictions about a possible tussle between the PTI government and state institutions? The controversy over the appointment of the DG ISI, dissolution of the…
The growing Taliban challenge
THE reported upsurge in the TTP’s terrorist violence in Pakistan in recent months has coincided with the Afghan Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan in August. While there are fears of a further escalation…
The burden of power
With Major General Chris Donahue, the commanding general of the 82nd airborne division having boarded the C-17 aircraft, the two-decade-old American military mission in Afghanistan came to an end. The…
