What comes next in Iraq is on everyone’s mind. Trump will inherit Iraq, its internal ethnic divides and external pressures between Iran and Saudi Arabia. He will inherit a complex, deliberate way of war solidified over eight years by Obama, yet born of the experiences of U.S. generals — including several who will now serve […]
Rafsanjani’s death reflects a growing reality for Tehran’s theocrats. The first generation of revolutionaries are now in their late sixties, seventies, and eighties. They are, literally, a dying breed. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has served as Supreme Leader since 1989, will be seventy-eight this year. Read Here – The New Yorker
His command of the issues was solid, his delivery even better. His body language signaled confidence, even though he was the youngest and least experienced person in the room. He had charisma. But most important of all, he made a more powerful case for his country than any Saudi official had done before. Read Here […]
“Every Army chief has had his own legacy or way of doing things,” says Saad, who is a barrister in Islamabad, “our father believes in the supremacy of the Constitution. He always says he wants the Pakistan [that the] Quaid-e-Azam envisioned, a Pakistan where institutions are more important than individuals.” Read Here – Newsweek
No American President has figured out an enduring way to calm the tensions between the West and the Islamic world, which have a troubled, millennia-old history spanning the Crusades, the Inquisition, European colonialism, and the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Many, however, have at least tried. Read Here – The New Yorker
An objective review of General Ayub Khan’s policies and actions suggests that his primary motive was to sustain and prolong his rule as his regime sowed the seed, and generously watered the plant, for Bangladesh’s separation that came years later. He empowered the religious fundamentalists as he sought their support against Fatima Jinnah. Read Here […]
On the surface, the similarities between 1960s Iran and modern Saudi Arabia seem self-explanatory. Like Saudi Arabia today, Iran in the Pahlavi era was ruled by a monarchy with a close (but complicated) relationship with the United States. Indeed, Tehran and Riyadh would go on to become the “twin pillars” of Nixon’s strategy for keeping the […]
Saudi Arabia doesn’t have the same clout it used to. That’s the message the chairman of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee says he has delivered to the Saudi government. Read Here – Bloomberg
The Pakistani passport has been a mirror of the persistent existentialist tussle in the country itself. The evolution of its look and contents have reflected (or, rather, have been made to reflect), what Pakistan as a polity and a nation stands for. Read Here – Dawn
Saudi support for Islamic extremism started in the early 1960s as a counter to Nasserism—the socialist political ideology that came out of the thinking of Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser—which threatened Saudi Arabia and led to war between the two countries along the Yemen border. This tactic allowed them to successfully contain Nasserism, and the Saudis […]
looking beyond borders 