• 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…

  • 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…

  • Game-Changer or Glorified Export Model? The Capability Gap Pakistan’s Navy Will Not Discuss

    When the Pakistan Navy’s PNS Hangor was commissioned at a ceremony in Sanya, China, on 30 April 2026 — attended by President Asif Ali Zardari and Chief of Naval Staff Admiral Naveed Ashraf — the official narrative was triumphant. Pakistan had finally broken into the advanced submarine club, the country’s strategic communications apparatus declared. What…

  • 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…

  • IMF Bails You Out, China Arms You Up: Pakistan’s Contradictory Economic Reality

    By March 2025, Pakistan’s total public debt had reached Rs 76,007 billion — Rs 76 trillion — of which $87.4 billion was external government debt, according to the State Bank of Pakistan and the Economic Survey 2024-25. The country is on its latest IMF programme, in a succession that spans more than two dozen arrangements…

  • Drones Over Neighbourhoods: The Civilian Cost of Pakistan’s Unmanned Warfare Strategy

    The drone has transformed modern warfare. Unmanned aerial vehicles offer militaries the ability to strike at distance, gather intelligence, and project power without putting pilots at risk. They have become a fixture of contemporary conflict. Pakistan has invested significantly in drone technology and, during the May 2025 military operations, employed drones on a substantial scale.…

  • Gwadar’s Moment Is a Mirage: Crisis Traffic Is Not Commercial Destiny

    Gwadar’s sudden rise in cargo movement should not be mistaken for the arrival of a durable maritime power. The reported jump to roughly 11,000 containers in April 2026, compared with about 8,300 containers across all of 2025, is striking only because it is so clearly abnormal. It is not evidence that Pakistan has built a…

  • EO-3 and the Credibility Deficit: Pakistan’s Space Claims Under OSINT Scrutiny

    Pakistan’s launch of EO-3 was presented by official channels as a “major milestone” in national space capability, with the entire government apparatus portraying it as proof of self-reliance, scientific maturity, and technological progress. The satellite was launched from China’s Taiyuan Satellite Launch Centre on 25 April 2026 aboard a Chinese Long March-6 rocket, and official…

  • Not Without Cause: Iran’s Mistrust of Pakistan Is Rooted in Experience

    Pakistan’s mediation between the United States and Iran continues. Delegations arrive and depart from Islamabad. Communiqués describe progress, or proximity to progress, in language calibrated to neither confirm nor foreclose. The ceasefire—brokered by Pakistan on April 8, extended once at Islamabad’s request — is holding, unevenly. The process is alive. What is under serious strain…

  • From Iqbal to Maududi: How Intellectual Orthodoxy Shaped Pakistan’s Anti-Ahmadi Legal Order

    Pakistan’s anti-Ahmadi policies cannot be understood without grasping their intellectual roots in 20th-century Muslim thought in South Asia. Two towering figures — the philosopher-poet Muhammad Iqbal and the theologian-politician Abul A’la Maududi — shaped the ideological environment in which anti-Ahmadi sentiment was transformed from theological dispute into state policy. Though different in method and emphasis,…