By Ayesha Siddiqa/ Published: October 31, 2012

The writer is an independent social scientist and author of Military Inc.

The writing of history is indeed an essential art which is critical to any nation’s emotional, psychological and eventually material development. But it is also an art that is lost easily, especially when states begin to treat history writing as a process of jotting down events and doing linear interpretations....

Development, population growth and a certain mindset are some of the factors that are destroying the rock art of Swat

By Rafiullah Khan
The past is not only a scarce resource but it is also the most threatened one. The threat is largely posed by the process of ‘development’. Pakistan is not an exception to this situation. This is an alarming situation because in this way the material sources of human history are being destroyed.

All the rock art sites of the Swat Valley are vulnerab...

Agha Waqar Ahmad deserves a medal from the people of Pakistan for his great service to the nation. In a few short days, he has exposed just how far Pakistan has fallen into the pit of ignorance and self-delusion. No practical joker could have demonstrated more dramatically the true nature of our country’s political leaders, popular TV a...

Published: May 21, 2012
The writer teaches physics and political science at LUMS. He holds a doctorate in physics from MIT

The honourable Chief Justice of Pakistan says he is losing patience with the Capital Development Authority (CDA). In a court-initiated (suo motu) action, he wants a quick rebuilding of the Jamia Hafsa madrassa, flattened by bulldozers in 2007, after it became the centre of an insurgency. A three-judge bench of the Supreme Cou...

This is when a succession of authors and academics rose angrily to suggest that ...

HOW scientific are the social sciences?

Economists, political scientists and sociologists have long suffered from an academic inferiority complex: physics envy. They often feel that their disciplines should be on a par with the “real” sciences and self-consciously model their work on them, using language (“theory,” “experiment,” “law”) evocative of physics and che...

When holy warriors wage their jihad, the first casualties are those whose cause they claim to represent. The poor and oppressed become further disempowered, and are ultimately crushed under tanks or blown up by cruise missiles

“Never before had been so tragic the links between wealth and weakness, material resources and moral bankruptcy. Never before in the history of Islamic peoples had there been so total a separation of political power and civil society”.

This was Eqbal Ahmad...

On February 9, 2012, the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee of the United States House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs convened a hearing on "Baluchistan" [sic], chaired by Congressman Dana Rohrabacher (R – CA). I, along with Messrs Ralph Peters, T. Kumar, Ali Dyan Hasan and Dr. M. Hosseinbor, testified as a witness in that hearing.

When I agreed to participate, I was told that the hearing was intended to be a ...

Sitting in a car parked at a gas station on the outskirts of Houston, Texas, my colleague Michelle holds an audio recorder to my cellphone. At the other end of the line is Arundhati Roy, author ...

Saying that the branch along with CT (Counter-terrorism) section were critical wings of the ISI, Ijaz alleged that the S Branch conspires intervention in other countries like Afghanistan as well as manipulate...

Occupy London is 50 days old on Monday and it's time to take stock. Unlike those occupations across the world that started off small and were able to expand gradually, our occupation was born in the full glare of the media on 15 O...

Striving for beauty through proximity to God is a theme that has always permeated Muslim poetry in different historical contexts. Here’s a look at poetics and ethics in Islamic art.

By Ayesha Jalal | From the Nov. 25, 2011, issue.

Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Security is a concept that changes with the times, responding to systemic changes in human governance, priorities, technology, economy as well as sociology. The most important question is what you want to secure. A related question is defining the ‘what’ in the above question. Pakistan appears to be unable to respond to these issues.

The international system based on state sovereignty has undergone sea changes. Sovereignty as “exclusive jurisdiction over a piece of territory” (M...

When people all over Pakistan will be celebrating Eid-ul-Azha, the people of Balochistan will be mourning their loved ones. The responsibility for this lies with the Pakistan military, its intelligence agencies and the Frontier Corps (FC). The entire nation should be ashamed of the brutalities unleashed by the military against its own people in Balochistan. Javed Naseer Rind, a young journalist, was abducted in September and his tortured, bullet-riddled body was found the other day in...

Published: October 29, 2011

The writer is Director at the South Asian Media School in Lahore khaled.ahmed@tribune.com.pk

A recent All Parties Conference (APC) has formally handed over foreign-cum-Taliban policy to the army. What the political parties are after is one another’s scalp: their default position is plotting the downfall of elected governments. The Pakistan Army is now in a precarious position of either taking the country out of the terrorist mess or repeating past blunders. If...

Illustration by Faraz Aamer Khan/Dawn.com

For over two decades, Pakistan’s socio-political landscape has been dominated by narratives and actions of the religious right.

Those concerned by the right’s onslaught and dominance have bemoaned the decline and defeat of the country’s ‘moderate’ and liberal polities, rightly complaining that their voices have been drowned.

The religious right’s growing intolerance, intimidation and sometimes outright violence (ever since the 1980s), ha...

Alladi Krishnaswami Ayyar, member of the drafting committee of the Indian constitution.

THE survival and consolidation of parliamentary democracy in Pakistan hinges on how the emergent judicialisation of politics is dealt with and curtailed in the near future. Judicialisation refers to the profound shift in power away fr...

The Pakistani planners apparently lauded the UN separation of the Taliban and al Qaeda on the sanctions blacklist. This distinction does not necessarily mean lifting the sanctions; it in fact sets the stage for further sanctions against al Qaeda-affiliated terrorists, especially the India-oriented Punjabi jihadist groups based in Pakistan’s heartland

In his speech on June 22, 2011, Barack Obama outlined the drawdown of the US forces from Afghanistan. He declared his plans to pull o...

Pakistan is not a republic, nor is it a theocracy; rather it is a praetorian state. A praetorian state is one where political power is concentrated in the hands of a select elite within the military. Hasan Askari Rizvi, a prominent analyst, writes: “Pakistan can be desc...