Evaluates macro-level shifts in global power, including Great Power Competition, supply chain vulnerabilities, and sovereign stability. This hub translates complex political events into actionable risk assessments for institutional decision-makers.
The stakes for both sides of the Gulf divide could not be higher. Saudi Arabia and the UAE cannot afford to fail in their effort to force Qatar’s hand after leading several Arab and non-Arab states in a rupture of diplomatic relations and declaring an economic boycott that also targets Qatar’s food supplies.
Cracks have appeared in a Saudi-led, US-backed anti-terrorist political and military alliance days after US President Donald J. Trump ended a historic visit to Saudi Arabia. The cracks stem from Qatar’s long-standing fundamental policy differences with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates about Iran and the role of political Islam.
Following the 9/11 incident in 2001, US and its allied forces invaded Afghanistan in a bid to eliminate Al-Qaida and Taliban, their safe-heavens and free the country from their “oppression.” Apart from providing billons of aids for reconstruction and development of Afghanistan, the United States have spent $70 billion thus far to build 350,000 strong Afghan National Army and Police to fight against terrorism and provide better security to the people.
To Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the 2011 Arab popular revolts that toppled autocratic leaders in four countries and sparked the rise of Islamist forces posed a mortal threat. In response, the two countries launched a counterrevolution that six years later continues to leave a trail of brutal repression at home and spilt blood elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa.
The stakes are far higher than when Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain withdrew their ambassadors from Doha in 2014 for a period of ten months, but failed to force Qatar to change its policies. Saudi Arabia and the UAE by now also breaking off economic ties are also seeking to disrupt Qatar’s air, sea and land links and complicate its exports and imports, and particularly its food supplies.
In Afghanistan, Pakistan has been scapegoated for a while – tactical failures and strategic reverses are conveniently justified by blaming it on Pakistan. It is fashionable for our own intellectuals to join in the chorus and blame the infamous Establishment. At times, I feel that Pakistan would be a better place to live in and things would be so much more stable and peaceful if this establishment was taken out of the equation.
Amid ruckus and mayhem in Afghanistan, top US officials, Defense Secretary James Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, have given a good account of what is the offing for the country. The day president Ghani offered an olive branch to the Taliban, James Mattis rejected the very idea.
A Saudi and UAE-led campaign to force Qatar to halt its support for Islamists and militants is little else than a struggle to establish a Saudi-dominated regional order in the Middle East and North Africa that suppresses any challenge to the kingdom’s religiously cloaked form of autocratic monarchy.
There seems to be an endeavor to prove that we can do without Kashmir and it should not be central to our relations with India. People have quoted from history, that it was we who invaded in 1948, sending in tribesmen into Kashmir and that India was justified in sending troops at the request of the Maharaja and Hyderabad was offered in exchange etc.
The international community has a moral obligation to speak up but will not; morality is not a factor in the affairs of the world. Pakistan needs to present a narrative to the world but it is too incompetent to do it and displays criminal indifference to the matter.
Caving in to Saudi and UAE demands that it break its ties to Islamists and militants and curb, if not shutter, Qatar-funded media like Al Jazeera, would amount to Qatar surrendering its ability to chart its own course, and like Bahrain becoming a Saudi vassal.
The Indian Defense Minister Arun Jatley visited the frontlines on the currently active Line of Control (LoC). After meeting field commanders and troops deployed on the Forward Defended Localities (FDLs), he expressed his satisfaction over the morale of the troops and called upon them to maintain heightened vigil.
The US is deliberating upon a military-heavy policy option to turn the tables in Afghanistan since it employed the GBU 43 bomb against IS last month in Nangarhar. A change in policy was deemed necessary because of Taliban’s swift and unabated resurgence. There have been many deliberations and statements but McMaster is the first senior official who has talked about the new policy applying to Pakistan too.
Pakistan’s tenuous house is built on a torturous effort to balance relations with Saudi Arabia and Iran amid rising tension between the two regional rivals, prevent Pakistan from becoming an operational base for possible Saudi and US efforts to destabilize the Islamic republic, and employ militant groups as proxies in achieving its geopolitical objectives.
American efforts in Afghanistan are back to square one these days as a second troop surge seems to be on the cards, recently General Nicholson apprised the Senate that thousands of troops are required in Afghanistan as the U.S. mission is in a ‘stalemate’, he also went on to admit that the Taliban had gained at least 15% more ground in 2016 even though 13,000 international troops remained in the country.
American efforts in Afghanistan are back to square one these days as a second troop surge seems to be on the cards, recently General Nicholson apprised the President Trump’s Pakistan policy is entirely different from his electoral rhetoric, up till now he has not done anything that goes specifically against Pakistan’s interests.
Increasingly caught up in the Middle East’s multiple conflicts, Pakistan is struggling to balance relations with rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran amid concern in Islamabad that potential US-Saudi efforts to destabilize the Islamic republic could turn its crucial province of Baluchistan, a lynchpin in China’s One Belt, One Road initiative, into a battleground.
