Tag Archive | Taliban
Why no outrage against Taliban?
Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) executed 15 kidnapped members of Pakistan’s Border Security Guard, a paramilitary force that guards the country’s northwestern border region in a major blow to government efforts to pursue peace talks with the militants. While the news about this massacre appeared in media on January 5, 2012, the video was released to media [...]
What’s Brewing in Pakistan
This was written for The Open Magazine of India, and appeared on Saturday January 21, 2012 ISLAMABAD ~ Ever since democracy was restored in Pakistan after the general elections of 2008, not a day has passed without a crisis—sometimes engineered, sometimes resulting from the government’s weaknesses and incompetence. The country’s two major political parties, the [...]
Give Peace a Chance? Thank but No Thanks!
Published in Daily Times on Tuesday December 13, 2011 as my weekly column BAAGHI Pakistan’s ‘government’, it seems, is well on its way to ‘give peace a chance’ in compliance with the declaration of an unelected All-Parties Conference (APC) convened by the prime minister in September this year. The otherwise ‘hawks’ when it comes to [...]
Let us tell NATO, "No More!"
This was originally written as my weekly column BAAGHI and appeared in Daily Times on Tuesday November 29, 2011 The anger in Islamabad is natural and understandable. The early morning attack on Pakistan’s two border security posts by NATO aircraft left nearly two dozen soldiers dead and several injured. Pakistan continues to claim (till Sunday [...]
No Clean Hands in AmAfPak
This was originally published by Daily Times as my weekly column BAAGHI on Monday October 24, 2011 The recent diplomatic overdose to Pakistan by the US has not only heightened the verbal tug-of-war between the two allies but has also exposed the paucity of both sides to defend themselves with rational counter-arguments. A cursory look [...]
Confronting Popular Narrative about the Taliban — II
This appeared as my weekly column BAAGHI in Daily Times on Monday October 17, 2011. The first part of this article can be seen here. This blogpost corrects the two names erroneously misquoted in the printed version; One: it was Jalaluddin Haqqani, not Mulla Omar who took Khost and Two: it was Peter Henning not [...]
Confronting Popular Narrative about the Taliban — I
It originally appeared in Daily Times as my weekly column BAAGHI on Monday October 10, 2011 Last week, one got the opportunity to be on a television talk show with General Hamid Gul and Oria Maqbool Jan, a civil servant turned hawkish columnist for Urdu language newspapers, on the panel. Both have a long, indomitable [...]
Resisting the Taliban Menace – II
This was originally published by Daily Times as my weekly column BAAGHI on Monday October 3, 2011. First part of this article, published by the same paper on September 26, 2011, can be seen here. While these lines are being written, hundreds of Afghans are rallying on the streets of Kabul to condemn last week’s [...]
Resisting the Taliban Menace – I
It originally appeared in Daily Times on Monday September 26, 2011 as my weekly column BAAGHI It was on August 25, 2001 — 15 days before 9/11 — that a conference in Islamabad resolved to oppose the appointment of 15 experts by the United Nations (UN) to check the observance of sanctions against the Taliban, [...]
Liberalization of Strategic Depth – II
It originally appeared in Daily Times on Monday September 19, 2011 as my weekly column BAAGHI. Its first part, appeared on Monday September 12, 2011 in same paper, could be seen here. The defenders of the report, launched jointly by the Jinnah Institute (JI) and the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) on a possible [...]
