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 […]
Ideological Foundations and Strategic Realities of Fitna al-Khawarij
Contemporary security statecraft requires dismantling the ideological underpinnings of non-state violent extremism alongside kinetic counter-terrorism operations. Ground-breaking scholarly research, most notably Dr. Tahir-ul-Qadri’s comprehensive study on terrorism, demonstrates that modern takfiri organizations are the direct doctrinal successors of historical Khawarij. Establishing this theological lineage equips state institutions with an unassailable legal foundation to delegitimize militant […]
Russia’s Taliban Gamble Opens a New Terrorism Fault Line
The immediate disagreement was between Pakistan and the Taliban authorities. Russia’s special representative for Afghanistan, Zamir Kabulov, said the two delegations could not agree on language referring to Afghanistan in the context of terrorism. Kabul objected that Afghanistan was being associated too heavily with militant activity, while Pakistan insisted that terrorism remained the central unresolved security issue. […]
India’s Afghanistan Gambit
India once accused the Taliban of bombing its embassy in Kabul. Today its embassy is back, and Pakistani intelligence reports describe a RAW–GDI alliance bringing the TTP and BLA together against Pakistan.
The Afghan Taliban’s Growing Drone War Against Pakistan
Pakistan’s air defense system shot down eight drones after they entered the country’s airspace from Afghanistan on September 23. Four drones were shot down near the border at Torkham and four were shot down near Kohat in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. In response, Pakistan struck 10 locations in Afghanistan that were being used to launch and store […]
After the War: How Iran’s Deterrence Is Reshaping the Gulf Security Order
The most important question emerging from the Iran war is not simply who inflicted greater damage. It is what the conflict has changed in the strategic calculations of the states surrounding the Persian Gulf. For years, deterrence in the region was largely discussed in terms of missiles, air defenses, military bases and the ability to […]
Liberation in Name, Terrorist in Deed: Why is BLA a terrorist organization?
In modern political discourse, liberation is a rhetorical tool to achieve one’s aims. It reminds people of being freed from empires and evokes sympathy. For the same reason, some political entities misuse it; for example, in Pakistan’s Balochistan province, the Balochistan Liberation Army used the narrative of liberation to justify asymmetric warfare tactics. However, BLA’s […]