Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Junaid S. Ahmad
-
The Field Marshal’s expiring warranty
Strongmen are not discarded because they become brutal. Brutality is often the job description. They are discarded when brutality stops delivering. That is why the Financial Times’ recent scrutiny of Field Marshal Asim Munir matters. After years in which much of the Western press handled Pakistan’s authoritarian order with the…
-
The nuclear leash: Washington’s deal to put Saudi Arabia back in its place
The United States has presented its new nuclear agreement with Saudi Arabia as a gift: reactors, technology, investment, prestige, and the radiant promise of a peaceful atomic future. Washington is forever giving gifts of this kind. Curiously, they tend to arrive fitted with surveillance equipment, political conditions, and a discreetly…
-
Oslo on the Strait of Hormuz
The most successful peace processes are often those that allow the stronger party to continue the war under diplomatic cover. Bombs fall. Ports close. Civilians die. Then diplomats appear before polished lecterns to announce that dialogue remains “constructive.” Constructive for whom is never explained. Not for those beneath the aircraft.…
-
The legacy of Professor John Esposito: The scholar who refused to turn Islam into an enemy
There are scholars who interpret the world, scholars who flatter it, and scholars who quietly make it less cruel. John L. Esposito belonged emphatically to the third category. His passing deprives us not merely of a distinguished academic, but of something now far rarer: a genuine public intellectual — one…
-
Trump’s “Memorandum of Surrender”: The art of the deal meets the fact of defeat
Donald Trump is not negotiating with Iran. He is negotiating with the humiliation of having failed to break it. Beneath the ceasefires, memoranda, podium theatrics and sanctimonious appeals to “stability” lies a fact Washington cannot admit: the United States entered this confrontation expecting submission and emerged confronting its own limits.…
-
India’s Israeli mirror
Nations do not usually commit suicide in one spectacular act. They do it by acquiring a taste for poison and calling it policy. They rename moral vandalism realism, isolation autonomy, and borrowed brutality strength. Israel has performed this degeneration with almost obscene clarity. Modi’s India now appears less like a…
-
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…
-
Thank you, Israel, for overplaying the empire’s hand
One must give credit where credit is due: Israel, by behaving with the strategic subtlety of a chainsaw in a porcelain museum, has achieved what diplomats, clerics, monarchs, generals, and think-tank acrobats spent decades failing to accomplish. It has helped bury the old Sunni–Shia melodrama as the organizing principle of…
-
The Swiss summit of imperial humiliation
In Switzerland, amid the alpine calm where empires go to perfume panic as diplomacy, Iran delivered another masterclass in the ancient art of refusing to kneel. The Americans arrived with the usual imperial luggage: threats, ultimatums, sanctions theology, and that peculiar Washington habit of mistaking obedience for “peace.” Iran arrived…
-
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…
-
“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…
-
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” —…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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,…
-
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,…
-
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…
-
“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…
-
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…
-
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.…
-
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…