Tag: Pakistan

Pakistan’s Civilisational Orphanhood

X.T.M · February 2, 2026 · 3 comments

The argument over Balochistan exposed something deeper than maps or borders. It revealed a confusion about what Pakistan is supposed to belong to.

Formally, Pakistan is one of the most nationalistic states on earth. Its red lines are absolute. Its territorial language is uncompromising. Its founding trauma has hardened into doctrine. And yet, beneath this rigidity sits a quieter truth: Pakistan’s elite does not actually live inside a closed nation-state imagination. They live in English.

They think in Western legal categories, read Western literature, speak the language of international institutions, and send their children into global circuits of education and finance. At the same time, their social world remains unmistakably South Asian; family-centred, hierarchical, ritualised, and deeply embedded in subcontinental habit. They are neither fully Western nor comfortably Indic. This produces a tension that Pakistan has never resolved.

The Nation-State After 1945: A Container That No Longer Holds

Continue reading Pakistan’s Civilisational Orphanhood

Iran and Pakistan Are Not the Same Kind of State

X.T.M · January 29, 2026 · 34 comments

Iran cannot be analysed using the same political categories as Pakistan or most modern states. The difference is not whether a regime is monarchical, clerical, or military. It is the age of the civilisation being governed. Pakistan is a young state. Its borders, institutions, and political language were assembled in the twentieth century. In such states, power fills a vacuum directly.

Power in Young States, Authority in Old Ones

A military dictatorship governs by force, hierarchy, and command. Its legitimacy is procedural and immediate: order, security, survival. This form works where political memory is thin and inherited meaning is limited. Pakistan’s army did not overthrow an old order. It stepped into an empty one. Iran is structured differently. It is a civilisational state that has existed in recognisable form for roughly three thousand years. Power there has never been exercised through force alone. Authority has always been tied to ideas that predate any single regime.

Monarchy as Civilisation, Not Administration Continue reading Iran and Pakistan Are Not the Same Kind of State

Why is the Pakistani consumer so poor?

Bombay Badshah · January 28, 2026 · 8 comments

So a new edition of the T20 WC is coming up and it is already embroiled in some controversy. Bangladesh refused to play in India and ICC had them replaced with Scotland.

Cue the usual voices from Pakistan – “BCCICC”, “India’s money is ruining cricket” blah blah.

But it led me to ponder something – Pakistan itself has a huge population of 250 million + and it isn’t that “much” poorer than India. India’s GDP pci is $3050 while Pakistan’s is $1710 (around 1.8x) . Similarly India’s GDP is $4.51 trillion while Pak is $410.5 billion (around 11x).

So the other numbers should be in the same ratio right?

Here is where the difference comes

Revenue of cricket boards

BCCI – INR 20686 crore
PCB – INR 458 crore

That is around 45x

T20 leagues media rights

IPL – $6.2 billion for four years
PSL – $24 million for two years

That is around 130x (normalized on a per year basis)

And if you look at other stuff these huge ratios persist

Cars sold annually

India – 4.1 million
Pakistan – 200,000

Forex reserves

India – $710 billion
Pakistan – $21 billion

Stock exchange market caps

BSE – $5 trillion
PSE – $65 billion

Why do you think that is?

My theory is because the Pakistan military is stronger than the 1/10 ratio, it kind of effects everything else which leads to these lop sided ratios.

Give your thoughts in the comments below.

Sphygmomanometer (Excerpt)–Translation from the Urdu

Kabir · January 28, 2026 · No comments

This translation was originally published in The Peshawar Review earlier this month. It is an excerpt from my translation of “Sphygmomanometer”, one of the Urdu short stories included in Bilal Hasan Minto’s collection Model Town (Sanjh Publications 2015). The collection consists of linked short stories set in Lahore in the late 1970s and early 1980s — at the beginning of General Zia ul Haq’s martial law. The narrator of these stories is an adolescent boy who comments on the hypocrisies of the adults around him.

One day, Naveed Bhai hadn’t returned from college by five o’clock. Usually, this wouldn’t have been cause for concern — a slight delay in returning home. But, over the past few days, Naveed Bhai had been behaving in a way that caused Abba to worry that he might be getting involved in something that would land him in trouble with the government of the cartoonish General Zia. Sitting at the dining table one day, Naveed Bhai had said angrily, through clenched teeth, that “we should teach these ignorant student union thugs a lesson.” On hearing this, Abba stared at him and said they had sent him there to study, not to get involved in useless things. Naveed Bhai should go straight to college and come right back. He shouldn’t even think about getting involved in union affairs and getting mixed up with dangerous people. Instead of being quiet after this reprimand, Naveed Bhai started speaking even more loudly:

“They are thugs! Their legs should be broken the way they broke Junaid’s. General Zia is behind them!”

Alarm bells had gone off in Abba’s head once before when Naveed Bhai had said he was going to join an underground group of progressive, pro-democracy students. Abba had only gently rebuked him, saying that future doctors shouldn’t get involved in such nonsense. Student unions were against the law. There was no need to get himself in trouble.

Who knows who he was, poor Junaid, whose legs had been broken. And I didn’t even know what a ‘union’ was but when Abba and Naveed Bhai started arguing loudly, I figured some dangerous people had become members of a student group sponsored by a political party, and now they were hovering around colleges and universities. The party they were affiliated with considered itself the last word on religion, and its sole champion. From Abba and Naveed Bhai’s conversation, I also gathered that these political workers used to beat students and coerce them into obeying strange orders. For example, boys and girls could not walk together on the street. If an emergency forced a boy to talk to a girl, neither of them was to be heard laughing — but such an emergency should never occur. Similar illogical things spewed from their strange minds, like the vomit from Faizan’s mouth. They had always done things like this, on behalf of that criminal general with the cartoon face and never did anything commendable just as that shameless general hadn’t either.

When Abba heard from Naveed Bhai about poor Junaid’s broken legs he became even more worried. Pointing his finger for emphasis, he warned, “Don’t you dare get involved in such things!” Continue reading Sphygmomanometer (Excerpt)–Translation from the Urdu

Report on Op-Sindoor

GauravL · January 27, 2026 · 41 comments

Link to the entire report.

Nevertheless, sufficient elements appear to indicate that, by the morning of 10 May 2025, the Indian Air Force had succeeded in achieving air superiority over a significant portion of Pakistan’s airspace. This in turn enabled it to continue long-range strikes against enemy infrastructure at will, at least for as long as it retained sufficient stocks of munitions such as BrahMos or SCALP-EG. At the same time, the Pakistan Air Force had lost the ability to repeat the operations it had conducted so successfully on 7 May 2025, owing to the loss of its forward air-surveillance radars and the threat posed by S-400 systems to its AWACS standoff weapons delivery platforms, while its own strikes conducted between 7 and
10 May 2025 had been largely thwarted by Indian defences.

Meanwhile, Islamabad demonstrated its manifest superiority in strategic communication, which notably benefitted from support within Chinese, and to some extent Western, information spheres. The destruction of one or more Rafales, for example, effectively masked the defeat of the adversary air force, which had reportedly suffered at least equivalent losses but had also proven incapable of defending its most important air bases or of delivering comparable, documented strikes against its adversary.

Operation Sindoor marked a significant evolution in Indian counter-terrorism doctrine, which now equates a terrorist attack to an act of war warranting a decisive response. It also eliminates the distinction between terrorist groups and their state sponsors, with the latter automatically becoming legitimate targets in the event of a renewed attack. Finally, it reaffirms New Delhi’s resolve, in such a case, not to be deterred by Islamabad’s nuclear arsenal. The potential for escalation on the Indian subcontinent therefore remains higher than ever, while developments since 1999 have constantly illustrated the stability/instability paradox

TL;DR take:
IAF won in air and the land after sustaining initial losses whereas PAF won in the media (which is not as trivial as it sounds).

 

Pakistan, the deciding hinge between the West & CRINK

X.T.M · January 22, 2026 · 9 comments

Pakistan does not announce itself as a great power. That is precisely why it works.

Prussia, built on Position, not Pretension

In a world that is reorganising around blocs, chokepoints, and undersea cables, Pakistan has emerged as one of the most dextrous middle powers on the planet. Not because it dominates geography, but because it understands it. Not because it leads alliances, but because it survives them. Most states are trapped by their alignments. Pakistan is not. It sits at the hinge of the Eurasian landmass: between the Gulf and Central Asia, between China and the Muslim world, between the Indo-Pacific and the Middle East. This position is dangerous for weak states. For competent ones, it is leverage. Pakistan has learned how to convert constraint into flexibility.

Dexterity & Diplomacy as Strategy Continue reading Pakistan, the deciding hinge between the West & CRINK

A Pakistani Wedding That Refused Not to Be Indian

X.T.M · January 20, 2026 · 40 comments

There is a tweet circulating of Nawaz Sharif’s grandson’s wedding. It is meant to be ordinary; the bride wore Indian designers, Sabyasachi and Tarun Tahiliani. Instead, it is revealing, the extent of Indic soft power. The colours are unmistakably Indian: red, gold, marigold. The symmetry is ritualistic rather than theological. The staging is ceremonial, not Quranic. The aesthetics are not Arab, Persian, or Turkic. They are Hindu-Indian; not in belief, but in form.

This is not a criticism. It is an observation. For seventy-five years, Pakistan has insisted that it is not India. That it broke away not only as a state but as a civilisation. That Islam did not merely replace Hinduism but erased it. Yet when Pakistan’s most powerful family marries its children, what appears is not a purified Islamic aesthetic but a recognisably Indic one.

Civilisation does not obey ideology.

Islam in Jambudvīpa did not enter an empty space. It arrived in a world already shaped by colour,  hierarchy, procession, music, and spectacle. It adapted to that world. It did not abolish ceremony; it repurposed it. Nikah replaced vivah, but the social grammar remained. Weddings stayed long, public, ornate, and familial. They did not become austere. They became Muslim in name and Indian in structure.

Continue reading A Pakistani Wedding That Refused Not to Be Indian

South Asia Is an Ugly Postcolonial Euphemism

X.T.M · January 15, 2026 · 56 comments

There is something faintly ridiculous about how often educated people insist on using the term South Asia as if it were a neutral, hygienic improvement on an older and supposedly “problematic” word. It is neither neutral nor an improvement. It is a bureaucratic euphemism invented to manage post-Partition discomfort, and it collapses the civilizational reality of the region rather than clarifying it.

The Indian subcontinent has had a name for millennia. It was called India because it lay beyond the Indus. Greeks used it. Persians used it. Arabs used it. Medieval Muslims, early modern Europeans, and the British all used it. The word survived because it described a geographic and civilizational unit, not because it flattered any modern state. The fact that the Republic of India later adopted the name does not retroactively invalidate its older meaning. Belgium did not abolish the word “Europe,” and Serbia’s existence does not make “European” offensive.

South Asia, by contrast, is not an ancient term misused by a nation-state. It is a late–Cold War academic construction, popularised by American area studies departments that were uncomfortable saying “India” once India no longer meant a single polity. It is a word designed to avoid an argument, not to resolve one. Like “Middle East,” it describes nothing from within the region itself. No one historically lived in “South Asia.” No one spoke “South Asian.” No one cooked “South Asian food.” Continue reading South Asia Is an Ugly Postcolonial Euphemism

Venezuela as Pakistan: A Template, Not an Accident

X.T.M · January 4, 2026 · 46 comments

Venezuela is not being punished. It is being re-made. Not into a liberal democracy. Not into a stable autocracy. Into something more useful. Into a Pakistan. By this, I do not mean a people or a culture. I mean a regime form (as what Bush did to Maduro’s earlier Iraqi doppelgänger): a state kept permanently unstable, permanently securitised, and permanently dependent; yet intact enough to sign contracts, police its population, and function as leverage against rivals. This is the form Empire prefers when it can no longer rule directly.

1) Why Venezuela Matters

Venezuela is not peripheral. It is inconveniently rich.

  • The largest proven oil reserves in the world (over 300 billion barrels)

  • Significant natural gas

  • Large gold reserves

  • Access to rare earths

  • Control of the Caribbean–Atlantic corridor, close to major shipping lanes and the US mainland

A sovereign Venezuela is not a local problem. It is a potential pole. This is why it cannot be allowed to work. Donald Trump said the quiet part out loud: Venezuela has “all that oil.” It should be “ours.” The language was crude. The intent was orthodox. What matters is not the tone, but the continuity of aim.

2) Sanctions as a Weapon System Continue reading Venezuela as Pakistan: A Template, Not an Accident

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