Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Junaid S. Ahmad
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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…
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Who’s afraid of Dr Naledi Pandor? Zionism, Empire, and the visa revoked in panic
There are occasions when state power reveals its insecurities with embarrassing transparency. The United States’ revocation of Dr Naledi Pandor’s visa—executed without reason, without process, and without even the courtesy of bureaucratic finesse—is one such moment. It is not a matter of administrative procedure. It is a symptom. A tremor…
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Imran Khan wasn’t overthrown — Pakistan was
From the barracks of Rawalpindi to the halls of Washington, a sordid alliance stalks the republic of Pakistan: a military caste addicted to power, a civilian class cowed into servitude, and a foreign patron ever ready to pull the leash. What unfolds is less a grand strategy than a tragicomedy:…
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The empire’s echo: Pakistan between Gaza and the great game
As Pakistan reignites its border war with Afghanistan, history repeats itself — empire’s old script plays again, with new actors and the same blood-soaked stage. The Pakistan–Afghanistan frontier burns once more. Over recent weeks, Pakistani airstrikes deep into Afghan territory and retaliatory Taliban assaults on border outposts have pushed the…
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Cold War 2.0: The empire’s last temper tantrum
The great lie of our time is that World War III is a looming possibility. Politicians whisper it with grave brows, think-tankers roll it out on PowerPoint slides, and journalists rehearse their “serious voice” to warn we teeter on the brink. But let’s drop the theatre. The war is not…
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Applause for ashes: Recognition, pacts, and the art of doing nothing while Gaza burns
The bombs fall in Gaza. Day after day, night after night. Schools collapse into dust. Hospitals—those sanctuaries of mercy—become morgues. Children, the most fragile units of human existence, are pulled from the rubble, their names never to be written on school registers. Water turns scarce, food impossible, electricity a rumor.…
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The generals and princes are cashing in while Gaza bleeds
Gaza is burning. Children are being buried beneath rubble, hospitals are starved of fuel, and the world watches in horror as one of the most grotesque spectacles of militarism in our time unfolds. And what are the region’s so-called leaders doing in response? Are they building ties to stop the…
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The NAM reborn: Non-Aligned monarchies and Pakistan’s mercenary generals
There are few spectacles as grotesque as Gaza under bombardment. But if anything can compete with it in sheer offensiveness, it is the sight of Pakistani generals dusting off their medals, tightening their waistlines, and flying off to Riyadh like underpaid mall cops called in to protect a billionaire’s parking…
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The theatre of hypocrisy: How Pakistan’s generals betray Gaza and Pakistan alike
It is hard not to retch when one hears yet another Pakistani defense minister, nearly two years into the televised genocide of Gaza, suddenly discovering his voice to call for “Muslim unity” against Israel. The timing is always exquisite: when the corpses of Gaza’s children are stacked too high for…
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Pakistan: The five who shamed the brass
Let us begin with a provocation, for nothing less will do: if courage had a capital in Pakistan, it would not be in Rawalpindi’s General Headquarters. It would be on the deck of a civilian vessel headed toward Gaza, with five Pakistanis—including former Senator Mushtaq Ahmed Khan—who have dared to…