The ground is shifting in Pakistan again. In a few weeks — if not days — the five-year-long experiment that has seen a fledgling democracy take root in a hitherto largely militaristic soil, could well be uprooted. In a carefully crafted bid to transplant a malleable caretaker government in...

The mood of the nation after the beheading and mutilation of two Indian soldiers at the Line of Control was such that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had to break his silence and say that after the “barbaric act there can be no business as usual with Pakistan’. It must have been a personal...

The Economist is an English-language weekly news and international affairs publication owned by The Economist Newspaper Ltd. and edited in offices in London. FROM a base in converted shipping container, placed on Islamabad’s main thoroughfare, Tahir ul Qadri, a populist cleric who has been...

The winds of change are stirring in Islamabad. On Monday 14 January, tens of thousands of people joined Dr Tahirul Qadri (pictured), a Pakistani-Canadian Sufi scholar, in Lahore on a ‘million man’ march towards Islamabad. Late last year, Qadri seemingly appeared out of nowhere,...

The political crisis in Pakistan threatens to trigger yet another period of instability in the country. The three-way power struggle between the military, the government and the courts once again exposes the weaknesses of the country’s democratic institutions, say German commentators....