Author: Uzma Ehtasham

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…

By Uzma Ehtasham India’s military adventurism last May, branded as the triumphant “Operation Sindoor,” has become a symbol not of strength but of hubris unmasked. What Delhi’s leaders hailed as a decisive blow against Pakistan now stands exposed as a costly misadventure, one that has left deep fissures in India’s strategic posture. The boasts from army and air force chiefs ring increasingly hollow, drowned out by the sober critiques of defence analysts and the uneasy murmurs within India’s own media circles. Even General Anil Chauhan, the Chief of Defence Staff, has taken to theatrical deflection, brushing off the episode as…

By Uzma Ehtasham In a world where alliances often fray under the weight of self-interest, the relationship between Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates stands as a quiet marvel—a bond as deep and unshakeable as that between two brothers, each ever vigilant for the other’s dignity. It’s not the stuff of grand treaties or blaring headlines, but of remittances that keep families afloat, workers who cross deserts for dreams, and diplomats who speak the language of the heart. This fraternity has weathered economic storms and regional tempests, proving that true partnership thrives not on spectacle, but on sincerity. Consider the…

By Uzma Ehtasham As the next round of US-Iran talks looms in Islamabad—a development confirmed by President Donald Trump himself—the world watches with a familiar mix of hope and exasperation. These aren’t abstract summits in sterile conference rooms; they’re high-wire acts where a single misstep could ignite shipping lanes, spike fuel prices at pumps from Karachi to Cornwall, and upend lives far beyond the Gulf. Trump’s pronouncements veer wildly, as they so often do: one moment he champions the negotiations as a masterstroke of his deal-making genius, the next he undermines them with threats that echo his campaign trail bravado.…