Mustafa Qadri

Come on a tour of Pakistan’s biggest city with Australian journalist Mustafa Qadri. For three decades he’s been travelling between his home town of Sydney and Pakistan, seeing firsthand how the country has slowly changed. Just like the rest of Pakistan, Karachi has seen an upsurge in terrorism and gang violence over the past few [...]

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[Listen to audio report here] By Mustafa Qadri It has been a relatively quiet winter in Peshawar with few bombings. There’s a sense that life is slowly returning to normal. But take a short drive north of the city and the situation is quite different. The village of Adezai marks the boundary between Peshawar city and [...]

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Blasphemy is the one thing that Pakistani Islamists agree on. The murder of a secular liberal politician has prompted a worrying union of Islamists and the Taliban, reports Mustafa Qadri from Karachi Pakistan’s blasphemy laws make it a crime to defile the Quran or to defame Prophet Mohammad, punishable by life imprisonment and death respectively. [...]

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More people have died from violence in Karachi than from suicide attacks in the whole of Pakistan so far this year Mustafa Qadri, guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 27 October 2010 09.59 BST A recent surge in targeted killings in Karachi is the product of years of lawlessness, much of which implicates major political parties and not just militant [...]

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Pakistanis are furious about western double standards – but to create change we must drop our habit of outraged victimhood Mustafa Qadri guardian.co.uk, Friday 1 October 2010 13:30 BST The fact that a troubled al-Qaeda sympathiser has been branded the daughter of Pakistan speaks for the madness that has engulfed our region. There is no place for [...]

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Today I was interviewed by Phillip Adams on Radio National Australia about Pakistan’s changing relationship with the Taliban. You can listen and download the interview here.

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With the capture or murder of senior leaders and with massive US-led operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, it appears the Taliban’s days are numbered.

The most spectacular evidence apparently in support of this claim is the capture last week of the senior most military commander of Taliban forces in Afghanistan, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar. Only weeks earlier, Pakistan authorities revealed that Hakeemullah Mehsud, head of the Pakistan Taliban, succumbed to injuries from a US drone strike in the tribal areas.

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Pakistan has seen rapid change and frequent conflict in its 62 years. Its resilience is a testament to its people

· Mustafa Qadri

· guardian.co.uk, Friday 14 August 2009 19:00 BST

Karachi’s Saddar Town is the frenetic heart of Pakistan’s commercial capital. A retail hub where anything and everything from cameras to salwar kameez can be purchased, it was once the economic gateway into the northern reaches of British India. That legacy is still visible in Saddar’s fading colonial terraces, but the intricate wooden shutters are mostly gone and the Victorian entrances have been converted into street stalls. Today most are too busy trying to survive to notice the heritage.

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Ordinary Pakistanis still suffer from energy shortages – and are unlikely to benefit from their country’s rich natural resources

· Mustafa Qadri
· guardian.co.uk, Sunday 2 August 2009 17:00 BST

Few things are as oppressive in Pakistan as the summer heat. In colonial times, the British would shift their garrison headquarters from Rawalpindi to the cool peaks of Murree, just north of present day Islamabad. Today, the elite are more likely to skip the country entirely or barricade themselves in the air-conditioned comfort of their cars and homes.

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The Karachi king

After a bloody conflict in Karachi, much-feared political boss Altaf Hussain fled to London, but he is no less powerful in Pakistan

o Mustafa Qadri
o guardian.co.uk, Monday 6 July 2009 18.00 BST
o Article history

With his healthy plume of gravity-defying hair and chunky tinted glasses, Altaf Hussain is as colourful in appearance as his reputation suggests. Perhaps no other Pakistani politician has as big a list of enemies as the one-time cabbie and university student who transformed himself into one of the most feared political bosses in the country. That he has directed his Muttahida Quami Movement (MQM) party from the distant shores of the UK since 1994 speaks volumes for his enduring influence in the treacherous political life of Pakistan.

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The Taliban Has No Plan B

By Mustafa Qadri

The Taliban is stepping up its violent attacks but ordinary Pakistanis have had enough and the organisation is losing popular support, reports Mustafa Qadri from near the Swat valley…

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Isolating the Taliban

Violence in Pakistan can only be tackled if the state listens to devastated communities and recognises the Taliban threat

Mustafa Qadri

guardian.co.uk, Thursday 28 May 2009 18.30 BST

It was really only a matter of time before we would see this. A day after a bomb ripped through central Lahore, three explosions rocked Peshawar – two at the famous storytellers’ market, and another near the city’s railway station, destroying significant amounts of property, lives and livelihoods. It is too early to know what motivated these latest attacks in Peshawar. Like so much of the North-West Frontier Province, however, Peshawar businesses, particularly book music shops and women’s clothing stores, have been heavily hit, often after being told to shut for being unIslamic.

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My latest article for NewMatilda.com is on ethnic tensions in Pakistan’s great port city of Karachi:

Shadowy Forces In Karachi

The recent gun battles across Karachi demonstrate that there’s a lot more to Pakistan’s problems than dealing with the Taliban, writes Mustafa Qadri

There were a number of Kodak moments for the presidents of Afghanistan and Pakistan in Washington last week. But back in their respective countries, the world’s media were transfixed by images of civilians suffering from the unending war with the Taliban. In Afghanistan the images were of the horrific bombardment of civilians in the southern province of Farah. And next door in Pakistan, there is little doubt that army operations against the Taliban along the foothills of the Himalayas are having a devastating impact on tribal societies.

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In January I interviewed a member of Lashkar-e-Toiba, the pro-Pakistan militant group believed to have been involved in the Mumbai attacks, for The Diplomat magazine. The interview has just been published in the latest edition of the magazine and is available online here.

JIHAD: THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES

02-Mar-2009

Mustafa Qadri investigates the organisations believed by many to have been behind the Mumbai terrorist attacks

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Dad left yesterday evening and the apartment has been noticeably quiet ever since. I’ll miss the old fella’s company. It was good to have him around for three weeks, even if he had five pet subjects he mentioned frequently every day. In other news, the taxi driver who threw our money back at us returned [...]

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It was an eventual day yesterday largely for uneventful reasons. The highlight was when the taxi driver we were using for three hours between nine and twelve at night asked for an exorbitant fee. When we paid him the usual amount we pay taxi drivers he literally threw the money back at us. After a [...]

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“A long wait for justice” NewMatilda.com 4 August 2008
(On the state of Pakistan’s lawyers’ movement)

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Today I had some yummy pancakes with a cousin and his family. It was good to have a chilled out late Sunday chat and a big feed. There was another bloke there, around my dad’s age or possibly older. He was an interesting character. Quite knowledgeable and it seems he’s had a lot of life [...]

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Today and yesterday I visited Karachi’s Hindu community at two different ‘mandirs’ or temples. One was in the Lighthouse district of the city. From the main road you would be forgiven for not knowing it exists because it is surrounded by markets. The only entrance to the tempe is through a small alleyway covered by [...]

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I wasn’t able to get to Hyderabad so I went to a public rally by the deposed Chief Justice of Pakistan’s Supreme Court, Iftikhar Chaudhry, in Karachi. It was a hot, humid day owing to the rain the previous evening. It got even hotter and more humid inside the hall where Chaudhry and other senior [...]

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The default mind frame for negotiating transactions in Karachi is suspicion. Occasionally suspicion spills over into outright hostility. Today I visited the bank to open an account. I was a little exhausted owing to the heat and while I patiently waited for all the formal things to get processed a gentleman sitting with another bank [...]

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Tonight I went to the ‘haq-eqa’ of one of my cousin’s first child Asad. The baby was all of eight days old and very cute. It was a good opportunity to meet a number of my father’s relatives whom I haven’t seen for some time. I asked a bunch of blokes at the event whether [...]

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The electricity has been shut down in Clifton, the part of Karachi where I’m staying, for two hours now. With it, most everything I do has ground to a halt. Almost everything. I started reading, ‘Torture Team’ by Philippe Sands, a book I’m meant to be reviewing but the heat eventually got to me. I [...]

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Everytime I leave for a long overseas journey I’m confronted by a rich mixture of emotions. I generally lose my appetite, a function of being a little anxious about the impending experience. Due to the nature of my work, there is always a fair degree of uncertainty about what precisely I’m meant to be doing. [...]

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