June 20th 2016, was the World Refugee Day, where Pakistan, a country that in the past had been taking credit for hosting one of the biggest refugee populations for several years, decided to celebrate the day in a different fashion. The government of Pakistan decided to publicly and officially own the campaign of hatred, harassment and demonization against Afghan refugees- ...

The Chabahar Port is the start of the new cold war -a cold war between China and India which will perhaps last till 2050s.  Actually it is just the tip of the iceberg. This is the start of an inevitable new cold war. Real war is not fought with weapons. It is fought financially with diplomacy as its weapon. It is ...

Definition – ‘the state of being male or female (typically used with reference to social and cultural differences rather than biological ones).’ (Oxford Dictionary) As is understood from the definition above, gender is not a biological absolute. The human body has huge variety and specifically gender identity, a very wide range. When a child is conceived there is an almost ...

Pakistan’s regional isolation can’t be in its long-term national self-interest A sovereign state’s foreign policy changes with the times, according to its domestic needs and changes in global politics around it. Nations have interests and there are no permanent enemies and friendships in international politics. A neighboring state can be a boon or a bane, depending on one’s ability to ...

The Subtle Distortions A typical example of oversimplification can be observed in a piece by Nadeem Farooq Paracha, otherwise an objective writer, titled ‘The misplaced image of the warring Pakhtun’ published in Dawn on June 12, 2016. It is now almost five hundred years since the peoples called in history the Pashtuns, Afghans and Sulemanis dubbed by the colonizers as ...

South Waziristan is inhabited by Pashtun tribes of Ahmadzai Wazir, Masood (locally pronounced Maseed) and Bittani and the main Pashtun tribes in North Waziristan are Utmanzai Wazir and Daur. Sections of these tribes also live in the adjacent districts of Tank, Lakki Marwat and Bannu. Both the districts of South and North Waziristan (known as political agencies as parts of ...

‘Beauty provokes harassment, the law says, but it looks through men’s eyes when deciding what provokes it’ (Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth: Vintage 1991) The quote highlights the dilemma faced by women everywhere, every day. Men decide how women should dress, what they should wear, how they should behave, where they should go, what work she should do, how much ...

The death of Taliban leader Akhtar Mansour in a US drone strike on May 21 in a remote part of Balochistan has dramatically underlined the terrorist challenge that Pakistan still faces, and of which Pakistan is still living in denial of, as the official response to the latest drone attack has amply demonstrated. It has been almost an open secret ...

Pakistan was created on the basis of a ‘two nation theory’ by dividing the Indian subcontinent into two states India and Pakistan. The rationale behind the formation of these states was to protect the legitimate socio-political and economic rights of the Indian Muslims from discrimination under Hindu majority rule; it cut across the diverse history of its different nationalities/religions that ...

The on-going suffering of the people of FATA seems never ending. The injustice and discriminatory ill-treatment served upon these people by past and present governments, religious militants along with the actions of military authorities of Pakistan have led to a relentless onslaught of misery, hardship and impoverished living conditions in this region. Continued imposition of a set of draconian laws ...