By Masood Hasan The Goddess of Despair and Despondency has taken up permanent residence in this 63-year-old-country which lurches from crisis to crisis every single minute of the day. She has spread her shroud of death over this land and watches from afar as we implode within and impale without on poisoned spears that inject [...]

By Anwaar Hussain Robert Michael Gates, the 22nd United States Secretary of Defense, spoke at a press conference recently in Kabul.  “There is still much fighting ahead, and there will assuredly be more dark days….but there is reason to be hopeful that Afghan and coalition forces can rout the hardest elements of the Taliban and [...]

By Ayaz Amir Times may be hard but why add to the sum of national misery? Some of our afflictions, like the economic downturn and the war raging along the Afghan frontier, may be beyond anyone’s control. But some are entirely self-created. We are not a police state in the political sense of the term. [...]

By Anwaar Hussain President Obama’s decision to surge the troops’ level in Afghanistan is understandable. That is the only thing America can do in fact. They cannot just pack their bags and go home. They are losing the war with the present troop strength. All other conventional tactics have been tried out. The troop surge [...]

By Anwaar Hussain Strange title, eh? Wait a bit please. Hoh is the surname of a former Marine who fought in Iraq and became a diplomat in a Taliban stronghold in Afghanistan and who on September 10 this year resigned in a high-profile protest of the Afghan war. In so doing, Matthew Hoh became the [...]

By Anwaar Hussain Listen up Government of Pakistan. If I were a Taliban advisor, this is what I would advise them; First and foremost I would tell Hakimullah Mehsud, the Shadow of God, to raise the golden whip of religion a little higher and continue wielding it at that height flogging all and sundry every [...]

By Anwaar Hussain Finally, the battle on the one-time protégés begins–the battle that was first promised in June and for which troops had been gathering on Waziristan’s horizons for the past four months. The critical delay not only enabled the militants to overcome the reverses they had suffered in the Malakand region earlier during the [...]