A version of this article appeared in The Express Tribune on August 27, 2011

Libya represents a watershed in the Arab Spring. The men heading Tunisia and Egypt may have fallen, but the military elite from their regimes still hold power, fighting a rear-guard political action against nascent revolutions. By contrast the Libyan regime is truly shattering.  

A version of this article appeared in The Express Tribune on August 12, 2011

The protests in Syria have spread to Hama, a city with a rebellious past. In 1982 it was the bastion of an Islamist uprising against the secular Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party rule of Hafez al-Asad, father of current Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. The elder al-Assad’s brother was put in charge of the pacification campaign. The city of Hama was levelled under an artillery barrage and up to 20,000 were killed. It is cruel irony that Maher al-Assad, Bashar’s brother and head of the elite Republican Guard, is leading the latest siege against Hama. An estimated 2000 men, women and children have been killed since the Arab Spring came to Syria. 

It is also ironic that Bashar has become his father. Youthful, reformist and with little apparent desire for power, Bashar enjoyed enough popular legitimacy to turn Syrian protests into a rallying cry for much needed political reforms. That he did not do so reflects a number of failing political gambles and constraints.  

This article appeared in The Walkley Magazine in July, 2011 (link opens as .pdf file)  

The media in Pakistan is free only so long as it toes the establishment line. Click here for full article (link opens as .pdf document)

A version of this article appeared in The Express Tribune on June 2, 2011

On May 26 Syed Saleem Shahzad wrote in Asia Times Online that the attack on naval base Mehran was in retaliation for an internal crackdown on al-Qaeda cells within the Pakistan Navy. Shahzad was Asia Times’ South Asia Bureau Chief and an internationally renowned journalist. On May 29 he went missing in Islamabad. On May 31 he was found dead. 

Shahzad’s killing underscores the need to understand the context of media freedom in Pakistan. Former President General Pervez Musharraf made much hay out of the fact that he liberalized and freed Pakistani media. But according to fascinating research conducted by award-winning journalist and the Pakistan Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Centre, Huma Yusuf, increased freedom for Pakistani broadcast media was an idea whose strategic time had come. 

A version of this article appeared in The Mark on May 13, 2011, in Asia Times on May 20, 2011 and in The Nation on May 20, 2011

With the world's most notorious terrorist dead, the Afghanistan war moves into its end game. 

 In the last decade, when the U.S. failed to get Osama bin Laden “dead or alive,” it turned to nation building in Afghanistan, complete with a dissimulating narrative of liberating women and importing human rights and democracy. Now bin Laden is dead, and, while it is still too early to accurately forecast the direction of emerging trends, there are strong indications that his killing will lead to a shift in American strategy in Afghanistan.

The American occupation of Afghanistan faces two distinct military challenges. The first is managing an essentially nationalist Taliban insurgency with Islamist overtones. The second is stifling al-Qaeda, a transnational terrorist organization, and its like-minded allies. Under operational cover of the former, it is the latter that has informed core American interests in Afghanistan. 

This article appeared in The Mark on May 4, 2011

Strategic alliances between states are successful only for as long as there is symmetry of interests. Alliances of convenience – those without any real approximation of interests – tend to decay rapidly. The fraying relationship between Pakistan and the United States – no doubt fractured further by the recent death in Pakistan of Osama bin Laden at the hands of U.S. operatives – is attributed to a number of surface phenomena, such as the increasing numbers of civilians killed in American drone attacks on Pakistani territory, or the operation of clandestine CIA contractors. However, at its root the deterioration in ties is symptomatic of a broader strategic divergence. 

A version of this article appeared in The Express Tribune on April 20, 2011 and a lengthier version of this article was published by the Transnational Institute in April, 2011

The question of Western intervention in Libya is not immune from considerations of geopolitical power, where the former possesses immeasurably more of it than the latter. Though the exercise of imperial power is always troubling, to oppose the UN-mandated intervention in Libya is to accept mass killing in Benghazi, Tobruk and other rebel held towns as an acceptable moral price for impeccable self-righteousness. And to tell the rebels that they are wrong to ask for intervention is to take a naively privileged, if not a culturally imperialistic, view.  

This article appeared in the Express Tribune on March 22, 2011

Many took the US turn away from Egypt’s former president Hosni Mubarak as a bellwether of the world’s most powerful democracy’s supportof their own democratic aspirations. Repressive rulers wondered if they too would go the way of Egypt. This is still a possibility. Success, however, will come despite the US, rather than because of it. 

This article appeared in the Express Tribune on February 28, 2011

Revolutions have a tendency of going viral. In 1848, a French contagion engulfed most of Europe. Led by Egypt, much of Africa and the Middle East decolonised and toppled their western-backed regimes in the 1950s and 60s. In 1989, Poland showed Eastern Europe how to cast off its Soviet yoke. Similarly, the cusp of 2010-11 will be remembered as the winter of Arab discontent. The revolutionary spark that began in Tunisia has turned into a beacon in Egypt. Popular protests have spread across the Arab world — from Morocco in the west, to Bahrain in the east.

Tunisia and Egypt have yet only seen a change at the top. Though this is significant, their respective militaries have so far ringed-off most of the ruling regime itself. Whether the political system that emerges is a genuine people’s democracy or the continuation of a form of military-backed rule, remains to be seen. The only country where it can reasonably be predicted that the regime will collapse more or less completely, is Libya. And Bahrain is the only country where it is equally reasonable to forecast that the regime will be able to maintain itself with only cosmetic changes. 

A version of this article appeared in the Express Tribune on February 8, 2011. 

Egypt’s political crisis has entered a critical phase. President Hosni Mubarak has refused to back down. So have the protesters occupying Cairo’s central Tahrir (Liberation) Square. They have rejected Mubarak’s vague concessions and are unimpressed by his fast-forwarded succession plan. Mubarak appointed former intelligence chief Omar Suleiman – seen as a necessary stepping-stone for the eventual rise of Mubarak’s son Gamal – to the Vice Presidency, a post that had stood vacant since Mubarak’s own ascent from it 30 years ago. With carrots failing, Mubarak turned to signature brutality. On February 2 the regime mobilized party faithful, plainclothes security-men and paid thugs under the guise of “pro-Mubarak demonstrators” to engage the pro-democracy movement in bloody street battles.