Dr Mahjabeen Islam

The rapidly degenerating situation in Pakistan forces the mind to re-explore the reasons for its creation. While a tome could be written on opposing arguments there, Pakistan proves the Malthusian and Darwinian theories quite simply. In the 1800s Rev Thomas Malthus postulated that population growth eventually gets checked by famine and disease. Well before Pakistan […]

For the last few years, the media has been the only effective opposition in Pakistan. The individuals that sit on the opposition benches in parliament are corrupted and carry convoluted agendas, raising their voices to wrest power rather than advance the democratic process. The torture and death of the Asia Times Online Bureau Chief, Syed […]

We have been sleeping with the enemy, that much is incontrovertible. But getting the Pakistani nation to realise that we face imminent demise unless some emergent action is taken is like trying to get the deeply somnolent, nay comatose, national ostrich pulled from under the sand. As though harbouring Osama bin Laden for years in […]

It is hip to hate sharia or Islamic law in the US. Many a Republican is jumping on the bandwagon and Representative Don Wells (R Cabool) even likens it to polio. That a CIA spy who killed two Pakistanis was freed because of it is quite ironic. In late January, Raymond Davis was driving in […]

This is a tough time to be Pakistani. Perhaps the humiliation and bewilderment of the average Pakistani can be analogised to the time when West Pakistan unleashed rape and murder on its eastern half and lost it. But those were not the days of the Internet revolution; propaganda whitewashed the gory details and West Pakistanis […]

It is like being newly orphaned. Or, as though in one clean sweep, our self-respect as a nation has been decapitated. Columns, rantings and protests now serve only as eulogies to our national grief, for the deed is done. Raymond Davis himself probably sits disbelievingly somewhere in the US that he actually got out of […]

The last shred of possible Pakistani pride has left me. Incontrovertibly, we are a nation of cowards and conspiracy theorists, always copping out and shifting blame. Minister Shahbaz Bhatti was assassinated in broad daylight and immediately all police wirelesses came alive. The killers were not just on a quickly hidden and weary motorbike but a […]