There seems to be no end to terror strikes within Pakistan. The Taliban’s retributive violence hasn’t spared any institution, city or region, the North West Frontier Province taking the brunt of it all with bombs and bombers blowing up in army cantonments, hotels, crowded bazaars, police stations and outposts. Read more

President Barak Obama has signed the Kerry-Lugar-Berman Bill named after its sponsors and passed by the US Congress. In the statute book, it’s titled Enhanced Partnership with Pakistan Act of 2009.

The new law triples non-military US aid to Pakistan to $ 7.5 billion over the next five years at the rate of 1.5 billion dollars every year towards healthcare, education and creation of infrastructure in the social sector. Read more

I wouldn’t say that nemesis caught up with the Pakistan Army when its Rawalpindi-based General Headquarters, better known as GHQ, came under terrorist fire followed by a siege that lasted nearly twenty hours. Read more

The Foreign Ministers of India and Pakistan met and bid adieu in New York without promise of a future date or resumption of the stalled composite dialogue. So much so that S M Krishna rejected reactivation of back channel talks that had worked so well till before Mumbai happened. Read more

I have known Pakistan’s Ambassador to the United States Hussain Haqqani since 1991-92 when he was spokesperson and special assistant to Nawaz Sharif. He performed similar duties for Benazir Bhutto when she replaced Sharif as Prime Minister after the 1993 polls. The first PM he served was Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi. Read more

I was in Pakistan within days of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh raising the specter of another major terrorist strike in India from the Pakistani soil. I found some of my friends among Pakistani journalists who preach peace with India moving around with armed guards, barricaded government buildings and crowded bazaars sanitized hours before VIP movements. Read more

After Lal Krishna Advani, we now have Jaswant Singh eulogizing Jinnah. I had agreed with Advani that the man who founded Pakistan was by choice a secularist whose politics turned communal. But I have problems coming to terms with Jaswant’s perspective released in the form of a full-fledged book. I wonder whether his project is aimed at denigrating Pandit Nehru or giving Jinnah his rightful place as a secularist who (for whatever reasons) went haywire to recognize — after the Partition — the limitations of the divisive philosophy that created Pakistan. Read more

I like debating difficult propositions. But running this blog that advocates peace between India and Pakistan has been a trifle exhausting— both  emotionally and intellectually. On accounting for exceptions when I touched a chord with some of my readers, the majority view that come out is that  I’m  being  naïve, unrealistic, even outright foolish in showing the flip side of the widely held Indian perceptions of Pakistan. Read more

I sold an old refrigerator earlier this month. And with that ended two decades of an emotional companionship. I had bought the machine for US $ 200 from a bonded warehouse in Islamabad in 1991. That was the time I was posted to Pakistan as a correspondent of Hindustan Times. Read more

Pakistanis spare none when it comes to making fun of their leaders. Their irreverence  for authority manifests itself in public discourse spiked with humor, parody and Urdu poetry lampooning the political class and military rulers. Read more