Author: Uzma Ehtasham

By Uzma Ehtasham An international survey by Ipsos has offered a revealing snapshot of how Pakistanis are interpreting their country’s perceived diplomatic engagement in the latest phase of tensions between the United States and Iran. At a time when global crises are increasingly mediated not only through official diplomacy but also through public perception, the findings point to something important: foreign policy is no longer confined to closed rooms in ministries, but is being actively read, judged and reframed by domestic audiences in real time. The headline figure is striking in its simplicity. Seventy-four per cent of respondents say they…

By Uzma Ehtasham There is a familiar conceit in the conduct of powerful states, whether in London or Washington: the quiet assumption that intervention in the affairs of more fragile regions is not only justified but inherently constructive. It is a habit that has survived the end of formal empire and continues to inform the tone, if not always the substance, of Western commentary. The latest remarks by Richard Lindsay, expressing concern over violence along the Afghanistan–Pakistan border and urging restraint, fall squarely within this tradition. They are couched in the language of diplomacy, careful and composed, yet they risk…

By Uzma Ehtasham There is a particular kind of exhaustion that settles over a country when its leaders keep asking for patience. Pakistan knows this feeling well. This week, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif stood before his federal cabinet and did what prime ministers here so often do: he acknowledged the pain, blamed circumstances beyond the nation’s borders, and promised that if everyone just holds on a little longer, the dawn will arrive with honor intact. The war in the Middle East, he explained, has set back Pakistan’s economic recovery. Oil prices have surged. The petroleum import bill has climbed from…

By Uzma Ehtasham A year has now passed since Operation Banyan-ul-Marsus, through which Pakistan’s armed forces achieved signal success and honor in the face of Indian military aggression. The occasion was marked yesterday with a powerful tribute, offered in the most stirring terms. In the Punjab Assembly, a resolution moved by the chief whip of the Pakistan Muslim League (N), Rana Muhammad Arshad, was adopted unanimously. It paid homage to the country’s military and civilian political leadership on completing a year since the operation’s triumph. The resolution declared, without equivocation, that the house openly acknowledges the exemplary resolve, strategy and…

By Uzma Ehtasham Every morning brings a fresh twist to the long, tortured saga between Washington and Tehran. One day the whispers from Vienna or Doha suggest a deal is imminent, that both weary adversaries have finally stumbled towards an accommodation. The next, verbal grenades are launched across the Gulf, and the world holds its breath, suspended between the thin hope of détente and the grim certainty of more brinkmanship. Just as global markets were learning to live with that perpetual ambivalence, a far more consequential tremor has now shaken the very ground beneath the world’s energy architecture. The United…

By Uzma Ehtasham There is a particular kind of cruelty found in the borderlands, where maps fade into scrub and kinship ties tether families to two nations at once. It is a cruelty that often wears the mask of strategy. This week, along the sinuous, disputed line that separates Pakistan’s Waziristan from Afghanistan’s Paktika province, that mask slipped entirely. The target, in the end, was not a military bunker or a supply convoy. It was a woman. A child. A neighbor. The mundane, irreplaceable flesh of civilian life. The prelude was predictable, almost scripted. According to Islamabad’s military accounts, a…

By Uzma Ehtasham There is a woman standing at a market stall somewhere in Lahore or Karachi or Peshawar, counting coins. She is not a headline. She is not a data point. She is not the subject of a cabinet meeting or the inspiration for a press release. She is just a mother, recalculating the week’s meals for the third time because the prices have changed since yesterday. And she knows, with the unerring precision that only necessity can teach, what a kilo of ghee ought to cost. She knows when the bread has shrunk while the price has grown.…

By Uzma Ehtasham There is a particular kind of silence that falls over a nation when it achieves something genuinely difficult. It is not the silence of secrecy, nor the hush of shame, but rather the quiet exhale of patience rewarded. Pakistan has just crossed one of those thresholds, and the world, predictably, has been slow to notice. From the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Centre in the loess hills of northern China, an indigenously developed electro-optical satellite named EO-3 has been sent into the black expanse above us. For those who follow the arc of technological development in South Asia, this…

By Uzma Ehtasham Every word uttered by the president of a country that styles itself as the world’s sole superpower demands serious attention. A single message from him can send the price of oil per barrel rocketing toward the heavens – and, once there, send it crashing back down to earth with a deafening thud. Journalists in Pakistan, however, are compelled to take his spontaneous pronouncements even more gravely, for Iran is our neighbor. We share a border stretching nine hundred kilometers. Moreover, nearly eighty per cent of the oil and gas available to us arrives via the Strait of…

By Uzma Ehtasham There is a particular kind of cruelty in setting a man on fire while he is still breathing. There is another kind, colder and more calculating, in turning that man’s death into a line item on a spreadsheet of statecraft. Both kinds were on display in the dusty, unforgiving terrain of Chagai district in Balochistan, where ten employees of the National Refinery Limited, among them foreign nationals, were torn from this world not by accident or impulse but by design. Their attackers did not merely shoot. They watched the oil reserves burn. They understood, as any arsonist…