Introducing Chota Jatt

When I was little, my after school staple was cartoons. Before my mother could yell at us to do our homework, we’d blissfully escape  into the folds of Thundercats or Transformers. We’d beg for “just ten more minutes” of Duck Tales or The Smurfs. We were kids of the ’80s and ’90s, who were lucky [...]

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If US & Pakistan Were An Ice Cream, They’d be Rocky Road – Bilal Baloch & Maria Hasan

Since the Raymond Davis debacle and the most recent Osama bin Laden raid & kill, much has been written about the future of U.S. and Pakistan relations. Some see the road ahead as rosy, likely to be steered back on course. Some see it as doomed to fail, unlikely to ever be resuscitated. Below Bilal [...]

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Post-PNS Mehran Thoughts

Star Wars Yoda. Cute & cuddly. No resemblance to armed militant. By now, you’ve all heard of the shocking attack on PNS Mehran, Pakistan’s largest naval base this past Sunday in Karachi. Here’s what we know: Armed militants stormed the base, using ladders to scale the back wall of one of Pakistan’s premier naval air [...]

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The WTF List

 It’s Friday, (ok fine, early morning Saturday), so I thought it was high-time for some recent WTF-worthy stories: WTF #1: Wikileaks has partnered with Dawn Newspaper, India’s NDTV and the Hindu to release a new round of secret U.S. diplomatic cables. Yikes. According to the cables, in 2008, COAS Gen. Ashfaq Kayani asked the U.S. [...]

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U.S. & Pakistan Relations: Mutual BS

Amid reported tensions between Washington and Islamabad since the Osama bin Laden raid and kill, the U.S. embassy in Islamabad said in statement this week, Pakistan-U.S. relations should go forward on the basis of mutual respect, mutual trust and mutual interest. But is the desire to mend these relations actually mutual? Just over the weekend, [...]

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Sick to My Stomach

Today, more than 80 paramilitary soldiers were killed when at least one suicide bomber blew himself up at a military training center in Charsadda. At least 115 people were wounded in the bombing, labeled by the NY Times as, “the first major terrorist attack since the American raid in Abbottabad on May 2 that killed [...]

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Deal or No Deal

It has been over a week since news broke that Osama bin Laden was killed in a U.S. operation in Abbottabad, and developments are still unfolding, tensions are still building, and we still are not quite sure what the hell is really going on. On Monday, our illustrious PM Yousaf Raza Gilani made a speech [...]

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Injustice Served – Hamza Khan

Just two weeks ago, Pakistan’s Supreme Court delivered a stunning sentence – acquitting five of the six men who had gang raped Mukhtar Mai, a woman brave enough to not only tell her story, but give voice to other voiceless and abused victims of sexual violence. Despite the news cycle unanimously shifting its attention to [...]

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Post-OBL Musings

By now, we have all heard the news. Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks and the head of Al Qaeda, was killed in a U.S. operation on Sunday night in Abbottabad, Pakistan. He was buried at sea today. Twitter streams were inundated with updates. The 24/7 news cycle has released a series [...]

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Ding Dong Osama’s Dead

Well friends, it appears after years of searching for Osama bin Laden, the hunt is over. Caput. Capiche. Ding dong the Wicked Witch is dead. Three cheers for freedom. The war is over. Not so fast. America may have pulled the trigger on the iconic OBL, but the “War on Terror” is not over. Tuck [...]

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