1. A rejoinder to John R. Schmidt, 'Pakistan’s alternate universe'

John R. Schmidt’s article (‘Pakistan’s Alternate Universe’), published in Foreign Policy, tries to offer a counter narrative of Pakistan’s links with the Taliban. However, it would be more ap...

2. India: Mullahs rake up Ahmadi issue

I often find the dichotomy of the oppressor and the oppressed baffling, for it underestimates a very key component of human nature, i.e. hypocrisy and double standards. People fail to understand that t...

3. Lending a voice to the voiceless people of FATA

When I read Taj’s book, ‘Taliban and Anti Taliban’, I thought a more suitable title for the book would have been A People’s History of FATA, as it has much in common with Howard Zinn’s seminal ...

4. Reading between the lines

It couldn’t have been a coincidence. As I was surfing the internet today for my daily dose of khabrein, two stories appeared side by side. The first story was about the growing suspicions of the US g...

5. Afghan drawdown: The vultures descend

Sometimes I go crazy. And in my craziness, I conjure ideas, which on second thought seem so foolish and naïve that I begin to laugh at myself. Now that the die is cast and the United States is finall...

6. Chirkeen

There is hardly any poet who talks about his beloved in a manner that makes her seem like a real person; just as imperfect and prone to the vagaries of life like the rest of us. Walter Allen once remarke...

7. Baloch encounters

There are times when life seems a bit too co-incidental. It makes you run into the same thing over and over again. Yesterday, while I was going through my daily newspaper routine, I chanced upon a photog...