Shared Control of the Strait of Hormuz? The Question Nobody Wanted to Ask Has Finally Been Asked By:Raja Zahid Akhtar Khanzada There are questions that powerful nations spend decades refusing to ask, not because the questions are unanswerable, but because the asking itself is an admission — an acknowledgment that the world has changed in ways that the official story cannot yet accommodate. These questions circulate in the back rooms of think tanks, in the careful hedging of former officials who no longer have careers to protect, in the silence between the lines of policy papers written by people who…
Author: Raja Zahid Khanzada
Trump’s Blockade and America’s Credibility: One Chinese Tanker Exposed Everything By: Raja Zahid Akhtar Khanzada There is an old line from an Indian film — crude on its surface, as folk wisdom often is — that translates, roughly, to this: a single mosquito can unman the mightiest of men. I have been turning that line over in my mind for days now, because it contains something true about power that power itself refuses to acknowledge. The mosquito is not strong. It has no army, no arsenal, no territory to defend. What it has is precision — the ability to find,…
The Strait of Hormuz: Power, Fear, and the New Chess of the World Order By: Raja Zahid Akhtar Khanzada Imagine a scene. It is the dead of night. The sea, from above, appears perfectly still. But beneath its surface, fear and power, commerce and war and politics, are all moving together. The Strait of Hormuz is the name of that stillness — quiet, but lethal. On a map, it is merely a narrow channel between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. In reality, it is the jugular vein of the world. The ships that pass through it carry…
The Islamabad Talks: The War Did Not End — It Only Changed Its Face By: Raja Zahid Akhtar Khanzada Islamabad’s long night ended, finally, on a single sentence. But that sentence was not a conclusion. It was the opening of a wound that had not yet been named. J.D. Vance placed his hands on the table, tapped it twice — softly, almost gently, the way a man taps a casket before they close the lid — and said: “This is our last and best offer. Now we’ll see whether the Iranians accept it or not.” Then the silence came down…
The Schoolbags on Empty Seats An Iranian Delegation Arrives in Islamabad Carrying the Memory of Children By Raja Zahid Akhtar Khanzada I want to ask you something before we begin. Not as a journalist. As a human being who has watched, for too many years, the machinery of power grind the innocent into footnotes. When you hear the word “diplomacy,” what do you see? I suspect you see men in suits. Conference rooms. Handshakes performed for cameras. Language so carefully constructed that it communicates nothing while appearing to communicate everything. What you do not see — what we have trained…
Islamabad Accord: A Quiet Pause or the Prologue to a Storm? By: Raja Zahid Akhtar Khanzada President Donald Trump said two things yesterday, in the same breath, without apparent contradiction. He said negotiations with Iran were going well. He said that if the Strait of Hormuz was not reopened, Iran’s energy infrastructure and bridges would be destroyed. Nobody in the room seemed surprised. Perhaps because we have entered an age where contradiction is no longer a flaw of power, but its language. On April 7, Iran and the United States announced a two-week ceasefire. The world exhaled. Stock markets climbed.…
The Theater of a Cease-Fire: Trump’s Gambit, Iran’s Deception, and Pakistan’s Burden By: Raja Zahid Akhtar Khanzada Twenty-eight hours before the world exhaled, it held its breath in the particular way that people do when they sense that something enormous and irreversible is being decided without them. Donald Trump had written a sentence. Not policy, not diplomacy — a sentence, the kind that arrives like a verdict. A civilization, he warned, could be erased before morning, lost to the long record of human memory without so much as a footnote. The words did not read like a presidential statement. They…
Fifteen Days of Silence: A World Suspended Between War, Power, and Time By Raja Zahid Akhtar Khanzada This was not merely a war of fire and steel. It was a war of nerves. And perhaps, more truthfully, it was a war over a question that has begun to haunt the modern world: what power really means anymore. When smoke rises, truth tends to disappear into it. But when the smoke settles, the questions return, sharper, more unforgiving. On that April night, the world did not simply watch the clock, it listened to it, as though each passing second carried the…
When War Becomes a Bet: Iran, Money, and the Market of Human Fate By: Raja Zahid Akhtar Khanzada As I write these lines, twenty hours remain in the forty-eight-hour ultimatum issued by the American president to Iran. But time, in moments like these, does not move on a clock alone. It travels through nerves, through markets, through the quiet anxieties of a watching world. Military experts lean over their maps. Journalists shape their analyses. International media calls this a decisive moment. And yet, there is no certainty. Only conjecture. Only possibilities. Only roads not yet built, but already debated. Some…
धुरंधर 2: पर्दे के पीछे छिपी जंग, नैरेटिव की ताकत और हक़ीक़त का संकट लेखक: राजा ज़ाहिद अख्तर ख़ानज़ादा ईद को गुज़रे कई दिन हो चुके हैं। मैं सोच रहा था कि यह रिव्यू आज लिखूं या कल, लेकिन हर बार कुछ न कुछ अधूरा रह जाता था। शायद इसलिए कि यह सिर्फ़ एक फिल्म का रिव्यू नहीं था, बल्कि एक एहसास था, एक अवलोकन था, एक ऐसा अनुभव जिसे शब्दों में ढालने के लिए वक़्त चाहिए था। आज आख़िरकार मैं इसे पूरा करके आपके सामने रख रहा हूं। कभी-कभी सिनेमा सिर्फ़ एक फिल्म नहीं होता, वह एक मानसिक निर्माण…
