While surfing through facebook, I found this interesting write-up by Ayub Khattak where he proposes to divide Pakistan into 18 administrative units or provinces. I am not aware of any other concrete proposal but this one looks an interesting starting point. Continue reading
Kazim is right though in not jumping to a wrong conclusions that many Europeans immediately take – adoration of the person Hitler and Aryanism being equal to Anti-Semitism. Still he points out (and thus suggests a link)
In the Islamic world, not just in Pakistan but right across from Iran to northern Africa, anti-Semitic sentiment of course plays a role. Conversations with German visitors rapidly turn to the injustice being suffered by the Palestinians who were robbed of their land. Continue reading
Ejaz Haider in his Friday Times article explain the Pakistani perspective ‘Why North Waziristan is a bad idea‘.
Karachikhatmal has a good reasoning up why Coke Studio does matter. It is an enrichment to the musical scene in Pakistan, whether you like the music they come up with or absolutely dispise it (like me).
But there are obsessions with the show from two groups that I find bemusing. Continue reading
During the ongoing missing persons case in Pakistan’s Supreme Court, the agencies have admitted that they abducted 11 missing persons from Adiala Jail, Rawalpindi. These are the same agencies that denied having any information, on disappearance of these 11 jailed persons, for 7 months. And there are hundreds of others who face the same fate. … Continue reading
Two rather recent papers by Christine C. Fair and Jacob N. Shapiro aimed at investigating the foundation for militant and violence support in Pakistan, after in recent years studies in this direction have become numerous, but most were not so clear when it came to data aquiring and whether this would be representative for Pakistan. The most important problem was that ‘conventional wisdom’ on Pakistan is often taken as granted and used as a basis for such studies without further testing. Mainly conducted in urban areas and without considering the huge differences between the provinces, these studies become next to worthless – but they shape international policies. Fair and Shapiro have attacked these conventional wisdoms and I believe do give some scholarly backing to observations that are rather obvious to people with experience in Pakistan. Continue reading
summary: Because the pakistani government has lost ground in flood hit provinces KP and Balochistan, and the international relief response has not yet met minimum requirements, it is likely that extremism will increase rapidly in the area. That will not only affect the war in Afghanistan, as the Pakistan Army is not capable of defending … Continue reading
The presentation held in Vienna as a Talaash discussion round can be downloaded as a Powerpoint here (.ppt, 9.5 MB) in short form, or as JPG slides for the original slides (.jpeg, 2.4 MB) (I wasn’t able to downsize the original presentation to a convenient size). Continue reading
I have earlier linked to a very good report on water issues in Pakistan here. Following are some links to recently observed water issues in the country. Continue reading
When Musharraf was in power, the West had it’s major evil in Pakistan: it’s not a democracy. Now having a, in the West’s eyes, democratic government in place we are back to dealing with the country through the Army and Secret Service rather than the elected representatives. What has the West done for a democratic Pakistan? Cheered at a brick-throwing lawyers movement? Shoved in a government that so far has shown little will to bring in the original constitution? Continue reading
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