FATF blues on July 14, 2018As widely expected, Pakistan has officially been placed on the Financial Action Task Force’s (FATF) grey list. The interim government, despite all diplomatic efforts in recent weeks, remained hapless in averting the decision since it was bound to happen owing to China and Saudi Arabia’s 11th hour withdrawal of support back in February 2018. Only […]
Peace that won’t go to pieces on July 1, 2018For Afghanistan, the last couple of decades have been nothing less than an endless nightmare. April marked the 40th anniversary of the Saur Revolution, which remains a key turning point of the Cold War to this day, along with the ouster and sham trial of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Several events which followed them led to […]
Ambassadors of naught on June 8, 2018While I have been consistently highlighting the general decline of Pakistan’s diplomacy in my recent writings, this time, the focus would be on the deterioration in the quality of the country’s contractual ambassadors. For a considerable part of its history, Pakistan’s foreign policy was steered by an exceptional set of non-career diplomats that made their […]
Ali Jehangir Siddiqui’s appointment in Washington on June 3, 2018Ali Jehangir Siddiqui has finally assumed the charge of Pakistan’s Ambassador to the United States, earlier this week. The appointment of the scion of the JS family as envoy to Washington has created much furore in the media, and the reasons were manifold with his lack of experience in diplomacy being the primaryone. Having been […]
The Sharifs and the Foreign Office on May 14, 2018In the context of this debate the past few days have been quite eventful and enlightening. My investigative op-ed for Daily Times — published on 7th May 2018 — received feedback from dozens of diplomats of the Pakistan Foreign Service, who are deeply concerned about the systematic degradation of their service by the outgoing government. […]
The shameful decline of Pakistani diplomacy on May 7, 2018As an avid follower of current affairs, I have studied Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s foreign policy as a case study comparison for introspecting into the current state of affairs of Pakistan’s foreign policy. Back in those days, the country was considered to be a leading power in the developing and Islamic world. It gained the respect […]
Assessing Pakistan’s soft-power on April 7, 2018For centuries, diplomacy has been used as a tool to project both hard and soft power by the movers and shakers of the international political order. While utilising hard power involves greater risks, soft power has relatively been a subtler tool for achieving foreign policy goals. With the onset of globalisation, states belonging to both […]
Integration is the way forward: envoy to UK on March 31, 2018Q: Since you took over as the high commissioner in 2014, what are some of the most intriguing difficulties you’ve faced in looking after the interests of one of the largest Pakistani diasporas in the world? A: I think you have rightly asked me a very pointed question. I wouldn’t call it a difficulty but […]
A need-based relationship on January 12, 2018Recently, we witnessed an unprecedented escalation between Pakistan and the United States (US) over their diverging goals in the War on Terror (WoT). It can be argued that the war has largely failed since its inception. While Pakistan seems to have pushed back militants since it launched countrywide operations in 2014, the US is still […]
Pakistan’s Independence Day celebrations in London on December 10, 2017This year marked 70 years since Pakistan’s inception and the country has certainly come a long way in making its place among the comity of nations. Despite all the socio-economic and political challenges faced by the state, it has managed to stand tall and survived a great deal of crises in the past few decades. […]