The Great Indian Delusion
India’s aggressive diplomatic bid to host the 2036 Olympic Games has unleashed widespread global skepticism, exposing a glaring chasm between New Delhi’s high-tech geopolitical pretensions and its grim domestic realities. While state propagandists aggressively market India as an ascending global superpower, international observers are confronting a nation still grappling with profound infrastructural decay, rampant public […]
Prioritizing Power Over Security Undermines Governance in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa
The ruling administration in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa remains consumed by political self-preservation and systemic power struggles rather than addressing severe governance failures and deteriorating public security. The widespread public indifference toward the provincial government’s recent long march exposes eroding popular support for political spectacles during a time of heightened regional vulnerability. Subordinating public safety to political […]
The Moscow Format’s Persistent Taliban Dilemma and the Way Forward
The eighth meeting of the Moscow format of consultations on Afghanistan concluded in Moscow on October 5 without issuing a joint statement. Zamir Kabulov, the Russian presidential envoy for Afghanistan, attributed the lack of consensus on a joint statement to disagreements between Pakistan and Afghanistan. A more balanced portrayal, however, would attribute this failure to […]
Legal Remedies
The missing persons’ issue is not new. The post-Soviet political tumult in the world released the pent-up energy of ethnic and ideological conflicts that had lain dormant under the stabilising hold of totalitarianism. Consequently, as armed conflicts amongst and within nations intensified, the number of missing persons remained high during the mid-1990s. An international commission […]
Israel Illegal E1 Plan Destroys Two-State Solution and Regional Stability
The advancement of Israel’s E1 settlement project represents a critical juncture that directly threatens the territorial viability and geographic integrity of a future Palestinian state. Moving far beyond routine housing expansion, the scheme unilaterally redraws regional geography and fractures the spatial contiguity essential for a sovereign nation. Pakistan firmly maintains that Palestinian statehood cannot be […]
The Complexity of Pakistan’s Civil-Military Relations
Some Background True to our character, the ashhrafiyya-driven political system cannot go easy without churning out regular if frivolous storms in the nation’s teacup. Army bashing has now become a favourite theme for all and sundry. The 1947 Constituent Assembly framed the interim constitution under the 1935 Government of India Act, replaced by the first constitution […]
Space as the Fourth Frontier
The strategic competition between South Asian countries and the broader Indo-Pacific region has been a battle fought on three known fronts: land, air and sea. They are now facing a fourth front as well, above them. Outer space, once under the cooperative idealism of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, has become a battlefield; India is […]
US Regulatory Action and Crony Oligarchies Expose Indian Structural Fragilities
The United States Department of Labor’s decision on October 8 to suspend permanent residence verification processing for eight major technology companies, including Indian IT giants TCS, Infosys, Wipro, and HCL, represents a severe structural blow to India’s service-export economy. The administrative freeze halts all new PERM applications and suspends pending files for key corporate entities […]
Indian Tech Firms Meet the Limits of American Welcome
“Foreign indentured servants.” Vice President JD Vance chose those words carefully on October 8, and they will outlast the policy they were meant to defend. He was explaining why the United States (US) had suspended Microsoft from the Program Electronic Review Management (PERM) program, the Labor Department process through which an employer takes the first […]