Megalomaniac

In the aftermath of a double suicide attack after a service on Sunday at Peshawar’s All Saints Church, more than 80 Christians, half of them women and children, were martyred and more than 100 others injured. It was the deadliest-ever attack on Pakistan’s Christian community. Words cannot describe the pain everyone must have felt while watching the tragic visuals on our television screens: parents looking helplessly for their children, family members holding dead bodies of their loved ones, children in shock at the tragedy they had just witnessed, men and women shouting and screaming at the authorities to help them. It was a nightmare…a nightmare that will not end when we open our eyes, a nightmare that will keep unfolding until our state decides to stop capitulating before the terrorists responsible for murder and mayhem. Unfortunately, it seems that those at the helm of the affairs have no such intentions. As a result, our religious minorities will continue to be threatened, persecut...

The most common thing in Pakistan, apart from conspiracy theories, is Zardari-bashing. To blame Mr Zardari for all the ills that befell our country is easy but at the same time it is wrong and unfair. The reason he tops the list of the most unpopular leaders in Pakistan’s history is because a concerted campaign was started against him by the military establishment and its lackeys from the moment he got married to Benazir Bhutto. It was not just to malign him as an individual but also to tarnish his wife’s name in the process. He spent more than eleven years in jail as a political prisoner. Imagine being away from your wife and young children for eleven and a half years, spending time in solitary confinement, being tortured only because you were married to the country’s most popular leader - a woman the military establishment feared like no other. Mr Zardari might not be a saint but then again, none of us are; yet he has suffered like no other. President Asif Ali Zardari’s presidentia...