Mubashir Akram

  The world today has 195 countries of which 193 are member states of the United Nations. States of the Holy See and Palestine have observer-status at the UN. Of these 193 nations, 123 are democratic that have one similarity: people vote to elect their governments. This constitutes 63.73 percent of the modern world. According […]

According to the Federal Bureau of Statics, Government of Pakistan, 96.28% of Pakistanis are Muslims. Many minority organisations and their leaders dispute that, but let’s go with the official statistics, and this makes 7.44 million Pakistanis as non-Muslims. This is equal to the combined population of Rawalpindi, Multan, Peshawar and Quetta. Imagine the size of […]

Sufism versus terrorism is one of those millions of debates in a complex world we all live in today. Type in any search string aiming at the subject, and the e-mighty Google shall return you an Everest of links of articles, debates, discussions, scholarly articles and images. Interestingly, a crushing majority of the links do […]

As of June 2017, terrorists have killed nearly 70,000 Pakistanis in direct acts of violence since 2003. Nearly 11 per cent of the casualties are personnel of the civil and armed forces. The State Bank of Pakistan reported on November 19, 2016 that Pakistan has suffered economic losses amounting to US$ 118.3 billion due to […]

I have spent all my life in Pakistan, and can speak about my own people with insight than any other. This probably holds true for other peoples of the world, but Pakistanis do not like unpopular opinions and prefer floating with the flow in their individual and group comfort zones that are usually established less […]

  The Pakistani state and society are at war for over forty years. This asymmetrical warfare has seen many actors since the late 1970s. First, it was the backlash on Pakistan’s policies in Afghanistan and bombs started to go off in trains and buses killing people. This trend converted into the high pitched battles that […]

Across the world, political and corporate elites may rule, but these are the middle classes that determine the course of their societies and nations. Middle class is a vertical connection between the elite and people in the lower layer of the society, and is absolutely not about just a certain number of people that thrive […]

Pakistan started off as a promised land, and after some struggle, started creating promising national and international narratives. The nation succeeded doing that because the society was focused, and created excellence in the given resources of the day. Those who have lived through the Pakistani society in any of the decades from 1950s, to mid-1980s […]

Popular political parties are assets of nations and are not built in one day. Political parties and leaders in Pakistan have survived persecution by the dictators, but they cannot survive their inability to govern, failure of people’s and perception management and reluctance to change with times. After all, change is the only constant, and one […]

Any functional and organised state builds its narratives at three levels: internal, regional and international. That is a perfectly normal practice, as the state consciously realises the need and crafts an impressive narrative that benefits it. Today, it is an inevitable requirement of the modern statecraft. Now, societies and economies are built on the marketing […]