analysis: Pak-US dialogue: a Pakhtun perspective —Farhat Taj

Courtesy to "Daily Times" 

Basically, the jirga is saying that it does not trust the military establishment, which is leading the dialogue with the US. The military establishment will follow the policy of strategic depth in Afghanistan, which is the key cause of the sufferings of Pakhtuns on both sides of the Durand Line

Days before the Pak-US strategic dialogue in Washington on the issue of terrorism, a grand tribal jirg...

Crisis and Hope: Theirs and Ours

Noam Chomsky, Courtesy to "www.chomsky.info"

Boston Review, September/October 2009

There is also a problem with the term "crisis." Which one? There are numerous very severe crises, interwo...

analysis: Assaulting the Pakhtun culture —Farhat Taj

Courtesy to "Daily Times"

The Pakhtun culture is reflected in Ghaffar Khan’s non-violent movement, in the mysticism of Rahman Baba’s poetry and in the romanticism of Ghani Khan’s poetry. This is a society that produced hundreds of anti-Taliban lashkar leaders all over Pakhtunkhwa who were target killed because they insisted that Talibanisation is the antithesis of
Pakhtun culture

Essentialism means that people have an intrinsic �...

VIEW: Trudging on —Gulmina Bilal Ahmad

Courtesy to "Daily Times" 

It is imperative to understand that we need to win the war and not just the battle. While we rightly pat ourselves and the police, military and paramilitary forces for their work, we need to remind ourselves and them that the war is yet to be won

In the wake of the tragic
Lahore blasts, the discussion of the ethnicity of the Taliban and the success of the operations against them has received a new impetus. During the...

Taliban Increasingly Unpopular in Pakistan

VIEW: Rehabilitation of the Taliban —Gulmina Bilal Ahmad

Courtesy to "Daily Times" 

Young children were kidnapped by the Taliban and then made to serve as suicide bombers. These young men, and in the latter part of the battle young women, became cannon fodder for the Taliban’s heinous designs. They did not have the freedom to choose their path

At least 13 people dead in the Lahore blast. On the day that marked the hundredth anniversary of the International Women’s Day, many wom...

analysis: Kamal Mehsud: did the ISPR cheat him? —Farhat Taj

Courtesy to "Daily Times" 

Kamal Mehsud’s story is just one of the hundreds of stories of horror in Waziristan. The other stories are much more brutal and sinister in terms of the intelligence agencies’ collusion with the Taliban

Kamal Mehsud was the most famous singer of Waziristan. He died in January 2010 in a fire that broke out in his house when his family was away for a wedding ceremony. The family believes he has...

VIEW: We do not learn from history —Wazhma Frogh

Courtesy to "Daily Times" 

Women’s groups, Afghan civil society organisations and activists have regularly raised alarm because they are concerned that the cooption of the Taliban is likely to amount to a loss of the achievements made over the past nine years

Could we turn the clock back in Afghanistan and travel through time? If so, then the Bonn Agreement of 2001 would be the right time and place to present the Taliban reintegrat...

BOOK REVIEW: Humanising the monster —by Dr Mohammad Taqi

My life with the Taliban, By Abdul Salam Zaeef

Courtesy to "Daily Times" 

Translated from Pashto and edited by Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn
Hurst/Columbia University Press; Pp 331

In his foreword to Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef’s book, Professor Barnett Rubin of New York University sets the stage for the launch, ostensibly, of a refreshingly authentic work of this inaccurate and revisionist take on contemporary Afghan...

analysis: Interpreting tribal leaders of FATA —Farhat Taj

Courtesy to "Daily Times" 

Anger against the Pakistan Army and the Taliban is intense and getting more intense with every passing day and so is disappointment with the government of Pakistan

I am compiling a list of the
tribal leaders of FATA who have been victims of target killings from 2003 onwards. This is still a work in progress and my estimate is that the names in the final list would be well over 1,000. There is a wid...

analysis: Midas’s gold —Mir Mohammad Ali Talpur

Courtesy to "Daily Times"

The powerless provincial government in Balochistan, if it has a modicum of decency, should quit immediately to absolve itself of the responsibility of exploitation and destruction of Balochistan’s resources and environment

Nawab Aslam Raisani,
Chief Minister (CM) Balochistan, announced last year that the provincial cabinet had unanimously decided to cancel an agreement with Tethyan Copper and Gold Company (TCC) ...

 

It was called the ‘New Left.’ Emerging in Britain in the 1950s, the New Left was the left’s disparaging response to the authoritarian tendencies of Marxism mainly symbolised by so-called ‘Stalinism’. The New Left revisited Marxist doctrines and atte...

COMMENT: The Balochistan truth —Sanaullah Baloch

Courtesy to "Daily Times"

The increasing rate of preventable maternal mortality is a symptom of the larger social injustice of discrimination against women. Thousands of avoidable maternal deaths each year indicate the government’s unfaithfulness to domestic and international laws

During the recent visit of
President Asif Ali Zardari, due to closure of the roads in Quetta, a poor woman gave a birth in an auto rickshaw. The situation in Ba...

The Process of Your Life Should Be the Process of Your Education

Dayal Chandra Soni

THE NECESSITY AND THE ABILITY TO LEARN ARE IMPLICIT IN HUMAN NATURE

The greatest and the most harmful illusion, from which our society is suffering today, is that ‘schooling’ and ‘education’ are synonymous. So, the most important task before all thoughtful and honest citizens in our society is to break this illusion. The origin and functioning of teaching-learning on this earth is as old as...

This conversation was published in The Post-development Reader compiled and introduced by Majid Rahnema with Victoria Bawtree (Zed Books, Fernwood Publishing, 1997).

Majid Rahnema: Ivan, I was already "contaminated" by many of your ideas on development and education, when I first read your talk on "Development as Planned Poverty," later followed by your other great essay on the Epimethean Man. Like your other writings...

A historical view of terrorism – By Dr. Mubarak Ali

A STUDY of terrorism from a historical perspective would shed light on the origin of this phenomenon and the motivation behind it. It has manifested itself in different hues and colours.

Terrorism has emerged in different circumstances with different aims and objectives. One of its earliest forms was directed against individuals when political or religious groups resorted to violence against people who posed a threat to their e...

What is Terrorism and How to Fight It?

Terrorism is defined as the use of violence without warning at places of one’s own choosing in order to achieve political aims. There are other such definitions too and all of them refer to acts such as the hijacking of aircrafts, detonating bombs in public places, indiscriminate firing upon civilians, derailing trains, demolishing buildings, releasing dangerous gases in public places and so on. In short, the definitions refer to the ...

The UNESCO as well as many linguists agree that children should get their basis schooling in their mother tongue. Pakistani schools, as I have argued in my article published in this section earlier (Dawn 23 November), generally impose alien languages upon them. There is, however, one school which makes a conscious effort at giving respect to a language other than English. As it is an elitist English-medium institution for small children it h...

POVERTY AND EDUCATION by Dr. Tariq Rahman

analysis: The dauntless heroes of NWFP Police —Farhat Taj

Courtesy to "Daily Times" 

The public perceive the police as as much an innocent casualty as the innocent civilians in the state’s pursuit of strategic goals in Afghanistan. They see an ethnic discrimination behind the lack of equipment, and training of the police

A considerable public perception in the NWFP puts an alarming ethnic perspective on the rising police casualties in the province. They note that the police dispr...

VIEW: Going dry —Gulmina Bilal Ahmad

Courtesy to "Daily Times"

We are so consumed with a matter of private faith that we will accept all ills in a head of state but not the fact that s/he is a non-Muslim. What right do we have to say that there is equality before the law in Pakistan when one of our laws bars a Pakistani from a position on the basis of his/her religion?

We are consumed by religion. The Muslims amongst us are consumed by Islam whereas the non-Muslim Pakistanis are consumed ...