That the Pakistan army had lost its ‘holy cow’ status within the country became more than evident in April last year when despite serious objections by the opposition, Pakistan’s National Assembly Standing Committee on Interior passed the Criminal Law [amendment] Act 2020. Accordingly, Section 500A [Titled-intentional ridiculing of the Armed Forces] was included in Act XLV of Pakistan Penal Code […]

Islamabad : Dr. Muhammad Faisal, Pakistan’s Ambassador to Germany, has said that Germany is the most populous country in Europe and Pakistan has a positive trade balance with it. Mr. Faisal was speaking at International Conference and Roundup on “Pak-German relations: Afghanistan post-2022 prospects and challenges” organised by South Asian Strategic stability (SASSI) University here. Faisal said that Germany is […]

How did the political crisis escalate? The Pakistani parliament voted no confidence in Prime Minister Imran Khan in the early hours of 10 April, in a culmination of tensions that had been building for some time. Khan’s main opponents, former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N) and Bilawal Bhutto Zardari’s Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), had long insisted that […]

Militants ambushed Pakistani troops in a former Taliban stronghold in the northwest, triggering an intense shootout in which two officers and two insurgents were killed, the military said Tuesday. The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack in a statement. The pre-dawn gunbattle happened in South Waziristan, a district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, according to a military statement. It said […]

A Pakistani court has jailed Islamist leader Hafiz Saeed, founder of the militant group blamed by the United States and India for a deadly 2008 attack in India, for 31 years in connection with terrorism financing, court documents showed. Saeed was found guilty of multiple breaches in two cases but it was not immediately clear how much jail time the […]

Following 9/11, when jihadi groups in the Pakistan-Afghanistan region attracted global attention, the Pakistani military-backed jihadi organization Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) came under international scrutiny. However, the Pakistani government, unable to act against the military-aided jihadi organizations, continued to turn a blind eye to LeT. Lashkar-e-Taiba continued to operate under various names. Although LeT went underground in Pakistan, its leaders began functioning […]

Pakistan’s Shehbaz Sharif was sworn in as the country’s prime minister on Monday at the President House, officially taking over from ousted premier Imran Khan. The oath was administered by the chairman of Pakistan’s Senate, Sadiq Sanjrani, in the absence of President Arif Alvi, a member of Khan’s party, who said he was unwell.

Despite close political relations and geographical proximity, sanctions by United States on the Islamic Republic have prevented Iran-Pakistan economic ties from realizing their full potential, solely because the Islamic Republic of Iran cannot access international banking. To resolve the mentioned problem, the two countries inked a barter trade agreement during the meeting of their Joint Economic Committee in Tehran in […]

Imran Khan on Sunday became the first Pakistani Prime Minister to lose a no-confidence vote, after failing in a last-ditch effort to block a vote that the country’s Supreme Court had said must be held on Saturday. Pakistan’s parliament began voting late on Saturday night on a no-confidence motion against Khan, after a 13-hour impasse in which parliament was adjourned […]

Every seminar on global peace and harmonious coexistence invariably has two things in common. One, all speakers wax eloquent in projecting their own countries as unconditional champions of peace, while portraying an unfriendly state as the fountainhead of evil, and responsible for the existing sorry state of affairs. Two, every speaker displays remarkable magnanimity, making reconciliatory offers to mend fences […]