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India Didn’t Cut Pakistan’s Water. It Cut the Forecast

“India Didn’t Cut Pakistan’s Water. It Cut the Forecast” On August 31, the Permanent Court of Arbitration unanimously ruled that the Indus Waters Treaty “remains fully in force” and that India is bound to observe its obligations. The tribunal rejected every ground India has offered for holding the treaty in abeyance since April 2025, be […]

Five Years On, Multi-Front Offensive Reaches the Taliban’s Heartland

Five years after the Taliban’s return to power, the anniversary has brought not commemoration but escalation. From Badghis to Kandahar, coordinated armed opposition – the Afghanistan United Front (AUF), the Afghanistan Freedom Front (AFF), the National Independence Front, and the National Resistance Front (NRF) – has sharply stepped-up operations against Taliban security personnel, intelligence cadres, […]

Why Pakistan’s Administrative Map Needs Redrawing

Pakistan’s 2023 census recorded a national population of 247,541,947 people, but the way this population is administered has barely changed since colonial times. Punjab alone has 127.7 million people, more than Japan, more than Mexico, more than any country in Europe, all nominally served by one chief minister’s secretariat in Lahore, through a deputy commissioner […]

How Small Administrative Regions Can Make Pakistan’s Governance Effective

Every few months, a familiar scene repeats itself somewhere in Pakistan. A flood destroys a village in interior Sindh, a gas pipeline never reaches a town in southern Punjab, or a hospital in a Balochistan district sits without doctors for years. The response, almost ritualistically, is a press conference in the provincial capital, a promise […]

The Reflex That Never Learned: From Carte Blanche to Colby

In August 2026, the Pentagon confirmed what attentive observers had been watching crystallize for months: Elbridge Colby, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy and architect of the 2018 National Defense Strategy, is drafting a revised nuclear posture that formally uplifts tactical nuclear weapons as vectors of battlefield use. The declared rationale is extended deterrence — […]

Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems and South Asia’s Fault Lines

In South Asia, Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems (LAWS) have become a reality and not just a theoretical discussion. Loitering munitions and AI-powered surveillance systems have become part and parcel of Indian and Pakistani military strategies, and both were deployed in the May 2025 skirmishes along the Indo-Pakistani border. However, the extent to which these systems […]

The Wrong Battle

Pakistan’s information policy has spent years fighting the wrong thing. It has focused on content: identifying hostile material, requesting removal from platforms, restricting VPN access and blocking platforms entirely when the volume becomes unmanageable. The assumption behind every one of these interventions is that the problem is the post. But it is not; the problem […]

How Nepal Can Reshape Global Response to Climate Catastrophes

The country has moral authority and political visibility in a rare combination. The question is what it proposes to the world. Following the devastating floods last month that tore through settlements across several districts, the wave of support from global leaders and citizens has been extraordinary. It reflects the standing Nepal has built over decades: […]

Leaked Directives Expose the Taliban’s Strategic Complicity

The exposure of an internal directive originating from Haibatullah’s supreme leadership office in Kandahar marks a definitive turning point in assessing the interim Afghan Taliban regime’s compliance with regional counter-terrorism commitments. The leaked document lays bare an official instruction authorizing the direct transfer of military-grade weapons and ammunition, including Kalashnikov assault rifles, RPG rocket launchers, […]