Posts published in “Day: November 5, 2016”

Salahuddin Rabbani, head of Jamiat-e-Islami party and Minister of Foreign Affairs (MoFA), on Friday said at the ninth death anniversary of Sayed Mustafa Kazimi that the current dispute between the National Unity Government’s leaders was due to power division and said the system has reached a deadlock and should be changed. Sayed Mustafa Kazimi, former head of the Parliament Economic Commission, along with six other former MPs and more than 80 people were killed in…

The PLA Air Force chief said development of the J-20 fighter jet would be sped up, in an apparent bid to quell speculation the domestic aircraft was falling behind its production schedule. “Of course I’m satisfied,” General Ma Xiaotian said when asked about the performance of the J-20 after its brief public debut at the opening of ­Airshow China in Zhuhai in Guangdong on Tuesday. “It’s a very good thing that our J-20 made an…

In recent decades the “core” of the Communist Party leadership in China can be likened to a pendulum, swinging slowly one way and then reversing direction. The core was a feature of political life under former president Jiang Zemin before swinging out of use under his successor Hu Jintao and coming back under President Xi Jinping. In the weeks after the June 4 Tiananmen crackdown in 1989, party elders including Deng Xiaoping, Chen Yun, Li…

(The author, a former editor-in-chief of the South China Morning Post, is now based in Beijing as editorial adviser to the paper) After a one-week delay, the Communist Party leadership on Wednesday night released the full text of the two documents approved at the sixth plenum of the party’s central committee – documents that aim to strengthen the party’s governance and the conduct of its members, particularly senior officials. Publication of the two documents may…

(Cary Huang, a senior writer with the South China Morning Post, has been a China affairs columnist since the early 1990s) Tuesday’s meeting between China’s President Xi Jinping and Taiwan’s Kuomintang chairwoman Hung Hsiu-chu suggested that Beijing would continue to pin its hopes on the island’s main opposition to be its proxy in the fight against Taiwanese independence. It is the most important interaction across the Taiwan Strait since Xi met then president Ma Ying-jeou…

The Iran Pakistan pipeline that has been in discussion between the two governments as early as 1995 is finally to be constructed. China has played the hero without a cape once again and offered to finance the Pakistani un-built portion of the multibillion-dollar gas pipeline project.The news of the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Resources’ intention to approach China to fund the IP gas pipeline has been making rounds since April 2015.Months of negotiating behind…

by Fahim Zaman is a Dawn staffer. Syed Muhammad Abubakar is an environmental journalist Blood and water can’t flow together,” declared a belligerent Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on September 26, 2016 in the wake of 19 Indian soldiers dying in a militant attack on Uri military base, just inside Indian-administered Kashmir. Holding Pakistan responsible for the violence, Modi promised to unshackle India’s policy of “restraint” — implying that India was now going to hurt…

The writer is an independent social scientist. In the past few days I have been targeted on Pakistani, media especially on social media. Countless tweets, blogs, Facebook posts and even a television channel have labeled me a traitor. All this has compelled me to write about it. I was  also reminded of an article written a few months ago by a US-based Pakistani scholar arguing for geo-political liberals to engage with the state and help…

Spying is known as the second oldest profession in the world. It has continued for centuries, involving both friends and foes, with nations desperate to gather information on the activities of others. It is, therefore, hardly surprising that Pakistan and India would spy on each other. The mechanisms we are hearing about are also not new, with diplomatic missions used as a place where persons assigned to gather intelligence converge in the guise of diplomats.…

ISLAMABAD: Even after getting a nod from the prime minister, a committee has not yet been notified to probe the ‘planted news story’ about a top level huddle on national security. The government also seems to be in a quandary as to who will head the high-profile committee comprising civilians and members of intelligence agencies. The government refuted the story published in English-language daily Dawn on October 6 as ‘false and fabricated’ not once, but…