As long ago as 1841, those who tried to govern Afghanistan complained about the country’s paltry income.
“But what can be done with a Kingdom whose net revenues are only fifteen Lakhs [1.5m] of Rupees per annum?” wrote a frustrated Sir William Macnaghten from Kabul to his East India Company bosses. Read more »
By Declan Walsh, New York Times
Gunmen on Friday May 3 killed a Pakistani prosecutor who had been investigating the murder of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and the 2008 Mumbai attacks. 
May 10 (Bloomberg) As every leading candidate has proudly noted, tomorrow’s parliamentary elections in Pakistan will mark the first civilian transfer of power in that country’s 66-year history. To ensure it’s not the last, the winner should turn to an unlikely ally: India. Read more »
This article written by (late) Syed Saleem Shahzad and published in the Asia Times on August 9, 2009 remains relevant today.
ISLAMABAD – Pakistan and United States officials are scrambling to verify reports that Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, head of the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), was killed in a US Predator drone attack in the South Waziristan tribal area on Wednesday. Read more »
One day, a 10-year-old girl died. The next, a seven-year-old boy. The victims of the relentless attacks on election meetings in Pakistan are so very rarely named that you have to start counting the ages of the children to give some kind of human meaning to the deaths. Read more »
There is no denying that the erstwhile modernist Pakistani leadership tried to make Pakistan both democratic and Islamic, but no constitutional formula could find the proper balance Read more »
How can a society indoctrinated for years on a self-righteous ideology be led to take an inquisitive look at itself? An irresolvable dilemma has gripped the country and its establishment
Indoctrination leads a nation to progress or self-destruction, depending on the way it is inculcated in the minds of the people and how they follow it. Read more »
By Shamila N. Chaudhary
The life of a Pakistani politician is fraught with life-threatening situations. In recent years, several high-profile politicians have been assassinated: former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in 2007, and Punjab Governor Salman Taseer and Minority Affairs Minister Shahbaz Bhatti in 2011. Read more »
(Reuters) – When Veero Kolhi made the asset declaration required of candidates for Pakistan’s May elections, she listed the following items: two beds, five mattresses, cooking pots and a bank account with life savings of 2,800 rupees ($28). Read more »
The following are the “Conclusions and recommendations” of the report on Afghanistan published by the United Kingdom’s parliamentary defence select committee on April 10, 2013
This book – Devils’ Game- by Robert Dreyfus is a must read for anyone who wants to have a better understanding of the Political Islam in the global context. 
Read more »
Recently during an exchange on Twitter, I was struck by the ignorance of some people who write for the opinion pages in local newspapers. One gentleman insisted that Jinnah never made any reference to Quran or Sunnah in relation to the system envisaged for Pakistan. Read more »
Published in DAWN
The three political parties leading in the opinion polls have promised to dramatically increase spending on education Read more »
Published in DAWN
March 18, 2013
The large size of Pakistan’s ‘unofficial’ or ‘informal’ economy is sometimes cited as an indicator of the country’s resilience and its potential Read more »
At the request of Mr. Yousuf Nazar, we are releasing his book (published in 2011) online. Click on the link Balkanisation and Political Economy of Pakistan Kindel
Farrukh Siddiqui, Editor
The recently-published memoirs of Lt. General (Retd) Shahid Aziz is more of an apology than an honest documentation of his life and time in the Army. At best, he comes across as a self-righteous retired general. Read more »
Published in the Express Tribune
That militancy is the biggest near term threat Pakistan faces is obvious. What may not be obvious is that the roots of militancy go deeper than just Pakistan’s links with the Afghan Talibans or its support of various other militant groups. Read more »
The Stratfor ( a private US intelligence service) just released this report under the above title which is quite meaningful. Read more »
From Pravda , 29.08.2012
By Felix Imonti
Saudi Arabia has gone on the offensive against Iran to protect its interests. Read more »
The following are some of the killings which reportedly have been carried out by the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi during 2012. I request all political parties, civil rights groups including lawyers’ groups/ associations, and journalists to email this to the Supeme Court of Pakistan Read more »
In Jan. 2012, Mr.Yousuf Nazar, a political economist and former Citibanker published his book: “Balkanisation and Political Economy of Pakistan”. Its last chapter “Pakistan’s Way Forward” offers a comprehensive strategy for the country’s complex political, economic, domestic and foreign policy issues. Read more »
By AARON DAVID MILLER
Foreign policy, including the use of military power, isn’t an end in itself. It consists of tools and instruments designed to achieve specific and hopefully well-thought-out ends. Those ends — let’s call them interests — are theoretically supposed to drive a country’s foreign-policy strategy. Sounds pretty simple, right? Read more »
We believe that anyone who promotes the conspiracy theory that Tehreek-e-Taliban or Baitullah Mehsud (yes they are terrorists and enemies of the people) bombed Benazir Bhutto’s welcome procession in Karachi on October 18, 2007 is either naive or an accessory in the cover-up of her murder. The following piece by Amir Mir is a must read. Read more »
Today a DAWN columnist wrote about the recently published book “Confront and Conceal” by David Sanger. The column misses some key points like Obama administration is dysfunctional and its information sources have often turned out to be completely wrong. The following review published in the New York Times is a more serious and objective (not reverential) critique of the book. Read more »
Published In The Express Tribune, June 23rd, 2012.
The brouhaha over the Dunya News video leak has shifted the spotlight from the real issue of accountability to the dark underbelly of the television news networks. Read more »
A record of payments allegedly made to 19 senior-journalists of Pakistan, by the Bahria Town owner Malik Riaz has surfaced on the social networking site Twitter, Aaj News reported. Read more »
We are reproducing the following email from Mr. Yousuf Nazar without comment:
Regards,
Farrukh Siddiqui Read more »
Occupy Seattle protesters, an off-shoot of the Occupy Wall Street movement, scuffle with police officers during a May Day rally and anti-capitalist march in Seattle. Read more »
The following article was recently published in a special supplement (May 10, 2012) titled “Emerging World Order” of the Financial Times. It is a must read for all thinking Pakistanis.
by Peter Shadbolt
If the African continent were to have its own modem-day Statue of Liberty, then Lady Liberty would probably be brandishing a mobile phone rather than a torch. Read more »
There have been calls for Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani’s resignation after his conviction by the Supreme Court. While Nawaz Sharif has demanded resignation, Imran Khan has threatened a tsunami march on Islamabad. Read more »
Updated April 22, 2012: 1210 Hours PST
The crash of Bhoja Airlines is a horrible tragedy. The Bhoja Air Boeing 737 carrying about 127 people was on its first flight from Karachi to Islamabad. The Bhoja airliner crashed in stormy weather on Friday evening. There were no reports of survivors. Read more »
One day in late November, an unmanned aerial vehicle lifted off from Shindand Air Base in western Afghanistan, heading 75 miles toward the border with Iran. Read more »
Is Pakistan’s middle class around 70 million (or nearly 40% of Pakistan’s population) as a recent article published in the daily DAWN suggested? After the publication of this article titled “Consumption conundrum” by Sakib Sherani (an ex-Banker), a former World Bank official Shahid Javed Burki writing in the Express Tribune Read more »
Former Army Chief Walks to the Supreme Court to appear in the Mehrangate Case
April 16 (Bloomberg) — The snarling between the U.S. and Pakistan won’t let up. The battle began, of course, when U.S. forces sneaked into Pakistan to kill Osama bin Laden last May. Read more »
We are pleased to publish copy of a classified internal document prepared by a special operations team of the US/NATO forces in Afghanistan.
By Unni Krishnan
April 13 (Bloomberg News) — Commercial University Ltd. in New Delhi offers degrees in commerce, one of hundreds of private colleges trying to fill an education gap as India’s growth creates a middle class eager for its children to succeed. Read more »
As I watched reports on GEO TV showing relatives of Dr Khalil Chisti eating sweets to celeberate his release in India, Read more »
DAWN
by Syed Shoaib Hasan
A Pakistani rescue worker is seen through the bullet-riddled window of a passenger train following an attack by unknown gunmen in Mach near Quetta.—AP Photo Read more »
ZULFIKAR LANGAU was 17 when he ran away “to the mountains”, a euphemism for joining independence-seeking insurgents in Balochistan, a vast, thinly populated province of deserts and mountains in the west of Pakistan. Read more »
April 5 (Bloomberg) — An Indian security guard, cradling a Kalashnikov assault rifle, shadowed two Indian engineers as they inspected the concrete shell of the parliament building they are constructing — in the Afghan capital of Kabul. Read more »
The battle that started in earnest last week to replace Robert Zoellick as the bank’s president reflects the complications of a world where power over the institutions of global governance is shifting from those developed nations that set up the bank to emerging economies. Read more »
Do you know that:
In 2000, there were 14 bomb blasts in Pakistan; 5 in Punjab, 4 in Sindh, 3 in Balochistan, and one each in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province (KPK) and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) in which a total of 79 people died; 55 in Punjab and Sindh, 18 in Baluchistan, 5 in FATA and only one in the KPK. Read more »
By Bhashyam Kasturi
Any study that seeks to understand the dynamics of India’s “presence” in Afghanistan with the application of soft power must realise that it is a carefully crafted piece of diplomacy—one that is riding high in the presence of the U.S. and the NATO forces in the region. Read more »
The military establishment and its supporters as well as the PPP government’s interior minister Rehman Malik accuse “foreign powers” of fomenting trouble in Balochistan. Rehman Malik told Pakistan Senate on Feb. 9 that some external powers were conspiring to detach Balochistan from Pakistan. Read more »
The following is the text of the statement released by the Human Rights Watch – a global human rights body.
January 30, 2012
The Pakistani government should redouble efforts to find the killers of the journalist Saleem Shahzad, following the failure of the judicial inquiry commission to identify those responsible, Human Rights Watch said today. Read more »
From the New York Times
In Pakistan’s Coup Intrigue, an X-Rated Plot Twist
By ROBERT MACKEY
via YouTube Mansoor Ijaz, an American at the center of Pakistani intrigue, in a still frame from a 2004 music video.
A complex political and legal drama dubbed “Memogate” by the Pakistani press veered into unexpected territory on Wednesday, when an American businessman who claims that Pakistan’s government Read more »
THE message that emerged loud and clear from the Pakistan Tehrik-i-Insaf’s massive rally in Karachi on Sunday was that people want a change. Read more »
By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON – The US military and the administration of President Barack Obama have been thrown into confusion by the attack on two Pakistani military posts near the border with Afghanistan on Saturday morning, even as the attacks provoked the Pakistani government and military leadership into much stronger opposition to US policy in the region. Read more »
By Jeffrey Goldberg
Nov. 22 (Bloomberg) — The Pakistani military and its spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, have an expansive menu of options before them in their endless campaign to subvert democracy. And subverting democracy (as opposed to, say, winning wars against India, or helping the U.S. defeat the Haqqani terrorist network in Afghanistan) is the real specialty of Pakistan’s military. Read more »
A growing rivalry between India, Pakistan and China over the region’s great
rivers may be threatening South Asia’s peace
Nov 19th 2011 | DELHI, DHAKA, ISLAMABAD AND SRINAGAR |
from the Economist
SONAULLAH PHAPHO has spent half a century picking a living from Wular lake high in Indian-controlled Kashmir. Today he is lucky if he scoops a fish or two out of the soupy mess. Read more »
Please read the following story published in Vanity Fair magazine in August 2002 and think?
THE JOURNALIST AND THE TERRORIST
by Robert Sam Anson
The reporter who comes to Karachi, Pakistan is given certain cautions.
Do not take a taxi from the airport; arrange for the hotel to send a car and confirm the driver’s identity before getting in.
Do not stay in a room that faces the street.
Do not interview sources over the phone.
Do not discuss subjects such as Islam or the Pakistani nuclear program in the presence of hotel staff. Read more »
China’s state-owned enterprises are on the march and account for 40% of China’s non-agricultural GDP
From the Economist
November 12, 2011
WHEN China joined the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in December 2001, many people hoped that this would curb the power of its state-owned enterprises. Ten years on, they seem stronger than ever. President Hu Jintao can expect to hear about this at the Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation summit this weekend. Hillary Clinton, America’s secretary of state, has warned stridently of the dangers of state capitalism. A Congressional report released on October 26th railed against the unfair advantages enjoyed by state-owned firms and lamented that China is giving them “a more prominent role”. Read more »
It is hardly a surprise that a Kangroo court – otherwise known as Anti-terrorism Court (ATC) in Faisalabad handed jail sentences of 490 years in total to six labour leaders from on November 1, 2011. Read more »
by Paul Craig Roberts
(Dr. Paul Craig Roberts served as President Reagan’s Asst. Secretary of the U.S. Treasury)
From the Foreign Policy Journal
Now that the CIA’s proxy army has murdered Gadhafi, what next for Libya?
If Washington’s plans succeed, Libya will become another American puppet state. Most of the cities, towns, and infrastructure have been destroyed by air strikes by the air forces of the US and Washington’s NATO puppets. Read more »
The Telegraph
By Dean Nelson, South Asia Editor and Javed Siddiq in Islamabad
US forces are massing on the Pakistan border in eastern Afghanistan amid reports of an imminent drone missile offensive against fighters from the feared Haqqani Network, a Taliban faction which operates from safe havens in Pakistan’s North Waziristan Agency, Pakistan Army sources have confirmed. Read more »
How the Kingdom is Wielding Influence Across the Middle East
John R. Bradley is the author of Saudi Arabia Exposed. His most recent book, After the Arab Spring: How the Islamists Hijacked the Middle East Revolt, will be published in December. Read more »
The New Economic Club Will Produce Conflict, Not Cooperation
Ian Bremmer and Nouriel Roubini
From The Foreign Affairs, March/April 2011
IAN BREMMER is President of Eurasia Group, the political risk consulting firm, and the author of The End of the Free Market . NOURIEL ROUBINI is Professor of Economics at New York University’s Stern School of Business, Chair of Roubini Global Economics , and a co-author of Crisis Economics.
This is not a G-20 world. Read more »
From New Statesman, U.K.
by Mehdi Hasan – 07 October 2011
…here are ten things you should know.
Today is the tenth anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan by the United States and its allies – including the UK – in the aftermath of the horrific attacks on 9/11.
It is a time to reflect and deliberate. Read more »
By Peter Millership
LONDON (Reuters) – Tahrir Square in Cairo, Green Square in Tripoli, Syntagma Square in Athens and now Zuccotti Park in New York — popular anger against entrenching power elites is spreading around the world. Read more »
Published in the Business Recorder
While the 9/11 was a big tragedy and caused the loss of around 3000 human lives, it is an undeniable fact that hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis, Afghans, and Pakistanis Read more »
When the CNN and other poodle media outlets carry unsubstantiated claims of discredited American establishments and liars like Donald Rumsfeld, it is NEWS. When bloggers like us diligently document the connections of Al Qaeda to the Western secret services, it is conspiracy theory. But we always quote mainstream or corporate media reports to raise difficult questions which Western reporters, US government paid think-tank analysts, or the likes of Fareed Zakaria would never be able to face. Read more »
Startling revelations by French intelligence experts back David Shayler’s alleged ‘fantasy’about Gadaffi plot
British intelligence paid large sums of money to an al-Qaeda cell in Libya in a doomed attempt to assassinate Colonel Gadaffi in 1996 and thwarted early attempts to bring Osama bin Laden to justice. Read more »
By Bruce Riedel
Yale Global
Fiery discord: US embassy under attack by Pakistan-backed Haqqani network (top); US charge provokes Pakistani protest Read more »
From Huffington Post / La Temps (Aug.30, 2011)
By Jean-Pierre Perrin
Abdel Hakim Belhadj, who leads the rebel forces in Tripoli, was a founder of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, and is believed to have been close to bloodthirsty head of Al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
Belhadj spoke last week to Al Jazeera Read more »
By Ian Johnson
February 2011
Muslim Brotherhood senior leaders Essam el-Erian (center right) and Saad el-Katatni (center left) taking part in a protest in Cairo, January 30, 2011
As US-backed strongmen around North Africa and the Middle East are being toppled or shaken by popular protests, Washington is grappling with a crucial foreign-policy issue: how to deal with the powerful but opaque Muslim Brotherhood. Read more »
By William Pesek
Sept. 28 (Bloomberg) — China and the U.S. finally found something to agree on: Europe is doomed and might take the world’s two biggest economies down with it. Neither officials in Beijing nor Washington are actually using the “D word.” They don’t need to, not with Zhou Xiaochuan, China’s central bank governor, talking matter-of-factly about emerging nations bailing out the euro region and U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner warning of “cascading default, bank runs and catastrophic risk” there. Read more »
Published Business Recorder, Oct. 1, 2011
The government and the Army think they can make up for decades of blunders of an adventurous foreign policy by convening an All-Parties Conference. Imran Khan thinks we can tell America to mind its own business. Liberals think all the faults lie with Pakistani establishment. We thrive on half-truths and wishful thinking but we cannot formulate a serious strategy like that. Read more »
By Dexter Filkins, from New Yorker
On May 30th, as the sun beat down on the plains of eastern Pakistan, a laborer named Muhammad Shafiq walked along the top of a dam on the Upper Jhelum Canal to begin his morning routine of clearing grass and trash that had drifted into the intake grates overnight. The water flow seemed normal, but when he started removing the debris with a crane the machinery seized up. Read more »
By Jesse Richard
Centre for Research on Globalization, Canada
I don’t believe the official story of 9/11 because I know the official story of 9/11!
By Ezra Klein
Sept. 8 (Bloomberg News) — You know how we know the terrorists didn’t win? It’s not because we killed Osama bin Laden. Read more »
By Alen Mattich, The Wall Street Journal
We could be reaching a new form of banking crisis. Read more »
From the Independent UK , By Robert Fisk
The Pentagon building after 9/11 attacks. The cause of destruction of the building remains controversial todate. Read more »
Dr. Zulfiqar Mirza’s explosive and unprecedented press conference was the first of its kind in Pakistan’s history. As dumb-founded millions watched, it was the probably the first time a senior provincial minister accused a federal interior minister Read more »
By Peter Chamberlin
Continuing and expanding upon their policies of being both blunt and devious, the Generals are getting in the faces of tribal leaders, doing their utmost to persuade them to take-on a policing function in their areas of control. Read more »
There’s an old axiom that goes “wise is the person who appreciates candor almost as much as good news” Read more »
By Aaron Task
Welcome to the new world disorder. Monday marked the first day of U.S. trading since America lost its coveted triple-A rating and traders braced for almost anything. Read more »
China’s official news agency has called for “international supervision over the issue of US dollars” Read more »
Former US Intelligence Chief Dennis Blair makes the same points that the critics of the so-called war on terror have made for nearly a decade: Read more »
By Michael Brenner
Leon Panetta, newly-installed Secretary of Defense and former CIA head, made a tour of troubled hot spots in the Middle East. His stopovers in Kabul, Baghdad et al were punctuated by a series of barbed remarks aimed at leaders in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran. Read more »
Pakistani security officials escort American CIA contractor Raymond Allen Davis, center, to a local court in Lahore. Mr. Davis’ detention soured U.S. – Pak relations, and the fallout of the episode has affected subsequent American strategy in West Asia. File photo Read more »
Picture is a worth a thousand words
Pakistan’s foreign exchange reserves hit a record high of $18.25 billion during the week ended July 2, following inflows of $411 million from World Bank and Asian Development Bank under programme loans, a senior central bank official said on July 8, 2011. Is this a reason to cheer? Read more »
This is a very familiar pattern over the last twenty years. MQM quits government and Karachi is terrorised by a wave of killings, burning, and arson. For over two decades, MQM is the only constant in the violence in Karachi. MQM has not matured into a political party from a militant group… it has degenerated into a criminal mafia. Read more »
From Daniel Serwer
The timeline for U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan is now clear: 10,000 troops out by the end of this year and 23,000 more out by the end of next summer. That will leave 67,000 troops, who, if all goes according to plan, will be withdrawn before the end of 2014, with a possible residual assistance force of unspecified size thereafter. That solves the military equation. But what about the political formula? Read more »
5th July 1977 was one of the darkest days of Pakistan’s history. Zia’s coup against Bhutto sealed Pakistan’s fate. The coup came after a right-wing violent movement – partly funded by the Americans – had subsided and its more moderate leaders had signed an agreement with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. According to Prof. Ghafoor Ahmed, the secretary general of the opposition alliance, Read more »
From New Yorker, By Ryan Lizza
How the Arab Spring remade Obama’s foreign policy.
Obama has said that his foreign-policy ideas defy traditional categories and ideologies. Read more »
There was no indication of whether the earlier account of Sheikh Essa’s arrest in Faisalabad was wrong. If it was right, how did Sheikh Essa reach Syria in 2009? Unfortunate and absolutely horrid and condemnable as Saleem Shahzad’s death was, it would be a mistake to take his stories on face value. Despite his apparently deep contacts with the militants (partly due to his former association with Jamaat-e-Islami), the glaring contradictions in his reports and the sweeping judgements contained therein do not reflect well on the credibility of either him or Asia Times online. Read more »
Saudi-Iran tensions could spell more trouble for Pakistan
According to the Guardian (June 29), Prince Turki al-Faisal, a former Saudi intelligence chief and ambassador to Washington, has raised the spectre of nuclear conflict in the Middle East if Irancomes close to developing a nuclear weapon. Read more »
The chairman of Indonesia’s largest Muslim organization has censured Saudi Arabia for the execution of an Indonesian maid over killing her employer. Head of Nahdlatul Ulema Said Aqil Siradj condemned Saudi Arabia for beheading Ruyati binti Sapubi, Read more »
Peter Chamberlin
In the complicated calculus of the men who would plan our destinies for us, if we would only let them, it is often hard to fathom which line of reasoning represents their dominant thinking on any strategic subject. In Afghanistan and in Pakistan, it is getting harder Read more »
Mirza Shahzad Akbar
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 29 June 2011
The photo that caused raucous in the United States: at the G20 Summit, President Obama bowed before the Saudi King and kissed his hand. Read more »
By Michael Cohen
For the first time in ten years, the light at the end of the tunnel of the U.S. war in Afghanistan is suddenly visible. To understand the implications of President Obama’s speech on Afghanistan this evening, perhaps the best place to start is not with what he said tonight in public, but what he allegedly said in private 18 months ago. Read more »
I had no idea that Ayaz Amir was capable of writing such a shallow analysis until I read his column titled “The Long Sulk” in the News International of June 17, 2010. Read more »
