By: Parvez Iftikhar ISLAMABAD: During my recent house renovation work, it was pleasing to see my semi-literate contractor using WhatsApp to remotely get my approvals for various small items that he had to procure for me. Normally, he would have brought some samples to choose from and then gone back to procure the selected ones; this has become quite a …

By: Shahid Javed Burki These days Pakistan finds itself precariously placed. In order to deal with its geographic location, Islamabad needs to show some deft handling of its external relations. In a book published by Macmillan of New York earlier this year, I went into some considerable detail on how the world was changing rapidly. The book appeared with the …

When President Trump began taking a wrecking ball to some of America’s traditional foreign policies, going so far as to threaten the country’s long and sturdy relationship with its Western European allies, many hoped that the other branches of government would provide a counterweight to the executive branch, and restrain his worst impulses. The federal courts helped by slamming the …

By: Hasan Khan On June 12, the US Defence Secretary James Mattis said that Washington was adopting a new strategy – a ‘regional strategy’ according to him – to resolve the lingering Afghan conflict. This new regional strategy for the Afghan conflict will be based on the “geographic reality of where this enemy [Taliban/Haqqanis] is fighting from. As you know, …

By: Wali Zahid Pakistan, along with India, has been admitted as a Full Member by the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) at its AstanaSummit in Kazakhstan. Existing SCO leaders have hailed Pakistan’s entry as carrying‘historic significance’. All stakeholders are excited at Pakistan’s entry into SCO. Pakistan is happy because, the SCO membership allows it to deal with issues with India and …

By: Khalid Bhatti The Punjab government has decided to continue the policy of handing over public schools to the Punjab Education Foundation (PEF), the Danish school authority and various NGOs. It wants to get rid of public schools. The planned handover of 5,000 schools in the province last year was met with fierce resistance from teachers. The provincial government has …

By: Eduardo Porter Could the entire American economy run on renewable energy alone? This may seem like an irrelevant question, given that both the White House and Congress are controlled by a party that rejects the scientific consensus about human-driven climate change. But the proposition that it could, long a dream of an environmental movement as wary of nuclear energy …

BY: DR QAISAR RASHID Revising our stance is a necessity Every year unfolds its own intricacies. The year 2017 seems to have ensnared Pakistan into six main foreign policy challenges. First, Pakistan is a victim of the illusion that by joining the 41-nation Islamic Military Alliance (IMA) formed in the Middle East (ME) against terrorism, not only would Pakistan’s international …

By: Sean Mcmeekin On April 16, 1917, Vladimir Ulyanov, the Russian exile better known by his revolutionary alias, Lenin, arrived at St. Petersburg’s Finland Station following a roundabout journey from Switzerland, after spending nearly two decades abroad. Lenin made an immediate splash with a fiery speech and a radical political program known as the “April Theses.” Russian, and world, politics …