Birthday anniversaries are meant for celebration. When it is USA's 250th year of existence, it becomes problematic to overlook some not-so-popular policy decisions.

As a Pakistani, and that too devoid of diplomatic education and vocabulary, I too face a mixed bag of emotions and reflections. To me, this is an occasion that should also invite an honest accounting: of what a nation represents, what it still has not branded, and what it owes to those who trusted it.

This is less a birthday message than a record of a few heartbreaks and a few enduring debts.

In reflective mode, I cannot help asking: what defines a country? The heritage it protects, or the one that it has forgotten? The debt it still owes, or the one it is not willing to pay? These puzzling questions also turned me, more urgently, to a reckoning closer to home. My homeland, to date, remains riddled with contrasts and contradictions.

A larger part of our own civil society and parliamentarians court American diplomats at every high-profile gathering, a badge of status: dancing, drinking, and boasting of invitations from powerful capitals, Washington chief among them.

The poor masses, meanwhile, remain in doubt and largely unconsulted whenever policy or ideology is decided in their name. No community illustrates this neglect more starkly than the Biharis. More than half a century after 1971, some 324,000 stateless Biharis – the Pakistanis who chose Pakistan, fought for a united........

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