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The Unz Review •�An Alternative Media Selection$
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Pakistan is the world’s most important Muslim nation. It has 251 million people, nuclear weapons, the world’s sixth largest armed forces, intelligent, capable people, vast lands and major sources of water. Yet Pakistan is a giant mess. Its current politics are a form of tribal warfare. Corruption engulfs almost everything. Disease, particularly diabetes, afflicts its... Read More
China is frustrated with Pakistan's inability to protect Chinese workers on the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), which has slowed progress due to violence and instability. Pakistan has launched an anti-terrorism campaign targeting the Pakistani Taliban (TTP), but tensions with Afghanistan complicate efforts to secure the region. Central Asia is developing alternative trade routes, like the... Read More
Two former leaders of major South Asian countries have reportedly accused the United States of covert regime change operations to topple their governments. One of the leaders, former Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan, languishes in prison, on a perverse conviction that proves Khan’s assertion. The other leader, former Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheik Hasina, fled to... Read More
On April 22, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, is scheduled for a state visit to Pakistan. Their number one topic probably won’t be Hamas or the Houthis, but rather a pipeline. The Iran-Pakistan natural gas pipeline was conceived in 1950, and in 2010 — despite U.S. opposition — the countries concluded a 25-year Gas Sale and... Read More
Enlightenment enthusiast Kenan Malik is at it again. So are Kenan’s Komrades, the fanatical Furedite freedom-fighters at the libertarian journal Spiked Online. Or rather, Kenan & Komrades aren’t at it again. The problem is not what they’ve done, but what they’ve yet again failed to do. A fascinatingly horrible story about censorship has been in... Read More
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Covert regime change strikes again. This time in Pakistan.
A principal instrument of U.S. foreign policy is covert regime change, meaning a secret action by the U.S. government to bring down the government of another country. There are strong reasons to believe that U.S. actions led to the removal from power of Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan in April 2022, followed by his arrest... Read More
America’s economic siege of Iran has been costly for Tehran’s neighbors, and now it is Pakistan’s turn to pick up the tab. On 7 August, Pakistan announced it was suspending its natural gas pipeline project in Iran under threat of U.S. sanctions, and issued a Force Majeure and Excusing Event notice to Iran under the... Read More
In this interview Clive Stafford Smith discusses his work defending Guantanamo prisoners and Pakistan’s national heroine Dr. Aafia Siddiqui; offers well-informed and thoughtful views on Imran Khan and the current political crisis in Pakistan; argues with me about the Ukraine war; and lays out his thoughts about how best to go about improving the sorry... Read More
Imran Khan is the single most handsome, intelligent, and charismatic person in Pakistan. He should be the leader of the country. He is also a populist, combining traditional Islamic views with a progressive economic and technological agenda in a way that fits the spirit of the country. He is basically the Paki Donald Trump. He... Read More
The U.S. and NATO hastily evacuated Afghanistan on 15 August 2021, ending the two-decade, $2 trillion-dollar effort to turn Afghanistan into Denmark with mountains or, more truthfully, to reform Pashtun culture to Western standards. The “mission transition” AKA “retreat” left Afghanistan without the hardware mod cons that, with the software – an enlightened Afghans populace... Read More
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Cognitively-Impaired Electorate and (Brain-)Dead Pols Oblivious to Taxpayer-Funded Mayhem in Turkey, Pakistan, Iran
When American voters cast their ballots last week, foreign policy was probably not at the top of their list of concerns. Misinformed by mainstream media to the point of virtual cognitive impairment, few Americans understand the devastatingly destructive role their country plays on the world stage. So there is something symbolically apropos about the spectacle... Read More
Australian biochemist Gideon Polya is one of the world’s leading experts on avoidable mortality, holocausts, and genocides. In Post-9/11 US-Imposed Muslim Holocaust and Muslim Genocide (2020) Polya writes of “the Zionist-backed US War on Muslims (a.k.a. the US War on Terror) which has been associated, so far, with 32 million Muslim deaths—from violence, five million,... Read More
A lot of times people say “this is like a third world country” about things that are not like a third world country. Like, having homeless encampments or drug addicts or violent crime everywhere – very few third world countries have that. However, here’s something that is like a third world country: prosecuting the opposition... Read More
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This is the concise story of how a suicide bombing may carry the potential to subvert the whole, ongoing, complex process of Eurasia integration. Recently, the Balochistan Liberation Movement (BLA) had released an ISIS-influenced video threatening “Chinese officials and installations” in Pakistan’s vast province. Yet what actually happened in late April was a suicide bombing... Read More
In today’s False Flag Weekly News (click HERE to watch on Rumble and HERE for links) Dr. E. Michael Jones and I agreed that the current war in Ukraine is a US war of aggression against Russia. Why? Because when the CIA overthrew Ukraine’s legitimate democratically-elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, in 2014—and replaced him with a... Read More
Afghanistan was at the heart of the 17th Extraordinary Session of the Council of Foreign Ministers representing 57 nations at the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC). It was up to Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan to deliver the keynote address to the session, held on 19 December at the Parliament House in Islamabad. And he... Read More
Fiercely independent, the Pashtun have famously lived for centuries on \"the margins of Great Empires,\" evolving into more sophisticated renditions, but never far from their roots.
Photo Credit: The Cradle
It was bound to happen: the remixed Saigon moment at Kabul airport and the stunning comeback of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, led by Pashtuns, has unleashed across the West a cheap Orientalization avalanche. The whole of Afghanistan is now “threatened” by the return of the “barbarians.” Once again, Afghan women need to be protected,... Read More
On the demand for an “all inclusive government” Imagine if the French revolutionaries were asked to retain the elements of the kingdom of Louis XVI while forming the new republic to keep it all ‘inclusive’. Imagine that the American revolutionaries were asked to keep the British loyalists as a part of the new American republic... Read More
August 12, 2021. History will register it as the day the Taliban, nearly 20 years after 9/11 and the subsequent toppling of their 1996-2001 reign by American bombing, struck the decisive blow against the central government in Kabul. In a coordinated blitzkrieg, the Taliban all but captured three crucial hubs: Ghazni and Kandahar in the... Read More
The ever-elusive Afghan “peace” process negotiations re-start this Wednesday in Doha via the extended troika – the US, Russia, China and Pakistan. The contrast with the accumulated facts on the ground could not be starker. In a coordinated blitzkrieg, the Taliban have subdued no less than six Afghan provincial capitals in only four days. The... Read More
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting of Foreign Ministers on Wednesday in Dushanbe, the Tajik capital, may have been an under-the-radar affair, but it did reveal the contours of the big picture ahead when it comes to Afghanistan. So let’s see what Russia and China – the SCO’s heavyweights – have been up to. Chinese Foreign... Read More
An Indian Train Ride. Credit: Asia Times/Facebook.
There was a time when New Delhi was proudly selling the notion of establishing its own New Silk Road – from the Gulf of Oman to the intersection of Central and South Asia - to compete with China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Now it looks like the Indians have stabbed themselves in the back.... Read More
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Daring Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of India, has killed a sacred cow, called Article 370 of the Constitution, enshrining the autonomy of Kashmir. The consequences could be dire, including the fourth India-Pakistan war, but not necessarily so. It could also be a successful scheme. Apparently, Narendra Modi had been encouraged by his success in... Read More
Two of the world’s most important powers, India and Pakistan, are locked into an extremely dangerous confrontation over the bitterly disputed Himalayan mountain state of Kashmir. Both are nuclear armed. Kashmir has been a flashpoint since Imperial Britain divided India in 1947. India and Pakistan have fought numerous wars and conflicts over majority Muslim Kashmir.... Read More
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It’s still the most dangerous border on Earth. Yet compared to the recent tweets of President Donald Trump, it remains a marginal news story. That doesn’t for a moment diminish the chance that the globe’s first (and possibly ultimate) nuclear conflagration could break out along that 480-mile border known as the Line of Control (and,... Read More
There are a few genuinely upbeat news stories when it comes to this planet and people trying to figure out how to save us from ourselves and our fossil-fuel addiction. This at a moment of record global surface temperatures and record ocean heating when, despite the Paris climate accord of 2015, carbon dioxide from those... Read More
Is this the Age of Anxiety? The Age of Stupidity? The Age of Hybrid War? Or all of the above? As right populism learns to use algorithms, artificial intelligence (AI) and media convergence, the Empire of Chaos, in parallel, is unleashing all-out hybrid and semiotic war. Dick Cheney’s Global War on Terror (GWOT) is back,... Read More
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The world slipped closer to nuclear war. Big false flags—actual, suspected, and anticipated—were a key factor. But hardly anybody noticed. Everyone was riveted by the story of actor Jussie Smollet, who supposedly paid a couple of Nigerian-American bodybuilders for a staged racist-homophobic near-lynching. The ostensible motive: Add a zero to Smollet’s pathetic little million-a-year salary.... Read More
� While Americans were obsessing over a third-rate actor’s fake claims of a racial assault, old foes India and Pakistan were rattling their nuclear weapons in a very dangerous crisis over Kashmir. But hardly anyone noticed that nuclear war could break out in South Asia. India and Pakistan, both nuclear-armed, have fought four wars over... Read More
The words ‘hope’ and ‘Pakistan’ do not often appear together. Pakistan, a sprawling nation of 205 million, is hard to govern, even harder to finance, and seething with tribal or religious violence and discord. But Pakistan, which for me is one of the most interesting and important nations on earth, is by far the leading... Read More
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Henry Kissinger rightly noted that it’s often more dangerous being an ally of the United States than its enemy. The latest victim of this sad truism is Pakistan, a loyal ally of the US since the dawn of our era. President Donald Trump’s visceral hatred of Muslims (never mind what kind, or why, or where)... Read More
 Lt Gen Niazi signing the 1971 Instrument of Surrender under the gaze of Lt Gen Aurora. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
My current piece at Asia Times, Balochistan Is Not Bangladesh, looks at the 1971 establishment of Bangladesh in context of Balochi independence advocates’ imploring Modi to do Balochistan a solid like Indira Gandhi did for East Pakistan. Here’s a video of an independence advocate ringing the bell on Indian TV: Long story short, there aren’t... Read More
The divided south Asian mountain state of Kashmir is like a volcano: forgotten when quiescent, but terrifying when it comes alive. After the first India-Pakistan War in 1947, in which the British Indian Raj was divided into Hindu and Muslim-dominated states, India ended up with two-thirds of the formerly independent mountain state of Kashmir, and... Read More
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India-Pakistan relations look to be interesting in the next few years, especially if by “interesting” one means “potential for regional conflagration with toasty global elements”. If the PRC continues its rise at its current trajectory and under its current management, chances are that by 2050 the United States will be facing a China that is... Read More
So Taliban supremo Mullah Mansour’s white Toyota Corolla was rattling across the Baluchestan desert just after it had crossed the Iranian border when a Hellfire missile fired from a US drone incinerated it into a charred / twisted wreck. That’s the official narrative. The Pentagon said Mansour was on Obama’s kill list because he had... Read More
That’s the theme of my most recent piece at Asia Times. Read it here. The U.S. sailor suit brigade is obsessed with playing profitable pattycake with the PLAN in the South China Sea. But a more significant and dangerous confrontation is brewing over the China Pakistan Economic Corridor. India doesn’t like the CPEC, and China... Read More
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America's "allies" pursue their own agendas
The redacted 28 pages describing the Saudi Arabian role in 9/11 have become somewhat of a political football. At this point, I suspect the Obama Administration is doing a damage assessment on them to determine whether they will in any way hurt Democratic electoral prospects in November. As the missing pages will likely lead to... Read More
Once upon a time, if a war was going to destroy your world, it had to take place in your world. The soldiers had to land, the planes had to fly overhead, the ships had to be off the coast. No longer. Nuclear war changed that equation forever and not just because nuclear weapons could... Read More
A Nuclear Armageddon in the Making in South Asia
Undoubtedly, for nearly two decades, the most dangerous place on Earth has been the Indian-Pakistani border in Kashmir. It’s possible that a small spark from artillery and rocket exchanges across that border might -- given the known military doctrines of the two nuclear-armed neighbors -- lead inexorably to an all-out nuclear conflagration. In that case... Read More
The deaths in South Asia of three of the West’s ‘Great Satans’ were announced in recent weeks: Mullah Omar and Jalaluddin Haqqani in Afghanistan; and Pakistan’s Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul. I never met Mullah Omar though I was present at the birth and expansion of his movement, Taliban. Mullah Omar was a renowned combat veteran... Read More
Now how do you top this as a geopolitical entrance? Eight JF-17 Thunder fighter jets escorting Chinese President Xi Jinping on board an Air China Boeing as he enters Pakistani air space. And these JF-17s are built as a China-Pakistan joint project. Silk Road? Better yet; silk skyway. Just to drive the point home –... Read More
Now how do you top this as a geopolitical entrance? Eight JF-17 Thunder fighter jets escorting Chinese President Xi Jinping on board an Air China Boeing as he enters Pakistani air space. And these JF-17s are built as a China-Pakistan joint project. Silk Road? Better yet; silk skyway. Just to drive the point home –... Read More
It was an open secret Pakistan’s ISI fostered the Taliban but the US never confronted Islamabad
The controversy over the use of torture by the CIA obscures two important aspects of “the war on terror” which the agency was supposedly waging. The first is that this war has demonstrably failed since Isis, terrorists by any definition of the term, today rules a large part of the Middle East in northern Iraq... Read More
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The White House is pushing hard to keep a significant number of American soldiers in Afghanistan contrary to President Barack Obama’s earlier pledge to have then all out by the end of 2014. As the United States President has demonstrated himself to be a habitual liar that failure to connect promises made in 2008 with... Read More
By readers’ request, this is a reposting of a translation of a Pakistani National TV interview with an eyewitness to the alleged SEAL Team Six attack that allegedly killed Osama bin Laden. I made the translation available two years ago in an article prior to the creation of this website. Before you believe “your” government’s... Read More
Pakistan’s former military dictator, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, was indicted last week on charges of murdering former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, and for treason. Benazir Bhutto was killed during a bomb attack on her convoy in Rawalpindi during an election rally in December, 2007. She had just returned from exile in Britain and Dubai and was... Read More
The United States, for the most part, regards Pakistan as little more than a sordid stage on which the West is forced to act out one of the central dramas of its epic War on Terror. However, Pakistan, a nation of 180 million people, is a lot more than that. It is a fragile aggregation... Read More
“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce,” wrote Karl Marx. Exhibit A: look at Pakistan this week where former dictator Pervez Musharraf’s monkeyshines made a laughing-stock of the nation created in 1947 to be a model of good government for the world’s Muslims. The former self-styled “president-general returned from exile last month to... Read More
Construction is nearing completion on a natural gas pipeline linking Iran and Pakistan, a project that portends a huge geopolitical shift. As regional powers strengthen ties in this key energy market, they’re looking to China, and away from the West. Since the early 2000s, analysts and diplomats across Asia have been dreaming of a future... Read More
ISTANBUL - Reports of fighting along Kashmir’s cease-fire line don’t normally receive much attention in the western media. Last week, for example, saw a series of clashes on 8 and 10 January that killed both Pakistani and Indian troops. One of the Indian soldiers was decapitated, provoking fury across India and calls from its extremist... Read More
PastClassics
The Shaping Event of Our Modern World
Analyzing the History of a Controversial Movement
The JFK Assassination and the 9/11 Attacks?