Political Analysis and Global Affairs

  Israel’s strikes on Syria’s Abu al-Duhur airbase have exposed a deeper contest over Turkey’s military influence, Syrian sovereignty and Israel’s security red lines. Eight Strikes on an Old Syrian Airfield On Wednesday morning in Karachi, I was reading reactions to Israel’s latest strike on Syria when one question stopped me. What would Ahmed al-Sharaa and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan actually do if Israel refused to tolerate a Turkish military presence at a Syrian airbase? The replies quickly moved from strategy to slogans, but I kept returning to the battered runway at Abu al-Duhur. Israeli aircraft struck the Abu al-Duhur military airbase in northwestern Syria eight times on August 18, 2026, according to Syrian state television. The strikes damaged the runway and storage facilities, with no casualties reported. Turkey condemned the attack, while U.S. envoy Tom Barrack described the Israeli action as an unnecessary escalation. Abu al-Duhur itself is not the real story. The deeper is...

  Why now? The Supreme Court’s order to move Imran Khan for hospital treatment raises a larger question about judicial timing, custodial control, and Pakistan’s shifting political calculations On Wednesday night in Karachi, I put the Supreme Court order beside the federal government’s review petition on my screen. One question would not leave me: Why Now for Imran Khan? After three years in custody and months of disputes over doctors and family access, the court suddenly created an outside medical channel that prison authorities could no longer control alone. The obvious explanation concerns health. Imran Khan’s lawyers have reported serious deterioration, including major loss of vision in his right eye, while medical concerns have reached the courts for months. Yet a medical explanation does not fully answer a political timing question in Pakistan. I cannot prove that Pakistan’s military establishment ordered the judges to act. No credible document or attributable report currentl...

  Overseas Pakistanis travelling on foreign passports should check their NICOP validity before departure. New 2026 rules may prevent boarding if the NICOP has expired. Information checked and updated on 19 August 2026. A Pakistani family can spend months planning a journey home and lose the flight at the check-in counter. I can picture the scene easily. A British-Pakistani traveller stands at Heathrow, Toronto or Frankfurt with a valid foreign passport and an old NICOP. Karachi is only a flight away, perhaps through Istanbul or Dubai, but the airline employee looks at the expiry date and refuses to issue the boarding pass. Until recently, the traveller might have produced a NICOP renewal receipt and continued the journey. That is precisely where the rules have changed. The Important Change Came in July 2026 For years, many overseas Pakistanis treated an expired NICOP as an inconvenience rather than a serious travel problem. There was a reason for this confidence. The Federal Invest...

  By Muhammad Munaeem Jamal | Karachi | Updated August 19, 2026 A few days ago, I read a comment on Pakistan’s political situation that made me stop. Raja Saad Khan argued that disturbing the present hybrid system could send the economy downhill and push Pakistan towards default. Sitting in Karachi, I found the implication more troubling than the prediction itself. What if Pakistan has built a political arrangement that has become too expensive to change? The question matters as debate grows around another constitutional amendment and the future shape of Pakistan’s federation. No published constitutional text currently proves that a 28th Amendment will permanently embed the existing hybrid order. I am examining something different: whether the direction of the political debate, combined with Pakistan’s economic dependence on continuity, could gradually turn an informal distribution of power into a harder constitutional structure. Pakistan escaped the immediate default fears th...

  My international travel backup system after 60 combines two smartphones, multiple roaming SIMs and a paper notebook for essential information when travelling from Karachi. I was thinking about an older passenger at Jinnah International Airport when I watched a travel video about keeping essential information on paper. I know the scene well: passport in one hand, cabin bag hanging from the shoulder, spectacles coming on and off while somebody searches a phone for an address. The battery shows 12 percent. Suddenly, a small problem feels much larger. At my age, I see international travel differently from the way I saw it twenty years ago. A younger traveler can lose an hour at an airport, walk quickly between distant gates, fight with an eSIM and still treat the experience as an irritation. After 60, the same chain of small failures can become physically exhausting during a long journey from Karachi to Europe, Britain, Canada or the United States. I have reached a simple conclusio...

  Old corruption files in Karachi are moving again. The deeper question is why Pakistan’s accountability system becomes urgent only at certain political and legal moments. I keep returning to one date: 27 September 2024. NAB Karachi wrote to the Commissioner Karachi about 769 acres of government land and pointed to court orders that had existed for years. The letter said implementation still awaited action despite an earlier Supreme Court order. For me, Pakistan's Politics of Accountability begins inside that gap between a court order and the moment the state finally decides to move. A corruption file does not become serious because a television programme discovers it. Government land does not suddenly acquire value after fifteen years. If an appointment made in 2012 violated the law, the legal defect existed in 2012 as well. Yet the transcript now describes NAB seeking records on old Karachi land cases and more than 13,000 allegedly illegal local-government appointments dating fr...