Pakistan's recent temporary closure of a key supply route for NATO ISAF forces in Afghanistan raises fresh questions about whether Pakistan is fully capable of defeating the Pakistani Taliban. Few people doubt the Pakistani government's public commitment to tackle terrorism....

From The Guardian comes the depressing news that the cancer of Sharia Law has infected the body of Pakistan. Pakistanis to impose Islamic law in a vast region of the north-west called Malakand in an attempt to placate extremists, even as President Asif Zardari warns that they are “trying to take over the state”. Pakistani Taliban militants

Our leaders are losing sleep over the Taliban's advance and what that could spell for Britain I would like to welcome Zahid Abdullah to Britain. He is a Pakistani student of English literature, rather than the snarling prose of the theocrats who threaten his country, and suffered the keenest blow a lover of books can take when he lost his sight. Undeterred, Abdullah divided his spare time bet...

Asked for the Prime Minister s view regarding the British police being refused access to the surviving suspect of the Mumbai terrorist attack by the Pakistani authorities, the PMS said that we were still trying to get to the bottom of the point being raised by Pakistan, as the suspect was being held by the Indian authorities, not the Pakistani authorities. original source.

In The Afghanistan Strategy we discussed one problem with the administration plan, namely reliance on more money being a precursor to Pakistani operations against the Taliban.  Some powerful people in Pakistan don’t really believe that the Taliban are a threat to Pakistan’s stability, and still believe in using them as a counterbalance to what they

Since the bin-Laden killing, relations between the US and Pakistan have plummeted.And the US government isn't telling you the half of it, as Pakistan's complicity with our enemies continues to surface. The Pakistani government, after turning over to the Chinese the wreckage of a US helicopter used in the bin-Laden raid equipped with advanced stealth technology arrested five Pakistani inf...

Parts of Pakistan have suffered a number of devastating earthquakes in recent years. In this article, Zab Mustefa draws attention to how the Pakistani community in Edinburgh have been affected and their response. The Imam at Edinburgh Central Mosque, Sajad Asam lost his father and two uncles in his hometown of Mussafrabad. Aid has been raised across the community, including in cooperation with the...

I will go back out to Pakistan again later this year. In the meantime I have been talking to Pakistani friends and to journalists and others based in Pakistan, before trying to give a few considered thoughts on Hillary Clinton's extraordinary and calculated remarks on Wednesday about the "mortal threat" to the USA posed by Pakistan. The first and most obvious point is that, since Obama and Hi...

In one sense, the claim of responsibility from the Pakistani Taliban for yesterday's attack on the police school, more accurately known as the Tehreek-e-Taliban, headed by Baitullah Mehsud, is something of a relief; it means, that as yet, Lashkar-e-Taiba, another group founded by Pakistan's intelligence agencies, has not declared war on the Pakistani state itself, even if they remain the...

Pakistani politicians are furious that American soldiers carried out a raid against alleged Al-Qaeda operatives on Pakistani territory. This is a very tangled issue. Firstly, the Pakistani's are alleging that the raid was based on faulty intelligence and resulted in the killing of innocent citizens, including women and children. On the other hand it is clear that Pakistan has been at best ign...