Pepe, Pakistan, and the last of the great foreign correspondents

The trouble with spy stories is not that they are unbelievable. It is that in Pakistan they are often believable for reasons that make every serious person reach for a notebook, a headache tablet, and perhaps a map of the last fifty years.

So when Pepe Escobar, on the YouTube channel Transition Protocol, discussed the allegation that Mossad had plotted to assassinate Field Marshal Asim Munir, the reaction was instant, theatrical, and mostly pointless. One camp received the claim as revelation, as if Pepe had descended from the Eurasian mountains carrying tablets engraved by the intelligence gods. The other dismissed it with the polished little smirk of people who confuse scepticism with intelligence. Between adoration and heckling, thought was quietly escorted from the premises.

This is unfortunate, because Pepe Escobar is not some digital fabulist in geopolitical costume jewellery. He is the last of the great foreign correspondents: nomadic, unbought, unhousebroken by empire, historically armed, allergic to official stupidity, and blessed with that vanishing journalistic vice — having actually been to the places he writes about.

Pepe knew “Af-Pak” before Washington flattened it into a bureaucratic cough. He understood Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Central Asia, the Pashtun belt, the Baloch wound, the Silk Roads, the Eurasian interior — not as Pentagon geometry, but as lived history.

Dust, blood, poetry, betrayal, empire, tea, checkpoints, drone shadows, vanished sons, and borders drawn by dead men and enforced by living fools.

That matters. It matters immensely. Pepe belongs to an older, nobler, nearly vanished tradition: the reporter as witness, wanderer, translator, dissident, irritant, and magnificent nuisance; the man at the border crossing, the tea house, the refugee camp, the hotel lobby, the back road where imperial language slips, falls, and loses its shoes.
His relationship with Pakistan is not recent, ornamental, or opportunistic. It is long, serious, human, and earned

He went where the credentialed cowards would not go. He listened where empire only measured. He distrusted power before distrust of power became fashionable, profitable, or safe.

He dragged geopolitical analysis out of the morgue of official narratives and plugged it into an amplifier. He gave us Rock’n Roll Geopolitics before the commentariat discovered history had a pulse.

That is why people across the lands mangled by the ‘War on Terror’ trust him. Not because every whispered source is scripture. Not because every claim must be received on bended knee. But because Pepe earned something almost nobody in his profession earned: political intimacy with the victims of empire. He has spent a lifetime mistrusting the correct criminals.

READ: Thank you, Israel, for overplaying the empire’s hand

And precisely for that reason, when a friendly Mr. Z of Pakistani descent appears with “privileged information” from “impeccable” sources, Pakistanis may ask — not with contempt, but with civic caution — who, exactly, is Mr. Z? Privileged by whom? Through what channels? With what proximity? In what political atmosphere?

This is not insult. It is political cartography. Pakistanis have lived too long under the grammar of “sources,” “larger interests,” “national security,” and “sensitive information.” They have seen too many coups marketed as corrections, too many emergencies sold as necessity, too many generals introduced as reluctant saviors while the public is told to clap quietly and avoid eye contact. In Pakistan, truth is often treated like a classified substance: too dangerous for the public, yet miraculously available to the powerful.

That is the heart of the matter. As framed, the story carries enormous political force. Pakistan’s Generalissimo is suddenly no longer merely the central military figure in a bitter national drama. He becomes the man Mossad supposedly feared, the secret defender of Iran, the Muslim sentinel who stared down Israel. In one cinematic flourish, he is promoted into Lawrence of Rawalpindi.

A good story, yes. Too good, perhaps. Pakistanis have seen this film before. The budget changes. The uniform does not.

And no, the claim is not absurd on its face.

Israel has not spent recent history auditioning for the Nobel Peace Prize. Zionism, armored by impunity and applauded by Washington, does not merely cross red lines; it bulldozes them, builds settlements on them, bombs the neighborhood, assassinates the witnesses, starves the survivors, and then releases a statement about restraint.

Assassination, sabotage, siege, occupation, espionage, blackmail, and plausible denial are not accidents in this system. They are its modus operandi.

Nor is Pakistan some disposable chess square in someone else’s thriller. It is a nuclear power, a Chinese partner, an Iranian neighbor, a military heavyweight, and a civilization-state of 240 million human beings who do not exist as extras in an Israeli security memo. Pakistan is not Bahrain. It is about 150 Bahrains with nukes, ghazals, mangoes, martyrs, paranoia, poetry, memory, and a national allergy to foreigners arriving with laminated maps demanding manageable natives.

Washington, meanwhile, is rarely an innocent passerby in Pakistan’s political weather. It has preferences, habits, appetites, and a long record of mistaking obedience for order. It rewards manageability, punishes independence, launders coercion as “stability,” and treats Pakistani democracy like an exotic houseplant — pleasant for display, dangerous if watered.

The project against Imran Khan was not merely a domestic tantrum by offended uniforms. It aligned beautifully with the preferences of power centers in Rawalpindi and Washington: remove the unpredictable civilian, restore the manageable men, call it stability, and hope the natives forget what sovereignty tastes like. They have not forgotten.

That is why Khan remains central. Not flawless, because politics is not hagiography. But singular. Unavoidable. The defining mass figure in Pakistani public life. The name around which millions still organize their political imagination. No serious account of Pakistan’s present can tiptoe around him like a bad smell at the geopolitics banquet.

READ: The Swiss summit of imperial humiliation

So yes: follow the smoke. Watch Transition Protocol. Listen carefully to Pepe, to Mr. Z, to the former CIA gentleman, to the denials, to the silences, to the timing, to the Swiss rooms, Israeli channels, Pakistani intercepts, intermediaries, motives, and fog. Ask what happened, what almost happened, what was exaggerated, and what may have been laundered through intrigue.

And Pepe, one suspects, will forgive the amateur hour around him: the overeager fans, the bruised Pakistanis, the follies, overstatements, and nervous interruptions of people who have lived too long under uniforms applauded from abroad. The point was never really to put Pepe in the dock. It was to register, once again, the old Pakistani wound: that a military man’s external utility can blind the world to his domestic consequences. Pepe knows Khan. More importantly, Pepe knows the Pakistanis at the peripheries. His love for them will force him, without much difficulty, to forgive us all.

But through all this noise, one thing remains gloriously true: Pepe Escobar is not merely a journalist. He is one of the last witnesses of the long imperial crime scene, one of the last men still moving across the map while others annotate it from climate-controlled cowardice. He carries dust from the roads, murmurs from the bazaars, sorrow from bombed countries, laughter from people who survived history’s worst guests, and the stubborn refusal to let empire write the final caption.

Pakistan needs Pepe Escobar. The world needs Pepe Escobar. Not as scripture, priest, or saint, but as witness — fierce, excessive, affectionate, dangerous to liars, generous to the wounded, gloriously impossible to domesticate, and still, thank God, walking the road.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.