Pak Affairs

Strategies for their Peaceful Repatriation It is more than 35 years that the Afghans have been living in Pakistan. They first came here after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1980 and the ensuing civil war and precarious security situation in the country. The second wave started after the US–led military campaign in Afghanistan in 2001. Hundreds of thousands of …

Bigotry settled in India as nowhere else. Many of Modi’s predecessors in BJP were, in fact, as bellicose as he is. Following is the text of a letter written by A. B. Vajpayee to the then US President Bill Clinton in the aftermath of the 1998 nuclear tests upon the lines of which he combined guile with statecraft. He wrote, …

Whether we like it or not, India’s Narendra Modi is in the driver’s seat at least in controlling the ‘temperature’ in Islamabad. He just has to ask his ministers to utter a few irresponsible words to instantly bring us into a ‘reactive’ mode as was seen in recent weeks with our government and media both quickly joining in the war …

40 Million Pakistanis Defecate Openly Imagine for a while, you are a guest or a host and you want to answer the call of nature, but there is no toilet in the house, nor you have the facility of public toilet outside your house. What will you do in this situation? Forty million Pakistanis have to face this situation daily. …

An important prerequisite for effective functioning of the federal structure is the framework of distribution of fiscal powers and the manner in which the revenues are collected and distributed between the federation and the provinces. Revenue distribution, thus, is an extremely sensitive and critical factor for the long-term sustainability of Pakistan. However, this has always remained a thorny affair as …

“The principal characteristic of twenty-first-century international relations is turning out to be nonpolarity: a world dominated not by one or two or even several states but rather by dozens of actors possessing and exercising various kinds of power. This represents a tectonic shift from the past.” (Richard N. Haass; The Age of Nonpolarity: What Will Follow U.S. Dominance) With a …

During Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s latest visit to Kabul, the leaders of Afghanistan and Pakistan once again reiterated their determination for building close relations and cooperating on the Afghan peace efforts. The Premier’s visit was the first since the inauguration of a National Unity government in Afghanistan. The Kabul rendezvous highlights recent efforts of the Afghan government to kick-start Pakistan-assisted …

A false sense of optimism seems to be growing on the state of the Pakistan Economy, a notion being consciously promoted by the economic managers, which if not checked can have larger long-term negative implications. First, complacency can set in and the much-awaited economic reforms, necessary to correct the underlying malaise of the economy, will once again be put on …

The global community has failed dismally in meeting the challenge of providing all children with a quality education. This failure is tragically apparent in Pakistan, world’s sixth most populous country. With one of the lowest education budgets in the world, development of education sector in Pakistan faces serious impediments. Pakistan needs to break out of it’s complacency with poor education …

The massacre of about four dozen men and women belonging to Ismaili community in Karachi on the fateful morning of May 13 is yet another reminder; if at all any other reminder was needed, of gravity of the problem of homegrown terrorism. This is the second most gruesome act of terrorism after the carnage at Peshawar’s Army Public School on …