Imran Khan’s less than four-year stint as prime minister of Pakistan came to an abrupt end with his defeat in a vote of no confidence in the National Assembly on 9 April. His departure marked …
Articles by: "Claude Rakisits"
The past two weeks or so haven’t been great for Pakistan on the world stage. On 24 February, Prime Minister Imran Khan, on an official visit to Russia, held a three-hour meeting with President Vladimir …
Two years ago, on 5 August 2019, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi removed the autonomy of Jammu and Kashmir as a state (the only Muslim-majority one in India) and redesignated it as two union territories, …
On 26 February, the Paris-based Financial Action Task Force (FATF), a 39-country anti–money laundering and counter–terrorism financing watchdog, decided to yet again keep Pakistan on the ‘grey list’ for failing to complete the last three …
On 5 August 2019, Prime Minister Narendra Modi scrapped Article 370 of the Indian constitution, which allowed the state of Jammu and Kashmir to make its own laws, and cancelled Article 35A, which gave the …
During this pandemic, much of the world’s attention has been focused on China and on how Covid-19 outbreaks are being handled in various countries, notably Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, the United States, Singapore, South …
Last week, the US State Department designated the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist. The Pakistani government officially declared the BLA a proscribed entity in 2006 following a number of terrorist …
Last week’s terrorist attack about 20 kilometres from Srinagar, the capital of Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir, was the deadliest attack since 1989, when a militant insurgency against Indian rule began. Almost 50 paramilitary troops travelling …
The results of last week’s national and provincial elections in Pakistan came as a surprise to most analysts (including me). And while everyone expected that the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) (PML-N), the incumbent governing party …
Late last week a US drone killed Maulana Fazlullah, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban—known as the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP)—in Afghanistan’s eastern Kunar province. This is a serious body blow to the TTP, which had …
The decision to release Hafez Muhammad Saeed—the founder and leader of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), a US- and UN-designated terrorist organisation—by a court in Lahore last week will be poorly received by Pakistan’s external interlocutors, particularly India …
On 1 August, the parliament of Pakistan overwhelmingly elected Shahid Khaqan Abbasi as the new prime minister following the Supreme Court’s decision to unanimously declare that Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was not ‘honest’ and that …