Ali Malik

I was determined to write on the ongoing political engineering experiment by the powers that be to install a leadership of their will. But then I have not fully learnt how to avoid useless arguments. And I indulged in one such argument with a few friends recently on Atif Aslam’s much talked about Tajdar-e-Haram for […]

A lot has been said about Asif Zardari’s statement aimed at the PML-N and Sharif government. However, going through the discussion rarely has anyone raised pertinent questions while analysing it and those who have leave few key relevant dimensions. To me, there are issues that remain paramount. First is the core message of the statement. […]

The Indo-Pak National Security Advisors’ (NSA’) level talks have failed even before commencing. The blame game continues and, in all honesty, both sides are to be blamed for this failure. In the present round, Prime Minister (PM) Nawaz Sharif set the tone for failure when he agreed, in Ufa, for the NSA level talks to […]

The Chinese economy is in turmoil. The crisis of the stock market is showing no sign of recovery despite a series of measures by Chinese policymakers. Chinese policymakers started with increasing the money supply. When that could not prevent selloff at the stock market, the next move was to apply circuit breakers on the stock […]

The most defining phenomenon of our era remains climate change. No one knows for sure where we are headed, whether the glaciers will deplete or we will soon hit a new ice age, whether the rise in temperatures will be a permanent feature (empirical evidence from the last few years supports the assertion) or the […]

The brutal operation by the Islamabad administration and security forces to evict occupants of the I-11 slums exposed the reality of the world we live in. It is a world in which the life, shelter and dignity of the poor are non-existent and they are treated as lesser beings, and in which, for the luxury, […]

Henry Kissinger said that while understanding geo-political problems, one cannot divorce the historical context and that the solutions that ignore historical context often fail. This cannot be truer than in the case of South Asia, where India, Pakistan and the region are stuck in perpetual chaos. It is an area that has been a common […]

I have been writing about this for years now. A series of articles was published on these pages in April that reiterated that at some point Pakistan would be asked to take a broader role in dealing with the emerging Islamic State (IS) threat in the Middle East. Recent news reports of meetings between top […]

Eight years into Pakistan’s latest bout with democracy and it seems the country has been gripped by a quasi-coup. The process that started in the name of cleaning up the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and affiliates’ insurgency, soon transformed into operation clean-up for Sindh in general and Karachi in particular, and has since then seeped through […]

The deal is a done deal now. Iran makes a comeback into the world order and with its demographics, hydrocarbon resources, skilled manpower and geographical location will soon be the dominant player in the Middle East region. The deal opens for Iran the world of international trade and diplomacy — from pariah state to regional […]