Pakistan’s enigmatic Prime Minister Imran Khan, charismatic and outspoken, has, it seems, tasked himself with rewriting the rule book on relations inside the Islamic world. His trips to Saudi Arabia and now Iran confuse watchers and pundits. With $20 billion in Saudi financial backing on the table for Pakistan, money needed since Trump cut off…
Doublespeak is commonplace in statecraft. A celebrated case is of the former US President Barack Obama who was facing re-election in 2012. Battered by criticism by his Republican contender Mitt Romney for being “soft” on Russia, Obama sought a private understanding with the Kremlin leadership that he couldn’t afford to be seen by the American…
The Indo-American Strategic Partnership has rapidly progressed to such a point that the South Asian state is now copying some of the same conspiracy theories as its new patron, though instead of India being obsessed with suspected Russian interference in its elections like America was, its people can’t stop talking about its imaginary Pakistani variant….
Eighteen months ago I wrote one article whereby I suggested that Pakistan was being attacked by US policymakers because it was no longer the regional bogeyman the West once needed it to be, and however as it tried to regain its former importance “it was damned if it did and damned if it didn’t.” Since…
A popular Indian online media outlet published a piece purporting that part of one of the Pakistani Prime Minister’s latest speeches was intended to “exploit India’s fault lines under Modi’s rule”, which implies that the self-professed “world’s largest democracy” is taking a page from its American ally’s infowar playbook by concocting a Russiagate-like hysteria ahead…
India thought that it pulled off an infowar coup by pretending to have carried out a “surgical strike” against 200-300 Jaish-e-Mohammed fighters in Azad Kashmir in the early hours of 26 February, but this vote-grabbing stunt by Indian Prime Minister Modi totally backfired on him after Pakistan turned this latest Bollywood flick into a reality…
