Pakistan

It’s hard to push off the already emergent, now growing belief that the Pakistani military, and indeed the Pakistani government, is not making strong enough moves against  the insurgent groups.  The recent news that Ilyas Kashmiri, a top terrorist aligned with al Qaeda who  trained as a Pakistani special forces officer, does not diminish the […]

The disillusioned community of journalists in Pakistan is directly blaming the Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI), a spy agency of the Pakistan army, for the killing of a renowned investigative reporter, Syed Saleem Shahzad, who worked as the Pakistan Bureau Chief of Asia Times.  The reputed correspondent went missing on May 29th on his way to […]

I thought you would be interested in this interview that I did last week for Dawn.com Pakistan’s respected news source. Dr. Stephen Philip Cohen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, Washington DC, is a respected authority on the Pakistani army and the country’s politics. His book The Pakistan Army was published in 1998 and […]

I recently had the pleasure of attending an excellent talk at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington D.C. on the way religious education structures pluralism in Pakistan.  Matthew Nelson, a Lecturer at SOAS, University of London and a Fellow at the Wilson Center, offered a deeply interesting discussion on ways to think about religious “madrasa” […]

The Asia Society last week released what it calls a unique sixty-one page report Pakistan 2020: A vision for Building a Better Future in New York and Washington DC.  The report has endeavored to look at Pakistan from multiple lenses rather than solely focusing on the country’s security issues. A team of around thirty American […]

President Obama’s first move in his speech at the State Department on U.S. diplomacy in the Middle East was to address directly and immediately the hunt for and death of Osama bin Laden.  He argued, forcefully, that bin Laden was not a martyr. Indeed he was anything but. The president reminded his domestic and international […]

Not too long ago, the Tehrik-e-Taliban claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing that claimed the lives of at least 80 paramilitary cadets at a military training center in Charsadda, in Northern Pakistan.  The Taliban announced the bombing was an act of revenge for the killing of Osama bin Laden.  It had taken out elements of […]

Has U.S. military aid to Pakistan over the past 50 years helped that country in any desirable way? Or is U.S. aid partly the cause of Pakistan’s dire security and development situation? Has aid to the military, and the ill-advised redistribution of that aid to other, less savory agents, fundamentally crippled governance and social and […]

I urge all our readers who live on the East Coast of the United States to tune into PBS stations at 10pm for “Bhutto”, a two hour investigative documentary on Benazir Bhutto, the assassinated former Prime Minister and PPP leader.  An examination of the life and politics of Benazir Bhutto -once popular leader, assassinated in […]

Decades have passed since Pakistan’s  elected government, the opposition, the military and the media spoke the same language on one issue. The last time when one saw overwhelming consensus among all these segments of society was perhaps the war with India in 1965. The killing of Al-Qaeda founder Osama Bin Laden in Abbottabad in  a […]

By Malik Siraj Akbar Foreigners who have never heard of Pakistan’s Balochistan crisis are often comforted by the fact that they are not the only ones who do not know much about the raging conflict. Even most Pakistanis are equally ignorant about the gruesome developments taking place inside Balochistan because of a nearly complete blackout […]

The narrative of the death of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan is still in flux, nearly seven days out. The nucleus of that narrative however remains static : what did the Pakistani military and intelligence services know about bin Laden’s whereabouts, when did it know it and what did it do about that knowledge or […]