Notes in Anguish

On 29 Nov 2022 Gen Bajwa skulked away into what, he must have been praying, would be oblivion. But he had already donated his name to the lexicon of metaphors. And so he is not fated to find oblivion in life nor in death. He will continue to live on, and for all the wrong… →

Gen Asim Munir is the new Army Chief. He is well spoken of, and one hopes he will also be spoken well of when he retires. I say this because, with the mantle that has fallen on him, he has been handed a chalice more poisoned than any of his predecessors was. The difficulties he… →

Perhaps Tasnim Haider Shah has put that fear of God in Nawaz Sharif’s mind which nothing else could. The quality of Shah sahib’s evidence on which he based his charges against NS, to the effect that he was given the first right of refusal to eliminate both Arshad Sharif and Imran Khan, is not known.… →

One could not have thought that the humiliation of the army could have been improved upon what transpired after the surrender in Dacca on 16 Dec 1971. Cols Aleem Afridi and Agha Javed Iqbal were despatched by Brig F.B. Ali to meet Gen Gul Hassan with an ultimatum he was asked to convey to Yahya… →

Nawaz Sharif, except when he is doing battle with food, is the very picture of an exquisite dullness. The only other time his zest betrays itself is when he selects his Army Chiefs. Unlike the masterful prowess he displays on the dining table, he has never done quite so well with these selections. In the… →

Primarily it is the same importance that it holds for the Zardaris, the Sharifs, and the rest of our “Elite” i.e Pakistan is a country they can all rob. This is much as was the case with India, when the Mir Jaffers and Sadiqs and the British were similarly arrayed on the same side against… →

When General Sir Douglas Gracey was the Commander in Chief of the Pakistan Army, he informed PA-1, Maj Gen Mohammad Akbar “rungroot” [the senior most Pakistan Army officer], to be prepared to take over the Pakistan Army as its next Chief. Akbar turned down the prospective elevation. He informed Gracey that he didn’t think he… →

The judge in question is Mr Mathew Nicklin. The case has to do with Ali Imran being broken into the art of stealing foreign exchange under the expert eye of his father-in-law, the Rt Hon’ble Mr Shahbaz Sharif, the Prime Minister of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. The brief of this case is: –In 2005… →

Our affliction has been long and unrelieved except by dreams of our own making, weaved around false promises dished out to us. We’ve been in slow decline, but what was a gradual fall has become a torrent in the recent past. Like the value of the Mark in Weimar Germany, the life of our most… →

A hit on Imran Khan was always on the cards. His remaining alive carried with it the threat that, with almost the whole population behind him, he may get back into power. And his return to power was a threat to those who engineered the sellout of Pakistan. The only bright sparks in this drama… →

I do not know Gen Nadeem Anjum or Gen Babar Iftikhar, nor know anyone who knows them. I did hear them speak on Oct 27,2022 but have no way of evaluating what they asserted, beyond noting that the press conference was unprecedented. It was obvious that this conference was an attempt to set the record… →

A little after our blood-soaked independence, signs of our economic progress started to become visible–slowly at first, and then a bit rapidly. They manifested themselves in new infrastructure, dams, bridges, roads etc followed by high rises and factories etc. And these became cynosures of our hopes and fired our imaginations for what the future may… →