THERE is a war in the neighbourhood and no one can be sure how long it might last. And for Pakistan this conflict brings a set of challenges which are not going to be easy to manage. Indeed, for month...
BALOCHISTAN witnessed a series of coordinated attacks on the weekend. Though details continue to be sketchy, a number of cities in the province were targeted, including Quetta, Gwadar and Noshki. It w...
THE young chief minister of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Sohail Afridi, is attracting considerable attention, since he has been catapulted into this position. Much of it has been because of the criticism direc...
IN times long past, kings and powerful men used messengers to communicate. Those of us brought up on Dastaan-i-Ameer Hamza and Tilism-i-Hoshruba imagined lone men on horseback rushing between cities a...
I GREW up in a Lahore very different from the grey expanse it has now become. Back then, it was a sleepier city but a very green one. The main boulevard in Gulberg was a long road with a wide and very...
THE new year is a mere few days old but 2026 already promises to be more exhausting than its predecessor. The mortals among us — and who have friends to party with — had barely recovered from New ...
AWAY from the noise and bluster that dominated the news in the last few weeks of 2025, not enough attention was paid to a statement. Last month, at a business event in Islamabad, Lt-Gen Sarfraz Ahmed,...
PAKISTAN’S history goes around in circles, it is said repeatedly, these days. It has easily become the most popular analysis presented on the talk shows, so much so that the Urdu phrase, daiyron ka ...
AFTER more than a year, the conviction of Faiz Hameed was announced last week. It’s hard to say if it came as a surprise to anyone; after all, once the news of his arrest was made public last year, ...