Kamran Shafi, Does God Care? “the Americans have the watch and we have the time.”

Kamran Shafi - India should know that there are growing numbers of people in Pakistan who feel that the Indians are more comfortable talking to dictatorships!

Does God Care? Recently, I met a Christian from Lahore. He has come to the US to do his PhD. I listen to him with a keen ear. I want to see if he ever uses the word ‘Allah’ in expressing his faith in the divine. Instead, he keeps on saying ‘Khuda’.

Aisha Ghani - While evidence for this widening space of acceptability for Islamophobia exists everywhere, it is particularly apparent in the colloquialization of ideas through language. Most recently, Tunku Varadarajan’s article for Forbes, “Going Muslim,” reveals that Islamophobia has entered into a free market place of ideas; a market in which the ‘value’ of a concept is determined by what it produces in terms of social and monetary capital. It is, after all, a combination of two considerations – readership and thus sales – that enables Varadarajan’s opinion to find a platform, tellingly, in Forbes

The chasm between these two excerpts from the same column by Roedad Khan:

1: We soon realised that under our existing judicial system it takes longer to get an answer from the accused than it takes to send a man to the moon and bring him back. There are so many loopholes in the system that the final judgment could easily be avoided for years. On one pretext or another, Ms Bhutto successfully evaded submitting her reply to the prosecution case made out against her after a long, tortuous, and dilatory process in which some witnesses were cross-examined for months. No wonder, some of them became nervous wrecks. With no support from the federal government, the fate of the references was sealed and the result was a foregone conclusion.

2: The nation is looking up to the Supreme Court, the only ray of light and hope, amid the gloom, to ensure ruthless accountability of those who betrayed the people’s faith, who bartered away the nation’s trust and who plundered the country’s wealth. Unless the men at the top are called to account now and those found guilty among them sent to prison, the entire democratic process will be reduced to a farce once again; clean politics and an honest democratic government according to the Constitution and law will remain an illusion.

Rahimullah Yusufzai - The outnumbered and outgunned Taliban and other resistance groups in Afghanistan know they cannot fight such a large and well-resourced military force. As has been their practice, they will retreat instead of fighting head-on, melting away and regrouping whenever opportunity arises to inflict painful blows on the coalition forces. They could follow the principle laid down by one Afghan Taliban commander who famously remarked that “the Americans have the watch and we have the time.” [ or as Mao wrote - when the enemy advances we retreat, when it retreats we attack]