What was the Foreign Office thinking? Before Nawaz Sharif had even reached the Arab-US summit it was telling everyone that the prime minister would...
The cult of CPEC is getting very stifling. Never before has something that is supposed to be nothing more than an economic agreement become quite so...
Back in the good old days, when Supreme Court justices couldn’t quote long-dead French writers because Wikipedia hadn’t been invented...
As predictable as it is infuriating, Mashal Khan is becoming yesterday’s news. Entertainment and masala always gets better ratings than moral...
Remember Gul Masih? He had a fight with a neighbour in 1991 over something as trivial as repairing a water tap on their street. The neighbour then...
The nationo-chauvinists on our television screens and social media follow the same jumbled playbook whenever someone they dislike is...
The PML-N is acting as if it doesn’t believe it can win the next election. In some ways, it is reminiscent of the PPP when the latter gave up...
Is Husain Haqqani a traitor – as members of the party he used to serve are now having to say? Questioning the patriotism of those who have a...
There is a myth in Pakistan – usually pushed by the political parties themselves – that our national politics is hopelessly divided. All...
Pakistan’s long sporting isolation ended in February when Iran’s tennis team visited Islamabad – the first country to do so in 12...
Answer: Dera Bugti, Charsadda, Khyber Agency, Sehwan Sharif, Mohmand Agency, Peshawar and Lahore. Question: Are we winning the war against...
Inquiry reports in Pakistan tend to take one of two forms. They are either suppressed – think Hamood-ur-Rehman or Osama bin Laden – or a...
Should we be stashing our water bottles, buying rations of tinned food and stocking up on fuel? Looks like it may be dharna time again. One result...
In the Stanley Kubrick satire Dr Strangelove, the US president has to call the Soviet head of state to tell him that a rogue general has launched a...
There’s a certain pride to be taken in breaking unjust – or, even worse, silly – laws. I used to be the proud owner of an outlawed...
Donald Trump can be a hard man to pin down. He says whatever comes into his mind at any given time. He doesn’t hide that the campaign...
It must be difficult being an Imran Khan supporter when he decides to go on the warpath. For months he – and by extension everyone associated...
Almost everyone has a crippling addiction of some kind, a self-destructive tendency to keep indulging in the same vice even though it brings nothing...
The Pakistani state has so many skeletons in its closet it’s more of an auditorium. The job of journalists is to give the rest of the country...
Relying on nuclear deterrence as our main military strategy against India can be quite a dicey proposition. It requires India to believe that we are...
There are two sure-fire ways to get your liberation movement noticed by the rest of the world. First – and this is vital – pick an...
Pakistanis, no matter what their political inclination may be, rarely consider Afghanistan a sovereign set of people. There are the right-wingers...
Waseem Akhtar will be Karachi’s least powerful mayor in recent history. The problem isn’t his incarceration. Politicians in Pakistan...
Back in 1991, the MQM’s dynamic young mayor of Karachi, Farooq Sattar, inaugurated Mukka Chowk, near the party’s headquarters. At the...
Nawaz Sharif must be relieved his party is an irrelevant afterthought in Karachi. For once he can sit back and smugly watch as everyone else races...
How many Pakistanis does it take to change a light bulb? Change? Pakistan cannot and will not ever change. Not even two months have passed since the...
Nawaz Sharif had just one thing to do. No one expected him to be able to defeat militancy, both because the problem is too large to be successfully...
Voltaire never actually said, despite the evidence provided by numerous Facebook status updates, that he may not agree with us but will defend to...
Unanimity is anathema to a democracy. Platitudes about consensus play well with a public sick of bickering politicians but without argument and...
So suffocating is the daily torrent of news in the country we tend to forget just how often Pakistan would – were it a person – be judged...
