COMMENT: Afghanistan portents —Dr Rashid Ahmad Khan Those who see the NATO forces’ withdrawal as a repeat of the American pullout from Vietnam in 1975 or the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989 are grossly mistaken The year 2010 has witnessed a series of developments in Afghanistan, which, as Admiral Mike Mullen, the Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff (CJCS) has said, are going to make it a make or break year for the US-NATO-led war in the country. The war in Afghanistan has become more intense and the NATO casualties have risen. President Hamid Karzai has fixed … Continue reading Afghanistan portents

Unity needed by Faisal Kapadia Pakistan faces a terrible time at the moment with the worst ever floods in its history. Around twenty million people are out there, in the flood-affected regions, most of them without a roof in the pelting monsoon rains which have lashed the country for the last two weeks. The resulting flood has devastated Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, large swathes of land, villages and crops in Punjab and is now presently wreaking havoc in Sindh. As I write this, an image of a woman carrying a four-month old baby I saw on the news today, is burnt in … Continue reading Unity needed for Pakistan

Next time, throw a book by Saima Shakil Hussain Along with a shoe, one wishes someone would throw a book or two at some of our newsmakers. Maybe, just maybe, it would do a world of good to them and to us, the 175 million Pakistani people who are affected daily by their words and (mis)deeds. However, in the case of some newsmakers, it appears that they are already hard at work studying some old classics …. What they are reading President Asif Zardari: The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli Granted, the sixteenth-century treatise on statecraft will read like a virtual … Continue reading Forget shoes – throw books instead

by Sana Saleem “It would have been better if we had died in the floods as our current miserable life is much more painful,” said Ahmed who fled with his family from the town of Shikarpur and spent the night shivering in the rain that has continued to lash the country.” “It looks like the number of people affected in this crisis is higher than the Haiti earthquake, the tsunami or the Pakistan earthquake, and if the toll is as high as the one given by the government, it’s higher than the three of them combined,” Maurizio Giuliano, spokesman for … Continue reading Lend a helping hand

Silence is not an option By Kamran Shafi dawn.com Relatives and policemen carry the flag-draped coffin of Sifwat Ghuyur, a senior police officer, to a burial site during his funeral in Peshawar August 5, 2010. Ghuyur was killed in a suicide attack on his car a day earlier in the city of Peshawar, a police official said. – Reuters Photo Enough is bloody enough! Enough of deafening silence as our people, women, men and children, are mercilessly killed and maimed and widowed and orphaned by cold-blooded murderers and their handlers and motivators. How many more Safwat Ghayyurs and Mushtaq Baigs … Continue reading ISI needs to take on Mullahs

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard ‘digging mass graves for US soldiers’ The Iranian Revolutionary Guard is digging mass graves for American soldiers in preparation for a war over its nuclear programme, according to a former senior commander. By Richard Spencer telegraph.co.uk The scene in the south of Iran where hundreds of mass graves have been dug General Hossein Moghadam, the Guard’s former deputy chief, was speaking after film footage showed strings of freshly dug graves in the south of the country. They were close to the site of war graves for the dead of the long war between Iran and Saddam Hussein’s … Continue reading Iran’s mass graves for US soldiers

$1.1 billion worth of dollar coins in US storage as Americans refuse to use coins A stockpile of dollar coins worth more than $1.1 billion that if stacked would reach seven times higher than the International Space Station is languishing in storage because Americans prefer dollar bills. By Chris Irvine telegraph.co.uk Americans prefer using notes to coins Photo: ALAMY Inventory is expected to grow to $2 billion (£1.3bn) in the next six years, despite calculations that the US Federal Reserve, which is running out of storage space, has enough dollar coins to last another decade. Only an act of Congress … Continue reading $1.1 billion worth of dollar coins in storage