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Remembering Salman Taseer
Today marks the third death anniversary of Salman Taseer. Usually political figures, even those assassinated, are remembered on their birthdays, but Taseer is different, mainly for what his death...
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Who Won 2013 In Pakistan?
A few days ago, fellow blogger @mediagag showed me a rather unique way of looking back at the year. It was a link to a series of posts on the American website Grantland, where the author Rembert Browne...
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Terrorism Report 2013
Data is from SATP, as all of PIPS’ stuff is behind paywalls now. SATP data is sometimes inaccurate and their casualty counts are higher than PIPS. Terrorist fatalities have been excluded. Total means...
View ArticleA Different World
A mock draft to fulfill some mundane fantasies A couple of things to mention before you begin reading this: first, this is a long piece, so I’d recommend you to stop right now . Second, this is the...
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This is not our war (Syria edition)
Well if things weren’t bad or stupid enough, they’re about to get worse and stupider. Here’s a graph of Muslim countries, ordered by the percentage of their population that is Shia (I averaged the...
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You Make My Finger Hover
He does it as a reflex, grabbing the remote as the first shouts of “out hai” fill the room. He had already stood up a few seconds earlier, and now he reaches out to the table and picks up his escape...
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Thinking out loud about what a “Taliban victory” in Pakistan looks like
I’m using this post mostly to think out loud about something I have been thinking about for a few months, so please bear with me if some of it is dumb. Mostly I’m trying to think through the tension...
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Some questions about the North Waziristan operation
I do not know the answers to these questions: 1. Which groups are being targeted? 2. Which groups are not being targeted? What does it say that the likes of JuD have explicitly come out in support of...
View ArticleFingerprint Verification
I have written about it before. Earlier. It was on how the majority of votes cannot even be verified. You can check that out here, and please read it before reading this post. Let’s start with hearings...
View ArticleFingerprint Verification – Part 3
This is the third in a series of posts on the ‘fingeprint verification’ of ballots in Pakistan. I first wrote about it in September 2013, when the whole exercise was picking up steam as some forensic...
View ArticleFake ‘Richest Pakistani’ lists
Well, this post is just because I’m fed up of telling sane minded, non-mentally challenged people again and again that there are no ‘official’ lists of wealthiest Pakistanis, or one prepared by a...
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The Sharif Family
As promised at the end of the previous post, here’s some extended detail into the wealth of the Sharif family. Almost all comes from publicly available documents that the politically active members of...
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Some thoughts on the horrific Peshawar attack
1. In the overall context of the state’s war against the Taliban and its affiliates, this has been probably the best year since 2007. Fewer civilians are dying in Pakistan in terrorist attacks today...
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Words That Kill
The following is a guest post by Mr. Irfan Husain. The article was originally submitted to Dawn by Mr. Husain, who is one of their regular op-ed writers. However, due to its contents, Dawn found...
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Universities with money should give some money to universities without money
The following propositions are true: 1. Universities claim to want to generate upward social mobility, mainly by educating poor, working class, and middle class people and making them upper class and...
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