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중도 성향
정치
‘Strategic doctrine’: Iran hails military shift after Beirut raid response
Iranians describe attacks on Israel as part of military approach prioritising 'taking initiative and offensive power'.
"DOCTRINE" · 총 38건
필터 보기현재 지수
50.3
0 = 부정 우세
50 = 중립
100 = 긍정 우세
최근 7일 기준 87,260건을 분석한 결과, 뉴스 심리지수는 50.2(균형)입니다. 긍정 4,474건(5.1%)·중립 80,606건(92.4%)·부정 2,180건(2.5%)이며, 중립 비중이 뚜렷하게 높습니다. 성향 지수는 종합 15.3(중도 균형)입니다.
Iranians describe attacks on Israel as part of military approach prioritising 'taking initiative and offensive power'.
From the intelligence gaps of Operation Blue Star to the precision of Operation Sindoor, India’s security architecture has changed dramatically.
India is rapidly building a powerful military space presence, launching a 52-satellite constellation from 2025 to 2029, with a significant portion by the private sector. This initiative, guided by a new joint doctrine, aims to enhance surveillance, secure communications, and space awareness, bolstering national security in an increasingly contested orbital domain.
ISLAMABAD: The Federal Constitutional Court (FCC) on Thursday emphasised that appointments to important public offices must demonstrably conform to constitutional standards of fairness, transparency, institutional integrity and merit-based governance. “Public authority cannot be exercised on undisclosed considerations, nor can structured procedures be reduced to empty formalities,” observed Justice Rozi Khan Barrech in a judgement he authored. Justice Barrech was a member of a three-judge FCC bench, headed by Justice Syed Hasan Azhar Rizvi, while hearing an appeal filed by Sifatullah Khan against a March 5, 2026, Peshawar High Court (PHC) order setting aside his appointment as chairman of the Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education (BISE), Bannu, in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The FCC observed that the legitimacy of public administration depended not merely on the existence of power, but on the disciplined and transparent exercise of that power in accordance with the law. Court upholds PHC ruling setting aside appointment of BISE Bannu chairman It upheld the PHC order, stating that it did not suffer from any legal or constitutional infirmity warranting interference by the FCC. The petitioner had challenged the PHC verdict that not only set aside his May 13, 2025, appointment notification but also directed the controlling authority to entrust the duties of chairman to another suitable person within three months. When the post of BISE Bannu chairman fell vacant, applications were invited from eligible candidates. Through a notification dated Feb 2, 2021, the controlling authority constituted a search and scrutiny committee to interview shortlisted candidates for the post. Under its terms of reference (ToRs), the committee was mandated to evaluate and interview shortlisted candidates and recommend a panel of three officers for each post for approval by the KP chief minister. The committee conducted interviews on Sept 26, 2024. Later, the committee recommended three names, but dropped that of the petitioner. The recommendations were forwarded through various secretaries and later placed before the KP chief minister for approval. The controversy arose when a revised summary was prepared, placing the petitioner’s name at serial number four. He was subsequently appointed on deputation for three years through a notification dated Sept 13, 2025, ignoring the committee’s recommendations entirely. ‘Doctrine of pleasure’ In his judgement, Justice Barrech observed that the “doctrine of pleasure, or the existence of administrative discretion, cannot be invoked to legitimise a process which, on its face, departs from the very mechanism devised by the executive itself”. The FCC observed that administrative decisions affecting public appointments must disclose the basis for any departure from the prescribed procedure. It added that silence on the record in this regard was fatal to the validity of such action. “The doctrine of pleasure, in its constitutional and administrative sense, does not confer an unfettered licence upon the executive to act in disregard of self-imposed procedural discipline,” the judgement held. It added that while the executive might, subject to law, appoint and remove public functionaries, the exercise of such power remained subject to the rule of law and the constitutional obligation to act fairly and rationally. Published in Dawn, June 5th, 2026
MANILA, Philippines — The official organization of lawyers in the country has invoked a 1949 landmark Supreme Court decision in saying that the session held by the new Senate majority on June 3 was “lawful and valid.” The Integrated Bar of the Philippines (IBP) on Thursday stated its position on the issue by citing the
Your bank account has less constitutional protection than your phone. That isn’t a rhetorical point. It’s the practical result of 50 years of Supreme Court doctrine, and the Arctic Frost investigation is what it looks like when the government uses that doctrine at full extension against sitting members of Congress. The Fourth Amendment required the […]
China's nuclear arsenal is rapidly growing, with over 300 new silos and expanded fissile material production aiming for parity with the US. Pakistan counters India with a "full spectrum deterrence" doctrine and diverse missile systems. India is bolstering its defence with the multi-layered Sudarshan Chakra air-defence umbrella to counter both threats.
Sergey Ryabkov said the hypothetical extreme situations were outlined in detail in Russia’s military doctrine and the fundamentals of Russia’s state policy on nuclear deterrence
The age of artificial intelligence requires the kind of strategic doctrine and arms control that stabilized the Cold War, writes Niall Ferguson. Right now, we have neither.
The U.S. government invented mosaic warfare—then forgot to use it.
AIMPLB says that certain stanzas of 'Vande Mataram' include concepts that are incompatible with the Islamic doctrine of monotheism
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.” — Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias “I am in blood, Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, Returning were as tedious as go o’er.” — William Shakespeare, Macbeth PROLOGUE This is and isn’t about America’s illegal war against Iran. It is primarily about hiding an empire in plain sight and now watching it unravel in plain sight. The war against Iran becomes a consequential event in tandem with other structural weaknesses, a fillip of sorts. It reminds one of the Soviet war on Afghanistan. That war, in and of itself, did not bring down the Soviet Leviathan. The process inhered in the very make-up of the Soviet Union. The war just shoved it over the precipice. But let’s get on with our purpose here. In August 2022, then-US President Joe Biden signed the CHIPS and Science Act into law. A $280 billion legislative package, it sought to revitalise domestic semiconductor manufacturing. The act was a response to a startling vulnerability: the world’s most advanced chips, essential for everything from F-35 fighter jets to surgical equipment to artificial intelligence, are overwhelmingly manufactured by a single company, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), located on an island claimed as sovereign territory by America’s primary strategic rival, China. This dependence is not an accident of geography or a supply chain anomaly. The semiconductor industry wasn’t even hobbled by Covid 19. Despite its complex and far-flung operations, the industry works smoothly. The US dependence is the logical endpoint of a decades-long corporate strategy that maximised profit by outsourcing physical production while retaining only the high-value design and marketing ends of the value chain, the so-called “Smile Curve” strategy. The undoing of the United States in the Iran war may be far more significant than its defeats in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. It may well mark a historic milestone in the fraying of the position of the US as a global hegemon. But the seeds of this erosion of American dominance, argues Ejaz Haider, were laid long before its misadventure in Iran… The Italian economist and sociologist Giovanni Arrighi, to whom I shall return, would have been amused to see the revered smile curve — taught at prestigious business schools and which encourages firms to outsource capital-intensive manufacturing to focus solely on high-margin research and development (R&D), branding and marketing — as a classic trap of late-stage capitalism. In fact, the CHIPS Act stands as a state-level admission that this strategy, so profitable for individual corporations like Apple and NVIDIA, to name just two, has become a major geopolitical vulnerability for the US. This is the central paradox of America’s declining empire. The very mechanisms that generated unprecedented wealth have systemically dismantled the material and industrial foundations upon which that wealth ultimately rests. The decline of the American empire is not a partisan talking point. The US is a behemoth. It won’t just collapse one day like the Berlin Wall. Nor is a snapshot view the way to go. It is an ongoing structural process and a number of scholars have used longitudinal designs to analyse the trend lines. I argue that it is a slow, systemic unravelling across interconnected domains. First, the financialisation of capital, theorised most rigorously by Arrighi. Capital shifts from productive investment to speculative finance, generating short-term profits at the cost of long-term industrial vitality. It hollows out domestic industrial and political power, a process identified by American sociologist and political scientist Ho-fung Hung, who argues that off-shoring of production destroys the industrial ecosystem, skilled labour base and, ultimately, the social cohesion required for great power competition. Second, the erosion of the alliance system. And no, it’s not just Trump. Three deeper currents are involved: the gradual unravelling of the post-WWII security architecture; the economic failure of neoliberalism; and the imperial outreach baked into the very idea of neoliberalism. Third, the lateral diffusion of technologies, now commodified and everywhere. They help innovative and determined weaker powers offset the asymmetric advantage of bigger powers: Ukraine versus Russia; Hamas/Hezbollah/Houthis versus the US-Zionist duo; and now Iran versus the US-Zionist duo. As I note later in this space, the war against Iran is a much bigger setback for the US than its wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. Corollary: the post-WWII ‘Pax Americana’ is transitioning from a period of hegemonic stability, to use American historian Charles Kindleberger’s concept, into a protracted and likely irreversible, terminal crisis, to borrow Arrighi’s term. But let’s first begin with the peg: the war against Iran. THE PRESENT Since its inception, America has been at war: wars of choice, wars of conquest, wars for resources, wars to defend its hegemony, wars to spread “American values.” How or why does the Iran war stand out? Foremost, the conflict has confirmed the structural limits of US coercive diplomacy in a shifting multipolar world. It has exposed acute structural vulnerabilities in defence economics and inventory endurance, as well as a critical absence of pragmatic post-war planning and a misreading of societal resilience. The conflict has also underscored the changing nature of global alignments in a multipolar world. This comes with the collapse of coercive economic power. For four decades, the US has relied on sophisticated sanctions and lawfare to pressure Iran into subjugation. It has failed, showing the limits of sanctions, especially on fungible commodities. Even sanctions on non-fungible elements like technology can be circumvented. As in Iran’s case, the sanctioned state can develop indigenous expertise through varied strategies. There’s clear evidence that Tehran has developed complex and sophisticated non-dollar lifelines with China and Russia, rendering unilateral sanctions increasingly ineffective. It has used an array of strategies to blunt the effect: interchangeability (can’t sell to X; sell to Y); value retention (barter, use of cryptocurrencies); substitution and evasion (relying on third parties, covert ship-to-ship transfers, use of shell companies). Unlike the insurgencies in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, the US is not involved in ground combat in Iran (so far). It has relied on high-tech aerial and missile attacks through its formidable ISTAR (Intelligence, Surveillance, Target Acquisition and Reconnaissance) capabilities. Iran has not responded through elusive, hit-and-run ground attacks. It has countered US technology through technology in a non-contact war. But its employment of technology is grounded in asymmetric capabilities: a large arsenal of ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and one-way attack drones. The cost-exchange ratio, by most accounts, is unfavourable for the US. For instance, the Iranian Shahed-136 one-way attack drone has an estimated unit cost of $20,000 (some estimates put it at around $10,000). It is a simple, slow-moving, and relatively easy to detect drone. But it is also cheap and plentiful. To intercept it with costly SM-2 or ESSM missiles creates a cost-exchange ratio of between 30 to one and 100 to one. It is also a shoot-and-scoot system. Iran can afford to lose hundreds of such drones and produce some 1,000 per month. The US cannot afford to fire thousands of interceptors at them. And those interceptors take three to four years to manufacture. It is a cost-asymmetric war. Similarly, the US has been pulling out assets from the Pacific to the Gulf. The USS Boxer amphibious group is an example. Diverting naval assets from the Pacific physically manifests deployment overstretch. As Robert Farley, visiting professor at US Army War College notes, resources needed to prevail in one theatre guarantee weakness in another. It’s the same with all force deployments and employments: “Every missile allocated to one target is unavailable for another.” The contrast with Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan is instructive. In those theatres, the US was defeated by determined insurgencies, even as it bombed and bombed. The adversaries were willing to absorb enormous casualties, drag it out and inflict mission fatigue on the US. In both Iraq and Afghanistan, broadly speaking, the US won the conventional war expeditiously but then got bogged down. In the Iran conflict, while Tehran has demonstrated the ability to absorb much pain, the US is not facing elusive insurgents but a state with a sophisticated missile programme, a sharp understanding of force employment, a network of allies across the region (Hezbollah in Lebanon, Ansar Allah in Yemen, and Hashd al-Shaabi in Iraq and Syria), and the ability to close the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 percent of the world’s oil passes. Iran has also demonstrated adaptation under fire, used the operational strategy of dispersal and delegation, exercised deception, demonstrated growing targeting capabilities through ISR, rapid repair of underground sites after US-Zionist bombing and consistently shifted locations for counterattack operations. Can the US still bomb Iran? Of course. Will that be painful? Yes. Will Iran respond? Hell, yes. Would that raise the overall cost? You can bet your dime on it. It will be proof, yet again, that it is a slow grind and the US cannot achieve its objectives at a sustainable cost. Yet, it is stuck, because to walk away means it loses credibility. Trump needs a win; Iran is not prepared to give him that. The war has changed the ground realities. There is no status quo ante. The objectives remain strategically incompatible — ie we might get a pause, even a long one, but the essential causes remain unaddressed. Spoiler alert: Zionist entity. US President Donald Trump attending the return of the bodies of the first six American soldiers killed during the war with Iran on March 7, 2026: the lateral diffusion of technologies help innovative and determined weaker powers, such as Iran, offset the asymmetric advantage of bigger powers, such as the US | AFP THE POINTILLIST EMPIRE: HOW IT BEGAN American imperialism did not begin with grand pronouncements like the Monroe Doctrine or the Big Stick diplomacy of Theodore Roosevelt, though they give us a potent sense of a rising, expansionist power. It literally began with bird poop, which sounds about right if one were to understand imperialism as a crap enterprise. The Guano Islands Act of 1856 allowed US citizens to claim uninhabited, guano-rich islands. The act set a precedent for later overseas acquisitions. Historian Daniel Immerwahr calls this a “pointillist” empire. This practical, resource-driven, and often hidden expansion set a pattern that would define America’s power and military bases for the next century. The Mexican-American War (1846-1848) established the continental empire, seizing vast territories from Mexico. This wasn’t a war of liberation but a war of conquest, not manifest destiny but a fig leaf to cover the musty crotch of violent expansion, economic greed and racial supremacy. The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo formalised the seizure of over half of Mexico’s territory. The Spanish-American War of 1898 definitively projected American power overseas. Theodore Roosevelt’s Secretary of State John Hay, in a personal letter to Roosevelt, called it a “splendid little war.” By its end, the US had seized Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines. But the “splendid” label concealed a brutal reality, just like the payload of Trump’s “gorgeous B-2 bombers.” The subsequent Philippine-American War (1899-1902) resulted in Filipino genocide. That savagery has been systematically erased from American popular memory, even as Mark Twain was scathing in his condemnation and also did a fantastic job of calling out Rudyard Kipling for The White Man’s Burden. But this wasn’t all. Immerwahr documents that American forces employed waterboarding (yes, much before the darned ‘War on Terror’), concentration camps (“black sites”), and scorched-earth tactics that would be recognisable to any student of colonial atrocities. After World War I, US President Woodrow Wilson attempted a new form of imperialism: liberal internationalism, rather than direct territorial control. Much has been written about the “Wilsonian moment.” British historian and diplomat E. H. Carr called it a utopian project, divorced from the reality of power politics. In fact, it wasn’t. The project was essentially colonial and Wilson’s liberal internationalism fit it perfectly. The mandates were thriving. The US Senate’s refusal to join the League of Nations left a vacuum that no amount of idealistic pronouncements could fill. War did come. Carr gives us insights into why it became inevitable. The US emerged from the war as the leading power. The post-WWII order was a direct lesson learned from the intervening two decades. No more “isolationism”. The US must play the role of the hegemonic stabiliser. The core argument was simple and powerful: a stable world economy requires a single power to act as lender of last resort, maintain an open market for distressed goods, and coordinate macroeconomic policies. The US did that via the Bretton Woods system, the Marshall Plan and a vast security architecture that spanned the globe. The quid for the quo? American dominance. The US was now fully involved. It bore the cost but the return on investment was handsome. It kept the US in the lead, even during the bipolarity of the Cold War and beyond. With the Berlin wall crumbling, American political scientist Francis Fukuyama became the mascot for neoliberalism. History had ended; all the wagon trains were destined for one town. Some might arrive late, but arrive they would. Europe was pacified and rebuilt. Japan was demilitarised and transformed into a manufacturing powerhouse. The dollar became the world’s reserve currency, giving the US what French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing called “exorbitant privilege.” For three decades, from 1945 to the early 1970s, this system appeared to confirm the virtues of hegemonic stability. Real GDP growth in Western Europe averaged nearly five percent annually, and the US share of world manufacturing output remained above 40 percent. But beneath the surface, the seeds of decline were already being sown. ARRIGHIAN COUNTER World-systems theorists like Immanuel Wallerstein and Giovanni Arrighi were not focused on immediate “imperial overstretch” in the manner of British historian Paul Kennedy. Kennedy argued that empires declined when their military commitments outpaced their economic base. The US, he warned, was suffering from imperial overreach. For Arrighi, the decline was gradual and subtle. He argued that capitalist hegemonies move through repeating “systemic cycles of accumulation.” A phase of material expansion where capital is invested in production, infrastructure and trade, inevitably gives way to a phase of financial expansion, where capital seeks profit through speculation, lending and financial engineering. The material foundation is hollowed out even as the financial superstructure appears to boom. This was the logic of capitalism. The “autumn” of each hegemon is marked by a dazzling financial belle époque that masks terminal decline. The smile curve strategy is the purest expression of this financialisation and Apple is a textbook case. It designs its products, develops its chips, creates the operating systems, controls the branding, marketing and the retail experience. But it manufactures almost nothing. The iPhones and MacBooks are assembled by Foxconn in Zhengzhou and by Pegatron in Shanghai. The advanced chips are fabricated by TSMC in Taiwan. The displays come from Samsung in South Korea and LG Display. Apple captures an estimated 80-90 percent of the profit from each device, while the suppliers who do the actual physical work fight over the remaining scraps. Business schools love this strategy because it maximises corporate profits and shareholder value. But as Hung argues in his work on global value chains and the Arrighian counter, what maximises corporate profits does not necessarily maximise national power. In fact, it may systematically undermine it. By outsourcing the middle of the smile curve, the US has drastically hollowed out its industrial ecosystem. Combine it with the faith in short, sharp wars of shock and awe through high-tech precision weapons and we get the full picture of what has happened in the war against Iran. This is very different from the WWII industrial base of America. This brings us to TSMC and the chokepoint crisis. It manufactures chips designed by other companies (Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm) rather than designing and selling its own chips. Over three decades, TSMC has built an unassailable lead in advanced process nodes. By 2025, it was manufacturing 92 percent of the world’s most advanced chips. The entire global technology industry (including the US military and intelligence apparatus) became dependent on a single cluster of fabs (fabrication plants) in Hsinchu, Taichung and Tainan. China, which views Taiwan as a breakaway province to be reunited with the mainland by force if necessary, has the physical means to blockade or invade the island. Whether it would do so or should is a different debate. On ground, the People’s Liberation Army has been systematically building anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) capabilities, to prevent US intervention in a Taiwan scenario. It’s a fairly absurd position from the US point of view! Its technological supremacy is guaranteed by a factory complex on an island which, in theory, its primary strategic rival could potentially seize or blockade. To circle back to the CHIPS Act, this is the background. TSMC is now building a fab complex in Arizona. Intel is expanding in Ohio and Arizona. Samsung is building in Texas. But, as a 2023 Marketplace report noted, replicating TSMC’s “deep, deep process knowledge” will take years. The fab in Arizona has already faced delays, cost overruns, and labour disputes. Taiwanese engineers are reluctant to relocate to the United States. The set goes to Arrighi. America’s weaponisation of the dollar has accelerated efforts by China, Russia and other BRICS members to create alternatives | Shutterstock THE DOLLAR DILEMMA The dollar’s role as the world’s primary reserve currency has been a central pillar of American power since the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944. This exorbitant privilege allows the US to borrow in its own currency, run persistent trade deficits without penalty and, crucially, impose unilateral financial sanctions on states, corporations, and individuals. This weaponisation of the dollar has accelerated efforts by China, Russia and other BRICS members to create alternatives. China has been aggressively promoting its own Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS) as an alternative to Swift. The People’s Bank of China has signed bilateral currency swap agreements with dozens of countries, allowing trade to be settled in renminbi rather than dollars. Russia has demanded payment in rubles for its natural gas exports. India has established a rupee settlement mechanism for trade. Brazil and China have agreed to trade in their own currencies. The Central Bank of Brazil has announced that it is diversifying its reserves away from the dollar. And yet, the actual pace of de-dollarisation has been glacial. Several structural factors explain this “stickiness”, to use American political economist Benjamin Cohen’s term. First, there is network stickiness. The dollar’s dominance is not simply a matter of policy; it is an issue of deep, self-reinforcing infrastructure. Global supply chains, commodity exchanges, derivatives markets, and correspondent banking networks are all built around the dollar. Second, as various experts have argued, there is a lack of viable alternatives. The Chinese renminbi, despite China’s enormous economic weight, is not a free-floating, fully convertible currency. China maintains capital controls, a heavily regulated financial system, and a non-independent central bank. No foreign investor can be certain that their renminbi holdings would not be frozen or devalued by arbitrary state action. The euro, the second-largest reserve currency, is hobbled by the Eurozone’s fragmented fiscal system and the lingering scars of the 2011 debt crisis. Gold is impractical for everyday transactions. And cryptocurrencies are far too volatile and illiquid to serve as a reserve asset. Third is the absence of a deep, liquid and open bond market. A reserve currency requires a “safe asset” in which foreign central banks can park their surplus reserves. The US Treasury market, with $25 trillion in outstanding debt and extraordinary liquidity, is the only game in town. Result: while China and Russia publicly call for de-dollarisation, their central banks have themselves continued to accumulate US Treasury securities, because there is nowhere else to go. Corollary: the near-term prognosis for de-dollarisation is not collapse but slow erosion. IMF data shows the dollar’s share of global reserves has declined from over 70 percent in 2000 to approximately 58 percent in 2025. This is not a precipitous decline, but it is a steady one. The debate is not if the dollar will lose its dominance but when. I have no expertise in this area and I have relied on studying existing expertise. Most analyses measure the timeframe in decades, not years. From that, my understanding is that increasing uncertainty, further weaponisation of the dollar, continuing application of sanctions and asset freezes will (a) erode the confidence that underpins the entire system and (b) force experts (and governments) to find alternatives. EPILOGUE: TERMINAL CRISIS Two other issues are important but I am only flagging them here for paucity of space: the implosion of neoliberalism and its internal effects and the fraying of the transatlantic alliance. Both are exacerbated by Trump but neither is a direct result of his election. Both are extremely consequential. The United States has not collapsed; not yet. Nor can it be defeated from outside. But it can crumble from within. The future is not about a return to US hegemony, certainly not in a unipolar sense. The industrial base may be gone but it can be rebuilt, albeit not overnight. Alliances are frayed; trust cannot be easily restored. The fiscal position is precarious, with a $35 trillion US national debt. Internal politics is deeply polarised, with a significant portion of the American electorate believing that the system is rigged against them. A lot of these factors, singly and in combination with other factors, are self-reinforcing. The future also lies in terra incognita, a contested transition to a multipolar world, whose contours remain unknown. A recent book by German political analyst Marc Saxer, Geopolitical Conflict in the Wolf World, is a sobering structural assessment of where the world and the US are headed. “Homo homini lupus est” (Man is a wolf to man) is how Saxer begins. With that statement, we are back to Plautus and Hobbes. This is not mere rhetorical flourish. Saxer’s wolf world is an analytic category, a systemic condition characterised by the absence of a hegemon capable of enforcing rules, the demise of neoliberalism, the collapse of shared legal-normative frameworks, the return of great-power competition, the rise of Middle Powers, many with regional hegemonic aspirations, and the normalisation of coercion as a primary instrument of statecraft. As I said to Saxer during the launch of his book in Lahore, for the Global South, it has always been a wolf world. Pax Americana did not keep the peace for the periphery. It financed selective peace on credit. The bill has now come due. The writer is a journalist interested in security and foreign policies. X: @ejazhaider Published in Dawn, EOS, May 31st, 2026
LAHORE: The Lahore High Court has ruled that a father cannot escape his continuing legal, moral and religious obligation to maintain his minor child through a private settlement, holding that a minor’s right to maintenance cannot be permanently waived or extinguished. Justice Mohsin Akhtar Kayani dismissed a petition filed by Akhtar Hussain Awan against concurrent judgements of family and appellate courts. Those earlier judgements allowed a maintenance claim filed by a minor, Naseer Akhtar Awan, through his mother, Sadia Awan. The petitioner argued that an earlier maintenance suit was settled through a 2007 compromise, under which Rs60,000 was paid and parties agreed not to raise future claims. He contended a subsequent 2019 suit was barred by limitation and the principles of res judicata, a legal doctrine preventing a matter from being judged twice. Justice Kayani cites Islamic teachings to invalidate any private contracts waiving child maintenance Rejecting the contention, Justice Kayani ruled that agreements preventing minors from enforcing future maintenance rights are void. He noted that while accrued claims can be settled, a minor’s ongoing right to maintenance cannot be waived during dependency. The judge ruled that the maintenance of a minor child constitutes a recurring cause of action and is not barred by res judicata. The court maintained that providing food, clothing, shelter, education, healthcare and other necessities is a father’s ongoing responsibility. “Under the law, every father is under a legal as well as moral obligation to maintain his wife and minor children in all respects,” Justice Kayani observed in the ruling. “Such obligation is neither optional nor contingent upon the will of the father, rather it is a continuing responsibility imposed by law as well as by the injunctions of Islam.” Citing the Holy Quran and traditions of the Holy Prophet (peace be upon him), he said that a father cannot avoid this divine duty through private deals harmful to a minor’s welfare. Additionally, the judge held that Article 120 of the Limitation Act, 1908, does not apply to claims for past maintenance of a minor child or a wife during an existing marriage. Justice Kayani dismissed the petition and ordered the judgment be sent to the Law and Justice Commission and Ministry of Law to consider reforms in limitation laws for maintenance cases, aligning them with Islamic principles. Published in Dawn, June 2nd, 2026
Pro-Trump lawyer Aberaldo de la Espriella pulled ahead as a leader in Colombia’s race for the presidency in the first round of elections over the weekend, capitalizing on a growing appetite for heavy-handed crackdowns on criminal groups across Latin America. Speaking with FRANCE 24's Mark Owen, Christopher Sabatini, Senior Research Fellow on the Americas at Chatham House, says that "this is really again a part of what's unfortunately called the 'Donroe' doctrine asserting itself in partisan politics in Latin America".
Marilyn Monroe still casts a long shadow across Hollywood. The highs and lows of her life and work are a constant source of comparison for fast-rising female stars. Especially if they happen to be young, talented and blonde. Monroe’s indelible image defines what it means for an actor to achieve a transcendent level of celebrity […]
The major-questions doctrine has received scant attention in prediction market cases nationwide. This controversy should not be one of them. The CFTC’s commandeering of sports gambling and ousting of traditional state authority to regulate that activity within state borders is tailor-made for the application of the major-questions doctrine. Doing so could shift the focus back to sports gambling, which, in turn, could bolster the States’ assertion of the presumptions against preemption and/or implied repeals that are heavily dependent on courts framing the case as being about sports gambling, not derivatives trading. If the relevant field is “sports gambling” (as courts in Ohio, Maryland, Massachusetts and Nevada have already determined), the States should have a clearer path to victory.
La victoire du PSG samedi soir s’est traduite par une soirée marquée par la violence. Le président du Rassemblement national (RN), pour qui «la vie et la fête sont devenues totalement impossibles», propose de «changer la doctrine sécuritaire et pénale».
TWENTY-eight years after the nuclear tests at Chagai, the strategic environment in South Asia has shifted dramatically. The assumptions that shaped Pakistan’s deterrence posture in 1998, and the paradigm shift from ‘Credible Minimum Deterrence’ to ‘Full-Spectrum Deterrence’, were rooted in visions of a conventional invasion, mass mobilisation and large-scale armoured thrusts across the border. In contrast, the modern battlefield looks very different today. The war in Ukraine, the Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict, the Iran-US/Israel war and — most importantly for Pakistan — the May 2025 India-Pakistan conflict, have demonstrated how precision missiles, armed drones, electronic warfare, satellite enabled surveillance and integrated air defence systems are reshaping escalation dynamics. Speaking over the weekend at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, Lt Gen Nauman Zakaria — commander of the 1 Corps who was introduced at the conference as the commander of the newly-raised Army Rocket Force Command — warned that emerging technologies were creating “new vulnerabilities… risk of miscalculation… [and a] compression of decision making timelines” that have altered “the nature of interstate conflict and strategic deterrence”. Raising of new rocket force signals a significant strategic shift, as precision weapons compress decision timelines and blur the line between conventional and nuclear signalling in South Asia This echoes what many view as the most important lesson from the May 2025 conflict: it was not that nuclear weapons failed; rather that they worked, but only in a limited sense. They prevented full-scale war, but did not stop sustained military confrontation involving missiles, drones, air operations, electronic disruption and naval signalling under the nuclear shadow. Reflecting on the May 2025 conflict, Lt Gen Zakaria said Pakistan’s response had “effectively debunked the notion of space for war in South Asia”. Historically, Pakistan’s deterrence posture has adapted to shifts in Indian military doctrine. ‘Credible Minimum Deterrence’ gave way to ‘Full-Spectrum Deterrence’ after India developed the ‘Cold Start’ concept, prompting Islamabad to lower the nuclear threshold through systems such as Nasr. But while Pakistan adjusted to the threat of limited ground incursions, India moved towards precision strikes, drones and standoff capabilities, as seen in Balakot in 2019, and the May 2025 conflict. Subsequent events showed that even the “quid-pro-quo plus” approach adopted after 2016, which sought to impose higher costs on Indian military action, has not fully denied New Delhi room for limited operations below the level of full scale war. To put it simply, India continues to look for ways to apply military pressure without triggering the nuclear escalation ladder. Here, Pakistan now faces an important doctrinal question. While nuclear weapons remain the ultimate guarantor against existential threats, they are no longer the only instruments available for imposing costs or shaping an adversary’s behaviour during a crisis. Pakistani strategists appear to recognise this shift. Prof Dr Adil Sultan, who is dean at the Faculty of Aerospace and Strategic Studies at Air University, argued that the impact of emerging technologies and the lessons of the May 2025 conflict highlight the need to “reconceptualise” existing notions of strategic stability. The creation of the Army Rocket Force Command is perhaps the clearest indication that Rawalpindi is building a stronger conventional deterrent layer. Lt Gen Zakaria has been emphatic that the force is “a strictly conventional force” with a command structure entirely separate from Pakistan’s nuclear forces. Moreover, the modernisation of systems like the Fatah missile series — whose fourth iteration was test-fired a fortnight ago — and efforts to improve precision strike capabilities clearly show that conventional missile forces are now being viewed not merely as battlefield assets, but rather strategic instruments in and of themselves. Dr Rabia Akhtar, a visiting fellow of the Harvard Kennedy School-based Project on Managing the Atom, sees the creation of the National Strategic Command and Rocket Force Command as recognition that “conventional deterrence is becoming increasingly important” and could provide decision makers “a wider range of conventional response options” before reaching the nuclear threshold. The reasoning is straightforward. If precision conventional systems can deliver calibrated but meaningful military effects, they reduce the requirement for early nuclear signalling and raise the practical threshold for nuclear use. It also means doctrines framed around tactical nuclear use for battlefield denial may no longer correspond fully to the realities of the evolving battlespace. Pakistan, therefore, may need to reconsider whether the existing formulation of ‘Full-Spectrum Deterrence’, or for that matter, the “quid-pro-quo plus” approach still reflects the strategic environment of 2026 or whether parts of it belong more to the threat perceptions of the mid-2000s. Ambassador Zamir Akram, an adviser to the Strategic Plans Division, noted: “Space for conventional warfare has increased and raised the nuclear threshold”. Yet, he also cautioned that new technologies have created greater “entanglement of conventional and strategic weapons”, making escalation faster and harder to control. The argument that conventional deterrence needs to be given greater importance does not suggest abandoning nuclear deterrence or pursuing unrealistic conventional parity with India. Indeed, Pakistan’s nuclear capability remains indispensable as the ultimate safeguard against existential coercion, but there is a growing case for recalibrating the relationship between nuclear and conventional deterrence. One reason is the growing danger of ambiguity in a battlefield increasingly shaped by speed, automation and dual capable systems. Modern warfare compresses timelines, blurs signalling and increases the risk of misreading intentions. Pakistan’s traditional policy of strategic ambiguity served an important purpose when the objective was to create uncertainty in the adversary’s calculations. Syed Ali Zia Jaffery, deputy director at the University of Lahore’s Centre for Security, Strategy and Policy Research, argued that while “calculated strategic ambiguity is still a critical part of deterrence”, there is also a need for “more emphasis” on strengthening conventional deterrence. “It would act as a clear signal that Pakistan will counter India’s efforts to create a new normal in South Asia. While nuclear deterrence has delivered what it is expected and designed to do, the past two crises underscore the significance of the other planks of deterrence,” Jaffery maintained. The May 2025 conflict demonstrated that limited war under the nuclear shadow is now a practical reality rather than a theoretical possibility. One implication is that Pakistan may require a more carefully layered deterrence architecture in which strong conventional capabilities form the first line of deterrence, while nuclear forces remain the ultimate backstop against existential threats. Published in Dawn, June 1st, 2026
La France insoumise a déploré l'absence de fanzones pour "éviter ce type de débordement" et a dénoncé "la doctrine du maintien de l'ordre". Le RN s'est quant à lui empressé de critiquer les violences et a accusé LFI d'"inversion des valeurs".