Articles

Shunned by the rest of the world in the wake of the Jamal Khashoggi murder, Muhammad bin Salman was embraced and feted by the Pakistanis. This may turn out to be a costly mistake for Pakistan.

The Americans have lost to the Taliban in Afghanistan. What is euphemistically referred to as “negotiations” are really the terms of American surrender to be able to safely withdraw their forces from Afghanistan.

Islamic Iran has survived for 40 years because it adhered to Islamic principles but sectarianism and nationalism are gradually creeping in. These must be guarded against just as the Ikhwan must re-evaluate their conduct over the last 40 years to rectify their mistakes.

Muhammad bin Salman is clumsier than Inspector Clouseau of Pink Panther fame but the former is far more deadly since he controls virtually everything in the medieval kingdom.

If Donald Trump is smart—a big if—he should do in Afghanistan what Richard Nixon did in Vietnam: declare victory and get the hell out. Staying put, as the Washington warlords are demanding, would merely prolong America’s misery.

America is in the midst of a civil war. The Reds and the Blues that fought in 1861 never disappeared. They are very much alive and there is every likelihood that the US might disintegrate in the new bust-up.

That the US was forced to choose drab Warsaw in the middle of winter to hold an anti-Iran hate fest that few major European powers attended merely exposed US isolation.

The Western media and politicians hype China’s economic progress because they want to use it to show that China’s economic progress only became possible when it adopted Western capitalism.

Despite the end of communism, the Central Asian republics are still controlled by family-based oligarchtes that continue to rule with an iron-fist. Dissent is ruthlessly suppressed.

Russia’s experience in Chechnya showed that it would have to change its approach to controlling these republics not through the old Soviet methods but by giving them a measure of autonomy so long as certain red lines are not crossed.