Research & Commentary Results

Understanding a state and its society involves understanding how the state treats its military, its record of governance, and the relationship between the military and civilian politicians. By all accounts, Pakistan, a state founded in 1947 as a homeland for the Muslim population of British India, is a unique case where the military dominates all other institutions in both state and society. This was on clear display in the recent court battle over the extension of Army Chief of Staff Gen. Qamar Javed Bajwa’s tenure.

Gen. (Ret.) Joseph Votel discusses the role of Afghanistan in US regional strategic interests, whether a peace deal is possible with the Taliban, and how important Pakistan is to achieving a sustainable political settlement.

There is no end in sight to Iraq’s political crisis even though Parliament unanimously voted to remove Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi on Sunday. Abdul-Mahdi now tends a caretaker government while Iraq’s political leaders are interpreting the country’s constitution to give President Barham Salih 15 days starting from Nov. 30 to name a new prime minister.

President Donald Trump’s lightning fast roundtrip to Bagram airbase north of Kabul had its share of surprises. In addressing troops, he confirmed previous reports that talks are once again underway with the Taliban, but then went on to inject a ceasefire as a condition for a new agreement.

Tehran’s reaction to the resignation of Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi is one of accepting the seemingly inevitable.

Although 350 Iraqis have died to date and close to 16,000 have been wounded, protesters are not going home. Yet, most of the ruling clique is still rejecting the idea of forcing the prime minister to resign.

Last week saw the Taliban’s release of two kidnapped professors in exchange for the Kabul government’s freeing of three prized Taliban prisoners. While the swap may have been necessary on humanitarian grounds, it was unfortunate otherwise. Rather than defending the swap on its own merits, Kabul and Washington are hailing the exchange as a possible breakthrough following the collapse of the Doha agreement and the stalling of planned intra-Afghan discussions.

Since early October, the southern provinces of Iraq have been consumed by protests and strikes. While ruthlessly attempting to suppress protests, the Iraqi government has promised legal and political reforms. Yet some of the Kurdistan Region-Iraq’s elites are suspicious that the government’s reform agenda is a “conspiracy” against Kurdish entitlements masquerading as a good faith effort to placate the protestors. The region’s hegemonic parties are concerned that legal, constitutional, and procedural reforms may overhaul the institutions that guarantee their positions of influence in the federal government and secure their territorial claims.

Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, has been paralyzed in recent days by supporters of Maulana Fazlur Rehman and his Jamiat-Ulema-e-Islam (JUI-F), a well-entrenched Islamist party. The protestors are seeking the resignation of the military-backed Prime Minister Imran Khan and fresh elections, and the demonstration has emerged as an existential problem for Khan.

Iranian mediation might bring the two big political blocs to an agreement on a new government, but the protest movement demands only new, clean faces and won’t readily accept another cabinet drawn from discredited political blocs.

MEI’s Paul Salem and Randa Slim join host Alistair Taylor to discuss the nationwide protests that have swept through Lebanon and Iraq this week resulting in political and economic turmoil as well as crackdowns by security forces. Where do things go from here?

Only one leader has the moral standing and mass appeal to be able to move Iraq out of the deadly stalemate in which it now finds itself and which may degenerate into more violence and chaos if the status quo is not upended: Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

While there is probably zero chance Prime Minister Khan will step down, efforts will persist in trying to delegitimize those in power because this is what Pakistan’s opposition parties seem best programmed to do.

The launch of Turkey’s military incursion into northern Syria on Oct. 9 represents an existential threat for the Autonomous Administration in Northeast Syria (AANES) and Kurdish parties in Syria as a whole, prompting Kurdish political factions, both within Syria and abroad, to reevaluate their survival strategies and alliances. This report explores the various political factions within the Kurdish coalitions in Syria as they functioned under the AANES and the major rifts between them. Even under these dire circumstances Kurdish political factions in Syria have responded to the Turkish invasion independently.