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Articles by Rashed Rahman
Impassable impasse
Despite the fact that the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaaf has postponed its much-touted ‘long march’ from September 27, 2026 to October 4, the state of heightened tension between the government and the opposition remains firmly in place. Chief Minister Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Sohail Afridi has returned to his song about the input of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa being included in national counter-terror policy.
‘Secret’ terrorism trials
On August 31, 2026, the Punjab Assembly in its wisdom chose to pass the Punjab Anti-Terrorism (Amendment) Bill 2026 after uproar and objections by the Opposition. The Bill was passed after the Opposition walked out. The latter’s criticisms were ‘naturally’ given short shrift. The content, timing, need for the Bill simply beggar the imagination. The Bill adds a new Section 21AAA into the Anti-Terrorism Act, 1997.
Extracellular polymeric substances from psychrophiles regulate ice crystal growth and thermal hysteresis to enhance frost resistance
Abstract Freeze-thaw cycles pose a significant threat to geotechnical stability, causing frost heave and permafrost degradation. Traditional chemical and mechanical mitigation methods are often costly and environmentally unsustainable, prompting interest in nature-inspired solutions. In this study, we investigate the cryoprotective potential of extracellular polymeric substances (EPS) produced by the psychrophilic bacterium Polaromonas hydrogenivorans.
Mountains and molehills
The brouhaha over incarcerated former prime minister Imran Khan’s medical check-up and treatment in a private hospital (Shifa Hospital), as ordered by the Supreme Court on August 18, 2026, seems an unnecessary going a mile too far by what appears to be an insecure ‘hybrid’ (i.e. establishment dominated) government.
Operation Shaban
The nationalist insurgency in Balochistan is assuming a heightened character that fits in with classic guerrilla war strategy and tactics. The tipping point between scattered small attacks by the guerrillas and the current spate of widespread, even simultaneous attacks, appears to have been reached when the Jaffer Express was waylaid. In that incident, dozens of hostages were taken by the militants.
Peace at last?
Ostensibly, the US and Iran have ironed out their differences sufficiently to allow the signing of a peace agreement in Switzerland on June 19, 2026, according to Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif. However, there still remain some discordant notes. While US President Donald Trump says the agreement is now ‘complete’, Iran has yet to formally confirm this. Trump stated the agreement included the toll-free opening of the Strait of Hormuz and the removal of the US naval blockade of Iran.
Trump’s constant goalpost shifting
Every day, the news from Washington about the Iran war is wearingly the same. President Donald Trump seems to be in the habit of constantly shifting even agreed goalposts, reiterating with new verbiage demands that have reached closure, and accompanying all this shilly-shallying with threats of further military aggression. That leaves Iran justifiably reluctant to trust Trump’s everyday menu of ‘new’ and old demands, without any end in sight.
On the verge of peace?
Indications from both sides of the US-Iran war point to progress towards an interim agreement to bring about a cessation of hostilities for a 30-60 day period, with the difficult questions on which the public postures of both sides differ being relegated to further detailed discussions within the framework of the broad interim agreement. However, even at this stage, the differences are there to be read on the surface on even the eve of the interim agreement.
Cuba next?
The US is intensifying its long-standing campaign of collective punishment of the Cuban people for daring to resist since 1959 (the year of Fidel Castro’s revolution) the diktat of Washington’s drive for global hegemony. Escalating sanctions have further worsened the punitive decades-old US blockade. Oil imports have forcibly been blocked, from Venezuela after the Maduro raid, Russia and Iran since Trump came to power.
Human rights missing
The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan’s (HRCP’s) annual report on the state of human rights in the country is always something to look forward to. It provides a check list of which areas of human rights continue repeatedly to be violated, as well as any new adventures in this direction. This year’s State of Human Rights in Pakistan 2025, albeit late, lives up to the high standards the HRCP has set itself and continues to adhere to.
No war, no peace?
Not entirely unexpectedly, the first ever face-to-face interaction in Islamabad between the protagonists of the Gulf war, the US and Iran, since the 1979 revolution in the latter, ended without agreement. Does this mean an end of the ceasefire and a return to military conflict? Perhaps not immediately. Both sides hinted at their respective positions after the conclusion of the talks and left open the possibility of their continuance in a second round.
A new form of imperialism
Most commentators have puzzled over what is the end objective of the US-Israel war on Iran. That war has thrown the global order, such as it is, and the world economy into a tailspin from which it may not soon recover. If the aim was decapitation and regime change in Iran, that has clearly not worked. If Israel sought expansion into Palestinian territory and neighbouring Arab countries, e.g. Lebanon, that too seems a goal too far.
New world disorder
In just one year of his second term as US President, Donald Trump has shaken the so-called ‘rules-based international order’ to its roots. ‘So-called’ because in practice, the rules were chalked up in favour of the US-led West and against all countries that dared defy the former’s will. Nevertheless, that order functioned behind a veil of ‘principles’ that were trotted out when it suited the world powers-that-be and conveniently shelved or forgotten when it did not.
US global hegemony drive in full swing
In its latest effort to annex the West Bank captured by it in 1967 and occupied since, Israel has now claimed West Bank land as ‘state property’. This would register large parts of the Palestinian area as Israeli state land.
Insurgency, terrorism, literature and kites
The last week or so has been a very ‘busy’ one. On January 31, 2026, an unprecedented coordinated series of attacks in Balochistan rocked the country. Pakistan had barely got over that shock when an anti-Shia sectarian bomb blast in a mosque in Islamabad once again sent the country reeling. While this mayhem was afoot, Pakistan, particularly Lahore, witnessed Literary Festivals, the annual Asma Jahangir Conference and a revived Basant. Balochistan’s troubles are hardly new.
Might is right
The world owes a vote of thanks to US President Donald Trump. If this sounds surprising given what Trump has been up to of late, bear with me. Not only has Trump abducted Venezuela’s elected President Maduro and his wife, he has threatened Cuba, Colombia, Mexico, Greenland and Iran with US imperialist intervention.
Free Amazon Gift Card Codes: How to Earn Them Instantly
Everyone likes the idea of scoring free Amazon gift card codes. They act like cash on the world’s largest online marketplace and can cover everything from groceries to gadgets. This guide walks you through legitimate ways to earn free Amazon gift card codes, how to use them, how to spot scams, and tactics to stretch every credit you earn. Read on for practical steps, examples, and FAQs designed for general consumers and deal hunters. What exactly are free Amazon gift card codes?
Six accords and a hangover
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Israel’s ‘Vietnam’?
Israel’s Gaza takeover plan has aroused a great deal of froth and indignant verbiage at the UN and in many countries of the world. To take a representative sample, UN Assistant Secretary General Miroslav Jenca told the UN Security Council on August 10, 2025 that the plan risks another calamity with far-reaching consequences reverberating across the region, causing further forced displacement, killings and destruction.
Decapitating PTI?
On July 31, 2025, an Anti-Terrorism Court (ATC) in Faisalabad sentenced over 100 leaders and workers of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) to jail terms of up to 10 years in connection with the May 9, 2023 riots. On that day, PTI supporters protesting the arrest of their leader Imran Khan, staged violent protests throughout the country, vandalising military installations, state-owned buildings and the Lahore Corps Commander’s residence.
Israel’s expansionism
In the convoluted and strife-ridden terrain of the Middle East, one fact remains constant and easily discernible. This is the Zionist entity Israel’s constantly being on the lookout for opportunities to feed its unlimited appetite for expansionism since its creation in 1948.
The end of PKK’s armed struggle?
Thirty fighters of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) burned their weapons at the mouth of a cave in northern Iraq on July 11, 2025 rather than surrender them to Turkish authorities in a symbolic step towards ending a decades-long insurgency. Half the fighters were women, including their commander Bese Hozat, who read out a statement declaring the group’s decision to disarm.
Taliban regime recognition
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Rogue states
The US-led west has created new forms and methods of exercising its hegemony over the rest of the world. The colonial history of the past two centuries is already filled with atrocities committed against the colonised in the name of a ‘civilising’ mission. In later times, and particularly since the decolonisation process following World War II, the US-led west has developed an extensive theoretical and ideological narrative to justify its so-called ‘rules-based order’.
Back from the brink
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No lessons learnt
Pakistan is a unique country in which the authorities seem incapable of learning from past experience. Here we are in the middle of trying to unravel the Independent Power Producers’ (IPPs’) ‘Take or Pay’ conundrum, the wisdom having dawned three decades after this idea was mooted that it does not take cognizance of market fluctuations, thereby landing the country in impossible financial trouble.
The Kurd struggle
The Kurds are a people divided between four countries: Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria. This reflects the fact that state boundaries were drawn in many parts of the world depending on factors other than ethnic homogeneity, reflecting the relative reach and control of territory by states that included peoples of the same ethnic origin, in the process dividing them.
Russia-Ukraine war: origins and endgame
Three years after the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, the advent of Donald Trump into power in the US has upset the applecart for Volodymyr Zelensky and hints at a changed geopolitical scenario in Europe and the wider world. Trump had exhibited a soft spot for Russian President Vladimir Putin even in his first term, and after leaving office, consistently opposed the war while expressing a tilt towards Russia.
Mad Hatter strikes again…and again
US President Donald Trump, in his inimitable style and thrust, continues to rock the boat globally. Not only has he unleashed (without, it seems, any consultation, and almost as a parting shot in his joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu) his ridiculous ‘cleanse Gaza, develop a riviera front there’ absurdity, he has threatened higher, punitive tariffs on friends, allies and ‘adversaries’ alike, triggering fears of a global trade war.
Autocracy on the march
The portents point to an overwhelming march towards autocracy. A country in the throes of unremitting crises in the political, economic and social fields will inevitably give rise to opposition and dissent. This is what the present dispensation has set out to control, if not quash. First it was the mainstream media.
A Mad Hatter’s tea party
Trump 2.0 has come out swinging, enacting a flurry of executive orders along the lines of what he had promised during his election campaign. A short list of the most important pronouncements will help to understand the implications of Trump’s frantic, hurried interventions. First and foremost, Trump’s outlandish suggestion to “clean Gaza”. Trump thinks Gaza is now a “demolition site” after Israel’s genocidal over one year’s war has left little else but crumbling ruins in the Strip.
Six canals kerfuffle
Federal Minister Ahsan Iqbal has been roundly taken to task for his dismissive attitude to Sindh’s objections to the proposed construction of six new canals on the Indus to water the Cholistan desert. Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) Sindh president Nisar Khuhro and former chairman Senate Raza Rabbani have criticised Ahsan Iqbal for rubbishing Sindh’s objections to the project as a ‘baseless debate’.
What ails Kurram?
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Bashar al-Assad’s fall
The fall of Damascus the Syrian capital came on December 8, 2024 as the climax to the fall of city after city to the lightning offensive launched on November 27 by the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) Islamic fundamentalist group led by Abu Mohammed al-Golani, who has emerged as the putative leader of Syria in the new obtaining circumstances.
Adieu Khaled Ahmed!
My friend, Editor, journalist of 40 years standing, Khaled Ahmed passed away on Sunday night, November 17, 2024. He had been ill with an array of old age afflictions for some time. Born 1943 in Jalandhar, East Punjab (now in India), Khaled belonged to the Niazi clan that migrated to Lahore after Partition and settled in Zaman Park, adjacent to Aitchison College.
A hollow victory
After much huffing and puffing during the last few days if not weeks, the government has finally managed to get the 26th Amendment to the Constitution passed by both houses of parliament with a two-thirds majority. But perhaps despite this, it may be premature on the part of the government to celebrate its ‘victory’, which has implications that may render it hollow. First, the Amendment itself.
State vs. citizens
The twists and turns preceding and accompanying the holding of the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement’s (PTM’s) Jirga in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) could not be described as anything but mind boggling. Initially, the police and security forces attacked the venue in Jamrud while preparations were still afoot. The toll of this (as it turned out later, quite unnecessary use of force) was four killed.
Battlefield Islamabad
What was proclaimed by Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaaf (PTI) leaders as a peaceful march on Islamabad to demand, among other things, the release of their leader Imran Khan from jail turned out to be anything but. All day on October 5 and 6, 2024, the federal capital was reduced to a virtual battlefield.
Unending conflict
Israel’s assassination of Hezbollah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrullah along with 20 of his commanders in a strike in Beirut has done nothing to sate the Zionist state’s bloodlust. Israel continues its unrelenting attacks on Lebanon, claiming the assassination of another top Hezbollah commander, Ali Karake, and an Iranian Revolutionary Guards commander, General Abbas Nilforoushan, in the strike on Hezbollah’s headquarters.
Ill-conceived gambit
The government has shot itself in the foot by launching an ill-conceived and hurried attempt to bring in a spate of Constitutional Amendments without proper disclosure, forging consensus on the proposed changes, or even ensuring it has the numbers in both houses of parliament to win the day. Hurried calling of sessions of both houses over the weekend too proved a dud in the end because no homework or discussion inside parliament or outside had been carried out.
International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances
Enforced Disappearances (EDs) have been frequently used as a strategy to spread fear and terror in a society, according to the UN. By now, the world body argues, it has taken on the dimensions of a global problem. Once largely the product of military dictatorships, nowadays the practice is perpetrated in complex internal conflicts as an instrument of political repression.
The plight of the minorities
August 11, 2024 was ‘celebrated’ as Minorities Day, as has been the custom now since 2009. The date, August 11, was chosen to mark Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s address to the Constituent Assembly on August 11, 1947, just three days before Pakistan came into being. The Founder’s speech has had a troubled existence in the state he virtually single-handedly brought into existence against heavy odds.
Bangladesh coup
The more than one month long agitation in Bangladesh against the quota policy has finally ended in a military coup. Army chief Waker-Uz-Zaman led the army action, giving Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina a 45-minute ultimatum to quit. Sheikh Hasina, accompanied by her sister Sheikh Rehana, resigned and fled in a military helicopter to Agartala, Tripura, India (a name that brings back memories of the Agartala Conspiracy Case against her father Sheikh Mujibur Rehman).
Here we go again
Here we go again with another military operation against the religious extremist terrorists that afflict this country, chiefly Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). This time it is Chinese pressure, casting a deep shadow over CPEC, that has tipped us over the edge, not the past terrorist massacres such as the Army Public School, Peshawar one in 2014.
The tide is turning
The Indian elections are an indicator of the fact that Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP’s) hubris has been punctured, signalling a turning of the tide. The defeat and retreat of socialism worldwide in 1989-91 opened the door to a triumphalist neoliberal capitalist globalisation. In its wake, right wing populism has held sway until now.
Predictable decline of ANC
The results of South Africa’s general elections have delivered a stunning blow to the ruling African National Congress (ANC), depriving it for the first time since it came to power under Nelson Mandela 30 years ago of an outright majority under the country’s proportional representational system. Seats are allocated to the parties in this system according to the percentage received of the total votes cast.
External-internal conundrums
Federal Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi has demanded in a press conference that the Afghan Taliban government arrest, prosecute and hand over the terrorists of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) based on Afghan soil found responsible for the March 26, 2024 suicide attack on Chinese engineers in Bisham. Five Chinese engineers and their Pakistani driver were killed in the attack. Naqvi said the caper was planned in Afghanistan and executed with the help of handlers and facilitators in Pakistan.
Ordinary Pakistanis are not citizens
It has been an eventful week, with more than its just share of tragedies. While the genocidal Israeli war on the Palestinians continues with ferocious horror, the news of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian and other senior officials’ death in a helicopter crash in Eastern Azerbaijan province has come as a shock.
Impasse
Anniversaries can be of different kinds, some mere rituals, others more than a mere remembrance of things past. May 9 has already passed into the category of the latter. A year ago, the happenings on May 9, 2023 have been detailed in a report by the caretaker government. It makes, to put it mildly, startling reading. What it says seems to nullify Imran Khan and the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf’s (PTI’s) lately found narrative of them being victims of a ‘false flag’ operation.
Wheat, wheat everywhere…
The wheat crisis has thrown up a host of troubling questions that revolve around the persistent wisdom that in our governance system, the left hand seldom knows what the right hand is doing. Or, alternatively, one hand is engaging in manipulation undetected by the other. The wheat crisis stems from two irreducible facts.
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