Dr Mohammad Taqi

“Baley shamey ta nazar krraChe pa sa zharri khpal zaanBaar de wotarra Khushala Da jaras awri fughaan”(Glance at the lit candle’s flameWhy does it cry and itself blameLoad up and depart o KhushalThe jingle of the caravan bell finally came) – Khushal Khan Khattak.For one of the most illustrious descendants of the great Khushal Khan […]

“Until I know this sure uncertainty I’ll entertain the offered fallacy” – Shakespeare. Peace prospects in landlocked Afghanistan appear to have entered unchartered waters after the recent Afghan government-Taliban powwow in Pakistan’s Murree hills. Both the Afghan president, Dr Ashraf Ghani, and the Taliban seem to have opted to entertain the fallacy offered as talks — courtesy […]

An Afghan government delegation and various elements of the Afghan Taliban finally met this past week in Murree, a few miles from where once Pakistan’s oldest brewery stood. A toast might be premature but would certainly be in order if the heady brew from Murree — Pakistan’s Camp David — did end up jumpstarting the […]

“He will lie, sir, with such volubility that you would think truth were a fool” — Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well.Perhaps even the most incorrigible of fibbers would have shied away from the camera’s glare after the complete edifice of his case against a fairly popular government, which he had built — in and […]

“Ah, that deceit should steal such gentle shape,And with a virtuous visor hide deep vice” — Shakespeare. In its so-called summer offensive — perhaps the fiercest in years — the Afghan Taliban attacked Afghanistan’s Wolesi Jirga, i.e. the lower house of parliament on June 22. The assault started with a Taliban bomber exploding his suicide […]

The separatists are capitulating in droves or so the federal and Balochistan provincial government officials would have one believe. Over 90 men purported to be Baloch militants have ‘surrendered’ to the two provincial ministers Jangez Marri and Sanaullah Zehri over the last week or so. The ostensible rebels repented, claimed the separatist leadership misled them, […]

There simply is no reprieve for the star-crossed people of Balochistan. After the carnage in Mastung just over a week ago, this past weekend saw the usual suspects shooting and killing the usual victims — the Hazara Shias of Quetta — at one of the busiest intersections of the city, within an earshot of the […]

Armed men wearing military fatigues stopped two buses near Mastung, Balochistan this past weekend, ordered the male passengers to offload and took them to the hills where at least 22 of them were executed, according to a man who apparently witnessed and survived the deadly assault. The buses had commenced their ill-fated journey from Pishin […]

The anthropologist Jack Weatherford once wrote, “Every society produces its own cultural conceits, a set of lies and delusions about itself that thrive in the face of all contrary evidence.” Just as individuals deploy psychological defence mechanisms to ward off unpleasant feelings of anxiety and impending doom, societies also use such tactics to explain socio-cultural […]

The Pakistani military spokesperson announced this past Monday that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and the Afghan intelligence agency, the National Directorate of Security (NDS), had signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) for “intelligence sharing, complementary and coordinated intelligence operations on respective sides”. The Afghan government confirmed that an agreement had been signed. It was arguably […]