A son of Salmaan Taseer, the liberal governor of the country’s powerful Punjab province who was shot dead by his own security guard in Islamabad in January, has been kidnapped by masked gunmen in Lahore. Taseer’s loss did not end the family’s miseries nor did the tragedy dissuade them to speak up for liberal values […]
Pakistanis do know that they have an image problem. They have a unique way of addressing this tough challenge. Many in Pakistan have historically believed that electing and appointing women to key posts can help improve the country’s unpopular international image. At a time when Islamabad’s diplomatic ties with Washington have reached their lowest ebb, […]
Courtesy: Dawn.com A veteran diplomat, Ms Wendy Chamberlin was serving as the US ambassador to Pakistan when terrorist struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. A former High Commissioner of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), Chamberlin is currently the president of Middle East Institute, a prestigious think-tank […]
Terrorist violence has once more ripped through Mumbai, India’s largest city and its commercial hub. Three bomb blasts, exploding over a span of 30 minutes in central and south Mumbai during the evening rush hour, yesterday killed at least 18 people and injured more than 130. The bombings are the latest in a string of […]
Has the war in Afghanistan spread into Pakistan? Yes; the circumstantial evidence certainly points to just that. The argument for, and fact of, war rests partly on the strategy through which combat in Afghanistan and Pakistan is being conducted. That strategy is precisely this-counterterrorism, which relies heavily on night raids and drone attacks;that strategy is […]
Courtesy: Dawn.com Sixty-eight year old Bob Woodward, an associate editor at the Washington Post, is considered one of America’s most informed investigative journalists. In 1972, his disclosure and consistent reporting with Carl Bernstein of the Watergate Scandal led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon. Woodward, a Pulitzer Prize winning author of 12 bestselling non-fictions, […]
President Bush and Prime Minister Singh celebrate the U.S.-India nuclear deal Was the U.S.-India agreement on civilian nuclear cooperation worth all the trouble? How have the expansive promises touted by its champions and dire warnings issued by its critics panned out? With the approach of the six-year anniversary of the landmark July 2005 summit between […]
Recent events in Pakistan continue to roil the dysfunctional machinery of that country’s convoluted and stably corruptible domestic and international politics. U.S. leaders have indicated that there exists conclusive proof that the ISI, Pakistan’s vaunted, though suspiciously-embarrasingly- incompetent spy service was complicit in the murder of respected investigative journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad. Recent reporting by […]
The latest Pew Research Center public opinion poll shows that the Pakistani people continue to hold the U.S in astonishingly low regard. However, one sliver of good news, for American interests, is that since the May 2nd Navy Seal operation that captured and killed Osama bin Laden, U.S support in Pakistan has not fallen further: […]
It’s hard to push off the already emergent, now growing belief that the Pakistani military, and indeed the Pakistani government, is not making strong enough moves against the insurgent groups. The recent news that Ilyas Kashmiri, a top terrorist aligned with al Qaeda who trained as a Pakistani special forces officer, does not diminish the […]
The disillusioned community of journalists in Pakistan is directly blaming the Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI), a spy agency of the Pakistan army, for the killing of a renowned investigative reporter, Syed Saleem Shahzad, who worked as the Pakistan Bureau Chief of Asia Times. The reputed correspondent went missing on May 29th on his way to […]
I thought you would be interested in this interview that I did last week for Dawn.com Pakistan’s respected news source. Dr. Stephen Philip Cohen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, Washington DC, is a respected authority on the Pakistani army and the country’s politics. His book The Pakistan Army was published in 1998 and […]
I recently had the pleasure of attending an excellent talk at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington D.C. on the way religious education structures pluralism in Pakistan. Matthew Nelson, a Lecturer at SOAS, University of London and a Fellow at the Wilson Center, offered a deeply interesting discussion on ways to think about religious “madrasa” […]
The Asia Society last week released what it calls a unique sixty-one page report Pakistan 2020: A vision for Building a Better Future in New York and Washington DC. The report has endeavored to look at Pakistan from multiple lenses rather than solely focusing on the country’s security issues. A team of around thirty American […]
President Obama’s first move in his speech at the State Department on U.S. diplomacy in the Middle East was to address directly and immediately the hunt for and death of Osama bin Laden. He argued, forcefully, that bin Laden was not a martyr. Indeed he was anything but. The president reminded his domestic and international […]