Last week the Supreme Court of Pakistan unanimously declared that Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was not “honest” and that therefore he was “disqualified to be a member of Parliament”. Mr Sharif subsequently resigned, promising to use all available legal and constitutional means to challenge the verdict. This long-awaited decision was the culmination of over a […]
Author Archives: Claude Rakisits
Last week’s deal between Pakistan and the US to reopen NATO’s supply routes into neighbouring Afghanistan ends seven months of deep freeze in the bilateral relationship. But the deal will be very fragile. The circuit breaker to this outcome was US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s very carefully crafted apology for the deaths of […]
For the past six weeks a high-level US team has been in Pakistan trying to negotiate a resumption of the convoys which travel through the country and provide Coalition forces in Afghanistan with about 30% of their non-lethal supplies. Pakistan decided unilaterally to stop the convoys following the killing of 24 Pakistani soldiers at a […]
(A version of this blog was published in The Australian on 11 April 2012) Washington’s decision last week to post a US$10 million reward for information leading to the arrest of Hafiz Mohammed Saeed, founder of the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), a terrorist organization accused of being behind the Mumbai attack in 2008 which killed 166 […]
(A version of this blog was first published in Dawn.com on 6 December 2011) THE Labor Party at its biannual national conference which was held in Sydney 2-4 December decided by a thin majority to support the Australian prime minister’s motion to scrap the party’s nonsensical and contradictory uranium export policy banning the sale of […]
Something has snapped in Washington. Last week’s terrorist attack in Kabul, including against the American embassy, reportedly by members of the Pakistan-based Afghan Haqqani Network, was the last straw for the Obama administration. In the wake of the attack, Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told US senators during a […]
Seven weeks after the elimination of Osama bin Laden, the fallout of the American operation continues to wreak havoc in the US-Pakistan bilateral relationship. Despite reassurances from US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, stating categorically after her visit to Islamabad two weeks ago that there was no evidence anyone in the Pakistan hierarchy was aware […]
Often things are not what they seem at first glance. And this is becoming increasingly obvious with the operation leading to the successful elimination of Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al-Qaeda, on 1 May by an elite team of American Navy SEALS in Abbottabad, a town only about 50 kilometres from Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital. […]
The Lahore High Court’s decision on 11 February not to release from custody the American official involved in the fatal shooting on 27 January of two Pakistanis in Lahore – despite very heavy US pressure to release him because it claims he has diplomatic immunity – demonstrates once again how limited is Washington’s leverage […]