Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Junaid S. Ahmad
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Imran Khan and the Islamophobia industry that buried him
There is a peculiar genius among certain Muslim intellectuals in the West: they can detect Islamophobia everywhere except where naming it might cost them something. In Paris, they are forensic. In Delhi, incandescent. In Gaza, thunderous. In Washington, fluent in the grammar of empire. But when Muslim political agency is…
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“May your problems always be so small”: Palestinian pain, Pakistani silence
At a recent gathering of social scientists in Washington, DC, a Pakistani-American academic spoke movingly about Palestine. The vocabulary was polished, the grief sincere, the analysis appropriately grave. Then a Palestinian academic asked the question that should stalk every Pakistani and South Asian intellectual in the West: why are you…
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Passports, prisons, and Palestine: Pakistan’s official anti-Zionism
There is a species of Islamabad analysis that should be served on expensive hotel stationery, with diplomatic coffee, complimentary ambiguity, and a small warning at the bottom: may contain traces of reality. The recent Middle East Eye piece — “Why Pakistan will likely refuse to join the Abraham Accords” —…
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Aafia Siddiqui and Pakistan’s bargain with American gulags
The Pakistani security state possesses an almost supernatural ability to discover “sovereignty” whenever cameras are rolling in Washington and to lose it entirely the moment the name Aafia Siddiqui is mentioned. Apparently, the Field Marshal can help broker ceasefires, whisper into the ears of presidents, posture as a grand strategist…
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Flotilla defiance, Zionist terror, and the cowardice of Muslim regimes
There are moments when power stops pretending to be lawful and simply performs its obscenity in public. Israel’s assault on the Gaza-bound flotilla is one such moment: a state so accustomed to impunity that it now treats the Mediterranean as its private checkpoint, international waters as occupied territory, and unarmed…
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Pakistan’s pageant, Washington’s whim, Iran’s refusal
There is something almost admirable — artistically, if not morally — about a “breakthrough” engineered to last precisely as long as a news cycle and not a second more. It appears, it trends, it reassures, and then, like a stage prop after curtain call, it quietly disappears. In Islamabad, diplomacy…
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Nobel, Not Flattery: Pakistan’s Moment of Leverage
There are few habits in client-state politics more revealing than the urge to decorate empire’s latest strongman with the language of peace. Some time ago, Islamabad flirted with the idea that Donald Trump deserved a Nobel Peace Prize. If Pakistan still insists on indulging that theatre, it should at least…
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Islamabad and the end of easy empire
History, when it chooses to humiliate power, does not bother with elegance — it stages spectacle. Islamabad — a capital long patronized, managed, and dismissed — now hosts the very powers that presumed they could redraw the region with missiles and press briefings. But let us be precise: this is…
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How to tell the rebels have won: The structural defeat of empire
Eqbal Ahmad, one of Pakistan’s finest public intellectuals of the 20th century, offered a ruthless litmus test for imperial decay in “How To Tell The Rebels Have Won”: ignore what power says — watch what its enemies dare to do. When those once expected to kneel begin to set terms,…
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Pakistan’s mirage of mediation
Diplomacy occasionally produces documents that clarify reality; more often, it produces documents that elegantly conceal its absence. The China–Pakistan five-point statement on Iran belongs firmly to the latter category — a text so carefully balanced, so impeccably reasonable, that it quietly exposes how little of consequence it contains. Ceasefire, sovereignty,…
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Iranophobia and the hardliners delusion
The laziest word in Western commentary on Iran is not “theocracy,” “proxy,” or even “threat.” It is “hardliner.” Its compulsory twin, of course, is “moderate.” Together they form one of the most intellectually threadbare binaries in contemporary foreign-policy discourse: a childish morality play masquerading as analysis, a vocabulary of caricature…
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“Either with us or against us”: Field Marshal sectarianism in the Zionist war on Iran
The first instinct of a discredited regime is not to answer dissent but to classify it. Name the dissenter. Isolate the constituency. Shrink the grievance. In Pakistan, that machinery is again being deployed with familiar malice: mass outrage at imperial war is being recoded as sectarian agitation, and a security…
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The other war in the Af-Pak frontier
War is the last refuge of failing states, but in Pakistan it often seems to be the first hobby of men who confuse uniforms with omniscience. When politics decays, legitimacy thins, and yesterday’s “strategic assets” develop the bad manners of independent thought, Rawalpindi reaches for the same old script: bomb…
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Banality cannot swim: Iran and evil on the high seas of empire
Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” is one of those concepts polite society cherishes because it flatters the audience. It reassures comfortable people that atrocity is merely a tragic software bug in modern bureaucracy: clipboards, procedures, rubber stamps, and men in sensible shoes who never quite understood what they were doing.…
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War on Iran: Zionist strategy and the machinery of Muslim collusion
For three days now, Iran has been under sustained bombardment. American and Israeli military power — long rehearsed through sanctions, covert strikes, assassinations, and proxy wars — has moved fully into the open. And while the sky over Iran burns, West Asian monarchies and military regimes convene meetings. They call…
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LeBron, Gaza, and the cost of “nothing but great things”
It takes a special kind of sentence to stain a legacy. LeBron James found one: “I’ve heard nothing but great things” about Israel — uttered while Gaza burns, while civilian bodies are counted in the tens of thousands, while entire neighbourhoods have been erased and families are digging loved ones…
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The final solution to Imran Khan
When a regime starts rationing a prisoner’s light, it is no longer governing — it is unravelling. If credible reports are accurate that Imran Khan’s eyesight has catastrophically deteriorated in custody, this is not bureaucratic failure, nor medical misfortune. It is escalation. It is the continuation — by more brutal…
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Pakistan’s blowback state: Generals, proxies, and the roots of terror
Every collapsing regime needs an external villain. Pakistan’s establishment has turned this into a reflex. Kabul did it. New Delhi did it. Foreign agencies did it. Invisible hands did it. The only entity permanently exempt from suspicion is the one that has dominated Pakistan’s political life for most of its…
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“Islamic NATO” or imperial tool? Zionism, unity, and collaboration
Every empire perfects a favourite trick: persuading its victims that participation is influence and obedience is maturity. The latest refinement is the so-called “Islamic NATO” — a Sunni Axis of Resistance designed chiefly to reassure Western capitals that Muslim anger can be processed, outsourced, and safely neutralised. It is unity…
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Pakistan on the “Board of Peace”: A seat at the afterlife of genocide
What has been christened the “Board of Peace” is not diplomacy; it is the administrative sequel to genocide. It exists to launder mass murder into procedure, to convert annihilation into governance, and to pacify the inexhaustible Palestinian resistance after Israel has finished reducing Gaza to dust. Peace, in this lexicon,…
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How to protest correctly: Notes from Iran, warnings from Pakistan
The West is very proud of its eyesight. Satellites blink. Algorithms scrape. Journalists retweet. Intelligence agencies inhale metadata like oxygen. We are assured—ritually — that nothing escapes the gaze. And yet, for more than two years, one of the largest, most unified, and most explicitly nonviolent protest movements in the…
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“Real men go to Tehran” — The Zion-Con fantasy of regime change in Iran
“Anyone can go to Baghdad. Real men go to Tehran.” It is difficult to imagine a sentence that more perfectly distils the arrested adolescence of American neoconservatism. Equal parts locker-room bravado and imperial hallucination, the phrase belongs to the same intellectual ecosystem as Rambo sequels, Tom Clancy paperbacks, and the…
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Nothing to see here: Pakistan, Gaza, and collaboration done the Zionist way
The most durable political crimes are not announced. They are administered—quietly—through protocol, wrapped in adult nouns like ‘restraint,’ ‘responsibility,’ ‘national interest.’ By the time outrage arrives, it is already being audited for tone and reminded to behave. Gaza is not merely the site of mass death. It is a stress…
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Pakistan, the Gulf, and the high cost of Zionist alignment
Geopolitics is most dangerous not when it erupts, but when it reorganises quietly — when the ground shifts beneath familiar alliances while elites continue to speak the language of yesterday. The Gulf today is in precisely such a moment. What once masqueraded as a coherent bloc has fractured into rival…