Moborate

The entire country seems to be seized with the issue of whether dual nationality holders should be allowed to hold public office in Pakistan . The Supreme Court is currently hearing a case against four Peoples Party parliamentarians including the President's media adviser Farahnaz Ispahani , whose National Assembly membership has been temporarily suspended by the court on prima facie evidence that she is also an American citizen. The Punjab Assembly has tried to weasel its way out of the same criteria being applied to its members by saying it has no record of which of its members are dual nationality holders . I'm not here to discuss the merits and contradictions of this issue, so if you can please leave that outrage for another time... What I'm really here to share, however, is an explosive little story that a little tweety bird with impeccable credentials has divulged to us (what, you think only Najam Sethi has mysterious chirryas ?). If you recall, a certain Interio...

The hue and cry over the 33-year sentence handed down to Dr Shakil Afridi , the doctor who may have aided the CIA in tracking down Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad is partly correct. Certainly, the fact that he was tried under the archaic Frontier Crimes Regulations, in secret, and without the chance to defend himself through a lawyer, makes the whole process highly suspect and against the basic principles of a fair trial. Valid questions have also been raised about the hollowness of some of the charges brought against him, including, apparently, 'waging war against Pakistan'. Dr Shakil Afridi (Photo: Express) However, some of the apoplectic reaction from members of civil society, which has condemned Dr Afridi being tried at all , is thoroughly misplaced. Some believe he did a great thing by helping rid Pakistan of the world's most dangerous terrorist and so should be thanked or awarded rather than prosecuted. Others have drawn comparisons between his swift trial and convic...

I don't watch Kamran Shahid 's show. I really don't. That's why I had to be told by another Pyala that I should probably see what happened on his show on Express TV yesterday. Having now seen the show in its entirety, I can safely say that my initial position was well-founded. Here was a show on Balochistan , whose dire situation is, thankfully, finally receiving some space in the media that has long shut its eyes hoping uncomfortable truths would all just go away. Recently there have been a few eloquent and blood-curdling pieces in the print media as well as no-nonsense coverage on some television channels. Some of the best coverage in the mainstream print media has been in Dawn : Here is veteran journalist I. A. Rehman today on " Balochistan's Agony ", here is writer Mohammed Hanif 's heart-rending front-page piece on February 11 on " The Baloch Who Is Not Missing ", and here is Dawn 's strong editorial on the same subject a day after...

We have been frequent critics of Imran Khan the politician in the past and with very good reason. I still hold that his prescriptions for Pakistan's various ills are entirely simplistic and that his flirtations with the mullah lobby are dangerous indicators of his muddle-headed analysis of this country's political economy. And if anything gets my back up more, it's his and his supporters' dour self-righteousness on top of it all. But even I have to admit that for the first time ever Immy bhai exhibited a sense a wit when he dubbed Nawaz Sharif and Shahbaz Sharif , presiding over a grossly personalized maladministration in the Punjab , the "Dengue Biradraan" (the Dengue Brothers). It actually made me laugh. Perhaps a rising popularity graph in the province can do wonders for your self-confidence. It's certainly loosened Immy bhai's stiff neck it seems. Imran Khan addressing a big rally in Gujranwala in September A showdown of egos now looms as the P...

So, most of our readers have probably already heard about the advertisement that the Government of Pakistan took out in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) on the 10th anniversary of 9/11 . According to Dawn , the ad was first offered to the New York Times , which "refused to publish it, forcing Pakistani officials to go to a business newspaper with a specialised but influential readership." Here is the ad (via the LongWarJournal): Pakistan's 9/11 ad in the WSJ Irrespective of the merits of the advertisement - and there are many who have questioned its design and message - one of the intriguing questions that arise is why the New York Times refused to publish it. A half-page ad is, after all, darn good revenue especially in these recessionary times. According to the WSJ's own blog , which shrugged off the ad's chances of changing the anti-Pakistan narrative in the American media: "The [New York] Times asked for “more clarity in the ad about who was placing it,” ...

Consider the following lines from an AP  distributed article published in Dawn today: "With... government all but paralysed by scandal, the Supreme Court has taken command of some of the nation’s thorniest issues in what activists hail as an overdue flexing of judicial muscle but critics call an unconstitutional power grab.   In the past month, the court has frozen..., disbanded..., reversed the seizure of..., and begun searching for billions in illicit cash stashed abroad.   To many..., the judges are simply filling the vacuum left by politicians who have failed to protect the poor or battle corruption that has grown rampant across the nation. “Because these guys aren’t doing anything, the court is the only saviour right now,” said...   Parliament collapsed in pandemonium over the winter and reopened last week to similar chaos as lawmakers traded barbs and accused one another of graft and financial mismanagement....   The deluge of scandals and criti...

I have been greatly amused by some of the speculation around the reasons for our blog being untended for the past couple of weeks. Unfortunately none of the speculation centred on us being part of OBL's support staff who could not update the blog because we were currently on the run. That would have really made my day. Sadly, the truth is not only out there, it is decidedly prosaic. Anyhow... A view of the PTI dharna in Karachi (Photo: Nefer Sehgal / Express Tribune) Today marked the first day of Imran Khan 's grand show of farce force in Karachi. He had vowed a two-day  dharna (sit-in) to block NATO supply routes from the Karachi port in protest against continuing American drone strikes in the tribal areas and, by God, he kept his word. Or at least that's what his party faithful will have you believe. Here's what I have been thinking after making a quick round of his dharna site: 1. This must be the first dharna in the world where chairs were provided for the angry ...

I never expected, when I wrote this small post challenging one by-the-way assertion of The Express Tribune 's publisher about ET 's online presence vis a vis that of its far more established rival newspaper, Dawn , that it would lead to an all-out flame war in the comments section. Those jumping to ET 's defence began first with trying to discredit our data, interpretation and our web-savvy, followed it up with spin about what was really meant by asserting that ET was "neck in neck" [sic] online with Dawn (hint: it can mean nothing other than readership especially when you're talking about circulations), and ended up by accusing us of carrying out some sort of campaign against ET . I was hugely tempted not to further indulge such grandiose notions of self-importance and (supposed) victimization, not to mention the fact that the comparative online reach of Pakistan's English print media is not an immensely critical issue in my opinion in the larger scheme...

There were some funny murmurings on Twitter about us not having commented on The Express Tribune 's one-year anniversary issue . I really don't see why we needed to. I mean, we don't usually comment on other paper's self-congratulatory anniversary supplements. And contrary to popular perception, we are neither obsessed with ET nor do we go looking for opportunities to stick it to them. And to be fair, ET has matured in many ways since it began. It remains the best looking newspaper in Pakistan and, while there is still plenty to poke fun at in terms of content (as there is in other papers), it is still the only paper to appoint an independent ombudsman for reader complaints , an innovation that other Pakistani papers would do well to emulate. With all the stuff going on around us politically and even in the media, we also really haven't found the time to do an exhaustive read of the anniversary supplement. I doubt anyone actually does that with any supplement, as...

DISCLAIMER: This piece was written yesterday, and then languished overnight due to a PTCL outage. It contains emotion and other profanity. I am rarely at a loss for words. I certainly wasn’t this morning, when I started out on a smarmy skewering of George Fulton’s ‘I’m leaving Pakistan because she’s being mean to me dammit! ' piece in the Express Tribune yesterday. I was going to run with his personification of the blessed motherland as a flighty female prone to self-destructive megalomania, I was. I was particularly taken with the bit featuring the Bryan Adams song where Pakistan, the impenetrable, fecund, feminine other, sings to him the lyrics To really love a woman/ To understand her - you gotta know her deep inside/ Hear every thought - see every dream/ N' give her wings - if she wants to fly/ Then when you find yourself lyin' helpless in her arms/ You know you really love a woman... Then I ran it by another Pyala who, with what is in hindsight admirable self-restrain...

Much can be said - and is being said - about the latest Wikileaks saga. Around the world, the two biggest issues being grappled with are the future of diplomacy - would interlocutors be open and frank with each other if they fear that what they say in private is going to find its way to the web - and the repercussions on sensitive regions such as the Middle East of some of the explosive confirmations of what people sort of suspected anyway about their leaders and American designs on the world. Unfortunately, most of what is being said in Pakistan is terribly uninformed, and swings from one extreme of 'it's all a big CIA conspiracy to undermine the Muslim world' on the one hand to 'how can you argue with this gospel truth?' on the the other. The former position does not understand the phenomenon of Wikileaks in the first place and conveniently ignores the fact that, so far, only some 500 of the more than 250,000 confidential cables have been released in the media....

Run for your lives, art vultures! Picasso 's still alive, he's cloned himself into a small army, and all of them are mighty pissed at how much money you've been making off them! From Dawn 's ' International Pages ': Page 11 of Dawn today In case you have difficulty reading from the image, the story - about a cache of hitherto unknown works by the master painter discovered at an electrician's home - is headlined "Horde of Picassos discovered in Paris." Shall we give this the "I Work for an English Paper But Find the Language Really Confusing" Award in today's Bizarre Newspaper Headline Contest ?

Isn't is quite remarkable that almost none of the major newspapers in Pakistan thought that the 'leader of the Muslim Ummah' King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia , and the 'brotherly Muslim countries' of UAE and Qatar egging on the United States to bomb their supposed sibling in faith, the Islamic Republic of Iran - as revealed by Wikileaks - was worthy of any major headline? Without fail, all of them buried that bit in the secondary 'catch-lines', if at all, with possibly only the Express Tribune  and Nawai Waqt attaching it some real significance. Most focused on Abdullah's views on Asif Ali Zardari , while Dawn  and the Urdu Express decided that the American plan to take enriched uranium fuel out of Pakistan was the most newsworthy. Here's how some of the main newspapers' front pages looked today: Dawn : Jang: The News: The Nation: Nawai Waqt: Express: Express Tribune: Pakistan Today: (Apologies for not having The Daily Times up here but t...