The calculus of the flood
The floods have caused death, destruction, and misery on a scale never seen before in Pakistan’s history. Unlike the 2005 earthquake in the Northern Areas, the flood of 2010 has spread misery equally in every part of the country. The unprecedented flooding has already affected the lives of approximately 14 million people by wiping out...
The Citadel
GHQ is the nerve center of the Pakistani military and is guarded by an Infantry battalion along with a similar number of the Defense Security Guards (DSG). Approximately 1600 military officials work at the GHQ who are responsible for running Pakistan’s military machine. Ten terrorists created mayhem for around 22 hours disrupting normal operations within...
The Citadel
GHQ is the nerve center of the Pakistani military and is guarded by an Infantry battalion along with a similar number of the Defense Security Guards (DSG). Approximately 1600 military officials work at the GHQ who are responsible for running Pakistan’s military machine. Ten terrorists created mayhem for around 22 hours disrupting normal operations within...
COUP D’ETAT
When General Musharraf was in power and decided to sack Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry, and then felt the force of the discontent his move created there were many in and out of Government who questioned the wisdom of opening yet another front. Bad advice, a big ego, and the belief that he was actually popular...
THE FIRST LINE OF DEFENSE
Pakistan has one fully equipped DNA lab in Islamabad which was established with Chinese assistance in 2006. It cost 8 million rupees and part of the deal was that two, yes two, scientists were trained by the Chinese as part of the program. We are a country of 160 million and growing by the second...
IMPEACHMENT SHIMPEACHMENT
There’s bad timing and then there’s bad timing. The Coalition’s joint press conference on the 7th of August to move to impeach President Musharraf has thrown the President’s plans to attend the opening ceremony of the Olympics into a tailspin and he had to cancel. Prime Minister Gillani, the man whom President Musharraf had thrown...
MONKS & MULLAHS
I remember going to Swat decades ago during a summer vacation from school and vividly remember the tranquil valley with its streams, the mountains, and the forests. Since then much has changed. First came the loggers who stripped the trees away as they have done so from much of Northern Pakistan. And now a different...
BATTLE LINES
There are time to sit on fences and there are times where you need to pick sides, and I think the time has come to pick our sides without any ambiguous grey areas so familiar to Pakistani politics and drawing rooms. Benazir Bhutto’s arrival in Karachi on Thursday and the hundreds of thousands of people...
MARTIAN LAW
If you woke up one day and found out that little green men from Mars had invaded Pakistan in their whacky spaceships and had imposed Martian Law throughout the Land of the Pure, it wouldn’t be all that different from what we’re witnessing today. The theater of the absurd continues which leaves almost every citizen...
LET US NOT FORGET
We Pakistanis are an emotional bunch and tend to get swept away by the momentum of events around us – both nationally and internationally. As a Nation we seldom stop to think about long term implications, cause and effect relationships, and generally rational thought seems to elude us at the best of times. Yet again,...
CELEBRATING WHAT?
14th of August 2006 was the 59th anniversary of Pakistan, but exactly what did we celebrate or does no one care anymore? Without going into the much amended history of Pakistan, today we’re at a point in our history where the vision of the Quaid-e-Azam has completely mutated into something unrecognizable. The principles for which...
FILLING THE GAPS
Due to the idiotic misadventures of Bush & Co in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the rest of the world, the US Army is facing the largest recruiting deficit since 1979. Though the US Army PR machine has denied it, reports of daily casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan might have something to do with the deficit. Across...
