Alluding to incidents at the Line of Control in recent weeks, Khurshid said that sometimes, unpleasant things happen between states but those shouldn’t be allowed to affect ties between them. Without giving any particular timeframe, the minister said that the peace process between the two countries will move forward. Khurshid said this while on the table with Pakistan’s High Commissioner to India Salman Bashir and two former Pakistani high commissioners to India, Shahid Malik and Aziz Ahmad Khan.

Prior to the speech, Khurshid had an informal interaction with several participants of the Track 2 Dialogue (which was organised in New Delhi by the Centre for Dialogue and Reconciliation and the Islamabad-based Jinnah Institute). The head of Ajoka theatre group, Madeeha Gauhar, spoke to the Indian minister in detail about the cancellation of a play scheduled to be performed by her group at India’s National School of Drama. The minister replied by saying that such decisions, including the one about sending Pakistani hockey players who had come to India to play in a professional league, were not the result of any coordinated decision-making by the government of India. Rather, organisers had assessed respective situations and acted on their own accord. “They must have sensed the wind and took these actions, and we have not reprimanded them for taking them because at times such things can happen,” said Khurshid.

The minister said that the media had blown the issue out of control, saying that the matter “snowballed” once it came into the media’s spotlight. In response to a question from Pakistani social scientist and defence analyst Ayesha Siddiqa, the minister said that the Indian government’s response is usually given by the foreign ministry and that other institutions had been told to avoid giving such statements to the press.

“The reality today is that one doesn’t need to look for a reporter or a camera to give a statement, the cameras are everywhere – so I don’t blame the military officials either,” he said.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 22^nd, 2013.

NEW DEHLI: For what it’s worth, Pakistan may not be the only country plagued with civil-military tensions. In fact, even the largest democracy in the world and our very own arch-rival, India, has not mastered the art of steering clear of strife between generals and politicians.

The row between the Government of India and the military chief raged on for the third consecutive day on Friday over a leaked letter that the latter wrote to the prime minister detailing gaps in the Indian army’s preparedness

On March 30, Indian army chief General VK Singh, who till quite recently was involved in a controversy with the government over his retirement age issue, said that the government should do all it can to find out who leaked the contents of the letter to the media and charge them with “high treason”.

Singh issued a strongly-worded statement saying that there were “rogue elements” who were trying to project a reality in which there was a schism between him and Indian defence minister AK Antony.

As this controversy continues, several leading politicians have made calls for General Singh to be sacked – some of this could well be a fallout of the previous retirement age matter which brought the Indian government unneeded negative publicity at a time when it was dealing with allegations of corruption. Some well-known Indian journalists also commented on the issue on Twitter with one saying that though the age controversy was over, India’s army chief needed to “grow up”.

According to the Times of India, Defence Minister Antony told parliament that the publication of the contents of the letter amounted to a “breach of national security”. The Times of India reported on March 30 that the Pakistani media (it mentioned this newspaper, The News and Dawn specifically) had also prominently covered the issue and quoted an unnamed retired Indian general as saying that the Pakistanis “must be laughing”.

Also, in recent days, General Singh was in the news because of an alleged offer for a bribe he claims was made to him by a defence contractor, a retired three-star general. Once the latter’s name appeared in the Indian media, he said he would sue General Singh for libel. When this matter arose, Mr Antony said that the army chief should have acted on it immediately, questioning why he waited to mention it at this particular point.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 31^st, 2012.

To say it in one sentence, 2011 was a year that would probably rank as among the worst for Pakistan. But then again, I just turned 40 and I wasn’t around for the first two-and-a-half decades or so of the country’s existence, but I would imagine that things were never as bad as they are now. However, there is no guarantee that they won’t get any worse.

Since public — and individual — memory is short, it’s best to start from the most recent ‘events’ (if one can call them that) and look backwards.

The first would have to be Memogate. Here, we have the army chief and the chief of the ISI filing affidavits before the Supreme Court, accusing the government, basically, of acting against the country’s interests and indulging in an act that is illegal. Why else would they insist that the memo, which they say definitely exists, should be investigated – as to who wrote it and to what end.

One shouldn’t forget that the army chief reports, in theory at least, to the defence secretary, who in turn reports to the defence minister, who in turn reports to the prime minister. The ISI chief is answerable, or reports to the army chief. So technically, the prime minister and the president, as per the Constitution and the government’s organisational hierarchy, are all far senior to him. Despite that, he went to London to meet a man, who in the past had written many an inflammatory article against the Pakistani military and its intelligence agencies, apparently to ascertain if the memo was authentic and to verify the details contained in it. The casualty of this was Husain Haqqani who resigned saying that he did not want to hinder the inquiry.

Mansoor Ijaz’s detailed BlackBerry messenger transcripts, however, also mentioned a plot to change the government and in which, it was alleged, the head of the ISI had travelled to friendly states in the Arab world to brief their leaders on this plan by the military. While ISPR eventually denied this several days after this detail was highlighted, at the very least, the DG ISI’s own investigations into the memo, which, for the sake of argument, was targeting his parent organisation, should have no relevance to the case. He cannot be a party to his own case and as such the government should have asked him to explain why he had gone to London to meet with Ijaz. The case is continuing before the Supreme Court and one would have to concur with Asma Jahangir’s comments that if one were to go by the army and ISI chiefs’ statements then all politicians in the country are traitors.

Looking further back, there were other milestones in the year, but all of them were such that the year would have been better off if they had not happened. The next one that comes to mind would have to be the Abbottabad raid of May 2. Here, we found, much to our surprise (or not, depending if you were a cynic) that the world’s most wanted man, Osama bin Laden, was living in Abbottabad, less than two hour’s drive from the federal capital.

However, we still have people who think that a) Osama died in 2003; b) This was an elaborate hoax by the Americans so that Barack Obama’s re-election bid could get a boost and c) That he never was in Abbottabad because there was no picture ever shown of his dead body, which was rather conveniently fed to the sharks of the Arabia Sea.

Instead of wondering what he was doing in Abbottabad, a garrison city more or less, all the wrong questions were asked. The issue didn’t become that why wasn’t he detected or why the armed forces didn’t detect American helicopters a good 200 kilometres inside Pakistan — including, as many reports said, some landing on the way in the Kala Dhaka area — but rather that how dare the Americans violate our sovereignty.

There was other unpleasantness in the year too. Perhaps, the other two or three major blots were the assassinations of federal minorities minister Shahbaz Bhatti and Punjab Governor Salmaan Taseer. It was only because the latter was killed by his guard, who turned himself in, that the state was able to solve one of the cases. But as we all know, even the lower court judge who convicted Mumtaz Qadri saw his courtroom ransacked by some of Rawalpindi’s finest black coats and had to then flee the country. Bhatti’s murder remains unresolved and will probably stay that way.

On the penultimate day of the year, the Supreme Court admitted PML-N chief Nawaz Sharif’s petition on Memogate and constituted a judicial commission of its own, at a time when a parliamentary commission was also seized of the matter. The new year will now tell us whether the elected government completes its full term in office or whether the military is yet again able to get its own way.

2011 also saw the rise of the so-called ‘tsunami’ of Imran Khan, a term avidly promoted by PTI followers without realising that it causes much destruction and mayhem in the real world. However, after two massively successful rallies in Lahore and Karachi, those observing the party’s rising fortunes are still wondering how its leader will achieve all that he claims he will do if elected to public office.

On that note, Happy New Year.

The writer is Editorial Pages Editor of The Express Tribune and can be found on Twitter @omar_quraishi

Published in The Express Tribune, December 31^st, 2011.

It was September 2009 when I first received a call from someone called Bilal Lakhani who was planning on launching a newspaper.

At that time, I was the editorial pages editor of The News and quite happy with the job as well as my position. I had been there for over three years and had found the organisation a decent place to work at. Of course, having Talat Aslam, a good friend and a thoroughly professional journalist, as the editor of that newspaper helped.

The first time the would-be publisher called, I was driving – ortrying to – on I I Chundrigar Road at rush hour. I had been told that such a call would come but wanted to know the details ofthe planned project and the exact position that was on offer as well as the money I’d be paid. I had figured since I was quite happy with my current position, and that the project was entirely new and hence a risk, it would take a considerable incentive to make me consider switching. The first phone call was a fiasco, one could say, because I was anticipating something specific and that was not forthcoming so I told Bilal, perhaps a bit to his consternation, that I was not interested.

However, to his credit, he persisted and called again. This time he was more specific and following that I also met with Muhammad Ziauddin, a very senior and well-respected journalist who I knew from my days at Dawn and who had come on board as executive editor. He met me and explained that I should seriously consider the offer because it would allow me to build up the editorial pages of a newspaper from scratch, a challenge in itself.

He was right because, prior to this, I had always taken over work in progress, so to speak. Six years were spent at Dawn and there was not much one could do to change things around (in any case, I wasn’t the head of the pages there but rather assisting the editorial pages’ editor). However, at The News, there had been some opportunity to do that.

However, it would be at The Express Tribune where I would have the opportunity, of course after input from the publisher, the executive editor and the editor Kamal Siddiqi who is an old friend and colleague from The News as well as Dawn, to fashion the editorial pages of the new newspaper, and hence its voice, from scratch. I cannot really pass judgment on the quality of the pages because that is something better left to the readers, but I will say that the idea behind them was not to replicate the competition but to be different. But having said that, it can be very, very difficult to find new writers. Of course, this is not to say that some of our writers have not come from other papers or haven’t ever written elsewhere, but the objective was also to uncover new voices and to bring them to our pages for an eclectic and varied debate.

I eventually joined in November 2009 and the launch didn’t happen for another six months. The one good thing that the newspaper did was to invest heavily in training the sub-editors that it had hired, particularly since the bulk had just graduated and had little or no print, or in fact any media, experience. In my section, I had three such sub-editors and our desk became functional in January 2010.

In the sixteen months gone by, I can say with some degree of certainty that, though one or two changes took place with replacements coming in, the quality of the staff has slowly but steadily been established. And while, compared to their counterparts in other newspapers, they may still have considerably less experience, but are by no means less competent at what they are asked to do. With the passage of time, I hope that they will begin to take more charge of the pages and own them increasingly.

As for myself, the one thing that I do regret after joining this newspaper has been the general inability to write under my own byline since, at least in my opinion (and it may sound clichéd but it’s true), a journalist who does not write is like a doctor who does not practice. Other than that, it has been, in retrospect, a move that I don’t regret at all. Just before moving to The Express Tribune, in my last weekly column for The News on Sunday, I wrote an article titled ‘Changing rooms’, which was about the generally transient nature of jobs such as mine and that, for someone like me, it was nothing more than changing rooms – which explained my decision never to keep any personal item at my place of work. Perhaps that may change now.

The writer is Editor, Opinion and Editorial pages.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 12^th,  2011.

KARACHI: One of the country’s oldest newspapers, Dawn, saw a change of editors on Oct 4, with its printline (on the back page) formally changing to reflect the transfer to Zaffar Abbas. This is the fifth editor the newspaper has seen in the past decade, and hence this can be seen as a time of transformation for it given that prior to that period the paper had the same editor for almost 30 years.

Mr Abbas takes over from Abbas Nasir, who himself was appointed as editor in May 2006. Mr Nasir, a former head of the BBC Urdu Service, had taken over from Tahir Mirza, the last of what many thought were the old-style traditional editors of the paper.

Mr Nasir was approached for his comments for this report but declined to respond. He brought in change to the newspaper, particularly as far as salaries were concerned. However, he was also asked to take charge of Dawn News, at that time a fully English news channel, which was struggling. Mr Nasir was seen by many staffers as accessible but at least two rounds of dismissals at the television channel somewhat tainted his staff-friendly reputation.

Under Mr Nasir’s stewardship, changes were brought to the newspaper’s website, www.dawn.com, for which a separate staff and editor were hired. However, there were allegations of favouritism given that the editor, Musaddiq Sanwal, did not have editorial experience prior to this in Pakistan’s English print media, and also happened to be a good friend of Mr Nasir’s.

A staffer who has been working at the paper since 1987 said – he didn’t want to be quoted by name, for obvious reasons – this of Mr Nasir’s tenure: “The man perhaps had too much to do – he started off well by significantly raising staff salaries, but then got bogged down in the Dawn News fiasco, and then over time it seems that the inertia of the organisation overtook the editor and prevented him from doing all the things that we all thought he would do.”

Another staff member, who joined the organisation after Mr Nasir, said: “To his (Abbas’s) credit, he was accessible and encouraging, especially of the lower staff, and he did manage to get some of the deadwood out of the organisation by not renewing contracts of staffers who had reached retirement age.

Zaffar Abbas, the new editor, has previously worked at the monthly news magazine Herald and the BBC. In August 2006, he joined Dawn as resident editor of its Islamabad edition. He was also approached for comments for this report but did not respond. Mr Abbas made his mark as a reporter, first for Herald and later as a BBC correspondent in Karachi and then Islamabad.

Aamer Ahmed Khan, former editor of Herald, and currently the head of the BBC Urdu Service in London, has worked many years with Zaffar Abbas. Of his association with him he said: “Zaffar Abbas has been a key player in Dawn’s editorial strength for as long as I have known him. It is exciting to see a journalist of his experience take charge of one of Pakistan’s best known newspapers in today’s highly competitive environment.”

Another former colleague of Mr Abbas – he was editor of Herald and both him and Mr Abbas worked there at least for around 10 years – is the current editor of The News, Karachi, Talat Aslam. Mr Aslam said: “I have always found Zaffar a solid, reliable and dependable individual and it was very good to have him at the magazine. His feet are firmly on the ground and he would always give us very useful and realistic feedback and assessment. During my time at Herald, I saw Zaffar evolve and grow – though as a person, of course, he never changed. I think he will make a very good editor at Dawn – and it will be good to have a good friend as editor of a rival newspaper.”

Muhammad Ziauddin, Executive Editor of The Express Tribune, said: “I have been watching Zaffar’s career since the early 1980s – since he began at the Star. During his days with Herald in Islamabad we met frequently. He is a top professional and a man of integrity.”

Published in The Express Tribune, October 5^th, 2010.