Shahab Usto

The political horizon has suddenly turned ominous. The Supreme Court has convicted the prime minister but the latter is ‘defiant’ with the support of the coalition partners. The ‘opposition’ (read PML-N) is threatening to march upon Islamabad in a bid to oust the ‘non-prime minister’. Using a more grizzly metaphor, the country is sliding into […]

Jean-Jacques Rousseau lamented about his times, “Ancient politicians spoke incessantly about morals and virtue, ours speak only of business and money.” Can we say our times 250 years later are any better in terms of morality and virtue? Well, the answer is not that simple; one needs to employ Einstein’s theory of relativity to decode […]

We are passing through ironic times. Each organ and department of the state seems to be pitted against the other, some using the constitutional and legal tomes, the others playing to the media-triggered public ethics, and still other capitalising on their political asset, inside and outside parliament. But none seems to be acting for the […]

Ideological states or entities being inherently schismatic, unleash countervailing forces, and more so when they grow weaker. ‘Ideological’ Pakistan is coming to grips with the countervailing forces in the form of increasing nationalist, ethnic and sectarian challenges. Ironically, Pakistan stands closer to Sudan than Israel or Iran. Israeli Zionist identity has faced internal and external […]

The most dangerous times for a country that is already afflicted with a deeper malaise are those when its leadership shirks from treating the ailment, disregarding the impact of the treatment on their partisan and institutional interests. But alas, such times seem to have fallen upon us. Populism, adhocism and opportunism have become the dominant […]

During the Great War, when much of the Russian Left toed the Czarist line of defending the motherland, Vladimir Lenin made his revolution by opposing the ‘imperialist war’, correctly judging the Czarist ‘peasant army’ was crumbling and the disaffected people were ready to heed his voice. Can we say the same for Imran Khan? Has […]

As if the harvest of shame that we have reaped in the form of the National Reconciliation Ordinance (NRO), the Raymond Davis affair, the Mehran Base attack, the Abbottabad operation, Memogate and the Salala attack was not enough, now we have been condemned to hear that the head of this 180-million-strong nuclear-armed state had ‘run […]

With the army chief’s express orders to the field commanders to retaliate in full force in case of another ‘aggression’ being enacted against them by the ISAF forces, US-Pak-Afghan relations have entered a new phase of unpredictability, if not outright hostility. The general’s response, which was prompted by the ISAF’s recent attack on the Pakistani […]

As expected, the Supreme Court (SC) has rejected the review petition that was filed by the government against the court’s July 31, 2009 order declaring the National Reconciliation Ordinance (NRO) void ab initio. This raises the question of whether NRO-related cases, including the money laundering cases allegedly pending in Switzerland against the president and others, […]

Why must every scandal cause a section of the media to conclude that the democratic edifice is about to cave in? Why is news no more reported but presented with juicy blandishments? Why are political and institutional rivals ever so prone to trumpeting ‘j’accuse’, forgetting their own acts of omission and commission? And why do […]