Yousaf Rafiq

    Considering the trauma that naturally comes with Partition — and the fact that the subcontinent had two within a quarter of a century (’47 and ’71) — it is understandable that a certain degree of hangover persists to the present day. Yet there are interesting points of divergence in the manner of sentiments […]

There are very few worse moments in life than the wife attempting suicide, especially with two grown children in the house, and the lord of the manor (yours truly) a heart patient. Yet while her recovery, implying the failure of her attempt, owes in no small way to the good work of the doctors at […]

Campaign season started early this cycle. About a year ago, in fact, when the government was suddenly cornered by the Panama leaks controversy and decided to deflect some of the outrages by putting the spotlight on some of its ‘democratic’ achievements. Now, of course, with the election a little more than a year away, the […]

Pakistani politicians do not stand out for their long memories, unfortunately. But, then, neither does the public. Not many really even remember the break-down of that famous PTI dharna of ’14, for example. Sure, nobody can easily forget the ‘Go Nawaz Go’ frenzy. And it’ll take some time, even for the average Pakistani, to really […]

Radd-ul-Fasaad is, perhaps, the most logical follow up to the carnage of the last few days. Suicide attacks up and down the country, killing well over a hundred, have proved that we might have read a little too much into the success of Zarb-e-Azb. That does not mean, of course, that the operation was not […]

Those who saw Gen Musharraf in Dubai in March ’13, just before he left for Pakistan and expected hundreds of thousands of his Facebook followers to greet him at the Karachi airport, will also remember how the former president misread the situation waiting for him back home. He would never admit that the following two […]

How ironic that after rubbishing Pakistan’s so called ‘good Taliban’ policy for a good decade the Afghan government pulls a similar stunt of its own. Perhaps Ghani didn’t quite factor in the reaction from the people of Afghanistan, not the least its capital, when he decided to pardon the ‘butcher of Kabul’, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and […]

One tried and tested rule of chess is that sometimes the ‘ghost’ of a move is more powerful than the move itself. Sometimes, you don’t actually have to move the knight or bishop to a central square or a rook at an open file; just the threat of moving the piece there is enough to […]

There seemed, for the briefest of windows, that the seriousness of real-time decision making in the Oval office would introduce a measure of sobriety to the extreme conservatism that drove Donald Trump’s campaign. But such thoughts went out the window practically before he had finished his inaugural speech. At home he moved fast to rein […]

It was Ghani, interestingly, that set the trend of meeting the Pakistani Army chief shortly after he assumed the presidency in ’14. It was, for all intents and purposes, a bold gambit. Reaching out to Rawalpindi rubbed almost everybody in Kabul the wrong way, especially the chief executive, Abdullah Abdullah, not to mention the old […]