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MUNIR AKRAM   —  PUBLISHED on Oct 18 2015 PRIME Minister Nawaz Sharif will be in Washington next week for a ‘working visit’. Normally, this would be a good opportunity for him to secure official and private-sector American cooperation to accelerate Pakistan’s economic development. With improved security and a relatively stable macro-economic environment, Pakistan is well placed today to promote rapid, investment-led growth. Unfortunately, after recovering from the crisis created by America’s ‘kinetic’ actions in 2011 (Raymond Davis, the Abbottabad incursion and the Salala attack), the Pakistan-US relationship appears to be headed for another showdown. The first ominous signs emerged during US National Security Adviser, Susan Rice’s visit to Islamabad several weeks ago, during which threats of halting reimbursements for Pakistani counterterrorism operations were held out unless Islamabad acted more forcefully against the Haqqani network. Simultaneously, proposa...

AP Photo Shane Harris DEVIL’S DUE 07.14.15 7:00 PM ET John Kerry denied it. So did Iran’s foreign minister. But the world’s most notorious spymaster stands to benefit—big time—from the accord with Tehran. Among the big winners in the  agreement  to curtail Iran’s nuclear program, count a notorious and shadowy Iranian general who helped Shiite militias in Iraq kill American soldiers and who has come to the rescue of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. You’ll find his name,  Qasem Soleimani , buried in an annex ( PDF ) of the unremittingly dense  Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action , along with some of his colleagues from the senior ranks of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, as well as its various divisions and corporate fronts. They’ll all be granted some sanctions relief as part of the U.S.-brokered deal to  curtail Iran’s development of a nuclear weapon . That Soleimani—who runs Iran’s elite paramilitary and covert operations group, the Quds F...

Paknationalists The compromise agreement between Pakistan and the  United States  that allowed the resumption of NATO supplies through Pakistan to Afghanistan is verbal and unwritten. This serves the interests of both Islamabad and Washington. The Pak-US stalemate was on the surface focused on a single incident: the  deliberate American military attack  that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers on November 26, commonly known as 26/11. But in reality, the Pakistanis used the incident to launch a complete review from the Pakistani side of Pakistan’s cooperation in America’s Afghan war project. The implicit message was this: Islamabad could end the review by exiting America’s war effort, leaving thousands of US troops in Afghanistan in the lurch. To emphasize the point, the Pakistani government and military ceded control over the review to the parliament. Knowing the popular mood in Pakistan, the message was received in Washington loud and clear: parliament will ac...

Was President Zardari too embarrassed to decorate China's envoy that he needed to balance it with Boucher? Why Boucher was awarded Pakistan's highest civil award, the Crescent of The Great Leader? Because his government killed Pakistanis, displaced thousands of them, turned Afghanistan into a den of anti-Pakistanism, and empowered India against us? Or was the President using an official award to thank the man who helped him get his hands on his – and his late wife's – millions of dollars in illegal wealth? By AHMED QURAISHI Wednesday, 7 January 2008. ISLAMABAD, Pakistan— Why would the Pakistani president decorate a deserving Chinese official with the country's highest civilian award and then follow it up the next day by awarding an undeserving U.S. official? President Asif Zardari couldn't wait after decorating Luo Zhaohui, the Chinese ambassador, on Saturday. Come Monday, the first thing he did was to decorate Bush admin official Richard Boucher with the same aw...