Rapid GCC requests for US-Iran de-escalation recall who really wants the war

17 Jan 202023 Jan 2020

Posted originally to Express Tribune blogs on 17 January 2020. The Gulf Arabs’ urgent engagement with the US to urge de-escalation with Iran from the current crescendo reached after the…

Lessons in tenacity: Why Pakistan should learn from Turkey

4 Jan 202017 Jan 2020

Posted originally to The Express Tribune on 4 January 2020. When faced with the seemingly unyielding support of its ostensible NATO ‘partners’ for Kurdish secessionists in the Syrian-Turkish border regions,…

Lacking direction: PTI’s Kashmir Policy

7 Dec 20196 Jan 2020

Posted originally to Strafasia on 7 December 2019. Does Imran Khan ignoring the letter of Syed Ali Geelani, veteran Kashmiri freedom icon, epitomize the PTI’s Kashmir policy? Is the PTI…

The falsehood that is the ‘Persian-Arab conflict’ narrative

2 Nov 201918 Nov 2019

Posted originally to The Express Tribune Blogs on 2 November 2019. Discredited and archaic explanatory frameworks are superposed onto geopolitical conflicts and rivalries at the expense of accurate appraisal of…

4D Chess by PTI standards: India’s Foreign Minister slams same ‘liberal media’ PTI keeps pandering to

22 Oct 201925 Oct 2019

'English-speaking liberal media biased, covered Kashmir unfairly - India's Foreign Minister' - 22 October 2019, RT A crude exhibition of the typical cheap brand of low-cunning possessed by Indian political…

Saudi brittleness and the real US-Saudi-Israel dynamic

27 Sep 201915 Nov 2019

Resharing this December 2018 article by myself commenting on frequent overestimation of Saudi power by some folk, and since then there's been several more signs of Saudi strategic-military ineptitude and…

Putting Pakistan’s ‘Israel Question’ into geostrategic context

18 Sep 201925 Oct 2019

Published originally by the Islamabad Policy Institute on 18 September 2019. Informed discourse on Israel, the Middle East and current geopolitical affairs pertaining to Israel is not stimulating the current…

Should Pakistan expect US withdrawal from Afghanistan?

16 Sep 201925 Oct 2019

I'm resharing this piece from a few months earlier where I expressed skepticism over the US-Taliban peace talks' prospects. This is founded in some very consequential, very long-term and very…

Imran Khan’s ‘anti-Islamophobia’ narrative and its pitfalls

19 Jun 201923 Sep 2019

Posted originally to Surkhiyan.com on 19 June 2019. Collective ideology drives people and holds large, diverse nations together. From the perspective of security – which is Pakistan’s utmost priority for…

The deceptive inadequacy of the ‘Israel-Palestine conflict’ label

7 Jun 201925 Oct 2019

Posted originally to CRSS on 1 June 2019. To treat the ‘Israel-Palestine conflict’as one in a long list of bilateral country disputes to be found in the modern age attaches…