Pakistan’s elections have been run and won … by the Pakistan Armed Forces. The adage that it takes more than elections to have democracy is ringing true in what many are calling Pakistan’s ‘silent coup’. Former test cricketer and serial political candidate Imran Khan’s Pakistan Movement for Justice (Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf ,or PTI) was on track […]
Tag Archives: Pakistan
Tensions between India and Pakistan are escalating as troops from each country have again clashed across the Kashmir Line of Control, with two Indian soldiers being killed. India claims Pakistani soldiers took advantage of misty conditions yesterday to cross the 1949 Line of Control dividing Kashmir into Indian and Pakistan controlled areas about 220 kilometres […]
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 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 […]
Debt crisis is indeed a burning current issue in the whole world. A true glimpse of this reality is provided by the ongoing violent protests against a series of fiscal austerity reforms in Greece. The worsening debt crisis of Greece is expected to trigger a contagion of sovereign debt crises in several other European countries. […]
It is reasonably widely accepted that Osama bin Laden was able to stay in the Pakistan town of Abbottabad because he had the protection of Pakistan’s military, in particular its powerful Inter Services Intelligence organisation. It would have been all but impossible for bin Laden to have stayed in one place in Pakistan without the […]
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 […]