Nida Amir Afridi- History in a glance

  Victors write history, people say. That’s too tidy. What the powerful actually do is curate memory, deciding which wounds get monuments and which get footnotes. Look at how modern global morality is built and the lopsidedness is hard to miss: some collective traumas are held up as absolute, universal measures of human depravity, while others get filed away as local quarrels over land. Read full article Minute Mirror  Listen on Spotify

  With US midterms on November 3 and polls pointing to a Democratic House, a politically wounded Donald Trump may have to recalibrate the eight-month war on Iran, a shift that will test Pakistan’s mediating role in the region. The electoral calculus is unkind to the White House. The Cook Political Report’s ratings of October 9 projected Democratic gains of nine to 19 House seats, putting the party at 224 to 234 seats, with 21 districts still rated toss-ups. Silver Bulletin’s FLIPR model, as reported by Newsweek, gave Democrats a 92.9 per cent chance of taking the House and 73.9 per cent in the Senate, while Kalshi traders priced the House at 90 per cent and the Senate at 63 on October 16. The Senate is the harder reach, since six of Cook’s seven Senate toss-ups, among them Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Ohio and Texas, sit in Republican hands. Originally published on Minute Mirror

  If the Mecca Pact produces fuel shipments and investment, it will be popular. The difference will be determined not by rhetoric in Mecca or Ankara, but by policy choices in Islamabad — choices about budgets, governance, and the limits of military engagement abroad. Until that work is done, the Mecca pact will only serve to highlight the glaring mismatch between Islamabad’s external security posture and its internal economic decay. The immediate coverage of the Makkah Joint Defence Agreement was theatrical. Headlines raced to christen a new “Muslim NATO”, pundits queued to pronounce a seismic realignment, and social feeds treated the signing as if it were a shortcut to global relevance. That is wishful thinking. A formal trilateral security architecture between Riyadh, Ankara and Islamabad is not a fast track to power projection. For Pakistan, the pact is a high-stakes gamble that will test the limits of strategic autonomy and expose the gap between diplomatic ambition and fiscal ...

  Summary A foothold in a water utility or a power network is a switch that someone else can flip in a crisis, with panic as the intended result, and no army has to cross a border to do it. This is the legal and public-relations trap that strategists call “lawfare,” and it can paralyze a militarily superior power without a single shot. They can be pieces of the same strategy, aimed at reshaping the balance of global power from the ground up. AI Generated Summary Pick up your phone. Glance at the thermostat on the wall, or the price of tomatoes at the supermarket. Ordinary things, you would say: the small conveniences of a connected age. To people who think about power for a living, they look like terrain. In 1999, two colonels in China’s People’s Liberation Army, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, published a slim and radical treatise called Chāoxiànzhàn , later translated into English as Unrestricted Warfare . Their argument unsettled readers then and looks uncomfortably prescient now....