Strategic stability is a term closer to dexterity; if one may call it in Orwellian terms, it is also a tyranny of sorts in Kafkaesque parleys. In strategic studies, which itself is more of higher politics played on geographic chessboards, strategic stability is a Cold War construct with a close linkage to deterrence theory. The […]
Climate — The Pakistan Story
Fantastic Four is a retro-futurist movie depicting heroes saving the planet while having powers to control water, air, and earth. These elements control humans and their sustenance. The world in general and Pakistan in particular have reached their fantastic four moment. The Anthropocene gap is widening like tectonic fissures, not visible but palpable. Pakistan’s climate […]
Indian Elections – Facts, Myths And Lies
During medieval times the most practised cultural ritual of dark-aged Europe was the making of perpetual stew in the scarcity-ridden towns of half-humans. The stew used to remain on the stove for months or years with very basic vegetables and tubers in it, the only thing of flavour was the taste of water and the […]
India: A Journey From Secularlism To Shaktism
Secularism is a complex idea in the sense that how and when it converts into something else is difficult to define and predict. It treads the road of religion and politics with the bare minimum cognitive symmetry in the lexicon of social sensibility. To be socially correct is the key to remaining secular. Separatism of […]
Indian Military Doctrine–A Bend in the Road
Nations fight wars, but not the same war twice over. The war on terror is becoming Pakistan’s thirty years’ war, a thorn sprouting from the same bud during every campaigning season. A festering wound of Shakespearian magnitude. The Pakistani military, therefore doubly engaged to fight with longitudinal deployments. Professional excellence is praised by all and […]
Pak-Russia Relations and the Kalabagh Moment
At the start of 1800, the US and UK went to war, courtesy of the press gangs mounted on imperial British ships caught red-handed, exploiting the coastal cities of the US. Exploitation was not marine or material, it was the mass kidnappings for military drafts to fight napoleon. To fight the enemy, countries or empires […]
Winter Olympics, Polarity Games and Indian Roulette
That the world is changing is hardly news. The information age has so abruptly transformed into the digital age that even Moore’s law is unable to grasp. The spreadsheet of rare earth metals or the meteors beyond the goldilocks zones of space is now all in the calculus of both powers of Thucydides trap: China, […]
Afghanistan — a Cat in the Hat
Afghanistan is famous for many things, the most diabolical notorious of which is its graveyard of empires. Ancient empires adopted the light-handed approach of doling out financial parcels to the tribal heads. Luckily, Alexander had a pass through the barren countryside with a scarce Afghan population. Otherwise, the Bucephalus(his horse) would have bogged down in […]
Changing global order and national gumption
The military contingents employed in the aid to civil power during the transition of reigns between president trump and President Biden, will be given democracy medal. The federalist papers, the constitution of USA and the political precedence is not so rich with such traditions. The populist rants spun out of 26000 tweets by Mr. trump […]
Pakistan’s strategic re-alignment
It is time to bury the past, move forward and put own house in order. This is the logline of general qamar bajwa’s speech at the occasion of Islamabad security dialogue. The message is very pertinent, realistic and pragmatic. To understand the urgency, one need not to be a strategist or an expert in international […]