Huma Yusuf

WE need more art. Whatever inquiries into Arshad Sharif’s killing determine, his death will be a reminder of the limits of free speech in Pakistan — not least because he was forced to flee the country to escape thre­­­a­ts. And where speech is curtailed, images must prevail. This may seem like an anachronistic argument in this newly dawned era of ...

PAKISTANIS are rightfully upset at US President Joe Biden’s categorisation of their country as “one of the most dangerous nations in the world”. Perhaps our ire would be less if he had referenced urgent present-day challenges — climate change, food insecurity, domestic militancy — than the tired trope of nukes in unstable hands. The fact is, Pakistan may well be ...

BARELY weeks have passed since Pakistan `[declared an emergency][1]`, and the floods have slipped out of the headlines. Many people are yet to receive emergency relief or medical attention, and yet the news cycle has moved on. The media is filled with talks of bugs and leaks, but there are few references to disease-bearing mosquitoes hovering over stagnant floodwater, or lake ...

YOUNG Americans are miserable. So says a new study out of Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science. The study found that 18- to 25-year-olds reported the lowest well-being, and that perceptions of well-being increased steadily with age, with those over 77 expressing most satisfaction, followed closely by Boomers (aged 58 to 76). Pakistan does not yet have such well-being data ...

AS the scale of flood devastation becomes apparent, the sense of climate injustice is rightfully mounting. Pakistan emits less than one per cent of global greenhouse gases (GHG), but is the eighth most vulnerable country to climate change-related disasters, a vulnerability that has been horrifyingly laid bare over the past few weeks. There is no doubt that the Global North ...

WHATEVER one thinks of Shahbaz Gill, he should not be subjected to torture. No one should. It is a violation of international law, of human rights, of all decency and morality. And yet, it is not explicitly illegal in Pakistan. Even if it were (and one hopes it soon will be), the country’s sociopolitical context offers little hope for the ...

THE continuing political circus is distracting from the intense monsoon, the worst in three decades. Public and media attention is rightly focused on the devastation — 550 dead, infrastructure washed away, acute food and water shortages, especially dire in Balochistan. But we are still not doing enough to connect this devastation with broader climate change discourse, using the grim circumstances ...

THINGS fall apart, the centre cannot hold. W.B. Yeats’s poem is oft-quoted, usually histrionically. Yeats wrote the poem about impending anarchy at the end of World War I, when the Irish independence war was starting, and his wife was battling flu during the last century’s pandemic. But the shenanigans last week in the Punjab Assembly have emboldened me to make the reference. ...

REALPOLITIK trumps ideology. That’s the main lesson from the thawing relations between the Afghan Taliban and India. Pakistan must carefully track these evolving ties to calibrate not only its foreign policy, but also its sense of its own global standing. A recent visit by representatives from India’s external affairs ministry ostensibly focused on humanitarian aid delivery, but inevitably touched on ...

THE recent political circus in Islamabad — replete with tear gas and the burning of trees — has distracted the nation from some media reports of developments in Kabul where senior establishment figures are believed to be holding negotiations with the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). While fighting for political survival at D-Chowk, have the PML-N and PTI lost the battle for civilian supremacy over a ...