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Deniable and Disposable: Tehran’s New War on Western Leaders
Following the military campaign in early 2026 that resulted in the death of Iran’s former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the geopolitical threat landscape has shifted toward highly aggressive, state-sanctioned retaliatory operations.1 Under the newly appointed Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, the clerical regime has intensified its domestic mobilization and transnational threats.1 This escalation culminated in…
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Naval Base or Trade Hub? Gwadar’s Identity Crisis Deepens With Every New Attack
Pakistan’s military said on July 8 that three militant attacks since July 6—near Quetta, at a police post guarding the Mangi Dam project in Ziarat, and on an army convoy on the N-25 highway near Bela—had killed 42 police, army personnel, and civilians, while security forces killed 54 militants in the operations that followed. That…
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The Spotter Force Multiplier Theory: Analyzing Kagusthan Ariaratnam’s Social Innovation in Counterterrorism and Military Intelligence
The resolution of protracted asymmetric conflicts often depends on conceptual shifts within intelligence and counterinsurgency (COIN) frameworks rather than the simple application of kinetic military power.1 During the Sri Lankan Civil War (1983–2009), the state confronted the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a highly disciplined, state-like insurgent organization that pioneered modern suicide terrorism and…
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From Signature to Selective Memory: Pakistan’s 1972 Bilateral Pledge Under Scrutiny
Few documents in South Asia’s diplomatic record carry the weight or invite the evasion of the agreement that India and Pakistan concluded at Shimla on 2 July 1972. Signed in the immediate aftermath of a war that Pakistan had decisively lost, the accord is most often discussed today as a contested text whose meaning each…
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Gwadar as a Transit Port: A Vision Not Yet Matched by Reality
Pakistan is proposing Gwadar Port as a transit hub for landlocked Tajikistan, nearly a decade after the port received its first container ships in 2016. In its best recorded year across that period, Gwadar handled 22 ships. Nine Years and a Ceiling of 22 Ships When CPEC was announced and Gwadar was positioned as its…
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Behind Closed Walls: How Beijing Conceals the Xinjiang Detention System
There is a particular cruelty in disappearing someone and then denying they were ever taken. It leaves families suspended in a kind of unresolvable grief — unable to mourn, unable to hope, unable to act. Across Xinjiang, this has been the experience of countless Uyghur, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and Hui families since the mid-2010s, as China’s…
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The Sovereign Shadow: National Security Coercion, Temporal Fragmentation, and the Administrative Human Rights Battle of Kagusthan Ariaratnam
This article examines the landmark administrative and human rights battle of Kagusthan Ariaratnam against the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), analyzing the structural tensions between domestic national security practices and international refugee protection obligations. It addresses two fundamental questions: first, whether security agencies can leverage the legal vulnerability of refugee status to extract prolonged, coerced…
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Arctic Sovereignty and the New Cold Front: Strategic Modernization and the Sino-Russian Challenge
The geopolitical equilibrium of the High North is undergoing a fundamental and irreversible transformation. For decades, the Arctic was characterized by “Arctic exceptionalism,” a shared understanding among circumpolar nations that the region should remain a zone of low tension and high cooperation, primarily governed through the consensus-based Arctic Council.5 However, the dual pressures of accelerated…
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Geopolitical Alignment or Strategic Autonomy: Sri Lanka’s Defense Posture and the 2026 Indian Ocean Crisis
The decision by the administration of President Anura Kumara Dissanayake to deny the United States military access to the Mattala Rajapaksa International Airport in March 2026 represents a critical inflection point in the maritime security of the Indian Ocean Region. While the Colombo government maintains that this refusal was a calculated act of “strict neutrality”…
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A Formal Disclosure and Challenge to the Professional Integrity of Professor Rohan Gunaratna: The “05” File and the Mechanics of State Deception
This open letter, authored by Kagusthan Ariaratnam (also known as Murali and code-named “05”), serves as a formal whistleblowing disclosure and a demand for historical rectification regarding his decades-long exploitation by internationally acclaimed counter-terrorism expert Dr. Rohan Gunaratna. Ariaratnam asserts that Gunaratna utilized his unique insider knowledge as a former LTTE Naval Intelligence Officer to…