The shadow judge of the Taliban group identified as Qazi Mohsin was wounded during an operation in northern Baghlan province of Afghanistan, local media reported on Monday. Afghan Ministry of Defense (MoD) said at least 15 Taliban militants were killed during the operations conducted in Dand-e-Ghori. According to a statement by the MoD, the Taliban militants suffered the casualties as part of Naveed#1 operations being conducted to suppress the activities of the group. The statement…
Posts published in “Day: June 14, 2016”
ISLAMABAD/LANDI KOTAL: The Foreign Office summoned the acting Afghan envoy on Monday to express anger over unprovoked firing by Afghan troops at the Torkham border crossing which reportedly left several Pakistani troops and civilians injured. The incident took place on Sunday when Afghan forces fired at Pakistan troops from across the border to prevent the construction of a gate at the crossing point. The skirmish also left a soldier dead and six wounded on the…
ISLAMABAD / LANDIKOTAL / ISLAMABAD: Islamabad has strongly protested to Kabul over Sunday night’s ‘unprovoked firing’ by Afghan security forces at the Torkham border crossing as authorities clamped a curfew on the main border town amid renewed tensions between the two militancy-plagued neighbours. Afghan border guards started ‘unprovoked firing’ at roughly 9pm on Sunday to disrupt the construction of a gate on the Pakistani side of the border. The military released an image on Monday,…
LANDIKOTAL: Afghan forces again fired at Pakistani positions at Torkham on Monday when the Pakistanis restarted work on the construction and re-installation of the border gate, sources said. The Afghans reportedly used mortars to target the Bacha Maina village close to the Pak-Afghan border. However, no casualty was reported.The reinforced Pakistani forces at the border returned fire. The Pakistan Army had earlier sent reinforcements to Torkham backed by tanks and other heavy weapons to deter…
Angoor Adda check post not handed over to Afghanistan: Aizaz Report in Pakistan Today, June 14, 2016
Islamabad: Pakistan has not handed over the Angoor Adda check post to Afghanistan, Foreign Secretary Aizaz Chaudhry said on Monday, snubbing earlier claims made by the army. The army had earlier announced that the check post had been handed over to the Afghan authorities. Briefing the Senate Standing Committee on Defence and Foreign Affairs, he said Pakistan Army only constructed a gate for the Kabul government in Afghan area of the check post “as a…
The writer is a former ambassador teaching at Georgetown and Johns Hopkins University, US. TIES between the US and Pakistan have been passing through testing times. First the F-16s dispute, and then the drone strike that killed Mullah Mansour, followed by implied threats of more such strikes by President Obama. Is the relationship headed for another of the now-familiar downturns? Mark Twain once said the history does not repeat; it rhymes. The fact is this…
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan is considering a Jordanian offer to buy sixteen used F-16 jets in lieu of the eight advanced fighters it could not buy from the United States because of a financing row, but officials fear Washington could still throw a spanner in the works. The case for the purchase of F-16s from the US is closed, “we are now going for a third party transfer of F-16s and have an offer from Jordan”, Defence…
The writer teaches at IT University Lahore Since the educational reforms a decade ago, everyone hears about the first president of the Constituent Assembly and the first law and labour minister of Pakistan, Jogendra Nath Mandal. Mandal’s existence is always taken as the critical proof that Pakistan was conceived as a pluralistic state and his patronage by the Quaid-e-Azam himself lends his figure credibility. However, very rarely do people ask: what actually happened to him,…
IN a month that is meant to reinforce the virtues of forbearance and compassion among Muslims, it is all the more reprehensible when the actions of some in this country demonstrate a distinct lack thereof. On Friday, a Hindu octogenarian named Gokal Das was set upon by a police constable and his brother in a village in Sindh’s Ghotki district, and viciously beaten for allegedly eating in public during Ramazan. Then on Sunday, a head…
There is something that ought to be profoundly disturbing at work inside the collective consciousness of Pakistan — a gathering tide of intolerance that manifests itself in a host of ways. Women and religious minorities are the focus of much of this rolling narrative, but it could be any person who manifests behaviour that may be defined by some as ‘other’, or different in some way that is offensive to the internal normative values of…
An article published in the China Youth Daily on Monday called for a “solemn” retirement ceremony for Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) officers, accounting for half of 300,000 military personnel who were cut as part of China’s military reform. Retirement ceremonies were recently held for military personnel from the Western, Central and Eastern Theater Commands. However, the article said that a grand ceremony was usually held for retired soldiers while those PLA officers left silently…