Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Junaid S. Ahmad
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Aafia, Adiala, and the architecture of the War on Terror
There is something revealing about the geography of Muslim moral courage. Western Muslim leaders and institutions can summon magnificent clarity when the perpetrator is Washington, Delhi or Tel Aviv. They have spoken, often rightly and courageously, about Palestine, Kashmir, Islamophobia, Guantánamo, rendition, drone warfare and the obscenities committed under the…
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Aramco is not the Kaaba
There are few political tricks more effective than wrapping the interests of a state in the sanctity of God. Saudi Arabia now says that its air defences intercepted an Ansar Allah drone south of Mecca before it entered the Holy City’s restricted airspace. Ansar Allah denies targeting Mecca or any…
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Riyadh phones Tel Aviv: From petro-power to palace panic
Sometimes an entire political order confesses itself in a single telephone call. Saudi Arabia, custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, self-appointed pillar of Arab leadership and purchaser of some of the most expensive weaponry ever manufactured, has reportedly found itself seeking Israeli intelligence assistance through US Central Command against Ansar…
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Ansar Allah, Gaza, and the great Gulf contradiction
Half a billion Arabs inhabit a region drowning in weapons. There are millions of men under arms, fleets of American and European combat aircraft, missile batteries, intelligence agencies, foreign bases and defense budgets large enough to make the arms trade look like a branch of theology. Then came Gaza, and…
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Pakistan’s Mecca pact: From sovereignty to Saudi subcontracting
There was a time when Pakistan could still distinguish an alliance from an employment contract. In April 2015, Saudi Arabia wanted Pakistani aircraft, warships and troops for its war in Yemen. Pakistan’s parliament did something that now looks almost embarrassingly sensible: it said no. Another country’s war, it understood, does…
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India remembers it has a spine
Nations do not usually recover their dignity with trumpets. More often, they rediscover it after humiliation has become so routine that even the bureaucracy begins to feel embarrassed. At Bishkek, India appears to have suffered such an outbreak of geopolitical self-respect. Not a revolution. Not a resurrection of Nehru. Narendra…
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Pakistan, cricket, and the lunch break comedy of a nervous regime
Some governments fear elections. Others fear protests, judges, journalists or students. Pakistan’s rulers have reached a more exquisite stage of political insecurity: they appear frightened by a lunch break at a cricket match. At Lord’s, the absurdity was almost too perfect. Michael Atherton interviewed Kasim and Sulaiman Khan, the sons…
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Bombing Iran toward the bomb
The most grotesque possibility in the war to prevent an Iranian bomb is that the war itself may manufacture the bomb. Washington has spent years declaring that Iran must never conclude nuclear weapons are necessary for survival. It has now furnished Tehran with the most persuasive argument for exactly that…
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Imran Khan: The prisoner the Field Marshal cannot afford to free — or lose
There are political prisoners whom regimes fear because they are alive. There are martyrs whom regimes fear because they are dead. Imran Khan has become something far more dangerous to Pakistan’s ruling order: a man whose existence humiliates it, and whose death could indict it. That is the trap now…
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The empire below deck
The American aircraft carrier was built to terrify other nations. The USS Abraham Lincoln has instead become something far more revealing: a floating monument to an empire powerful enough to bomb half the world, yet too arrogant, overstretched and politically diseased to care properly for the people it sends to…
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Flags, Field Marshals, and foreign masters: Pakistan’s independence pageant
Every August 14, Pakistan performs sovereignty like a state auditioning for the role of itself. Flags breed on rooftops. Fighter jets carve patriotism into the sky. Politicians discover freedom for twenty-four hours. Generals appear beneath enough ribbons to upholster a sofa and assure 250 million people that Pakistan bows before…
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Condi Rice and the belated “birth pangs of a new Middle East”
Twenty years ago, as Israeli bombs pulverised Lebanon, Condoleezza Rice surveyed the carnage with the serene vocabulary peculiar to imperial officials who experience other people’s funerals as geopolitical opportunity. These, she suggested, were the “birth pangs of a new Middle East.” History, which possesses a considerably darker sense of humour…
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There are no “good” Pakistanis left: The geopolitics of obedience
For most of Pakistan’s history, the security state has divided the country into two convenient species: the obedient and the dangerous. The terminology changes with geography, ethnicity and political need. “Good” Taliban and “bad” Taliban. “Good” Baloch and “bad” Baloch. Patriotic Pashtuns and foreign-sponsored Pashtuns. Heroic Kashmiris and suspicious Kashmiris.…
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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…
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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…
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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.…
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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…
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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.…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…