Published in Daily Times on July 13 2014 Operation Zarb-e-Azb has cost Pakistan at least two billion dollars thus far. This, according to one of Pakistan’s most astute military commentators who is a retired brigadier of the Pakistan army, Samson Simon Sharaf. The operation’s effectiveness is now...
Published in Daily Times on July 6th 2014. Chances are that about 600,000 of the Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), also known as the internally ‘disowned’ people of North Waziristan, will need more than a few tonnes of wheat, which the army is supplying to them in...
Published in Daily Times on June 29th 2014. The Punjab police’s brutality against Tahirul Qadri’s Pakistan Awami Tehreek (PAT) workers was unpardonable. It led to 11 killed and over 80 injured. With all the hunters of our people out there, the police being part of the...
Published in Daily Times on June 22nd 2014. Now that the army, backed by the government, albeit hesitatingly, has waged war on the terrorists, one feels like there is some oxygen to fill one’s lungs with. The question is if Operation Zarb-e-Azb is merely a...
Published in The Guardian on May 29th 2014 On 27 May 2014, as Farzana Parveen lay dead on the uneven floor of the Lahore high court, it was not easy to ignore the blood-stained brick next to her. A chador she had worn that morning covered her crushed...
Published in Daily Times on June 8th 2014 Acid burned, honour killed and choked, the Pakistani women who make the headlines are literally out of a nightmare. Like Farzana Parveen who recently was murdered by her own family with bricks outside the Lahore High Court, there are...
Published in Daily Times on May 17th 2014 I recently returned from Istanbul where the streets in Taxim were choked with protesters rallying against the mismanagement of the mining tragedy that killed hundreds in western Turkey. There erupted a Twitter campaign against a person close to...
Published in Daily Times on May 18th 2014 I had the opportunity to meet Meena Menon at a close friend’s house in Islamabad many months back. She was sociable and inviting. We talked about The Hindu where she worked as its Pakistan correspondent. The paper holds...
Published in Daily Times on May 4th 2014 There is an Urdu columnist whose content is oddly blinkered in its focus on historical revisionism, whipping the liberals for being immoral and chastising women who are not invisible. However, a few days back, he wrote about press...
Pakistan will be the last place where polio and rabid right wing discourse will exist in the world. The rest of the world is fighting both while we are being overpowered by the forces that want to make them proliferate. In a bloody campaign to shoot...