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Proxy war helps Al Qaeda – Simon Tisdall
RENEWED fighting in northern Yemen between government and rebel forces is feeding fears that a Middle Eastern proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran is spreading to the ungoverned spaces of the southern Arabian peninsula. But western analysts are staring boggle-eyed at quite a different spectre: the prospect [...]
March of the skeletons – Mahir Ali
GOING by the rate at which former operatives from a plethora of military and other agencies have been emerging from the woodwork and spilling the beans, it almost seems as if someone went around spiking their preferred beverages with truth serum in the run-up to the month of fasting.
If [...]
Green lessons – Bina Shah
NORMAN Borlaug, the father of the Green Revolution of the 1960s, died recently in his Dallas home. He was known as the man who saved a billion lives from starvation.
His scientific research saw the development of high-yield crops, including the revolutionary dwarf wheat variety. His wheat research in Mexico led to [...]
The road to corruption? – Zubeida Mustafa
FOR many decades governments in Pakistan considered it a waste of resources to invest in education.
This was such a neglected sector that those aspiring to a ministerial portfolio generally shunned the offer to head the education ministry. Then the scene changed when foreign donors demanded that we educate our [...]
Afghanistan, Post-Election scenario – Ch Naeem Sidhu
With the country engaged in war, the electoral process in Afghanistan never looked open and valid in the eyes of Pakistani leaders. Still, a country without the requisite ingredients of democracy such as political parties or a universally accepted constitution cannot have credible electoral process. [...]
Climate change & a grim future – Arif Pervaiz
IN the most comprehensive exercise of its kind to date, research from MIT shows that unless there is “rapid and massive action, the problem [of global warming] will be twice as severe as predicted six years ago and possibly much worse”.The climate modelling exercise shows that if [...]
Afghanistan: shift in US policy – Simon Tisdall
THE primary focus of the US war strategy in Afghanistan could shift towards the eastern provinces bordering Pakistan and away from the south of the country, where British forces are heavily engaged, under a plan [...]
The knives are out – Kamran Shafi
IF every wrong is to be placed at the politician’s door, in the instant case at Asif Zardari’s, then the good that has come with his government and with democracy must also go to his account and to those of other politicians.
Here I refer to the Swat operation which [...]
Necessity or choice? – Shahid Javed Burki
WHILE contesting for the nomination of the Democratic Party and campaigning for the country’s presidency, Barack Obama took a position on the Afghan conflict that clearly distinguished him from his two rivals, Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party’s nomination and John McCain for the presidency. Both Clinton and McCain [...]
A forgotten pledge! – Mir Jamilur Rahman
Roti, kapra aur makan was the most popular and attractive slogan of the seventies. The slogan was a pledge from Zulfikar Ali Bhutto that when the PPP came to power it would strive to provide food, cloth and shelter to the teeming poor of the country. In fact every [...]
Pointing figures – Anjum Niaz
The writer is a freelance journalist with over twenty years of experience in national and international reporting
The vibes from Washington may not be Zardari-friendly. The US Senate seems in no hurry to approve the five-year $1.5 billion annual aid to Pakistan. Why? Before we address this question, let’s talk of the [...]
Welfare funds: civil-military comparison – Masood Sharif Khan Khattak
The surest way to fritter away a massive financial capital with no short or long term gains is to distribute it in small sums to millions of people. Such a distribution can never result in poverty alleviation but can open the floodgates leading to massive corruption. Who [...]
Sugar and society – 4 – Dr Adeel Malik
It takes little imagination to recognise that the organising principle of Pakistan’s sugar markets is political patronage. Sugar mills are both founded and sustained through public resources. The nation pays dearly in this process: firstly, by subsidizing sugar mills through loan defaults and debt write-offs; secondly, by [...]
Ramazan and social evils – Dr A Q Khan
Over the last few days, TV stations have constantly been showing disturbing pictures of fasting men, women and children standing in queue in front of trucks to buy flour or sugar. Even worse are images of distributors beating the same people up to exercise control over the [...]