Dr Mohammad Taqi

In Pakistan, an apparent national consensus followed the heinous attack on the three young girls Malala Yousafzai, Kainat and Shazia. It lasted for less than two days perhaps. What should have transformed into a national resolve to fight the Taliban terrorists degenerated quickly into a Malala and anti-Malala, or more accurately perhaps, a pro- and […]

Two reports appearing in the United States last month castigated the US for its drone attacks on terrorists in FATA. Their timing, just before the Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf’s (PTI’s) now-fizzled-out march against the drones, might be coincidental but the similarities in the agenda are not. The United Kingdom-based group Reprieve had commissioned the New York University […]

Two new studies recently came out in the US criticising the use of weaponised unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones by the US against the terrorist targets in Pakistan and elsewhere. The debate over the drones is as old as the perhaps first known use of the Hellfire missile by the US, killing the Tehrik-e-Taliban […]

From being a prayer and reflection day, Friday, over the years, has effectively become a day of rage and rampage in the Muslim countries. Protests and mayhem are planned around this day of the week, when the rabblerousing clerics can and do unleash hatemongering congregations utilising the well-oiled infrastructure of violence. This past Friday was […]

One was hoping that at least Pakistan would weather the storm that an absolutely abhorrent, shoddy video clip has unleashed. However, with the protests outside the US Consulate in Karachi turning violent and claiming at least one life, perhaps it was not meant to be. It is still too early to say if the protests […]

It was almost to the day a year ago that the then chairperson of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen called the Haqqani terrorist network the “ISI’s veritable arm” and that Pakistan was “exporting violence” to Afghanistan. Mullen drew flak from the softies in the US administration for his blunt remarks and the […]

So we are back to medieval times and the medieval discourse whether music is halal (permissible) in Islam or is explicitly haram (forbidden). A deeply disturbing news item appeared in sections of the Pakistani press this past weekend. On August 27, 2012, a senior journalist and the op-ed editor of a major national English newspaper, […]

Pakistan’s Chief of Army Staff (COAS), General Raheel Sharif, recently completed a tour of Washington, DC. Meetings with the vice president, Joe Biden, and deputy national security advisor of a lame duck administration were then dubbed as the high-water mark of the visit. Despite the ritual welcome that the Pakistani entourage received, one area they […]

The Paris massacre perpetrated by a jihadist band has the whole world grieving alongside the French. In tandem with the condemnations of the jihadist terror have been voices calling for a rethink of European and North American policies dealing with the refugees leaving Syria. While a Syrian passport found near the Stade de France attack […]

History repeats itself; in Afghanistan’s case, first as tragedy and then as a bigger tragedy. On November 17, 1999, the then Taliban regime publicly executed a Pashtun woman named Zarmeena in Kabul stadium’s pitch. She was accused of killing her husband. Almost 16 years to the date, another band of Taliban, operating now under the […]