Pakistan

Reuters reports: Toppled in a 1999 military coup, jailed and exiled, Pakistan’s Nawaz Sharif has made a triumphant election comeback and looks set to form a stable government capable of implementing reforms needed to rescue the fragile economy. Sharif may not win enough seats to rule on his own but has built up enough momentum [...]

Basharat Peer writes: [O]n Saturday, Pakistan was overwhelmed by an enthusiastic outpouring of voters across classes and ethnicities. Some waited for hours to get into the polling booths. Some walked miles, in temperatures ranging from a hundred to a hundred and ten degrees Farenheit. Some had flown from U.A.E., Saudi Arabia, United Kingdom, and the [...]

Shashank Joshi writes: October of last year marked the fiftieth anniversary of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Many Asian policymakers will read the lessons of that harrowing episode with some self-satisfaction. When India and Pakistan conducted their nuclear weapon tests in 1998, foreign analysts repeatedly told them that, as poor countries with weak institutions, they [...]

Owen Bennett-Jones writes: In her posthumously published book, Reconciliation, Benazir Bhutto named a man whom she believed had tried to procure bombs for an unsuccessful attempt on her life in Karachi in October 2007: I was informed of a meeting that had taken place in Lahore where the bomb blasts were planned … a bomb [...]

Mohammed Hanif writes: Apparently, Pakistanis don’t need the Taliban to destroy their schools any more – they can do it themselves. Last week, a girls’ high school was set ablaze in Pakistan’s second largest city, Lahore. And no, the Taliban were not the culprits. A mob, enraged after allegations of blasphemy against a teacher, carried [...]

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad writes: For advocacy to be successful, it has to come from a place of empathy rather than superiority. Many of the most vocal advocates of women’s rights in Pakistan today are also known for their sanguine views on the “war on terror.” It is, therefore, doubtful that their new self-image as the [...]

The Associated Press reports: Despite widespread outrage over the Taliban shooting of a female teenage activist, Pakistani leaders and opinion makers are divided over whether the government should respond by targeting the militants’ last major sanctuary along the Afghan border. The U.S. has long pressed Pakistan to launch an operation in the remote and mountainous [...]

Sami Yousafzai reports: Malala Yousafzai has taken one more step in her very long and difficult journey. Separated from her family for now, the 14-year-old Pakistani schoolgirl arrived today at Birmingham’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Britain’s primary receiving facility for military casualties returning from overseas. Doctors say she still has not regained consciousness since being shot [...]

BBC News reports: The 14-year-old Pakistani girl shot in the head by Taliban gunmen is being flown to the UK for medical treatment. Malala Yousafzai has until now been at a military hospital in Rawalpindi, with doctors saying her progress over the next few days would be “critical”. She remains in a serious condition after [...]

At Open Democracy, Meredith Tax writes: The US antiwar group Code Pink, which describes itself as “a women-initiated grassroots peace and social justice movement working to end US funded wars and occupations,” recently sent a delegation to Pakistsan to campaign against drones with Imran Khan. On October 9th, a dozen of them held a symbolic [...]