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Smokers' Corner: Myths of the ‘Madman’

SMOKERS’ CORNER: MYTHS OF THE 'MADMAN'

American President Donald Trump is often described by many as an ‘irrational’ man. Yet, there are those who claim he is instead an over-the-top practitioner of the ‘Madman Theory.’ This theory encapsulates a political concept suggesting that a leader can gain a significant advantage in international negotiations or crises by convincing opponents that he or she is irrational, unstable, or downright ‘crazy’. Former US President Richard Nixon coined the term during his tenure, even though the underlying strategy had been present in modern politics long before Nixon gave it a formal name. Looking to force the communist forces in North Vietnam to sign a peace treaty that would guarantee an honourable exit of American troops from South Vietnam, Nixon told his Chief of Staff, H.R. Haldeman, that he had shaped a Madman Theory for this precise purpose. He explained that he wanted the North Vietnamese to believe he had reached the point where he might do absolutely anything to stop the war, wanting his ministers to intentionally drop hints that he constantly had his hand on the nuclear button. Indeed, it is quite common for hubris to emerge within a regime or in the person leading it. But, according to the noted political scientists John J. Mearsheimer and Sebastian Rosato, hubris is not really about irrationality. They argue that states are fundamentally rational actors that rigorously hypothesise scenarios through sound theories and information, from which they develop their policies and strategies. Nixon’s strategy was entirely rational. States and leaders rarely act without reason, and it’s usually flawed assumptions, rather than irrationality, that drive policy failures and political crises However, Mearsheimer and Rosato place heavy emphasis on the fact that state rationality does not automatically guarantee successful outcomes. Their analysis suggests that policies are typically forged by leaders who act as “homo theoreticus”, relying on structured, evidence-based theories to navigate the immense complexities of international relations. These may work or fail, but their formation is a rational process. In their 2023 book How States Think, Mearsheimer and Rosato focus primarily on the mechanics of foreign policy. But I posit that the heightened interconnectivity characterising the modern digital age necessitates an acknowledgement that internal policies are no longer insulated from global consequences. Illustration by Abro In this context, domestic choices can alter the course of a nation’s foreign affairs as well. During the conflict between Iran and the US, in which Pakistan is an active mediator, Pakistan found itself accused by India and Israel of being a ‘fanatical’ Islamist state that was siding with Iran. The Pakistani government and state recognised the threat these narratives posed to its international standing. To mitigate this, the Pakistani state accelerated the abandonment of its post-1970s ideological narrative, choosing instead to actively promote a new national identity. This new narrative frames Pakistan as a moderate, pragmatic Muslim-majority civilisational state. Here we see how internal policies can impact or be impacted by geopolitics. On the foreign policy front, the Indian and Israeli states hypothesised that, if they could successfully proliferate the perception of a ‘fanatical’ Pakistan, they would create enough doubt in the White House about the wisdom of having Pakistan act as a go-between for the US and a ‘fanatical’ Iran. On the other hand, the Pakistani state hypothesised that, given Israel’s growing reputation as an aggressive state and India’s declining reputation as a secular democracy due to its shift towards a radical Hindutva state, the Pakistani side can now convincingly bolster its new contrasting narrative of being a moderate, dependable nation. The Indian, Israeli and Pakistani policies in this case were all entirely rational. Mearsheimer and Rosato are firmly of the view that scholars who accuse leaders of irrationality often conflate the concept of irrationality with that of failure. Failed policies are routinely blamed on flawed decision-making processes. To Mearsheimer and Rosato, though, this is a mistake, because even failed policies are meticulously shaped through empirical information and theories. A state is considered rational if its actions follow logically from a coherent theory, even if that theory is proven to be incorrect. The theories are constructed through a deliberative process, requiring the careful gathering of information, the assessment of alternatives and the debate of potential outcomes, rather than being a product of mere impulse or emotional reaction. So, does that mean there have never been states/ governments/ leaders that were truly irrational? Mearsheimer and Rosato use the word “non-rational” in this regard, meaning governments, states and leaders who fail to employ a credible strategic theory, relying on wishful thinking instead. Most Western media outlets describe Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s “Supreme Leader” Kim Jong Un as irrational leaders. To Mearsheimer and Rosato, this is a flawed understanding. Putin’s and Kim’s policies are rooted in rational processes, as are those of Chinese leader Xi Jinping. In Mearsheimer’s recent commentaries, he does not see Trump’s decision to plunge into a war with Iran as an irrational move but one based on an ill-informed hypothesis. According to the Lebanese-American academic Fawaz A. Gerges, the decision to attack Iran was built on an illusion heavily fed by Israeli security components, which insisted that Iran’s internal architecture would crumble immediately under direct kinetic pressure. Nothing of the sort happened. Trump’s decision was rational but based on a flawed hypothesis and inaccurate information on the reality of Iran and of contemporary geopolitics. Therefore, one can suggest that Trump isn’t ‘mad’ as such, but simply not very well-informed. What about Imran Khan? Khan was not irrational, nor was he a crank. His decisions, especially to antagonise the military establishment after he was ousted in 2022, were based on a theory that he believed in. The theory suggests that a large-scale political movement scares the military establishment who then immediately submits to its demands. This theory was formed after Khan saw how troops had refused to confront violent protests by the Barelvi Islamist outfit, the Tehreek-i-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP) in 2016. This theory mutated in 2023, largely under the influence of the then pro-Khan former head of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Lt Gen Faiz Hameed. Allegedly, Hameed believed that since there were pro-Khan officers in the armed forces, targeted riots would trigger a mutiny to force out the then military chief, Gen Asim Munir. This was not a delusion. It was a theory based on information Khan and Hameed found sound, meaning the rational thing to do was to trigger the riot. However, despite the riots, the military’s chain of command remained intact. The mutiny theory failed because it completely ignored the fact that, historically, mutinies have been almost non-existent within the armed forces of Pakistan. The attempt was what Mearsheimer would call a “rational failure.” From then onwards, though, Khan’s strategies became increasingly non-rational, based on an ever-weakening understanding of Pakistani and international politics. The state’s strategy was rational as well: to keep him behind bars and gradually isolate him, leaving his subsequent moves increasingly detached from reality and thus triggering non-rational and even irrational thinking processes in him. Published in Dawn, EOS, June 7th, 2026

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SMOKERS’ CORNER: COUNTER HISTORIES

In last week’s column, I discussed how certain Pakistani historians challenged the ‘reactionary’ national narrative constructed by the state after 1971, when the country’s eastern wing violently broke away to become Bangladesh. The post-1971 narrative amplified Political Islam, weaving it into what was officially branded as the “Pakistan Ideology” in 1978. Though some historians began dismantling this construct in the 1980s, it took another three decades for their efforts to bear fruit. Today, the state has not only softened its stance towards these counter-narratives, but is actively borrowing elements from them to fashion a brand-new national identity. This emerging narrative seeks to reposition Pakistan as a moderate, organic continuation of the ancient civilisations that flourished along the Indus River for over 5,000 years. Works of scholars such as K.K. Aziz, Sibte Hassan, Ayesha Jalal, Mubarak Ali, Muhammad Waseem, Aitzaz Ahsan and, later, Abdul Hameed Nayyar, Rubina Saigol, Pervez Hoodbhoy, M. Qasim Zaman, Manan Ahmed Asif and Ali Usman Qasmi, are instrumental in providing the intellectual material for this quiet shift. For decades, Pakistani historians who challenged the state’s narrative faced censorship, exile, isolation and financial ruin. Yet, the perspectives they championed are now quietly shaping the country’s evolving identity By the mid-2000s, counter-narratives became easier to evolve, but doing so in the 1980s and 1990s was a rather dangerous pursuit. In this column, I will explore this, alongside a now largely forgotten historian who pioneered the pursuit of challenging state-curated history, long before the state’s reactionary turn was fully formalised after 1971 and was cemented in the 1980s. In 1977, the source material Aziz was using to write a book on the ‘sensitive’ Hamoodur Rehman Report, was confiscated and allegedly destroyed by the Ziaul Haq dictatorship. The report was the outcome of a commission set up by the Z.A. Bhutto regime to investigate the civil war in East Pakistan. After Bhutto’s fall in July 1977 in a Zia-led coup, Aziz was forced to leave the country. In exile, he managed to find a research position at Heidelberg University in Germany. In 1985, during the peak of the Zia dictatorship, Aziz chose to return to Pakistan, where his brother-in-law provided him with a place to live in Lahore. Here he wrote his most influential book, The Murder of History. Though published by Najam Sethi’s Vanguard Books, The Murder of History faced severe distribution hurdles from a regime hellbent on making it disappear. The book had used original source material to expose the glaring historical discrepancies that had crept into Pakistani textbooks after 1978. According to the late author and journalist Khaled Ahmed, when Aziz ran out of funds, he approached several wealthy patrons that he believed valued intellectual pursuits. But none replied. Relief came in 1994 when Benazir Bhutto’s second government sent Aziz to London, employing him at the Pakistan High Commission, so he could continue his multiple research projects. This stability ended in 1996, when the Benazir government was dismissed by President Farooq Leghari. Fortunately, the alumni of Lahore’s Government College (Ravians) stepped in to fund his research and stay in London, though this support from the Ravians eventually dried up in 1998. Upon returning to Pakistan that same year, Aziz was told he could no longer stay at his old Model Town residence. His once-doting brother-in-law had finally had enough of him. Aziz tried to earn a living as a lecturer, but discovered that no college or university would dare hire him. The Murder of History had ruffled too many feathers in the state, even though Aitzaz Ahsan’s counter-narrative, The Indus Saga, was by then gracing the shelves of all major bookstores. Vanguard had already issued a second edition of The Murder of History in 1993 and, riding the wave of the popularity of counter-narrative literature generated by Aitzaz’s book, the publisher released a third edition in 1998. Driven by the increasing public interest in counter-narratives, The Murder of History finally began to sell well, more than a decade after it was first published. Although Aziz left Pakistan once more in 1999, The Murder of History had already established itself as an early work that systematically debunked the post-1971 narrative. It became an inspiration for a new generation of historians who have since driven a gradual shift in the state’s own historical outlook. Aziz passed away in 2009, having authored over 50 books. The Murder of History has gone through 12 editions and sold thousands of copies, vindicating a tome that long threatened the livelihood and life of its author for challenging a national narrative he refused to accept. Illustration by Abro Long before Aziz, though, there was Dr Ashiq Husain Batalvi. As a young scholar, Batalvi had worked closely with the poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal, and the founder of Pakistan, Mohammad Ali Jinnah. Following the creation of Pakistan in 1947, and particularly after Jinnah’s demise in 1948, Batalvi had a falling out with the country’s nascent ruling elite. To Batalvi, this new leadership was abandoning the path Jinnah had envisioned. He watched with dismay as the state apparatus was infiltrated by men who had actively worked against Jinnah. These included landed elites from the anti-Jinnah Unionist Party and Islamists with whom Batalvi held deep ideological differences. Sidelined by these factions, Batalvi left the country in 1954. Settling in Britain, he became Dawn’s foreign correspondent and earned his PhD from the prestigious School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). His first post-Partition book was published in 1961, but it was in his landmark 1969 work Chand Yaadein Chand Tassuraat [Some Memories, Some Impressions] that he lamented in detail how post-Partition Pakistan had drifted away from its original inclusive and pluralistic ideals. Though a passionate Pakistani nationalist, Batalvi never returned to the country. To him, Jinnah’s Pakistan was long dead. He continued writing for Dawn, but his output as a historian in his lifetime was eventually overshadowed by more prolific counter-narrative historians such as Aziz, Ali and Jalal. As mentioned, while early counter-narrative historians faced immense struggles in the 1980s and much of the 1990s, things in this regard have improved significantly since then, unlike the tightening of intellectual spaces in present-day India. Yet, certain institutional no-go areas remain. For instance, no local publisher or bookseller dares to touch Qasmi’s 2014 study, The Politics of Religious Exclusion in Pakistan. It remains one of the most thorough investigations into how the Ahmadiyya community was ousted from the fold of Islam in Pakistan. This is a stark reminder that, while the state’s narrative has softened on some fronts, certain historical truths are still deemed too dangerous to print. Published in Dawn, EOS, 31st, 2026

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[Capital FM] Nairobi -- Kenya is lagging behind many African countries in helping smokers shift away from traditional cigarettes, according to a new global ranking released ahead of World No Tobacco Day.

Smoking rate hits historic low in HK: govt

The Department of Health on Wednesday said the current smoking rate of Hong Kong stands at 8.5 percent, marking the lowest number of smokers on record. Manny Lam, head of the Tobacco and Alcohol Control Office, attributed the decline to the government's multi-faceted approach in introducing tobacco control measures over the years. "Among all these years, we continued to introduce new measures, such as [in] 2024, we introduced the 10 tobacco control measures and most of them have already been implemented," Lam said. "We expect there will be a continuing decrease in the smoking prevalence in the coming years." The department also noted that nearly 40 percent of smokers smoke flavoured cigarettes and the situation was prevalent among females and younger adults. “Flavoured cigarettes have a very significant effect in attracting females and also our young generation to start smoking and to continue to use these products because these flavours will reduce the harshness of the smoke. “Evidence also showed that people who use flavoured cigarettes will [find it] more difficult to stop smoking,” Lam added. Lam said the department is working out measures to ban flavoured cigarettes. “We already have a plan to introduce a ban on flavoured cigarettes after the implementation of the coming measures including the plain packaging and also the duty stamp for the cigarettes,” Lam said. The chairman of the Hong Kong Council on Smoking and Health, Henry Tong, added that flavoured cigarettes are “sugar-coated poison”. “Flavoured cigarettes are really poisonous and harmful to people, but they have a sugar coat. “The people who smoke [flavoured cigarettes] don’t notice and they actually feel that because of the sugar coat and the flavour, the harm is smaller, which is completely misleading,” Tong said. Tong suggested there is a need for better education and enforcement in banning flavoured cigarettes in Hong Kong. As in previous years, the department has also launched its “Quit in June” campaign, aiming to encourage and support smokers in their efforts to quit. Measures include the distribution of free one-week trial packs of nicotine replacement therapy drugs as well as Chinese medicine ear points patches. Edited by Tony Sabine

SMOKERS’ CORNER: REWRITING THE PAKISTAN NARRATIVE

Illustration by Abro Introduced by the Imran Khan administration (2018-2022), the controversial Single National Curriculum (SNC) represented a final institutional attempt to preserve a state-curated national narrative dating back to the 1970s. By the 2010s, this identity framework had begun to fracture under the weight of escalating sectarian violence, unprecedented Islamist terrorism and fraying civil-military relations. The Islamist violence intensified alongside growing political friction between the military and the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP)-led government that took power in 2008. The resulting instability triggered a national debate over the state’s religious narrative. The conflict between the state and the Islamists exposed a stark ideological contradiction: anti-state extremists were utilising the exact same Islamist rhetoric that the state, mainstream religious parties, and centre-right groups had been championing, especially ever since the 1980s. This forced a fundamental questioning of state-sponsored Islam, particularly its presence in school textbooks. For decades, the Pakistani state crafted a national identity detached from the Subcontinent’s past. But changing dynamics within the country and in the region are pushing it towards a different imagination of itself — as the modern inheritor of the ancient Indus civilisation This discourse was not entirely unprecedented. In the 1980s, intellectuals such as Sibte Hasan, K.K. Aziz and Ayesha Jalal created a counter-narrative by arguing that the state was distorting the foundational vision of Pakistan’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah. They contended that Jinnah viewed Islam as an enlightened, humane and modern faith. This portrayal was in stark contrast to the rigid version of Islam and of Jinnah’s image sculpted by the state from the 1970s onward. However, the counter-narratives remained largely confined to elite intellectual circles. Meanwhile, the official state narrative grew increasingly dominant, thoroughly propagated through textbooks, state-controlled media, and pro-state ulema [Islamic scholars] empowered by the Ziaul Haq dictatorship (1977-1988). A second wave of academic criticism emerged during the 1990s and early 2000s. Led by scholars such as Dr Abdul Hameed Nayyar, Rubina Saigol and Ahmad Salim, this critique posited that the era’s escalating Islamist and sectarian violence was a direct consequence of classroom indoctrination. According to Saigol, after the violent secession of East Pakistan in 1971, a pervasive state paranoia began to suffocate national rhetoric and reshape the curriculum. This insecurity culminated in the formal unveiling of the “Pakistan Ideology” in 1978. It was a construct born out of the fear that, without stitching a rigid interpretation of Islam into the country’s political and social fabric, Pakistan would face further disintegration. Nayyar, Salim and Saigol further suggested that the state and its nationalist intelligentsia harboured a perpetual urge to divorce the roots of South Asian Muslims from those of other regional faiths, particularly Hinduism. This ideological project gained urgency after the 1971 ‘East Pakistan debacle.’ In post-1978 textbooks, Pakistan was finally decoupled from its Subcontinental geography and tied to a civilisational claim that South Asian Muslims were genealogically linked to the birthplace of Islam in Arabia. Critics termed this the “Arabisation of Pakistan” — a claim that Arabs found rather amusing. From the late 1970s, history textbooks largely disregarded the region’s pre-eighth century past, undermining everything prior to the Arab invasion of Sindh. The ruins and artefacts of ancient civilisations physically located within Pakistan, including the 5,000-year-old Indus Valley Civilisation, were treated as foreign phenomena rather than foundational elements of the nation’s own heritage. Although an extensive 2003 study on this subject by Nayyar and Salim attracted brief interest from the ‘modernist’ military dictatorship of Pervez Musharraf (1999–2008), it yielded only superficial structural reforms. In 1996, the state narrative was more comprehensively challenged by Aitzaz Ahsan, a prominent intellectual and senior member of the PPP. Synthesising fragmented ideas into what became known as the ‘Indus Theory’, he formalised his thesis in his book The Indus Saga and the Making of Pakistan. The theory suggests that modern-day Pakistan is far from an artificial state hastily created in 1947. Instead, it is the organic, modern manifestation of a distinct 5,000-year-old civilisation anchored to the Indus River system. According to Ahsan, the civilisational divide between Pakistan and India is fundamentally cultural and geographical rather than purely religious. It is driven by the separate evolution of two distinct societies: one born along the banks of the Indus River in Pakistan, and the other along the Ganges in India. Versions of this theory had circulated since the 1950s. Their lineage can be traced back to the 1950 book Five Thousand Years of Pakistan by British archaeologist Sir Mortimer Wheeler. The concept was then revived in the 1970s by figures such as Sibte Hasan, eminent archaeologist Dr Ahmad Hasan Dani, and veteran Sindhi nationalist scholar G.M. Syed. However, the post-1971 state sidelined this paradigm in favour of its Arabian hypothesis. Ahsan’s mid-1990s formulation remains the Indus Theory’s most cohesive and articulate expression. In 2010, the PPP-coalition government succeeded in passing the 18th Amendment to the Constitution, with the support of the main opposition party, the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N). The amendment provided extensive autonomy to the provinces, devolving education from the federal government and loosening the Islamabad-driven national narrative. Sindh took the lead, exercising its new authority to reintroduce the province’s ‘Sufi’ history and regional heroes into provincial textbooks, bypassing old federal frameworks. In 2015, the Sindh government reintroduced Jinnah’s August 11, 1947 speech into textbooks. This speech, in which Jinnah declared that the state would have nothing to do with the religion of its citizens, had been expunged from the curriculum after 1971. Combined with the widespread availability of internet-driven literature challenging the state’s post-1971 narrative, these developments hurled the Indus Theory into mainstream national discourse like never before. The state made a last-ditch effort to mitigate the erosion of the old narrative through the SNC, launched by Imran Khan in August 2021. While the SNC was a more radical manifestation of the traditional state narrative, it was ultimately rejected by the governments of Sindh and Balochistan. What’s more, its implementation triggered widespread confusion and disgruntlement among middle-class parents in Punjab, causing the project to stall after Khan’s regime was removed through an act of parliament in 2022. Today, as Pakistan navigates its position as a rising regional power, both the government and the military establishment are prioritising pragmatism. Seeking to sustain this status while addressing Baloch separatism, Islamist violence and the Indian threat in a more systematic manner, the state is quietly integrating the Indus Theory into its own narratives. An additional driver of this shift is the Hindu nationalist regime in India, which is aggressively reshaping the past to construct a Hindu-centric, civilisational identity. This has eroded India’s secular image internationally. Pakistan views this as an opportunity. By embracing the Indus Theory, Pakistan seeks to position itself as a moderate, pragmatic nation-state with ancient roots in the civilisations that emerged along the Indus, the country’s largest river and ‘life giver.’ Published in Dawn, EOS, May 24th, 2026

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