Kamal Mustafa

I will be honest with you. When I first heard about the Fatah missile test on May 5th, I did not immediately think about range specifications, navigation systems or technical parameters. I thought about my country. I thought about what it feels like to be Pakistani in a moment like this — when the region is on edge, when accusations are flying, when a neighbour is rattling its sabre, and the world is watching to see if we will blink.

What Really Happened During India's So-Called Operation Sindoor? One Year of Marka-e-Haq in May 2026

The first anniversary of Marka-e-Haq was something else entirely. I will be honest with you. I did not expect to feel what I felt.

Monday morning, I got some very bad news for the Indians. Modi gold ban appeal sparks India market crash: what the prime minister's address really means for the rupee and the economy. When a prime minister tells 1.4 billion people to stop buying gold and cancel their foreign holidays, the markets do not wait for an explanation.

I was having a quiet scroll through my phone on Monday evening when I came across the story. A man had sacrificed his life near Attock. He had intercepted a suicide bomber. His name was Muhammad Liaqat Ali, a retired railway worker, out in a field tending to his goats when it happened. I set my phone down and didn't pick it up again for a good few minutes.

Somewhere in Karachi right now, a mother is waking up before dawn to pack her son's school bag. In Lahore, a factory worker is starting his second shift of the day. In Peshawar, a shopkeeper is pulling up his shutters for the morning. In Quetta, an old man is sitting with his tea, watching the news. These are not abstractions. These are 241 million human lives, counted officially in the 2023 national census, living inside a country that has existed since August 14, 1947, and that an Indian general casually threatened with historical erasure last Saturday.

Helle Lyng Svendsen is a journalist. She works at Dagsavisen in Oslo. She showed up to do her job on a Monday morning in May, and by Tuesday night strangers were searching for her front door.

Start here. Two Muslim men. A cow they wanted to sell before Bakra Eid. A crowd that gathered and told them their paperwork was not right. Under the new rules.

Pakistan is not alone in this. India did not build its technology industry by keeping people home. It sent them out, watched them succeed in Silicon Valley, and those same people became the investors and connectors who tied India into the global economy. China dispatched students abroad in vast numbers from the 1980s; many returned, and those who stayed became living bridges to Chinese industry and research. South Korea and Taiwan followed the same path. Even the richest nations play this game. American universities are full of European, Japanese, and Australian researchers moving ideas across borders as naturally as breathing. The movement of talent is not a weakness. It is how nations rise.

There comes a point in every conflict when the question is no longer who started it. The question becomes why those in power allowed it to continue for so long.