The lack of economic opportunities for the populace in Afghanistan is a major impediment to peace and stability. Without an adequate industrial base and/or agriculture infra-structure, guns for hire in abundance as a means to finding income is neither conducive neither for foreign direct investment (FDI) nor domestic entrepreneurial initiatives. That a small elite cabal…
Dear Readers, Pakistan-Afghanistan relations have largely remained estranged for a number of reasons. With a hostile India to the East that consistently threatens and tries to intimidate Pakistan, another irredentist neighbor will not be in Pakistan’s interest. Pakistan is aware that it’s prime security interest in Afghanistan remains in having a friendly government in Kabul…
Ordered by Musa Bin Nusayr, the Governor of the muslim provinces of North Africa under the Umayyad Caliph Al-Walid-I, to conquer the Visigothic Kingdom in Hispania (Spain), Tariq Bin Ziyad crossed over from Morocco to mainland Europe on or about April 19, 711. Reinforced by an additional 5000 soldiers from Musa consisting mostly of recent…
Success creates its own problems, a gross misperception created by the outstanding “Operation Zarb-i-Azb” is that terrorism having been dealt a decisive blow we have little to worry about. Nothing can be further from the truth! True that the loss of training camps, hideouts, military dumps, ammunition and bomb manufacturing factories, medical centres etc has…
The Supreme Court (SC) recently dismissed several petitions contesting the 2013 elections for various deficiencies. Interestingly just before the 2013 elections the SC ordered the defective electoral rolls to be corrected, because of time constraints the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) was instructed to go ahead with the elections, verification of voters being mandated for…
Dear Readers, Because of the political and economic standoff since early August between PTI, PAT and the ruling PML(N) in Islamabad, the government was rendered almost inactive for some time. When PAT leader Dr. Tahirul Qadri recently announced ending his dharna in Islamabad, lmran Khan displayed no such intention and vowed to continue his sit-in…
To obtain power politicians tend to make a lot of promises. Most of them can hardly be kept, in a feudal society populism is simply a means to an end. A gullible populace can be faulted however for being taken for a ride again and again, and mostly by the same lot. For all its…
Smashing more than half a dozen vehicles parked around the Minhaj ul Quran Secretariat on June 17 in Model Town Lahore under the rather benign patronage of the Punjab Police, the man who perpetrated the vandalism refuses to go away from the public eye. Ahsan Rana’s blog says that with 10,000 plus downloads of a…
Most politicians can be economical with the truth even at the best times. With Khursheed Shah shedding crocodile tears in the Joint Session of the National Assembly about the PM buckling under pressure from the Army and the resultant threat to “democracy”, Mian Sahib crossed the failsafe line that an awakened public is now increasingly…
A man starts yelling “fire, fire” in a movie theatre, the stampede towards the exits results in injuries (even deaths) among the cinemagoers. Restraining or punishing the man would technically violate his freedom of speech, allowing such “freedom” would result in injuries and deaths to innocent bystanders, what should be the logical course of justice?…
