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Znet Article Ali: Onward, Christian soldiers

Znet Article, July, 21 2008 Mahir Ali
Ali's ZSpace page

The Catholic invasion of Australia’s largest city last week was attended by two prominent controversies. The first of these was sparked by the New South Wales state government’s decree that, in designated areas across Sydney, anyone found behaving...

Znet Article Ali: Going Nuts About Obama

Znet Article, July, 15 2008 Mahir Ali
Ali's ZSpace page

There are two ways of looking at the direction Barack Obama’s presidential campaign has taken since he effectively secured the Democratic nomination early last month. One is that he is doing what it takes to get elected, and his pandering to conse...

Znet Article Ali: The Harbingers of Doom

Znet Article, July, 07 2008 Mahir Ali
Ali's ZSpace page

THERE’S plenty of irony, intended or otherwise, in the fact that the terrorist attack that claimed at least a dozen lives in Islamabad last Sunday targeted policemen who had been deployed to guard a conference marking the first anniversary of the ...

Znet Article Ali: The Re-Liberation of Zimbabwe

Znet Article, June, 30 2008 Mahir Ali
Ali's ZSpace page

To his brothers-in-arms, he was simply Comrade Bob. Lord Soames, who presided over the change as London’s representative, called him a “splendid chap”. Smith, who had kept Mugabe in prison for 10 years, abhorred the idea of majority rule but recog...

Znet Article Ali: Pakistan’s Neighbourhood Bully

Znet Article, June, 23 2008 Mahir Ali
Ali's ZSpace page

The likelihood is minuscule, but what if Hamid Karzai were indeed to follow up his threat of military operations on Pakistani territory with some sort of action? The Afghan president has argued over the years - particularly since 2006, when a surg...

Znet Article Ali: The Philosophy of Poverty

Znet Article, June, 02 2008 Mahir Ali
Ali's ZSpace page

Some weeks ago, George W. Bush had an epiphany that he was keen to share with the world...

Znet Article Ali: The Spirit of ‘68

Znet Article, May, 26 2008 Mahir Ali
Ali's ZSpace page

ON his road to Palais de l’Élysée, Nicolas Sarkozy proclaimed, among other things, that he was out to obliterate the legacy of 1968. “The heirs of May ‘68,” he said, “imposed the idea that there was no longer any difference between good and evil, ...

Znet Article Ali: Sixty Years of Instability

Znet Article, May, 12 2008 Mahir Ali
Ali's ZSpace page

AS Israel, going by the Hebrew calendar, marked its independence day last week, there were instances of its national flag being set alight by malcontents for whom the occasion offered cause for indignation rather than celebration. They were not, a...

Znet Article Ali: Asif Zardari’s injudicious vacillation

Znet Article, April, 28 2008 Mahir Ali
Ali's ZSpace page

MOMENTS after his unanimous election as Pakistan's prime minister last month, Yusuf Raza Gilani said in parliament that he was ordering the release of all incarcerated judges. The announcement produced dramatic results almost immediately. It seeme...

Znet Article Ali: Pakistan’s Travails

Znet Article, April, 27 2008 Mahir Ali
Ali's ZSpace page

TWO days after General Pervez Musharraf promulgated the emergency, rumours of a coup were rife across Pakistan. At least one observer saw the irony of it all. “It is a testament to the woeful state of the Pakistani political imagination,” wrote Ti...

Znet Article Ali: Helping hand from Uncle Sam

Znet Article, April, 26 2008 Mahir Ali
Ali's ZSpace page

IT might have been possible, in different circumstances, to feel sorry for John Negroponte. The US deputy secretary of state’s weekend mission to Pakistan was never likely to bear fruit. Apart from everything else, there’s no evidence that Negropo...

Znet Article Ali: Shalom, Israel

Znet Article, April, 26 2008 Mahir Ali
Ali's ZSpace page

WHAT exactly was an octogenarian former US president doing pottering around the Middle East earlier this month? As far as the Israeli authorities were concerned, he was simply being a nuisance. Long before he published the provocatively titled boo...

Znet Article Ali: Regime Change in Australia

Znet Article, April, 24 2008 Mahir Ali
Ali's ZSpace page

NO one should be under any illusion about the implications of Australia’s change of government: sharp deviations from the country’s political or economic trajectory are an unlikely consequence of the Labor Party’s return to power at the federal le...

Znet Article Ali: Red Alert Under Everest

Znet Article, April, 21 2008 Mahir Ali
Ali's ZSpace page

Prachanda might have been as surprised as the Dalai Lama to hear George W. Bush’s national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, say last week that his boss wouldn’t dream of skipping the Beijing Games on account of the situation in Nepal.

Znet Article Ali: Occupational Hazards

Znet Article, April, 14 2008 Mahir Ali
Ali's ZSpace page

IT is not hard to imagine how perturbed the Chinese leadership must be over the misadventures of the Olympic torch on the long road to Beijing. This year’s Summer Games were intended, after all, to showcase the tremendous achievements that the vas...

Znet Article Ali: Martin Luther King’s Legatee

Znet Article, April, 03 2008 Mahir Ali
Ali's ZSpace page

THE Martin Luther King Jr who was assassinated 40 years ago this Friday wasn’t quite the preacher who nearly five years earlier had shared his dream of racial equality with hundreds of thousands of demonstrators in the heart of Washington...

Znet Article Ali: Conflict Resolution in the Andes

Znet Article, March, 12 2008 Mahir Ali
Ali's ZSpace page

Despite the reported massing of troops by Venezuela and Ecuador on their respective borders with Colombia, an outbreak of hostilities was considered unlikely, given the extent to which the three Andean nations are economically co-dependent.

Znet Article Ali: Now Heal the Wound, Comrades

Znet Article, March, 03 2008 Mahir Ali
Ali's ZSpace page

A FUNNY thing happened on the edge of Europe last week, when the second round of a presidential election on a divided Mediterranean island yielded a communist victor. Even more peculiar, arguably, was the reaction in some European capitals to this...

Znet Article Ali: Now that Spring is in the Air

Znet Article, February, 25 2008 Mahir Ali
Ali's ZSpace page

Many of those who greeted the advent of the general’s rule as some sort of a daybreak subsequently found plenty of cause for disillusionment.

Znet Article Ali: It’s Official: Australia has a Conscience

Znet Article, February, 17 2008 Mahir Ali
Ali's ZSpace page

The closing ceremony of the Sydney Olympics in 2000 included a performance by the rock band Midnight Oil, and millions of Australians experienced a frisson when it turned out that the band members’ attire was emblazoned with the word “sorry”. The ...

Znet Article Ali: The Ghost at the Electoral Feast

Znet Article, February, 11 2008 Mahir Ali
Ali's ZSpace page

Scotland Yard’s reputation across the Commonwealth as the last word in crime detection is starkly at odds with the manner in which it has long been lampooned in British fiction and film as a repository of well-intentioned but less than sparkling b...

Znet Article Ali: Strategies for Survival

Znet Article, February, 04 2008 Mahir Ali
Ali's ZSpace page

“WHATEVER the outcome of the Pakistani elections ... the existing multiethnic Pakistani state is unlikely to survive for long unless it is radically restructured.” “Can there be democracy if there is no independent judiciary?” “Do we need enemies ...

Znet Article Ali: A Fleeting Sense of Freedom

Znet Article, January, 29 2008 Mahir Ali
Ali's ZSpace page

TOWARDS the end, during George Habash’s bouts of pain, his doctors in Amman used to half-joke that he was in fact empathizing with the agony of the people of Gaza. According to his wife, Hilda, the founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation o...

Znet Article Ali: The Pakistan Pickle

Znet Article, January, 25 2008 Mahir Ali
Ali's ZSpace page

SOME eight years ago, when Republican presidential hopeful George W. Bush was asked to name the military officer behind Pakistan’s recent coup d’etat, he racked his insubstantial brain and came up with a category rather than a name: “General...” A...

Znet Article Ali: Fruitless Quest for Relevance

Znet Article, January, 22 2008 Mahir Ali
Ali's ZSpace page

THE pathetic sight of a lame duck hopping across the Middle Eastern landscape, looking for love in a hostile terrain and studiously avoiding the site where its wings were clipped, was more than compensated for by the priceless image of the Leader ...

Znet Article Ali: Tragedy and a Travesty

Znet Article, December, 31 2007 Mahir Ali
Ali's ZSpace page

FAIZ - the South Asian subcontinent’s answer to Pablo Neruda or Nazim Hikmet - often serves as a source of comfort during periods of national trauma, and there is no dearth of verses that could be deemed to address the precarious position in which...

Znet Article Ali: The Power of Simple Ideas

Znet Article, December, 12 2007 Mahir Ali
Ali's ZSpace page

DAWN, Pakistan -- THE winter of our discontent sprouted legs last Saturday. It may have a long way to run. Sooner or later, though, it is bound to be overtaken by a spring of some sort. Pakistan is hardly a stranger to sudden seasonal variations; ...

Znet Article Ali: Musharraf’s Second Coup

Znet Article, December, 12 2007 Mahir Ali
Ali's ZSpace page

After months of feverish speculation, Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf, in his capacity as chief of the army staff, carried out what appeared, on the face of it, to be a coup against his own government. Employing a method that has long been a...

Znet Article Ali: Common Sense Under Attack

Znet Article, December, 09 2007 Mahir Ali
Ali's ZSpace page

What makes the level of equanimity and goodwill remarkable is that the previous day, following Friday prayers, there were mobs baying for her blood, demanding that the 15-day prison sentence handed down by a Khartoum court be upgraded to death by ...

Znet Article Ali: Beyond the explosive homecoming

Znet Article, October, 23 2007 Mahir Ali
Ali's ZSpace page

ONE can hardly disagree with Benazir Bhutto when she argues that militant Islamists must not be allowed to determine the political agenda in Pakistan. To a certain extent, however, they have already been doing so. The mass murder in Karachi th...

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