Dr Mohammad Taqi

Hamid Mir’s guardian angel was watching over him perhaps. Mir, a prominent Pakistani journalist and media personality, survived despite receiving multiple bullet injuries. He may be out of the woods medically but the violent threat to him and the Pakistani media at large has not dissipated. Mir was not the first journalist to be targeted […]

The Pakistani security establishment is visibly upset. Its reservations are about former military dictator General Pervez Musharraf’s trial for high treason and the negotiations with the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). The army — let us face it, the other two services are not really the movers and shakers in the euphemism ‘establishment’ — appears to have […]

The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan 2001-2004 Author: Carlotta Gall Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Pgs: 352 Price: $ 28   “When the Taliban took Kabul days later, the first thing they did was drag Najibullah through the streets and string him and his brother up on Ariana Square…The first ring of Taliban fighters controlling the […]

A rising star of the Urdu electronic media, a reputable English language journalist and a very dear friend, Raza Rumi, narrowly escaped a hail of terrorist bullets last week. One cannot thank the good Lord enough for that. His driver Muhammad Mustafa died of the 11 gunshots sustained in the barrage while his guard remains […]

The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provincial Assembly has sneakily passed a resolution asking the federation to vivisect the province. The speaker did not order a headcount for the resolution that calls for carving out a Hazara province from the current boundaries of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The constitutional and legal status of the move is moot and may be […]

Finance Minister Ishaq Dar got caught with his hand in the cookie jar recently. The goodies in this instance were a $ 1.5 billion bailout deposited into Pakistan’s coffers by what Mr Dar described as a “friendly donor who wished to remain anonymous”. Within hours a foreign news agency revealed Pakistan’s secret Santa as none […]

Since independence, Pakistan’s security establishment has managed to find champions among western scholars who are willing to overlook the transgressions of the military-intelligence-jihadi complex, or worse, actively find excuses for it. Instead of helping the troubled country introspect honestly into the genesis of its problems, some of these apologists have tried to blame the conflict […]

Just as the Pakistani state was finally inching towards a limited military action against the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) in North Waziristan (NW) came yet another political tour de force by the Taliban. The Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) government seems ecstatic about the ceasefire crumbs thrown its way by the TTP over this past weekend. The […]

Federal Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan has offered the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) to sort matters out by playing a cricket match. It is truly astounding that someone holding an important official position at such a critical juncture in Pakistan’s history could make such cavalier remarks. The TTP swiftly rebuked his offer not just verbally […]

The spokesman for the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), Mohmand Agency wing, Muhammad Omar Khorasani, made a ghastly claim over this past weekend about how his group had killed 23 Frontier Corps (FC) soldiers it had held captive since June 14, 2010. In his statement, Khorasani pledged to release the footage of the killing and, within 48 […]