The terrorist attack on the naval base in Karachi is just the beginning. I apprehend many more such attempts to make a mockery of the Pakistani State, especially its security establishment the Taliban and Al Qaeda despise for being in cahoots with the US-led NATO forces. Read more

Noted Pakistani humorist Ibn-e-Insha once wrote about his encounter with a Pakistani troubled by his countrymen’s overwhelming ethnic and sub-nationalist sensitivities. Read more

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

I can feel these days a tenuous consensus building among security experts in India and Pakistan for some kind of institutionalised interaction between intelligence agencies of the two countries. It all began with a rare meeting between Pak ISI chief Shuja Pasha and defense advisors in the Indian High Commission in Islamabad. 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

Moderate cleric Dr Sarfraz Naeemi’s assassination by a suicide bomber has shocked liberal opinion in  Pakistan. He became a victim of the Deobandi Taliban  for  daring to pit  he Brelvi school of thought against their ideology of violence.

Considered close to former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and his party, the Pakistan Muslim League (N), Naeemi presided over the Lahore based- Jamia Naeemia seminary that was the first to introduce computer education for its students. Read more

The Indian media betrayed once again its lack of proper understanding of the Taliban surge in Pakistan by playing down a very important New York Times’ report. I reproduce the excerpts with additional facts culled from authoritative accounts to place in perspective the gravity of the terrorist challenge:

“The  Taliban  have  advanced  deeper  into Pakistan by engineering a class revolt  that  exploits  profound  fissures between a small group of wealthy landlords and their landless tenants (locally known as Haris)… Read more

I  cannot  think  of  a better way of starting this blog than with personal recollections  of Nawaz Sharif whose triumphant long march drew the world’s attention  to the Pakistani civil society that yearns for modern democratic institutions—not the Qazi Courts the Taliban got at gun-point in Swat and elsewhere in battle-torn NWFP. Read more