January 2013

Will naming decades’ old Shadman Chowk after Bhagat Singh immortalize the legendary figure? The renaming of Lahore’s Shadman Chowk as Bhagat Singh Chowk sparked a spontaneous controversy over distortions of history that led to this ill-advised decision. There were many reasons against this decision. As if already there were not enough governance worries at home, we recently saw the Lahore …

An important dimension of the long-standing Palestine-Israeli conflict is the virtual dominance of the two major extra-regional players: Britain and the United States, and their existing nexus with Israel. Periodic clashes between Palestinian and Israeli forces made headlines time and again. What came as an unprecedented and remarkable development on the Palestine-Israeli conflict is the United Nations (UN) General Assembly’s …

Pakistan reiterated its support to an Afghan-led and Afghan-owned peace and reconciliation process. The two sides emphasised the importance of an intra-Afghan inclusive dialogue and the consequent political settlement for a durable peace in Afghanistan. Pakistan and Afghanistan are once again trying to follow a hand-in-hand policy in overcoming the common challenges. If saving their citizens from the menace of …

Despite being geographically contiguous, Pakistan and Russia have remained politically distant from each other during the last six decades. The framework of Cold War and the East-West confrontation defined relations between the two countries during that very period. This assessment of relations between Pakistan and Russia looks at the influence of South Asia and Central Asia’s bilateral relations in a …