Pakistan’s capitulation to US sanctions pressure and resultant decision to pull out of its pipeline deal with Iran will make its energy security much more dependent on its already close Qatari industry partner. The emerging triangle between those two and the US could therefore lead to Pakistan entering into dual-vassalhood status vis-a-vis its “senior” partners,…
Bilateral ties are presently beleaguered by three challenges: 1) alleged Pakistani arms shipments to Kiev; 2) a continued pricing dispute that could capsize their planned strategic energy deal; and 3) PAKAFUZ’s loss of appeal, all of which are directly derived from April 2022’s post-modern coup against former Prime Minister Imran Khan. Pakistani media reported that…
PAKAFUZ isn’t as promising of a project as it initially seemed due to its total dependence on seemingly intractable Pakistani-Taliban tensions and the revival of the North-South Transport Corridor as a viable complementary alternative. That’s not to downplay this project’s geo-economic importance in the best-case scenario that it’s completed and those two’s security dilemma is…
The challenge ahead is a formidable one that will require the military-intelligence services to fully focus on this newly metastasized terrorist threat in order to emerge victorious, which in turn necessitates their top brass giving them the order to abandon the all-out nationwide crackdown against the opposition. Pakistan’s prior large-scale anti-terrorist operations succeeded precisely because…
Once again, a number of notable events allow us to address the situation in and around Pakistan. Both what happened recently and what is expected to happen in the near future. Among these, of course, the most important is the factor of the forthcoming general elections to the country’s parliament. The term of its current…
To be out of sync with the contemporary life anywhere at anytime becomes indeed a despairing situation. That was the tragic predicament of the Austrian writer of the inter-war period, Stefan Zweig, who once wrote, “One must be convinced to convince, to have enthusiasm to stimulate the others” — alluding to the rising tide of…
