Lal Khan

The visit of Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai to Pakistan this week ended in a diplomatic disaster during the final round of talks with Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. The latter had promised a deal with the Taliban to initiate peace in the region. However, the Pakistani assurance seemed too good to be true. When it came […]

The maiden speech by the third time prime minister, Mian Nawaz Sharif, was no different from the ones we have heard from the rulers of this tragic land ever since its creation. Every time a prime minister or a dictator addresses the poor nation on assuming power, we are informed: the country is in danger, […]

In 1940, 73 years ago, on August 20, Leon Trotsky was assassinated. Leader of the Russian revolution Trotsky was living as an exile in Mexico at the time of his assassination. The declassified documents prove that his assassin, Ramon Mercader, was a Stalin agent. He was awarded the Order of Lenin by Joseph Stalin in […]

The killing of five Indian military personnel in firing across the Line of Control (LoC) in Kashmir yet again lays bare the festering wound Kashmir has become over the last 65 years. It also exposes the fragility of the relations between the two nuclear neighbours and the hoax of war and peace. After every such […]

Once the US ambassador to India in the Kennedy years (1961-63), John Kenneth Galbraith called India “a functioning anarchy”. He considered India “the most organised chaos in the world”. In the subsequent years, this anarchy and chaos intensified. Presently, this anarchy is reaching its zenith. While the high economic growth rates of the last decades […]

The boom in capitalism of the last two decades served to mask the underlying contradictions in society, but not to remove them. The gains of economic growth were not evenly distributed. According to a UN report, the richest two percent own more than half the world’s wealth, while the poorest half of the world’s population […]

After the 2008 crash of the world economy, there was an unprecedented turbulence in the world markets and economies. In the advanced capitalist economies most regimes, social-democratic or conservative, carried through severe austerity and cuts that started the process of dismantling the welfare state, mainly in Europe. All those gains achieved through intense struggle by […]

At the start of the talks during his recent visit to China, Pakistan’s Premier Nawaz Sharif told the Chinese Prime Minister Li Keqiang what has become a traditional cliché in Pakistani diplomatic policy: “Let me tell you very candidly and very sincerely that what I am witnessing here on my visit to Beijing, it reminds […]

Such was the ferocity, scale and sweep of the mass upheaval that in three days the Egyptian military was forced to remove President Muhammad Morsi and his Islamic fundamentalist government. In 2011, it took 18 days for the movement to humble the former dictator, Hosni Mubarak. The military was terrified at the sight of mass […]

Since the 2008 financial crisis has set in, there has been no respite for world capitalism. The crisis has been deepening on a daily basis. The European Union, the world’s second largest economy, is back in recession. Stocks and bonds have fallen sharply across the world as Dow Jones and FTSE remain bearish. In the […]