Hassan Khan

At the beginning of the year, Prime Minister Imran Khan expressed “no confidence and serious reservations on the performance of the office of Auditor General of Pakistan”. Indeed, he noted “that corruption worth 180 billion has been unearthed in the institution”. Most of the work related to addressing audit reports ultimately proves fruitless in terms […]

America’s longest war, costing over $2.26 trillion and resulting in some 241,000 casualties (71,00 civilians), is heading towards its conclusion this year. Yet its policymakers are exploring options to maintain a small regional presence in order to pursue counter-terrorism and intelligence operations in Afghanistan. Of course, the first country that sprang to mind to help […]

For several decades Pakistan’s state has been plagued with a plethora of intra and inter-institutional issues that essentially kept its potential for economic development restrained, and in some cases caused a serious reversal, setting the country back by leagues. Two of the state’s key organs, namely the judiciary and bureaucracy, have been unable to evolve […]

Considering the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict, the Arab world remained on the forefront in diplomatic and military interventions with Egypt and Jordan playing the most crucial roles. Their normalisation of relations with Israel in 1979 and 1994, respectively, have had their own limitations with the status quo remaining more or less intact. It was […]

For quite a long time, the Palestinians have been asking themselves when the world would attentively listen to their pleas of being subjugated to ethnic cleansing by an apartheid Israeli regime. That moment of reckoning is finally here when people across the world came out to support them in a singular voice on the streets […]

In his most recent media comments on the working of Pakistan’s embassies/ consulates abroad, Prime Minister Imran Khan was gracious enough to console the Foreign Office, so as to mitigate the loss of morale caused by his earlier public chastisement of the organisation. Nevertheless, he again emphasised the need to improve consular and welfare services […]

If the ignominious suspension of the former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Raja Ali Ejaz, and recalling of half a dozen other diplomats sent shockwaves through the Foreign Service of Pakistan (FSP) cadre – Prime Minister Imran Khan’s lambasting of ambassadors in full media glare over allegations of a ‘callous and uncaring attitude’ towards their compatriots […]

When the Covid-19 pandemic struck in early 2020, nobody knew how lethal it would be; even as multiple strains were gradually detected across the globe. The original Wuhan virus was superseded by these newer strains that kept evolving. There was talk of herd immunity in Sweden and certain South Asian countries — yet none of […]

Being a film buff for the better part of my life, I never imagined a time would come when Bollywood, one of the largest film industries in the world, would fall into the grip of an odious Hindutva regime; one that is ardently inspired by Nazism and other brands of fascism. Bollywood itself represents a […]

The day Pakistan’s Foreign Minister, Shah Mahmood Qureshi, was in Germany to hold talks with his counterpart on enhancing economic ties and present his country’s ambitious ‘geoeconomics’ agenda — something sinister occurred back home. The entire state was held hostage in a matter of minutes when far-right extremist group TLP’s (Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan) leader Saad Rizvi […]