The Red Line: Pakistan's Two Front War

 When Obama left the White House he stated that the thing that kept him up at night more than anything else was the potential for Pakistan and India to stumble into an unplanned nuclear exchange. What was once a regional conflict has now drawn in a number of great powers such as China, and the US, but no side yet has a real plan to try to avert the risk of this simmering conflict going nuclear. The estimate is that in the event of an Indian invasion toward Islamabad the Pakistani command may only have around 6 hours to either "use or lose" their nuclear weapons, so we ask our panel what the likely outcome will be for this nightmare scenario. On the panel this week. Ayesha Jalal (Tufts University) Adam Weinstein (Foreign Policy) Andrew Small (George Marshall Fund) For more information please visit - www.theredlinepodcast.com Follow the show on @TheRedLinePod Follow Michael on @MikeHilliardAus

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The Pragati Podcast: What’s Happening in China?

 Indians and Indian news outlets are rightfully concerned with the ongoing Chinese aggressions in Ladakh and the India-China border conflict that could escalate any day. On Episode 150 of The Pragati Podcast, Hamsini Hariharan helps listeners take a peek at what is happening within China since the Coronavirus pandemic started, how the Chinese economy and politics are faring, and explores what else is occupying China’s foreign policy today.

Hamsini Hariharan started The Pragati Podcast along with Pavan Srinath in April 2017, and was a co-host for close to 70 episodes. Currently, Hamsini is the host of States of Anarchy – a weekly podcast on global affairs and foreign policy. She also writes a weekly column for CNBC News-18 on Chinese politics and policy. She is a visiting faculty at the Symbiosis Centre for Media and Communication. She is on @HamsiniH on twitter and @lady_baritone on Instagram.

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The Pragati Podcast: Nuclear War, Deterrence and Peace.

 Nuclear war feels unthinkable, but how much peace does nuclear deterrence guarantee? Do nuclear programmes truly deter or compel adversaries in the real world? And can we imagine a world where 20+ countries have nuclear weapons?

Vipin Narang joins Pavan Srinath on Episode 124 of The Pragati Podcast to dive into the world of nuclear weapons and strategy. He shares the evolution of our understanding of nuclear strategy from early ideas of mutually assured destruction.

The Pragati Podcast is a weekly talkshow on public policy, economics and international relations hosted by Pavan Srinath.

Vipin Narang is an Associate Professor of Political Science at MIT and a member of MIT’s Security Studies Programme. He published his first book Nuclear Strategy in the Modern Era in 2014, and is currently working on his second book, Strategies of Nuclear Proliferation, in which he explores how states pursue nuclear weapons. He is on Twitter at @NarangVipin.

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The Red Line: Will the Afghan Peace Deal Actually Work?

 The US has now been at war in Afghanistan for almost 20 years, and three administrations have all failed to find a solution to this war. Now the clock is ticking, with the Taliban gaining more and more ground every day, and the US risks a second "Rout from Saigon". So the US is looking to a peace deal, but will it actually bring stability to the region or simply further splinter an already expanding civil war. This week's guests are Sahar Khan (CATO) John Glaser (CATO) Jarrett Blanc (Carnegie) For more info visit www.theredlinepodcast.com

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The Red Line: Who is India's Biggest Strategic Enemy?

 India is fast becoming one of the world's great powers, set to take the number 2 or 3 slot by 2050. This is unless another country were to derail India's current path, and the list of potential derailers is fairly long. So this week we take a look into who will be India's great strategic threats over the next 3 decades, and where India sits in the power struggle for leadership of South Asia today. This weeks guests are Swaminathan Aiyar (CATO Institute) Dhruva Jaishankar (ORF/Brookings) Harsh V Pant (London School of Economics)

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Today in Focus: The crisis in Kashmir

Azhar Farooq and Vidhi Doshi report on the crisis over Kashmir, triggered by the Indian government’s decision to impose direct rule from Delhi. Plus Jason Burke on life in post-Mugabe Zimbabwe.

A communications blackout means accurate, up-to-date information from Kashmir is extremely difficult to get. The reporter Azhar Farooq had to fly from its summer capital, Srinagar, to Delhi to file his dispatch as phone lines and internet connections are all down. He describes an eerie quiet on the streets as residents prepare for what they fear could be long period of lockdown.

On Friday, the BBC released a video appearing to show huge crowds marching through the streets of Srinagar. The footage shows people running for cover as police appear to open fire and use teargas.

The Guardian’s Vidhi Doshi tells Anushka Asthana that the history of Kashmir since it was given special status after Indian independence in 1947 has been that of a contested territory and the centre of tensions between India and Pakistan.

Mirza Waheed, a Kashmiri journalist and author, describes how his idyllic childhood in the 80s changed abruptly as his home town became a frontline for militants after elections widely seen to have been rigged by India sparked an insurgency.

Also today: Jason Burke reflects on life in post-Mugabe Zimbabwe where living conditions for millions have rapidly deteriorated.

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The Observer view on India’s aggression over Kashmir

Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, and the ruling nationalist BJP stand accused of acting without proper legal authority by unilaterally revoking article 370 of the constitution, which guarantees Kashmir’s special status. Delhi’s arbitrary bifurcation of the state into two union territories (Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh) is also legally contentious. Opponents say Modi has opted for “raw power” over legitimacy.

Modi also ignored UN resolutions on the internationally recognised dispute with Pakistan over sovereign control of the Kashmir region and, notably, the 1972 Simla agreement, which stipulates that its final status must be settled by peaceful means. That point was made last week by the UN secretary-general while appealing for “maximum restraint”. To cap it all, Modi failed to consult Kashmir’s political leaders, whether pro-independence or pro-India, or the Kashmiri people. Quite the opposite, in fact. Political leaders were placed under house arrest. The population was placed under curfew. Means of association and communication were cut. And massive army deployments have been used to enforce Delhi’s diktat. [...]

Khan has limited options. His country is severely indebted. Modi has been clever in strengthening ties with Muslim countries such as Saudi Arabia that traditionally bankrolled Pakistan. None of them spoke up on Islamabad’s behalf last week. Meanwhile, relations with the US have become strained, not least over Afghanistan.

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statista: Lebanon Has By Far The Most Refugees Per 1,000 Population

Turkey hosts the most refugees of any country worldwide with 3.7 million in total at the end of 2018, ahead of Pakistan (1.4 million) and Uganda (1.2 million). As a share of the population, however, Lebanon hosts the most by far with 156 per 1,000 of its inhabitants. Jordan comes second with 72 per 1,000 of its population while Turkey rounds off the top three with 45 per 1,000 of its people. Prior to the war in Syria, Lebanon only hosted 8,000 refugees and the huge influx has pushed its socio-economic absorption capacity to the very limit.

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Haaretz: Pakistan Just Became Saudi Arabia's Client State, and Turned Its Back on Tehran

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman may have got the cold shoulder from protesting crowds in Tunisia and been publicly sidelined at the G20 conference last November, but he was treated to a hero’s welcome in Pakistan this week. [...]

Khan has acquiesced to MBS’ pointed demand: to join the Sunni Muslim axis against Iran. That formalization of an anti-Tehran alliance that Pakistan has previously hesitated to endorse will have ripple effects both within Pakistan, and across the region.

The first leg of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman’s Asia tour saw him strike $20 billion worth of deals in Pakistan. The financing comes as much needed relief for Islamabad, which is looking to dodge a thirteenth International Monetary Fund bailout amid a balance of payment crisis that is crippling the economy. [...]

Just as India threatens war in retaliation, assurances Pakistan received from both Saudi Arabia and China bolstered its decision that there was no need to go after Jaish-e-Mohammad, the terror group that took responsibility, and whose leadership is still living openly inside Pakistan. [...]

Just as Islamabad gave MBS an anti-Iran podium, Tehran is echoing claims often made by India: that Pakistan provides a safe haven for to jihadists and fails to take action against militants crossing the border to launch attacks on neighboring territories. That identification with its arch-enemy naturally makes Pakistan’s alignment against Iran easier.

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The Guardian: As a system, foreign aid is a fraud and does nothing for inequality

he five poorest countries in the world, measured by GDP per capita, are the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique, Uganda, Tajikistan and Haiti.

One might imagine, then, that these countries are among the top recipients of UK aid. Wrong. The main beneficiaries are, in fact, Pakistan, Syria, Ethiopia, Nigeria and Afghanistan. Not one of the five poorest countries is among the top 10 recipients of British aid. [...]

Nor is it any different with multilateral aid (funds channelled through international organisations such as the World Bank rather than directly between donor and recipient). Again, not one of the poorest countries is among the top 10 recipients of multilateral aid. [...]

Half of all international development aid is “tied”, meaning that recipient countries must use it to buy goods and services from the donor nation. As the USAid website used to boast (until the paragraph became too embarrassing and was deleted in 2006): “The principal beneficiary of America’s foreign assistance programmes has always been the United States. Close to 80% of the US Agency for International Development’s contracts and grants go directly to American firms.” Aid has “created new markets for American industrial exports and meant hundreds of thousands of jobs for Americans”. Long before Trump entered the White House, USAid was “putting America first”. [...]

Aid not only boosts the economies of rich countries but also promotes their foreign policy aims. As a 2014 report by the US Congressional Research Service put it, aid “can act as both carrot and stick and is a means of influencing events, solving specific problems and projecting US values”.

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The New York Review of Books: Pakistan’s Promised Day?

Like so much else in Pakistan’s labyrinthine politics, proving the military’s involvement in the Sharifs’ criminal convictions is impossible. It is clear, though, that the Sharifs had been leading in polls until that point, but that the army favored Imran Khan and his Islamist party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (Pakistan Movement for Justice). In an interview in May, Khan declared his loyalty to the military. “It is the Pakistan Army and not an enemy army,” he said. “I will carry the army with me.” Two months later, the Sharifs were sitting in Adiala prison, and Khan was giving a victory speech to a rapt Pakistan—promising “open borders” with Afghanistan and an Islamic renaissance of Pakistan (already officially an Islamic Republic). [...]

Khan has played along. In another dog-whistle to hardline Islamists—those like Maulana Fazlur Rehman Khalil, himself a pioneer of the Afghan jihad, who are already in his alliance, and others he hopes to attract—Khan last week reiterated his promise to create the “type of state that was established in Medina,” referring to the first Muslim city-state during the lifetime of the Prophet Muhammad. Seconds earlier, Khan had also promised to make Pakistan the country that Pakistan’s founder Mohammad Ali Jinnah had dreamed of.” The two, Jinnah’s secular democracy and Medina’s Islamic state, are polar opposites, but this Janus-faced leader is not bothered by the contradiction. [...]

The Pashtun-dominated Islamic state may be closer to Khan’s truth, and he doesn’t care whom he sacrifices to get it. In the past, Pakistani rulers of doubtful legitimacy have used religious strictures that control women, their clothing and behavior, as a convenient means of rallying support and consolidating political control. Khan looks likely to follow suit. In the past, he has opposed legislation criminalizing domestic violence and expressed his support for enforcing the Zina and Hudood Ordinances, which have been used to imprison women on the basis of unproven accusations of illicit sexual relations.

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The New Yorker: Can Imran Khan Really Reform Pakistan?

Khan’s tiny political party, Tehreek-e-Insaf, or P.T.I., expanded rapidly, and it surged in national and provincial elections, ultimately leading a provincial government for a number of years, to mixed reviews. But Khan fell short of winning a high national office and, in recent years, he has largely played a role of opposition agitator and provocateur. Now he appears to be within close reach of his ambition to serve as the Prime Minister. According to results in Pakistan’s general election, held on Wednesday, the P.T.I. won the most seats, by far, in Parliament, although not an absolute majority. The expectation is that Khan will be able to negotiate a majority coalition by attracting support from smaller parties and independent members of parliament. [...]

There can also be little doubt that the office of Prime Minister of Pakistan will remain the country’s second most powerful position, after the Chief of Army Staff, currently held by General Qamar Javed Bajwa. Bajwa and his senior generals exercise authority well beyond their constitutional role, influencing the media, politics, and the judiciary. Their power has only consolidated in recent years, as evidenced in military-sanctioned crackdowns on media outlets critical of the “establishment” (as the military is euphemistically known in Pakistan), human-rights activists, and other sections of civil society. However, for more than a decade, the Army has found it preferable to rule Pakistan indirectly, focussing on national security and foreign policy, and leaving the messy and intractable problems of poverty, energy deficits, and development to the Prime Minister and the Cabinet. Imran Khan is only the latest in a series of junior partners whom the Army will expect to concentrate on the economy and other domestic matters but tread lightly on foreign affairs. [...]

Khan’s attitude toward the Taliban has shifted over the years, but his current outlook seems aligned with the Army’s. That is, where Taliban factions leave Pakistan alone and seek to be accommodated in Afghan politics, he is sympathetic to, or at least tolerant of, the movement’s legitimacy. (Since the Afghan Taliban emerged, in 1994, the Pakistan Army and its principal intelligence service, Inter-Services Intelligence, or I.S.I., has sought to use the movement as a source of influence in Afghanistan, and as a check on India’s ambitions in the country.) Khan also describes Pakistan as a victim of the American-led war in Afghanistan. He has denounced U.S. drone strikes inside Pakistan and rejected the premises of U.S. counterterrorism policy in the region. “I never thought the Taliban were a threat to Pakistan,” he told me in 2012, when I interviewed him for a Profile in The New Yorker. Still, it has always been hard to think of Khan as anti-Western, in the sense that he was educated in Pakistan’s finest British-inspired prep school, attended Oxford University, married a British woman (the first of three wives), and thrived as one of the first English-speaking global athletic superstars of the satellite-TV age. His Westernness has always been a part of his identity, and even of his political appeal inside Pakistan. [...]

If Khan does become the Prime Minister, he will inherit an economy in crisis, with debts rising and foreign reserves shrinking, likely presaging yet another painful round of bailout negotiations with the International Monetary Fund. The economy is growing, with the gross domestic product forecast to rise nearly six per cent this year, but corruption, persistent terrorist violence, and decades of bad government have saddled the country with an almost bottomless list of structural problems, such as illiteracy, sectarianism, and public-health crises. It’s no wonder that the Army does not wish to run Pakistan directly these days. Better to let ambitious civilian politicians like Khan take on the intractable problems, while the generals take care of themselves offstage. If Khan actually changes Pakistan in the ways that he has promised, it will be a greater miracle than any of those he achieved on the cricket pitch.

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The Atlantic: ‘A Sudden Burst of Movement’ on the Afghan Peace Process

This month, the Trump administration reportedly ordered its diplomats to seek direct talks with the Taliban. That news report came just days after General John Nicholson, the head of the nato mission in Afghanistan, said the United States was “ready to talk to the Taliban and discuss the role of international forces.” The militant group maintains that the Afghan government is illegitimate and that it will talk only to the U.S. It also insists on a withdrawal of all U.S. forces from the country as part of any reconciliation process in Afghanistan. The Taliban has not dismissed the reported offer—but noted it was awaiting a formal offer from the U.S. [...]

The reported U.S. offer of direct talks with the Taliban comes on the heels of the Afghan government’s own unprecedented overtures toward the militant group. In February, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani offered the group unconditional talks; and last month, he offered the Taliban an unconditional cease-fire to coincide with the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. If that offer was a surprise, the Taliban’s response to it was a shock: It accepted the offer and ordered its fighters to lay down their weapons for three days. The effectiveness of the truce—as well as the resumption of the fighting after Eid—signaled just how much control the Taliban has over its fighters and the Afghan government over its forces. Not only that, the scenes of public celebrations, Taliban fighters embracing Afghan soldiers and taking selfies together, and a dramatic reduction in bloodshed during those three days showed just how tired everyone in Afghanistan, including those engaged in the fighting, is of their nearly two-decade-long conflict. The Taliban, which is now publicly seeing that the public it claims to represent supports a reconciliation process, has even ordered a halt on attacking civilian targets. The reports of the U.S. offer of direct talks have also strengthened the optimism in the country. [...]

“My interpretation is that the Afghan government sees potential value in a U.S.-Taliban channel with at least two conditions: That it’s coordinated very closely with Kabul and with a great deal of transparency about what’s discussed,” Walsh, who previously served at the State Department as the lead adviser on the Afghan peace process,  told me. “And, second, no talks are going to delve into the political future of Afghanistan without the appropriate Afghan representatives in the room.” He said there is no deal the U.S. could make with the Taliban without “a meaningful agreement between the actual stakeholders who have to live with it, and those are Afghans.”

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statista: The ten countries where it's worst to be female

A new study from the Thomson Reuters Foundation has found that India is the most dangerous country in the world for women. The research was based on a survey of 550 experts on women's issues and criteria included healthcare, discrimination, cultural traditions, sexual/non-sexual violence and human trafficking.

Ending violence against women in India was made into a national priority after a student was raped and murdered on a bus in Delhi five years ago. Experts have now said that the country is not moving fast enough to eradicate danger to women with rape, sexual harassment/harassment and female infanticide still continuing at alarming levels.

The war-ravaged countries of Afghanistan and Syria came second and third in the study while number 10 is certainly a surprising addition. According to experts, the United States makes the top-10 list of the most dangerous countries for women due to the #MeToo and Time's Up campaigns dominating newspaper headlines and media coverage for months. 

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Jacobin Magazine: Bangladesh’s Incomplete Revolution

East Pakistan faced what amounted to internal colonialism. Economic exploitation extracted millions annually, and the Pakistani government still heavily discriminated against Eastern citizens. Badruddin Umar, active during this time in the East Pakistani Maoist movement, wrote that “the slogan of Independent Bengal had begun to be raised in the streets of Dhaka, especially by the workers belonging to the leftist students’ organisations during the 1968–69 movement. At mass rallies, demonstrators chanted Joi Bangla (Long Live Bengal) and called for Krishok-Sramik Raj, “rule by peasants and workers.” [...]

Though the East had stronger left-wing traditions than the West, Communist parties failed to lead the mass movement or profit from the elections. One reason for this was that both the most dynamic parts of the Left and Pakistan itself had strong ties to Mao’s China. Most left-wing forces were in some way influenced by Maoism, and the government maintained friendly relations with China as a counterweight to their shared rival, India. Because of Ayub’s “objective anti-imperialist characteristics,” much of the Maoist left did not oppose his regime and avoided making demands that might weaken Pakistan’s position in relation to India, including self-determination for the East. [...]

The pro-Moscow left was much smaller, but it enjoyed disproportionate representation in the press and academia. In both halves of Pakistan, these leftists focused on restoring parliamentary democracy so single-mindedly that they became almost indistinguishable from liberal forces. In the East, Soviet sympathizers supported self-determination but were little more than an appendage of the AL. [...]

But the new government quickly became mired in corruption and nepotism, and its radical promises went unfulfilled. Despite American opposition to the independence struggle, large parts of the AL leadership held fundamentally pro-US positions. The nationalization program avoided touching American or British interests, and the government tried to refrain from antagonizing the United States. Prices multiplied while wages dropped. The nationalizations that took place just allowed the politically connected to loot the expropriated companies. [...]

But the new government quickly became mired in corruption and nepotism, and its radical promises went unfulfilled. Despite American opposition to the independence struggle, large parts of the AL leadership held fundamentally pro-US positions. The nationalization program avoided touching American or British interests, and the government tried to refrain from antagonizing the United States. Prices multiplied while wages dropped. The nationalizations that took place just allowed the politically connected to loot the expropriated companies.

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The New York Review of Books: If Trump Blows Up the Deal, Iran Gets the Bomb

To create a nuclear weapon, two things are required: a design and a sufficient amount of “fissile” material. It is my belief that the Iranians have the design. One limitation of the JCPOA is that there is no provision for verifying this. Unless the Iranians tell us, or unless they come up with a bomb, we don’t know. But there are two reasons why I think they have the design. The first is the likelihood that they bought a design for a Chinese device from the Pakistani metallurgist and nuclear proliferator A.Q. Khan. But the second reason is more important because it has larger implications.

I use Pakistan as an example. With fewer than six physicists and computer facilities that were inferior to what any high school student now has, the Pakistanis designed their nuclear weapons using open-source information. Iran has a very sophisticated nuclear program and I feel quite certain they have followed a similar path. This means, I believe, that if they ever had enough fissile material, they could produce a bomb in very short order. Therefore, the focus must be on restricting this material; to that end, I turn to the JCPOA. [...]

One cannot say with any certainty whether the countries that will remain in the agreement will be able to constrain the Iranians, who have made absolutely clear that they will not agree to any modification of it. The notion that President Trump has of somehow getting a “better deal” is delusional. There is no better deal. The Iranians have everything they need to make nuclear weapons—including uranium. The JCPOA is our best, and perhaps our only, chance of preventing Iran from getting the bomb.

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The Guardian: A eureka moment for the planet: we’re finally planting trees again

China plans to plant forests the size of Ireland. Latin American countries have pledged to restore 20m hectares of degraded forest and African countries more than 100m hectares. India is to plant 13m hectares, and on a single day last year 1.5 million people planted 66m trees in Madhya Pradesh alone. [...]

We are seeing a great global attempt to plant and restore forest land but paradoxically we are still losing tree cover. The rate of global deforestation has slowed by more than half in 25 years but tree loss jumped 50% in 2016, and 2017 is likely to have been worse.

The greatest threat to trees used to be loggers and the expansion of farming. These are still a threat, but human-caused deforestation and degradation make forests more fire-prone, and disease, droughts linked to climate change and harmful beetles are likely to kill trees in greater numbers. [...]

We must keep planting trees but think differently. Mass, state-sponsored tree-planting has a reputation for being expensive and badly managed. When forests are planted on an industrial scale, up to 20% of the trees may die within a few years. It costs around £720 a hectare to plant a forest, so it would cost around £250bn to plant the 350m hectares that countries have signed up to. That money is just not available to developing countries.

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The Washington Post: Putin’s Silk Road gamble

Another blow was the loss of Ukraine as a potential participant in Russian-led integration arrangements. Without Ukraine, the second-largest post-Soviet economy and a market of about 44 million people, Moscow’s hopes to create an integrated bloc that would be on par with the European Union and other centers of global economic power were essentially dashed. Lacking a market of sufficient size to create its own viable geo-economic area, Russia was left with the only option of moving into another nation’s economic orbit. [...]

Still, while praising the Belt and Road plan, Moscow is keen to prevent Beijing’s geopolitical domination of continental Eurasia. Instead of wholeheartedly subscribing to China’s scheme, the Kremlin promotes its own vision of “a larger Eurasian partnership” or “Greater Eurasia,” a network of existing and emerging “integration formats.” Beijing’s Belt and Road would be just one element, alongside the Eurasian Economic Union, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and potentially even the European Union. [...]

Russia aspires to be the main security and diplomatic broker in Eurasia while leaving China with the role of the economic leader. As one observer put it, “China would be the bank, and Russia would be the big gun.” Such an arrangement might harken back to the history of the European Community, when France acted as the political leader while West Germany was the economic engine. Moscow’s preference for a new Eurasian order is reflected in its diplomatic activism, such as its leading role in securing the admission of India and Pakistan into the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and in advocacy for the future membership of Iran.

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Slate: The Pakistan Problem

It was also something that gave us another kind of access, which was a physical access of routes through Pakistan into Afghanistan, which is still very important today. So the opposing argument is basically: Why are you doing this? Don’t you still need access into those routes into Afghanistan if you are actually increasing the number of troops like you said? If you don’t do it through Pakistan, you have to do it through Central Asia, which is a lot more expensive and requires balancing the relationship and dynamic with Russia, which opens up this whole other weird can of worms. The Obama administration didn’t want to deal with Russia and only did it for a certain amount of time. So I guess you could argue that, because of the Trump administration’s relationship with Russia, they see this as not really an issue, because they can get the material there. This is the No. 1 issue: How are you going to support the war in Afghanistan now? [...]

But I don’t actually agree with the whole thing and don’t think that in the long-term it is a good strategy because of our interest in Afghanistan and the region as a whole. We need to figure out a way to have this relationship besides threatening to cut off aid and cutting it off until they check some box somewhere. Trump is actually being pretty consistent with the Bush administration policy and the Obama administration policy. Nobody found a good way to work with Pakistan, and that is underlying all of this. We have lots of relationships with other countries where we don’t agree on everything, and we figure out a way to meet somewhere—not in the middle, but somewhere, and we hash it out. [...]

You're right, though. Those are the answers. I think that a lot of folks, including Pakistanis often, would go to the United States to do this, because we gave the most money, or we had the most at stake. But guess what? It's not that anymore. The Chinese have a lot at stake now. The Russians actually have a lot at stake. Saudi and Iran have a lot at stake too, especially because of what's happening in the Middle East and how they're using South Asia as their strategic bet to engage each other, and Pakistan is smack dab in the middle of that. I actually think that there are more stakeholders now than there were when 9/11 happened, and we should see that as an opportunity. I don't think the Trump administration is at all going to be interested in doing any of that. That's not really a priority for them. It's the opposite. They want to pull out.

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Haaretz: Pakistan's New anti-Soros Campaign Boosts Its anti-Semitic, Conspiracy Theory-Infested Political Culture

This is because while analysts see the rise of the anti-Soros phenomenon in the West as a reincarnation of old anti-Semitic tropes about nefarious Jewish financial and social engineering designs, this kind of conspiracist thinking about Jews have never left the Pakistani ethos  - so it's more a question of continual peaking rather than resurfacing. In other words, anti-Semitism is a feature, not a bug, of Pakistani politics. [...]

Last Friday, for instance, in expectation of the Supreme Court verdict on Imran Khan, the chairman of the Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf (PTI), the main opposition party in the country, the Federal Information Minister Marriyum Aurangzeb accused Khan of being "funded by Jews and Hindus." [...]

While the prevailing anti-Hindu bigotry is rooted in the legacy of the violent Indo-Pakistani Partition, and Pakistan’s need to justify its creation, the ubiquitous anti-Semitism in the country has Islamist roots. A literalist reading of the Islamic scriptures serves as a justification for espousing violent anti-Jewish sentiments, a characteristic of jihadism. [...]

This has meant that Pakistan, with a registered Jewish population of precisely one person, where both the left and right wings perpetuate anti-Semitism through quasi 'anti-colonialism' and Islamism respectively, remains ripe for political point-scoring through perpetuating anti-Jewish bigotry. 

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