Dr Mohammad Taqi

Sir: The Protection of Pakistan bill has been unanimously approved by the Senate. This bill seeks to protect Pakistan against security threats. All political parties are in support of this bill in the backdrop of the current scenario. Security forces have been given complete power to deal with the situation and now it is their […]

Amsterdam: the afternoon was a bit nippy but the warm party atmosphere in the Leidseplein Square in the city centre more than made up for it. The Dutch had painted the town literally orange in anticipation of their upcoming football fixture against Mexico. When I arrived at 263 Prinsengracht after a few minutes walk along […]

After dragging its feet for over a decade, the Pakistan army has finally launched an operation in the North Waziristan Agency (NWA), the hapless region that the country’s security planners had virtually ceded to local, cross-border and global terrorists. Half a million Pashtun civilians, forced to vacate their homes, are at the mercy of nature’s […]

Nawab Khair Bux Khan Marri is no more. Nawab Marri was the chief of the largest Baloch tribe and arguably the father of modern Baloch nationalism. He inspired not just three generations of Baloch activists but countless political workers across ethno-national boundaries. His name ignited a spark in many a leftist worker’s eye in Khyber […]

Scores of Shia pilgrims, a majority of them ethnic Pashtuns, were massacred in Taftan, Balochistan by jihadist suicide bombers over the weekend, just as their ideological cohorts unleashed death and mayhem at Karachi airport. This is not an escalation in the war unleashed by the jihadists as some analysts have claimed but an unfortunate norm […]

Yet another one of the best and brightest has been killed. Dr Mehdi Ali Qamar was mowed down in Chenab Nagar, formerly known as Rabwah, in front of his wife and their two-year-old son as he was leaving the Ahmedi graveyard there. He was an accomplished cardiologist, an artist, a poet and, above all, a […]

In an Urdu travelogue, the 19th century literary giant Maulana Muhammad Hussain Azad writes that on a cold winter night, a pack of wolves that had hunted together earlier sits in a circle on the snow. The beasts watch each other carefully for any signs of weakness. The moment any wolf falters from injury, fatigue […]

As the government in Pakistan completes its first year in office, the Afghans move to the second round of their presidential elections and the US and NATO forces potentially pack their bags, a brilliant Pashtun journalist has released a book that not only raises the Pashtun question but also pledges to provide the key answers, […]

It was inevitable. Declaring a global health emergency, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has recommended restrictions on travellers from Pakistan, Syria and Cameroon. What else could have been the logical outcome of appeasing those who have waged a relentless war on the polio vaccination teams and killed scores of healthcare workers? WHO recommended that the […]

In the aftermath of the attack on the journalist and anchorperson Hamid Mir, which he thankfully survived, people are falling over each other to express their support to Pakistan’s premier intelligence agency. In a first of its kind even by Pakistani standards, and certainly unprecedented anywhere else in the world, banners have popped up in […]