Political Analysis and Global Affairs

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The Makkah Agreement Is Reshaping Iran’s Strategic Flanks

Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Türkiye form a new collective-defence framework, forcing Iran to reconsider how separate regional military relationships could develop into a coordinated security structure. The new Makkah defence pact does not yet create a regional NATO, but it forces Tehran to calculate risks it once considered separately. I still remember the sound of telex machines in a Karachi banking office during the Iran-Iraq War. In 1986, I sat in a dim back office near I.I. Chundrigar Road and watched international payments slow as the war spilled into Gulf shipping. Tankers were being attacked, while Kharg Island, the nerve centre of Iranian oil exports, repeatedly came under pressure. For a banker thousands of kilometres from the fighting, the Tanker War arrived through delayed instructions and nervous conversations about dollars. That memory returned on August 7 when Saudi Arabia signed the Makkah Joint Defence Agreement with Pakistan and Türkiye. Crown Prince Mohammed bi...

The Next Superpower Will Not Exist

A fractured geopolitical table shows power dividing among the United States, China, Europe, and India, with no single heir to the old American-led order. America is losing its monopoly, but China is not inheriting the whole system. Power itself is splitting across rival centres. A Karachi Screen and a Broken Map Last night in Karachi, with the ceiling fan pushing warm air across my desk, I kept returning to one thought from the comments under my earlier essay: the next superpower may never arrive. America can lose part of its old command without China inheriting the whole structure. I think that is the real story now, not a ceremonial transfer of power from Washington to Beijing. The old map still tempts us. One empire fades while another rises. History appears to change uniforms, but I no longer believe the twenty-first century will behave so neatly because powers once gathered inside one American system are separating into different institutions and economies. Why the Next Supe...

Why Jamaat-e-Islami Lost Karachi to Ethnic Politics

A view overlooking Karachi's cityscape in late 1986 from the AEG Pakistan office desk as political turmoil reshaped urban Sindh I sat at my desk in the accounts department of AEG Pakistan in late 1986, balancing job order costing ledgers for the German firm while smoke drifted across the city skyline. The sharp air smelled of burnt rubber and tear gas, a bitter haze that crept through window frames and settled in the back of your throat. My job demanded absolute numerical precision down to the last rupee, yet nothing in those corporate cost sheets could account for the sudden explosion of violence consuming the streets outside. My colleagues talked in low, frightened whispers about ethnic clashes, while older men in my neighborhood insisted that religious solidarity would eventually calm the crowds. They were completely wrong. The old political consensus was dying, and the party that had built its entire identity on that foundation was about to be swept aside. Jamaat-e-Islami had...

Karachi Province Campaign Exposes Sindh Assembly Math

I watched a senior Sindh Assembly clerk flip through a worn 1973 constitutional manual in his Karachi office during the 2020 parliamentary debates. He tapped his finger on page ninety-four and laughed at the political headlines blaring from a desk television. "They preach to the street," he told me, "but they never read the ledger." That ledger remains cold and unyielding today. Chief Minister Murad Ali Shah recently moved a formal resolution in the provincial assembly, citing Article 239 of the Constitution to counter the partition narrative. The law explicitly demands a two-thirds supermajority vote in the affected provincial legislature before Parliament can alter boundaries. MQM-P holds twenty-eight seats in the one-hundred-and-sixty-eight-member house, making any legislative boundary change impossible without Pakistan Peoples Party support. Simple arithmetic defeats the campaign before a bill reaches the floor. Historical precedents demonstrate how const...

Karachi’s Representation Deficit and Political Vacuum: Brawls in Bahadurabad, Neglect on the Streets

The video out of Bahadurabad was hard to watch, but for anyone who has followed urban Sindh's politics for decades, it was entirely predictable. Shouting matches quickly escalated into physical brawls outside the party's temporary headquarters. Factions loyal to rival leaders clashed over appointments and internal control, leaving workers bloodied on the pavement. Having spent years drafting English press releases and analytical commentary for the movement—and having watched my own sibling serve as a deputy convener who continues to participate in the political process behind the scenes—I view these internal struggles through a very specific lens. The physical brawls over party turf in Bahadurabad are not just organizational friction. They mark the total separation of urban political leadership from the municipal realities facing Karachi's streets every day. While self-appointed leaders compete over shrinking party turf and federal cabinet allocations in Islamabad, Pakist...

A Brave Girl Made Me Remember the Bihar My Parents Never Forgot

I watched Sakhi’s interview in Karachi just after sunrise. The ceiling fan moved warm August air while she described police batons and a torn T-shirt, then smiled as she recalled mocking the officers who had beaten her. Sakhi’s courage reached me before her politics did. I am Bihari by family inheritance, and I grew up admiring young people who refuse to bow when power expects silence. My father came from Patna, while my mother also belonged to Bihar. Their homeland remained present in our home through family memory and long political arguments that often continued after dinner, when the tea had gone cold and nobody wanted the last word. Sakhi is not identified as Bihari in the interview. I do not claim her as one. I recognised something else in her. Her defiance reminded me of the political temperament my parents admired, because they respected people who questioned authority even when the price arrived quickly. Sakhi entered that moral space through her own family and her own p...