US-South Korean bilateral ties have come under increasing strain, with months of political bickering now spilling into the operational sphere. President Donald Trump’s decision to scale back the annual Ulchi Freedom Shield exercise between South Korean forces and US troops has been followed by the cancellation of the biennial Ssang…

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The Taiwanese military frequently reveals its soldiers’ full Chinese and English names to local media, putting it at odds with the counter-intelligence practices in places like Israel, NATO, and South Korea. Examples reach from Chen I-tzu …

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South Asia’s new governments have discovered that overthrowing an old political order is easier than escaping the economic constraints that helped destroy it in the first place.

In less than two years, three South Asian countries have overturned seemingly entrenched political orders. Bangladesh’s 2024 uprising ended Sheikh Hasina’s …

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The war against Iran has been going on for more than five months, running up against the adage that history teaches: wars are easier to start than to end. Tactical victories can become strategic defeats if they deepen instability rather than resolve it.

For ASEAN, the lesson from the unfinished war is not to take sides in great-power confli…

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For more than a decade, Yemen has been viewed through the prism of regional rivalry. News coverage has revolved around the Houthis, Saudi Arabia, Iran, the United States and, more recently, the movement’s attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea. The latest es…

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Impressed by Ukraine’s success in using low-cost sea drones against Russia’s Black Sea navy, Taiwan is increasingly focusing on asymmetric coastal defense by pushing the development and procurement of unmanned surface vessels (USVs), evidenced by new drone orders for the Coast Guard, tests of kamikaze models and a multi-billion-dollar sw…

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Although the Strait of Hormuz has dominated global attention, with Iran’s intermittent disruptions threatening one of the world’s most important energy arteries since the United States and Israel launched military strikes against Iran on February 28, the collapse of the four-year truce between Saudi Arabia and Yemen’s Houthi moveme…

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The killing of a police constable in the Kashmir Valley city of Anantnag, allegedly by Islamists militants, has triggered one of the largest security crackdowns since India officially revoked the special status of the region in 2019, arresting more than 2,500 and triggering concern over “collective punishment” amid heightened vulnerability for the ongoing Amarnath Yatra pilgrimage.

The Resistance Front (TRF), a proxy of Lashkar-e-Taiba, claimed the attack, marking the first major insurgent strike in the Kashmir Valley since the 2025 Pahalgam attack which killed 26 people, mostly tourists. It is the latest of a decades-long string of provocations in Kashmir, one of the world’s premier tourism sites, which has been a source of tension since the end of British colonial rule, with both majority Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan claiming the region is their own. It has evolved into a multifaceted crisis involving nationalism, religious identity and military conflict.

Soon after the killing of head constable Ashiq Hussain Qureshi (45) of the Jammu & Kashmir Police, who was shot dead at Lal Chowk in south Kashmir’s Anantnag district on July 22 while on security duty, the family homes of two Lashkar‑e‑Taiba militants were razed with controlled explosives within 48 hours. The demolitions targeted houses of Adil Ahmad Thokar and Haroon Rashid Ganaie, both active militants since 2018, although their family homes had already suffered previous demolitions.

According to police officials, the arrested included suspected above-ground associates of militants, members of banned separatist organizations, former stone-throwing protestors and those whose names have figured in investigations and militancy-related cases in the past. The arrests are meant to “dismantle ecosystem supporting terrorism,” police said, and carried out on “credible intelligence.”

Lieutenant Governor (LG) Manoj Sinha, while strongly condemning the killing, said that the “heinous act will not go unpunished. J&K Police and our security forces are on the ground and will bring those responsible to justice.” The current Chief Minister Omar Abdullah of the former state also condemned the attack but flagged concern over mass arrests following the attack.

“People are angry that a police head constable has been killed so brutally. But when the number of arrests rises from hundreds to 2,000 or 2,500, that public anger risks being redirected against us,” the chief minister said during a press interaction in Srinagar. “So, demolishing houses or making thousands of arrests will not help improve the situation.”

Kashmir-based politicians from different regional parties, while condemning the attack, also expressed concern over mass crackdowns and arrests following the attack. Former chief minister and President of People’s Democratic Party Mehbooba Mufti and J&K Peoples Conference President and MLA Sajad Lone denounced the mass arrests as measures that “look more like community punishment.”

“As the country welcomes the government of India’s decision to withdraw cases against student protesters elsewhere, one question remains: why is the same compassion denied to Kashmir’s youth?” asked another PDP MLA Waheed Parra.

A political analyst and scholar of Kashmir studies, who wished to remain anonymous, said these actions may deliver short-term security gains but ultimately weaken the prospects for lasting peace by reinforcing resentment instead of addressing the conflict’s underlying political realities.

“The mass detentions following the killing of a policeman and the demolition of houses in South Kashmir reflect a continuing reliance on coercive state practices that have long shaped governance in Kashmir,” the analyst told Asia Sentinel, adding that punishing families and communities for the alleged actions of individuals raises serious constitutional, legal, and human rights concerns. “In a region already burdened by decades of conflict, such measures are widely seen as collective punishment, deepening mistrust and political alienation rather than restoring confidence.”

Praveen Donthi, Senior Analyst at International Crisis Group, who has reported extensively from the Kashmir region in previous years, told Asia Sentinel that New Delhi’s iron-hand security approach to Jammu and Kashmir has created “a superficial calm, allowing it to claim a return of peace and stability to the region.”

“Yet even a single militant attack undermines the narrative, triggering panic among security forces, who then resort to disproportionate responses,” said Donthi. “Such intimidating security tactics, intended to instill fear, don’t counter militancy but end up fueling it. The Pahalgam attack and the Delhi blast prove that the security policy hasn’t yielded dividends after seven years.”

Ultimately, the state’s reliance on coercive, heavy-handed tactics, including mass detentions and home demolitions after every other militant attack, can be counterproductive. While security operations can offer short-term security control, treating the entire population as suspects, going for mass arrests and punitive house demolitions, can fuel deeper alienation on the ground, experts and analysts warn. Disproportionate responses to singular militant attacks, the analysts argue, run the risk of further reinforcing public resentment, raising concerns about violating human rights and shattering prospects of lasting peace in the region.

Although military rule in Thailand officially ended years ago, its footprint in the boardrooms of the country’s biggest state-owned companies is less well known, with interventions into the economy and in particular the vast state-owned enterprise (SOE) sector replacing dozens of civilian directors with military/police officers since the military coup that ended participatory democracy for more than a decade.

In 2025, the 38-member Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development reported that Thailand’s SOEs generate revenues equivalent to almost one-third of the nation’s GDP, amounting to US$161.3 billion. Thailand has 52 SOEs covering sectors including energy, public utilities, telecommunications, transport, media, finance and banking.

Critics have long argued that military-proxy governance often results in national economic stagnation, dampening foreign direct investment and delaying crucial institutional reforms. Sustained high defense spending and complex military procurement – in Thailand’s case accompanied by massive, endemic military corruption – and often protected even during broader national budget austerity, draw public resources away from high-yield investments like education, technology upgrading, and social welfare.

Thailand has become the poster boy for those criticisms. Since the 2014 military coup, its economic trajectory has shifted from healthy growth to structural stagnation. Formerly one of Southeast Asia’s economic powerhouses, its performance has steadily lagged its faster-growing neighbors, reflecting a loss of regional competitiveness. The country has consistently recorded some of the lowest GDP growth rates in the ASEAN-6 major economies.

Strategically important sectors

Several of these SOEs operate in strategically important national infrastructure sectors, with Airports of Thailand (AOT), Thai Airways (TA) and Petroleum Authority of Thailand (PTT) among the most prominent examples. Many are commercially operated corporations listed on the stock exchange with foreign investors. However, because of their strategic importance and state ownership, board appointments carry significance beyond ordinary corporate governance.

The number of senior serving/former military and police officers presently on the boards of Airports of Thailand, Thai Airways and Petroleum Authority of Thailand is striking, particularly when considering the political events of the last 12 years. Both Airports of Thailand and Thai Airways, for instance, have operated with 15 board members since at least 2013. Both have two board members who are senior serving/former military or police officers. Before the 2014 military coup, each had one and in the year after the coup this increased to three each.

The pattern extends beyond aviation. Thailand’s energy giant PTT and its major subsidiaries show an even more pronounced increase in military and police representation, although the group structure makes it less straightforward to summarize. Pre-2014, across PTT’s parent board and its four key subsidiaries PTTEP, PTTGC, Thai Oil and IRPC, there was only one military/police connected board member. Including PTTOR, the retail arm founded in 2018, there are now 12. In the year after the coup, this increased to four. Since that coup and across the existing 52 companies of the present-day SOE sector, dozens of civilian directors have been replaced with military/police officers.

The military takeover

How did the Thai military – who, historically, have had their own business interests in everything from banks to golf courses – take control? On the evening of May 22, 2014, Thais switched on their televisions and discovered that their democratically elected government had been removed, their political and civil rights suspended, and the media placed under military control. Hundreds of activists and political opponents were arrested and the coup leaders, led by General Prayuth Chan-ocha (who was, while commander in chief of the Thai Army, also a director at the Thai Military Bank), created a body entitled the National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO) and seized power.

Yet the NCPO didn’t just have its sights set on political control. It also had Thailand’s economy as a target, particularly the massive SOE sector. The message the NCPO pushed was “reform” and within a month of staging the coup it created a “superboard” of military officers, with Prayuth as chairman, which brought every Thai SOE under its control. The superboard – officially the State Enterprise Policy Committee – then began pushing out civilian board members and directors from a range of companies. At the same time, according to Thai newspaper Khaosod, the National Anti-Corruption Commission’s deputy secretary general Worawit Sookboon stated there was no basis to investigate the personal assets of junta members who’d taken up these positions.

Not only were the military requisitioning a vast swath of the Thai economy, but oversight had also taken a back seat. The NCPO’s replacement of civilian board members with military and police officers loyal to the junta took place in the context of the complete suspension of political and civil rights. Thais faced military courts if they dissented and those who publicly criticized the junta risked imprisonment in a military barracks. The civilian directors of these companies had little choice but to acquiesce. The generals had not merely seized political power; they had embedded themselves into the leadership of the companies that powered a third of Thailand’s economy. The post-2014 coup Thailand that the generals were in control of was, arguably, less democratic than Myanmar.

Getting away with it

Impunity is written into the Thai system in a manner hard to comprehend for anyone living in a functioning democracy. As Asia Sentinel reported on July 13, (also raised at thaiscamwatch.blogspot.com), senior police and business figures from Thailand met notorious US government-sanctioned cyberscam center criminals Rithy Raksmei and Ly Yong Phat. One complete lack of institutional accountability was by Airports of Thailand (AOT), whose directors were photographed meeting Thai Police General Visanu Prasatthong-Osoth – who has served or is serving on the AOT board, with Visanu as the chairman, with several of its directors replaced with military officers post- coup. AOT has issued no statement, answered no questions and offered no explanation.

The cycling of loyal and unaccountable senior military/police officers through Thailand’s SOE boardrooms continues. At AOT, experienced civilian directors were replaced with senior military officers by the NCPO. In 2023, Visanu, a “loyal” police general, was appointed Chairman of AOT.

The “perk” for well-connected senior police and military officers of a directorship at a Thai SOE continues. External questioning by foreign investors remains limited. Even “ethical” funds fail to address this, including when chairmen and directors of Thai SOEs meet wanted and notorious cyberscam center criminals.

The meetings Kong and Visanu held with Rithy Raksmei and Ly Yong Phat—meetings AOT has never addressed—should not be forgotten. Southeast Asia’s cyberscam industry is associated with rape, murder, confinement, torture, and severe human rights abuses. That the chairman and a leading director of a major Thai SOE could attend such meetings without facing accountability should concern anyone focused on ethics.

The question that remains is whether ethical-investment frameworks are equipped to recognize corruption and governance risks when they emerge, not through a single company’s actions, but through the political capture of an entire state-enterprise system. The effective rule of law - and corporate governance - in Thailand remains a challenge.

Thai Scam Watch has chosen to remain anonymous, saying it is concerned individuals who believe these unanswered questions deserve public scrutiny, and who are committed to exposing organized criminal networks and the corruption that enables them in the face of considerable personal retribution. Asia Sentinel has satisfied itself as to their legitimacy and agreed to publish periodic articles from the group.

The war with Iran has forced an overdue reckoning that reaches well beyond the Middle East, illustrated dramatically when US Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently stated that the United States cannot protect global shipping indefinitely, he was addressing more than the Strait of Hormuz. He was signaling a fundamental strategic recalibr…

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The US-Saudi nuclear agreement is not really about reactors. It’s about rules and Washington deciding its own rules are negotiable. That decision will ripple through the region soon after the first Saudi reactor breaks ground.

Riyadh is calling this a breakthrough. Washington is calling it a win. Both are missing, or hiding, the point. The deal’s importance is not in how many reactors Saudi Arabia builds. It is in what the deal reveals, and what it sets loose, some of it far from the Middle East.

South Korea has pushed for enrichment rights for years and been turned down on gold-standard grounds. Japan’s plutonium stockpile draws periodic American unease. Brazil has never fully accepted IAEA terms that Washington treats as fixed everywhere else. Each of those governments will read the Saudi file the same way Tehran will: the rule was never about physics. It was about how badly Washington wanted something from you. Riyadh may be where this deal got signed. Seoul and Brasília will be reading it just as closely.

For almost 20 years, the US enforced a “gold standard” on civilian nuclear deals in the Middle East. The 2009 US-UAE agreement is the template. Abu Dhabi gave up enrichment and reprocessing for good. It accepted the IAEA’s Additional Protocol, which allows tougher inspections. This wasn’t meant to be a starting offer. It was meant to be the price of entry, full stop.

The Saudi deal breaks that template. The full text isn’t public. Key details are still contested. But the reported framework doesn’t lock Riyadh out of enrichment permanently. It doesn’t require the Additional Protocol on UAE terms. Instead, it leaves the door open to future enrichment under conditions still being negotiated, wrapped in a bespoke bilateral safeguards regime built for this one deal.

The mixed signals make it worse, not better. First, reports suggested enrichment could eventually be allowed after a joint US-Saudi study. Then Trump said publicly that no enrichment would happen at all. Then he tied the whole thing to Saudi Arabia joining the Abraham Accords. Three positions. Three audiences. No fixed line anyone in the region can plan around.

That instability is the real story. Whether Saudi Arabia ever actually enriches uranium is almost secondary. Trump can change his mind again next month. What can’t be simply undone is the demonstration effect: the gold standard is not a principle anymore. It is a price tag, and the price depends on who is buying. Every government in the region just watched that happen. Every government will now act on it.

From Rules to Leverage: The Regional Fallout

The bigger question is not whether this triggers an arms race. It is how each regional actor’s calculus shifts now that Washington’s non-proliferation standard has revealed itself as leverage, not doctrine. Four reactions matter most.

Iran will use this as evidence, not provocation. Tehran has spent two decades under enrichment limits and sanctions, sold partly on the idea that restraint is a universal rule, not a favor granted to friends. This deal undercuts that pitch directly. If Riyadh — aligned with Washington, hedging against Iran, no special treaty banning enrichment — can plausibly keep a path to enrichment open through friendship rather than years of trust-building, the lesson lands hard: compliance was never about non-proliferation logic. It was about whose side you’re on. Expect Iranian negotiators to cite this deal explicitly in future talks, not to justify a bomb but to argue that “zero enrichment” was always pressure dressed up as principle.

Israel now has to choose between alignment and precedent. Israel has quietly welcomed a Gulf security architecture built against Iran. But this deal forces a real trade-off. Closer US-Saudi ties strengthen the anti-Iran coalition Israel has bet on for a decade. But accepting a more permissive nuclear posture for an Arab state — one that goes beyond the 2009 UAE baseline — chips away at a core Israeli doctrine: no regional actor, however friendly, gets nuclear-adjacent capability. Israeli planners now have to weigh not just Saudi intentions, which may be entirely peaceful, but a harder fact that the ceiling has been moved. A ceiling that moves once tends to move again.

The UAE just got handed leverage it didn’t have yesterday. This is the most overlooked piece. The UAE accepted real limits in 2009 to be first, and to be the “responsible” nuclear partner in the Gulf. But Article 12 of that agreement lets Abu Dhabi revisit its own commitments if another regional state gets better terms. If Saudi Arabia secures a more permissive deal, the UAE does not just lose relative standing. It gains a legal opening to walk its own restraint back. Watch Abu Dhabi use that leverage, not necessarily to pursue enrichment, but as a bargaining chip with Washington and with rival vendors (French, Russian, Chinese) who would happily offer terms the 2009 deal never allowed. Washington may end up costing itself its most cooperative nuclear partner in the Gulf, not because the UAE wants a bomb, but because playing by the old rules stopped paying off.

Turkey and Egypt now have a “why not us” case. Ankara is already building reactors with Russian help at Akkuyu. Cairo is building with Rosatom. Neither trusts Washington’s rules to hold steady, and this deal proves the point. Both have less reason than ever to accept US conditions when a state with a similar regional profile got more flexibility. The likely result isn’t a weapons race. It’s a scramble, with regional states shopping American, Russian, Chinese, and French vendors against each other, using Washington’s own precedent as the opening bid in every negotiation.

Military Alliance to Technological Entanglement

There’s a deeper shift underneath all four of these reactions. For 70 years, US Middle East strategy ran on a simple formula: security guarantees and arms sales, in exchange for basing rights, oil stability, and alignment against ‘common’ threats. That formula assumed the US had no real competitor for the role of guarantor.

That assumption is gone. China buys most of Saudi Arabia’s oil and is its largest trading partner. Russia remains a security hedge Riyadh keeps as insurance against American unreliability. The Gulf states have spent the last five years proving they will hedge—regardless of how Washington feels — through OPEC+ decisions, a Chinese-brokered rapprochement with Iran, and deepening BRICS ties.

This is also why treating the deal as a simple energy play, or a simple anti-China play, sells it short. Reactors create decades-long dependencies — fuel supply, safety regulation, technician training, waste management — that arms sales do not. Washington is betting that this slower, thicker entanglement binds Riyadh more tightly than security guarantees alone, at exactly the moment those guarantees have looked shakiest. Washington’s muted response to the 2019 Abqaiq attacks made that shakiness visible to everyone in the region. The nuclear deal is, in part, an attempt to substitute technological dependence for military credibility that has already been called into question.

Abraham Accords Linkage: Second Gamble

Tying implementation to Saudi normalization with Israel adds a risk the administration may not have fully priced in. Riyadh has long insisted that normalization follow real progress on Palestinian statehood. This is a position that has got hardened, not softened, by the war in Gaza and its aftermath. By conditioning the nuclear deal on normalization with Israel, Washington has handed Saudi Arabia new leverage to extract concessions on Palestine as the price of a deal it already believes it earned on the merits.

It has also handed critics — from Islamist opposition inside the kingdom to Iran’s propaganda machine — a ready-made story: that Riyadh’s nuclear cooperation is being traded for recognizing Israel, with nothing for Palestinians in return. Whether or not the deal ever gets implemented, the linkage itself sends a signal. Washington now treats nuclear cooperation, regional security, and Arab-Israeli normalization as one bargaining space. Everything is up for trade. Every actor watching has taken a note.

Dr. Salman Rafi Sheikh is a longtime commentator on diplomatic affairs for Asia Sentinel. He is an Assistant Professor of Politics at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS).

Last week’s successful maritime strike carried out by US Central Command against Iran’s major Bandar Abbas Naval Base is a significant maturing step for US naval drone warfare capability, with the US Navy finally beginning to make serious progress out of its naval drone R&D efforts. These efforts have been lackluster at best and to…

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Baghdad, in a tenuous recovery and increased internal peace after the chaos of its post-2003 conflict years, is now trying to be Washington’s partner, Tehran’s neighbor and the Gulf’s investment prize all at once. But the war next door is making that math impossible to solve.

Shia businessman-banker Ali al-Zaidi didn’t rise to Iraq’s premiership in May through the usual channels of patronage and coalition-building. He was, in a real sense, installed by veto. When Iraq’s dominant Shia bloc, the Coordination Framework, moved to back a Tehran-aligned candidate for prime minister, Washington drew an explicit line: no government seen as captured by Iran-linked factions would retain US security cooperation, and Treasury officials warned that anyone enabling militia violence “will be held accountable.”

After a first attempt to push through an alternative ally of former premier Nouri al-Maliki collapsed, the Framework capitulated in a single, 25-minute session and unanimously approved al-Zaidi. He is a 40-year-old banker with no prior political office, chosen precisely because he apparently belonged to neither camp.

That origin is the key to understanding everything al-Zaidi has done since. His mandate doesn’t come from an Iraqi electoral coalition; it comes from the narrow space Washington and Tehran have each agreed, however reluctantly, to tolerate. He has spent his first 10 weeks in office trying to widen that space rather than being crushed by it. His maneuvering has included attending Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s funeral procession in Tehran after Khamenei’s assassination in the opening days of the war, and then, days later, shaking hands in the Oval Office with the man responsible for it.

Trump’s Praise

The five-day Washington visit in mid-July produced the kind of imagery Iraqi diplomacy rarely generates: US President Donald Trump praising “tremendous chemistry” with al-Zaidi, and Iraqi officials announcing a pipeline agreement linking Basra’s oil fields to Turkey’s Ceyhan port, backed by Chevron, TI Capital and Qatar’s UCC. Al-Zaidi’s office framed the trip around economic partnership, attracting American investment, expanding US corporate involvement in Iraqi infrastructure, and deepening the energy sector. On departure, he thanked Trump’s administration for what he called a new era of strategic economic partnership.

But the goodwill has a price tag Baghdad hasn’t yet paid. Washington’s support for al-Zaidi has always been conditioned on visible progress toward disarming Iran-backed militias and folding their weapons under state control, a demand that predates his premiership and has outlived several of his predecessors’ promises. Several factions pledged in June to begin disarming; by mid-July, little progress had been made.

Iraqi militias aren’t just militant groups. They are embedded in politics. After last year’s parliamentary elections, the militias’ political wings hold a quarter of the seats in parliament, control ministries, influence the judiciary, and command significant economic resources. It took Iraqis six months to reach consensus on an untested new prime minister who serves at the pleasure of these powerful militia-aligned groups. Removing them from state institutions is therefore not a straightforward law-enforcement exercise but requires a fundamental restructuring of Iraq’s post-2003 political order. It is a venture that a leader like al-Zaidi, new to Iraqi politics, may not be too willing to undertake.

The recent killing of an Iraqi intelligence officer in a drone attack, which Iraq’s own foreign ministry attributed to “factions from the inside,” is a preview of how dangerous that confrontation could become if al-Zaidi pushes harder. He knows the cost of doing that—a calculation that may have influenced Iraq’s decision that al-Zaidi must visit Tehran. He doesn’t want his ties with Washington to be seen as a rupture with Iran.

External Events May Hold Key

Timing has made the balancing act more precarious, not less. The ceasefire that Pakistan brokered between the United States and Iran in April has collapsed again, with fresh strikes on shipping through the Strait of Hormuz in early July prompting Trump to declare the truce over even as Qatari and Pakistani mediators scramble to restart talks. Washington, meanwhile, is planning a further reduction of its troop presence in Iraq by the end of September, removing leverage and protection from Baghdad at precisely the moment the region is escalating again.

The US withdrawal is a double-edged sword. It cuts the risk of American soldiers being sitting targets, but it also cuts the one thing that kept Washington genuinely invested in Iraq’s stability. What is left is a relationship held together by Trump’s fondness for al-Zaidi and a handful of oil deals, which is a much flimsier thing to build a foreign policy on. Iran, for its part, is not going to read this as America stepping back in good faith; it’s going to read it as an opening.

And al-Zaidi is the one left holding the bag: he no longer has “the Americans are still here” as his excuse for not disarming the militias, but he has not gained anything that would actually let him do it either. Push too hard, and Tehran makes him pay. Don’t push at all, and Washington loses patience. Either way, the cushion he used to have is gone.

Betting on a Fractured Gulf

Al-Zaidi’s outreach has not stopped at Washington. Baghdad is simultaneously courting the Gulf states, structuring a new energy and development fund that it hopes Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar will help capitalize alongside American and European investors, part of a broader push to rebuild trust with Gulf capital after years of underinvestment. This is a rational hedge, but it assumes a coherence in Gulf policy toward Iran that no longer exists.

The Gulf Cooperation Council states have responded to the war in starkly different ways: the UAE, having absorbed the most direct attacks of any GCC member, has taken the most confrontational posture and reportedly welcomed direct Israeli defense cooperation. Saudi Arabia has pushed for de-escalation through the same Pakistan-mediated channel while reserving the right to strike back. Qatar and Oman have positioned themselves as the region’s diplomats, hosting Iranian officials for talks even as the war continues. Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, once tightly aligned, have grown into rivals rather than partners on the core question of how to handle Tehran.

Iraq is, in effect, asking a fractured Gulf to fund a state that hasn’t resolved its own fracture with Iran. There exists a dependency that extends well beyond politics into the physical grid, since Iraqi electricity generation still relies in part on Iranian gas and power imports that no amount of Gulf capital has yet replaced. Riyadh, Abu Dhabi and Doha each have their own reasons to keep investing regardless of the war’s trajectory: Gulf sovereign wealth funds have grown enormous over the past decade, and Iraqi reconstruction offers returns that data-center and tourism megaprojects alone cannot match. But the same governments financing Baghdad’s pivot toward Washington and the Gulf are also, individually, hedging their own exposure to Iran through separate military and diplomatic channels. Iraq cannot borrow a unified Gulf position on Iran, because no such unity currently exists to borrow.

What Baghdad’s Bet Actually Wagers

The temptation is to read Iraq’s position as passive; a country buffeted between larger powers with no real agency of its own. That undersells what is happening. Al-Zaidi’s government has made an active, calculated bet: that enough visible alignment with Washington and the Gulf can be sustained without triggering the kind of rupture with Tehran that would destabilize Iraq’s own security architecture, still built substantially on Iran-aligned militias embedded in the state itself.

That bet has a shelf life, and the war is shortening it. Every additional round of US-Iran strikes narrows the middle ground Baghdad is trying to occupy, and every month the militias remain armed is a month Washington’s patience compounds against al-Zaidi rather than for him. If the current escalation in the Strait of Hormuz hardens into a longer war rather than another fragile pause, Iraq won’t be able to remain a hinge state indefinitely; it will be forced into a choice its founding transaction with Washington was specifically designed to avoid. The more interesting question for the region is no longer whether al-Zaidi can keep Iraq out of the war; it is which of Iraq’s external patrons will get tired of the balancing act first.

Dr. Salman Rafi Sheikh is an Assistant Professor of Politics at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). He holds a Ph.D. in Politics and International Studies from SOAS, University of London. He is a longtime regular contributor to Asia Sentinel.

With fertility rates hitting record lows in Asian-Pacific states including China, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan and Singapore, the looming demographic cliff-edge is cutting into the numbers of people filling out their militaries’ uniformed ranks, fundamentally challenging their ability to raise military power centered around the curre…

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Beginning next year, U.S. and UK nuclear-powered attack submarines are scheduled to rotate through Royal Australian Navy base HMAS Stirling in Western Australia, with preparations and family relocations already in progress. At the same time, Australia’s submarine builder and maintainer ASC is pushing workforce expansion and the upskilling of Australians, including training in Pearl Harbor, to support future submarine sustainment and build a sovereign nuclear capability. At the recent Indian Ocean Defence and Security Conference and Exhibition (IODS) in Perth, Asia Sentinel witnessed Abi Clayton, President of Rolls-Royce Submarines, describing a major production surge for all the new nuclear reactor plants for Australia’s submarine endeavor already being underway.

These developments are the fruits of AUKUS, the trilateral security partnership between Australia, the UK, and the U.S. launched in 2023, comprising the submarine enterprise (Pillar One) and long-term defense technology cooperation (Pillar Two). The submarine rotation period will be followed by Australia purchasing potentially up to five used Virginia-class nuclear-powered attack submarines from the US starting in 2032, dependent on the US ramping up production to release boats. Then, Australia’s own nuclear-powered attack submarines will be jointly built, initially in the UK and ultimately in South Australia.

With Australia eventually basing up to 18 nuclear-powered attack submarines, the naval balance in the Indo-Pacific will be significantly changed to the detriment of China’s territorial ambitions, observers have told Asia Sentinel.

“The looming start of rotation at HMAS Stirling increases allied submarine presence closer to the South China Sea and the broader region, enhancing deterrence now rather than in a distant future,” said Gordon Flake, founding CEO of the Perth USAsia Centre.

“Given that Australia has one of the world’s largest exclusive economic zones, it will use its small navy mainly for backyard patrols, but the submarine will also have their roles within routine peacetime functions, including freedom of navigation operations alongside allies, translating into a stabilizing regional presence and representing a big shift relevant to Taiwan and the Philippines.”

Flake went on to point out that a key enhancement for deterrence comes from nuclear-powered subs’ improved capacity. As they remain submerged for extraordinarily long periods, their locations are virtually unpredictable, thereby delivering strategic ambiguity. By contrast, Australia’s existing diesel-electric submarines must snorkel every 12–24 hours and have limited depth and duration, making their locations more predictable.

For his part, James R. Holmes, a professor at the U.S.’s Naval War College, said that the AUKUS subs could be “huge” also from alliance and military standpoints.

“From the alliance standpoint, it cements solidarity among a significant fraction of the old British Empire while committing Australia, an external power, to any Taiwan conflict but a significant power, to the island’s defense, and it would seem to commit Great Britain, a really, really outside power, to the same cause,” Holmes said.

“From the military standpoint, to secure Taiwan, you mainly need to deny China control of the Taiwan Strait and adjacent waters. Submarine warfare remains an allied advantage and a sea-denial weapon par excellence.”

The AUKUS partnership is providing a major boost to the industry, with around US$240 billion set to be invested over the next 30 years. A key focal point for this upswing was the Indian Ocean Defence and Security Conference and Exhibition (IODS) held in Perth in May 2026. It brought together figures from the military, politics, business, and research sectors.

IODS panel discussions examined the multifaceted challenges of delivering AUKUS, underscoring the need for decisive leadership, rapid workforce and infrastructure build-out, and tightly coordinated trilateral collaboration. Urgent priorities include constructing a dry dock at Henderson near Perth, establishing a single accountable “controlling mind” on the Australian side and releasing contracts to catalyze industry investment. Success hinges on creating an interchangeable workforce and standardized, shared supply chains across Australia, the UK, and the U.S., while building Australia’s sovereign nuclear sustainment capability. Panel participants also stressed the need for a “social license”, meaning the Australian public needs to be made supportive of the costly endeavor.

Unsurprisingly, China has been doubling down on anti-AUKUS information operations and psychological warfare to target public opinion domestically and regionally, noted Gordon Flake. China seeks to gain influence through economic coercion, military activities near Australia’s shores, political pressure and intelligence activities.

“However, these efforts are largely counterproductive, as they raise threat perceptions region-wide when combined with assertive behavior,” Flake said.

“Pre-COVID, polls showed roughly 80% saw China as an opportunity; today, it’s more like 80% for threat and 20% for opportunity. This is attributable to daily incidents against the Philippines and Taiwan, surveillance and survey vessel activity around Australia, and overt economic coercion targeting our exports of coal, barley, crayfish, and wine.”

As to whether the Australian government of the day would choose to come to the U.S.’s help in the event of a Taiwan war, Flake noted Australia’s historical pattern of fighting alongside the US since WWI but referenced the Iran war to illustrate non-coordination with the U.S. U.S. President Donald Trump started the war without consulting U.S. allies.

“Australia’s future decisions will hinge on the trajectory of U.S. alliance coordination. Recovery from periods of ‘nontraditional non-coordination’ [under Trump] will shape how readily Australia aligns with U.S. requests,” Flake said.

Myanmar’s civil war has settled into a pulverizing, multi-front stalemate in which neither side appears capable of a military victory with the Tatmadaw, as the junta’s military are known, seemingly having halted prior territorial losses and stabilized their position. Armed resistance groups, however, are said to control or contest up to 80 percent of the country of 55 million people, while the Tatmadaw control most of the cities and the sinews of commerce.

While tens of thousands have died on both sides in the conflict, it is a war that has been forgotten by the outside world, receiving a fraction of the news coverage or international aid afforded to other global crises. The brutal reality of the war—now well into its sixth year—is thus that it is largely unfolding in the dark.

More than two years ago, anti-junta forces launched a combined offensive that put the country in a severe political, economic and humanitarian crisis. One of the powerful resistance groups, the Arakan Army (AA), occupies and rules over 70 percent of the landmass of Rakhine State, with AA fighters continuing to target junta forces to take control over the state capital city of Sittwe. But the rebels received a rude shock in early June when the junta’s military leader Min Aung Hlaing, bolstered by the fig leaf of a sham January election, paid a five-day state visit to India, his first since leading the 2021 military coup that ousted the democratically led government headed by Aung San Suu Kyi. Discussions with Delhi are said to have ranged over trade, defense, security cooperation, border management, and “bilateral, regional and global issues of mutual interest.”

India’s interests are both strategic – countering China’s regional dominance – and commercial. New Delhi anticipates benefits from the ambitious Kaladan multi-modal transit-transport project it has sponsored on Myanmar’s western border, which would connect India’s landlocked north-eastern region with western Myanmar’s Sittwe port in the Bay of Bengal. An India-Myanmar-Thailand highway spanning over 1,360 km is expected to enhance regional connectivity and trading activities. The riverine project was supposed to be operational 10 years ago, but it continues to face difficulties primarily due to political turmoil in Rakhine and Chin States of Myanmar.

Both China and Russia have already taken sides, providing diplomatic, economic and military support to the junta, formally known as the State Security and Peace Commission. Lacking an international sponsor, the rebels are forced to source their weapons through a combination of domestic production, black-market purchases, battlefield captures and alliances with longtime ethnic rebel groups. But if the rebels are in stalemate, it is worth remembering that minorities have been carrying on civil wars in Burma and Myanmar for over 78 years, making it the longest ongoing civil war in the world.

In the meantime, Myanmar is being cut to pieces by strife. Global aid organizations claim that more than 5.3 million Myanmarese people are now living in distress. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees recently revealed that 1.6 million had already fled to the neighboring countries. Around 3.7 million internally displaced residents continue to live in border areas with no regular access to food, healthcare or shelter. Chronic poverty now affects nearly 80 percent of the population. Refugees have sought shelters in neighboring countries such as Bangladesh, Thailand, and India, putting pressure on their border economies.

Min Aung Hlaing has positioned himself as the civilian head after the disputed national election, which took place without the participation of opposition parties including the National League for Democracy. His recently concluded official visits to India and China have earned some dubious respectability. Although both giant neighbors welcomed Hlaing with red carpets, the ground reality remains the same. It remains one of the world’s most discredited regimes.

The ongoing conflicts have resulted in heavy casualties, with the United Nations estimating that more than 75,000 people have died over the past five years. Other estimates range above 100,000. The Rakhine region and central Myanmar continue to face the brunt of military atrocities. The UNHCR recently stated that civilians in both regions face continuing brutality, with junta forces using fighter jets and drones to drop explosives on civilian areas, even targeting schools, hospitals and refugee camps.

Students remain silent sufferers, with more than six million children and young people staying out of school in the 2026-2027 academic year. Thus, almost half of the country’s children (around 13 million) are now deprived of formal education. The healthcare sector has also collapsed as many doctors and health workers have died in repeated aerial attacks on clinics. Private hospitals have also been shuttered by the administrations and large numbers of healthcare professionals who allied with the opposition leaders have been arrested and prosecuted.

The media face the most critical period since independence, with at least 215 journalists arrested in the last five years. Some 15 remain in detention. The Geneva-based global media rights body, Press Emblem Campaign recently demanded their urgent and unconditional release. PEC President Blaise Lempen told Asia Sentinel that 97 media outlets have been subjected to legal harassment. Lempen urged authorities to revoke all bans, restriction and de-licensing of news outlets. Lempen’s demand is likely to fall on deaf ears, as all other such demands have done since the junta took over the country.

Likewise, the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) has been urged to demand the unconditional discharge of all political prisoners, said to number 31,100 people since the 2021 coup, with more than 22,000 detainees remaining in military custody. Rights groups also have repeatedly asked ASEAN to condemn the forceful conscription of young people to fight against the anti-junta forces on the frontline.

Suu Kyi’s son Kim Aris has appealed to international governments and organizations to seek the 81-year-old woman’s whereabouts and to confirm that she is receiving appropriate medical care. The European Union, Yangon-based foreign embassies and diplomatic missions belonging to Australia, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Norway, the United Kingdom and Netherlands, the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners and the UN special envoy on Myanmar echoed concerns while calling for her urgent release along with other political prisoners. The rebel National Unity Government joined the chorus for the release of all political prisoners

During Hlaing’s recent visit, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi also raised the issue of Suu Kyi and democracy, saying he supports an initiative for resolving security concern in the entire 1,643 km Indo-Myanmar border areas. North-eastern separatist militants have engaged in disruptive activities in the eastern part of India and then run to the safe hideouts inside Myanmar.

The Pentagon’s mid-June decision to restore “US Pacific Command,” reversing a 2018 decision to rename the command as the Indo-Pacific Command, is not merely a bureaucratic rebranding. It is the clearest institutional signal yet that Washington is narrowing its strategic horizon.

The 2018 choice was deliberately political, reflecting an emerging strategic consensus that the Indian and Pacific Oceans constituted a single geopolitical theatre and that India would become indispensable to maintaining a favorable balance of power against China. Then-Secretary of Defense James Mattis described the decision as recognizing the “increasing connectivity between the Indian and Pacific Oceans,” while the Trump administration’s subsequent Indo-Pacific Strategy Report placed India at the center of its vision for a “free and open Indo-Pacific.” The command’s new name institutionalized this strategic imagination within the US military itself.

That institutional commitment now appears to be receding. In June, the Department of War, restored the command’s historical designation while explicitly retaining its existing area of responsibility. Officially, the change is presented as a return to tradition rather than a change in mission. Yet strategic institutions rarely rename themselves without purpose. Military commands embody particular conceptions of geography, priorities, and threats. While operational responsibilities remain unchanged, the vocabulary through which Washington defines its principal theatre of competition has unmistakably changed. The question, therefore, is not whether the command’s map has changed, but whether America’s strategic imagination has. The answer increasingly appears to be yes.

The Indo-Pacific concept emerged at a moment when Washington believed that balancing China required integrating the entire maritime space stretching from the eastern coast of Africa to the western shores of the Americas. India occupied a central place in this vision. It was expected to serve as the western anchor of an emerging coalition alongside Japan, Australia and the United States. The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad), revived in 2017, complemented this broader strategic architecture by projecting the image of four major democracies collectively shaping regional order. Eight years later, many of the assumptions underpinning that vision have weakened.

Most importantly, the military challenge posed by China has become significantly more immediate. Taiwan has shifted from being one contingency among many to becoming the organizing principle of US defense planning in Asia. The Pentagon’s force posture, alliance coordination and operational concepts increasingly revolve around deterring a Chinese attempt to alter the status quo in the Taiwan Strait. This has inevitably concentrated American attention on the first and second island chains, particularly Japan, the Philippines and Guam, where military assets can directly influence a potential conflict. As strategic urgency has narrowed geographically, so too has Washington’s conception of which partners matter most.

Why India No Longer Occupies the Center

The restoration of the Pacific Command designation doesn’t suggest that India has become strategically irrelevant. It remains indispensable to American efforts in technology cooperation, supply-chain resilience, intelligence sharing and long-term balancing against China. However, strategic importance and operational centrality are not the same. Washington’s earlier Indo-Pacific strategy assumed that India would gradually emerge as an increasingly integrated security partner capable of anchoring the Indian Ocean component of regional deterrence. That expectation has encountered important structural limits.

India has consistently preserved its doctrine of strategic autonomy. It has refused formal military alliances, maintained longstanding defense relations with Russia despite Western pressure, and repeatedly demonstrated that it will align with Washington only where its own national interests converge. None of these policies are surprising; they simply reflect India’s longstanding foreign policy tradition.

From the perspective of US military planners, however, these realities carry important implications. In the event of a Taiwan contingency, treaty allies such as Japan and Australia provide legally institutionalized commitments, established command structures and integrated military planning. The Philippines has similarly assumed renewed strategic significance by expanding American access to military facilities under the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement. These partnerships translate directly into operational planning.

India occupies a different category. Its value lies less in participating in immediate military contingencies than in shaping China’s long-term strategic environment. That distinction matters because Washington increasingly appears to be prioritizing the former over the latter.

The restoration of the original name, therefore, reflects more than nostalgia. It suggests that American strategy is moving from an expansive geopolitical vision toward a more concentrated military geography. The decisive theatre is no longer conceived primarily as the vast Indo-Pacific; it is increasingly the Western Pacific.

New Alliance System

If the restoration reflects a narrowing of America’s strategic geography, it also points towards an evolving hierarchy of alliances. The beneficiaries of this shift are unlikely to be new partners, but existing treaty allies situated closest to the prospective theatre of conflict.

Japan has embarked upon its most ambitious military modernization since WWII, significantly increasing defense spending and adopting a new National Security Strategy that explicitly identifies China as the greatest strategic challenge. Australia has become central to American force posture through the AUKUS partnership and expanded rotational deployments. Meanwhile, the Philippines has assumed renewed importance by granting the United States access to additional military facilities under the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement, providing critical logistical depth for any Taiwan-related contingency.

The restoration of the Pacific Command designation also hints at an emerging hierarchy within America’s regional partnerships. Washington’s treaty allies—Japan, Australia and the Philippines—are becoming increasingly central because they occupy the immediate theatre of any potential conflict with China. These relationships are underpinned by mutual defense treaties, integrated command structures, forward military deployments and operational planning. They are designed not only to preserve regional stability but also to wage war should deterrence fail.

The Quad occupies a fundamentally different strategic space. Since its revival in 2017, it has evolved into an important diplomatic framework promoting cooperation on critical technologies, resilient supply chains, maritime domain awareness, infrastructure and public goods. Yet it has never developed into a military alliance, nor does it possess the institutional architecture necessary for collective defense or integrated war planning. Its value lies in shaping the strategic environment rather than preparing for combat.

That distinction acquires greater significance if Washington is indeed narrowing its strategic focus from the broader Indo-Pacific to the Western Pacific. A strategy centered on deterring Chinese action against Taiwan naturally privileges partners capable of contributing directly to military operations in East Asia. In such a framework, the Quad is unlikely to disappear, but its relative importance could diminish as operational alliances assume greater prominence.

Whether this marks a lasting strategic reorientation or merely a response to today’s security environment remains uncertain. What is already evident, however, is that Washington’s strategic vocabulary is changing. In 2018, adding “Indo” to the command’s name institutionalized the belief that the Indian and Pacific Oceans constituted a single strategic theatre and that India would occupy a central place within it. Restoring “Pacific” does not erase that geography, but it suggests a different hierarchy of priorities—one in which the decisive arena of competition is increasingly conceived as the Western Pacific rather than the wider Indo-Pacific.

The significance of this shift, therefore, lies not in the command’s new-old name, but in the strategic logic it reflects. If the United States is redefining the geography of great-power competition, regional states will inevitably recalibrate their own strategic assumptions. For India, the challenge will not simply be preserving close ties with Washington but adapting to the possibility that the Indo-Pacific may no longer serve as the organizing principle of American strategy. Whether a more narrowly defined Pacific order ultimately replaces it will shape the future of alliance politics, defense planning and regional diplomacy across Asia.

Dr Salman Rafi Sheikh is an Assistant Professor of Politics at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) in Pakistan. He is a long-time contributor on diplomatic affairs to Asia Sentinel.

On June 9, India opened a strategically vital 13.15 km tunnel linking the Kashmir region to Ladakh beneath the 3,529-meter Zojila pass, the world’s longest single-tube bi-directional road tunnel at the world’s highest altitude, providing permanent, all-weather reinforcement of its sovereignty along the Line of Actual Control demarking the border with China, reducing travel time from three hours to 20 minutes. It is designed to allow the Indian Army to rapidly move troops, artillery, and supplies to forward positions without the previous weather-dependent delays.

The 3,488-km de facto military border between the two countries has been a source of tension since at least 1963, when disputes over sovereignty at the roof of the world escalated into a full-scale border war in which China secured control of the Aksai Chin region in the west, while claiming nearly all of India’s Arunachal Pradesh region. In 2017. Hostility flared again for 73 days on the Doklam plateau near the Bhutan-India-China tri-junction after Indian forces halted Chinese road-building crews. Hand-to-hand combat between border patrols in the Galwan Valley in 2020 resulted in casualties for both sides, leading to sustained military standoffs.

Built at a cost of US$820–850 million, the tunnel is the first-ever all-weather, year-round connection between the two regions. Historically, the past has been cut off for 160 to 180 days annually by snowfall and temperatures which plunge to -35°C. It is being developed under extremely demanding geological and climatic conditions. Once operational, the project will provide year-round connectivity on the Srinagar–Kargil–Leh axis, a route that remains affected by prolonged winter closures due to heavy snowfall and avalanche risks. The tunnel is expected to be fully operational by 2028.

The project makes it Asia’s longest bi-directional road tunnel with a total project length of 30.894 km including tunnel roads and bridges, located between Baltal in Jammu & Kashmir and Meenamarg in Ladakh across the challenging Himalayan corridor. The project is being executed by Megha Engineering & Infrastructure Ltd (MEIL) as the main contractor under the client National Highways & Infrastructure Development Corporation Ltd (NHIDCL), utilizing the New Austrian Tunnelling Method (NATM) construction methodology.

The final breakthrough of the main tunnel, as per an official statement, represents the “completion of the most critical excavation phase and reflects the successful execution of underground works in fragile Himalayan geology under highly adverse terrain and weather conditions.”

“The project is of immense socio-economic and strategic importance, as it is expected to improve mobility, strengthen logistics reliability, support tourism and essential services, and enhance connectivity for border regions,” the release stated.

The work on the project was inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on May 19, 2018 in Leh. Union Minister Nitin Gadkari (Road Transport & Highways), accompanied by J&K Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha and Chief Minister Omar Abdullah, inaugurated the breakthrough ceremony on June 9, marking the connection between the two ends of the tunnel.

“This is a historic day in India’s infrastructure story,” union minister for road transport and highways Nitin Gadkari said on the occasion. “The Zojila Tunnel is set to make a world record once it is fully operational. It will be a lifeline for the people of Ladakh and Jammu & Kashmir.”

Chief Minister of Jammu & Kashmir Omar Abdullah said the long-awaited dream of the people of Ladakh and Jammu & Kashmir has finally come true. “The joy on people’s faces shows how positively the tunnel’s completion will affect their lives. Improved transport, new opportunities, and tourism will bring real change to the region. Now that the breakthrough is complete, I hope the remaining work is finished quickly,” the chief minister said.

The tunnel is designed to strengthen military movements along the border with China and Pakistan. Improved military movements and quicker access via tunnel are also expected to strengthen India’s ability to respond to potential Pakistani and Chinese aggression along the Line of Control and Line of Actual Control.

“From the defense point of view, the road link will strengthen national security. It will be of great importance to the defense forces,“ said Iranian engineer Yousef Eshaghpour, who worked for years as a team leader on the Zojila tunnel project. He said this was the most challenging project he has worked on in his career until now.

“This project is vital for Ladakh as you don’t have access to this area for about 4 to 5 months in winter due to snowfall. Through this tunnel, one can reach Ladakh in 15 minutes, and it provides all-weather connectivity between Ladakh and Kashmir. Almost 80 percent of the project is completed,” the engineer said.

Another engineer who has worked on the project said the tunnel ensures the road will remain open in all seasons, bringing economic benefits for Ladakh and boosting winter tourism to Ladakh as visitors can visit Ladakh via the tunnel route in the winter season as well.

“The defense forces have to use air force planes to carry equipment and advance stock to Ladakh from Chandigarh when the road closes for several months in winter. When the road is opened, advance stocks will not be needed and the government can use the tunnel to ferry stock for defense and civilian purposes in all weather conditions,” the engineer said.

After the Union Minister of Road Transport and Highways Nitin Gadkari pressed the button for the final blast inside the tunnel on June 9, he emphasized that the tunnel project will prove to be a game-changer when it comes to strengthening India’s security.

“With round-the-year connectivity, the movement of the Indian Army, as well as the supply of Army materials, equipment, and logistics, will become faster, safer, and more effective, thereby strengthening the country’s strategic preparedness,” he said.

On May 24, a suicide car bomb tore through a military train near Quetta, the capital of Pakistan’s restive Balochistan Province, killing at least two dozen soldiers. Hours later, Pakistan’s army chief was in Tehran carrying diplomatic messages between Washington and Iran, seeking to broker international peace while fighting a full-scale insurgency on its own soil.

The contradiction is not incidental; rather it is the defining tension of Pakistan’s strategic moment. The Balochistan Liberation Army is no longer the peripheral irritant Pakistani officials have long sought to portray. In late January and early February, the BLA conducted synchronized, multi-pronged attacks across at least 0 to 12 locations including Quetta, Gwadar, Mastung, and Panjgur, striking security forces through suicide bombings, assaults on military posts and sabotage of critical infrastructure. The May 24 attack on the Quetta train was not an aberration; it was a continuation. The day before that bombing, the BLA publicly unveiled its first female commander and a formalized women’s fighting unit, a calculated signal that the insurgency has embedded itself across generations, classes, and genders.

Pakistan’s military response has been correspondingly massive. According to official government figures, security forces conducted more than 78,000 intelligence-based operations across Balochistan in 2025. Yet the same officials acknowledged that these operations resulted in the deaths of 202 security personnel and 280 civilians over the same period. The arithmetic is damning: operational intensity has not translated into strategic gains. More troubling, reports have documented civilian casualties from aerial strikes in towns like Zehri in Khuzdar district, each incident a potential recruitment tool for the next cycle of insurgency.

The security picture is further complicated by the BLA’s evolving alliances. Intelligence and security assessments indicate a growing tactical partnership between the BLA and the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) — two groups with wholly incompatible ideologies, united by a shared adversary. This convergence has coincided with a marked escalation in operational sophistication, shared logistics and coordinated timing of attacks. The Afghan Taliban, for their part, maintain strategic ambiguity — neither formally endorsing the BLA nor disrupting its movement through southern Afghan provinces like Kandahar and Helmand, treating the insurgents as useful leverage against Islamabad.

Geopolitical Vise Tightens Around Balochistan

Pakistan’s deteriorating relationship with Kabul compounds each of these threats. Last October, Indian External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar held the first high-level bilateral meeting between India and the Taliban, after which New Delhi upgraded its technical mission in Kabul to a full embassy. It is not hard to understand that India is explicitly seeking to exploit divisions between Islamabad and Kabul. The Taliban’s own foreign minister, during his New Delhi visit, pledged that Afghan territory would not be used against India — a commitment conspicuously not extended to Pakistan.

Afghanistan, in other words, is now more strategically aligned with New Delhi than with Islamabad. This matters enormously for Balochistan, which shares a long border with Afghanistan and has historically served as a transit corridor for insurgent logistics. The BLA’s access to Afghan territory, where the IEA provides what analysts describe as a “sovereign shield,” is not a marginal factor; it is structurally embedded in the insurgency’s operational model.

Pakistan’s improving ties with Iran offer a partial counterweight. Pakistan and Iran are experiencing one of the most constructive phases of their bilateral relationship in recent decades, with over 25 high-level delegations exchanged and 25 agreements signed in the past two years. Better coordination on the Iran-Pakistan border could help interdict BLA movement along that flank. But it closes only one corridor. With the Afghan route open and the TTP alliance active, a partial fix does not constitute a solution.

Meanwhile, Pakistan’s extraordinary diplomatic exertions in West Asia — brokering the April 8 ceasefire between the United States and Iran, hosting Islamabad talks with US Vice President JD Vance, and dispatching Army Chief Asim Munir to Tehran as a back-channel envoy — have generated significant international prestige. That prestige, however, rests on a domestic foundation that is actively eroding. Balochistan sits at the precise intersection of South Asia, West Asia, and Central Asia. It is where China’s CPEC investments are most concentrated, where the Iran border is most porous, where the insurgency is most deeply rooted, and where Pakistan is actively seeking Saudi investment to build an oil refinery. A state that cannot stabilize its own strategic heartland will eventually find its credibility as a regional stabilizer questioned.

New Contract, not New Operation

The military logic has been tested to exhaustion. Despite 78,000 operations in a single year, a suicide bomber still reaches a military train in the provincial capital. The problem is not operational capacity; it is a strategic error. Pakistan has consistently treated Balochistan as a security problem requiring a military solution—a preference captured in the Chief of Defence Forces’ notion of a “hard state.”

Balochistan, however, is at its core a political problem that security operations can suppress but never resolve. A genuinely different approach would begin with an honest accounting of what decades of military primacy have produced: an insurgency that has grown more sophisticated, better networked, and more socially embedded with each passing year. It would then require concrete commitments on the issues that have driven Baloch alienation — an end to enforced disappearances, which have haunted thousands of families for two decades and remain one of the most potent sources of radicalization; genuine resource-sharing from the extraction of copper, gas and gold from Baloch soil, rather than arrangements in which local communities bear environmental costs while revenues flow elsewhere; meaningful political empowerment that gives Baloch representatives real authority over their province’s future; and a phased, deliberate demilitarization that replaces the logic of control with the logic of governance.

None of this is straightforward. Pakistan’s civil-military dynamics, its coalition politics, and the institutional interests of its security establishment all create structural resistance to precisely the kind of political concessions that a settlement would require. Recognizing Baloch grievances as legitimate — rather than simply reducing them to foreign-sponsored agitation — requires a rupture with decades of official narrative.

Yet the trajectory, absent that rupture, points in a discernible direction. The BLA is broadening its social base, formalizing its structures, and deepening external relationships in a geopolitical environment increasingly hospitable to its cause. Afghanistan’s alignment with India, the TTP alliance, and the UAE’s well-documented pivot away from Pakistan — freezing accounts, deporting workers, demanding early repayment of loans amidst deepening ties with India— collectively suggest that the external environment is changing in ways that could increase pressure on Balochistan. Pakistan’s window for a political solution is not permanently open. If Islamabad continues to govern Balochistan through the barrel of a gun, it may one day find that the gun is the only thing left.

Dr Salman Rafi Sheikh is an Assistant Professor of Politics at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) in Pakistan. He is a long-time contributor on diplomatic affairs to Asia Sentinel.

The unprecedented participation of 1,400 Japanese combat soldiers in the seven-nation Balikatan Exercise 2026, the longstanding annual drill between the Armed Forces of the Philippines and US allies, marks a first for the region and as such demonstrates the newly aggressive foreign policy of Japanese Premier Sanae Takachi, who has already raised hackles in Beijing by asserting that a hypothetical Chinese military attack on Taiwan could constitute a “survival-threatening situation” in the region.

The closing ceremony for the multinational exercise, involving 17,000 personnel from the US, Philippines, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, France, and Japan coincided with the Asean 48th Summit that was also held in the Philippines on May 8. While on paper the purpose is to improve interoperability between the participating militaries, the narratives calling for the destruction of enemy (read China) assets on land, at sea, and in the air, have quietly generated geopolitical ripples throughout the region. The arrival of Japanese troops to join the exercise isn’t quieting those geopolitical ripples. The exercise was concluded just shortly before U.S. President Donald Trump arrived in Beijing to meet with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

Balikatan is touted as a significant event in US-Philippine military relations dating back to when both signed a Mutual Defense Treaty in 1951 prior to the Philippines achieving the status of an archipelagic state in 1982. The Philippines has included the Kalayaan Islands – also known as the West Philippines Sea – as its territories since 1974. China has long contested the Philippine ownership of these territories.

What started as a bilateral arrangement now involves seven other militaries. However, the participation of Japanese soldiers, marks a new beginning in regional geopolitical security dynamics considering Tokyo’s decision to take up arms again. The decision to arm has sent prickly signals to many in the region, especially after Japan raised military expenditure to two percent of GDP, amounting to a US$58 billion defense outlay in the 2026 fiscal year. This makes Japan the third-largest defense spender in the world, after the US and China.

Japan’s participation in Balikatan thus signals that the exercise is evolving from a bilateral alliance drill into a broader strategic alignment of US proxies aimed at countering China, with a newly energized Japan’s participation. Even prior to Takaichi’s ascendancy to the premiership, Japan had been rapidly expanding its defense footprint in Southeast Asia, shifting from a strictly pacifist stance to actively partnering with regional nations. This buildup centers on securing the First Island Chain and countering Chinese maritime expansion in the South China Sea. Tokyo’s strategy includes relaxed arms exports, security pacts, and joint exercises.

While many countries feeling the heat of China’s overpowering presence in the South China Sea welcome Japan’s new activism, however, there are long memories of its invasion and occupation of Southeast Asia from 1941 to 1945 that claimed an estimated 4.4 million civilian lives due to forced labor, famine, and violence. Postwar aid which began in the mid-1950s through war reparations, evolving into massive Official Development Assistance (ODA) and private investments that built foundational infrastructure and fostered deep economic interdependence with ASEAN hasn’t completely erased concerns that a remilitarised Japan could provide a pretext for a new round of defense spending and procurement.

The objections generally don’t run to governments. While Beijing frequently objects, governments in Southeast Asia generally extend a welcome, often viewing Japan as a vital, stabilizing partner and a regional counterweight. The big concern is how much Japan’s growing military presence raises the temperature across an increasingly volatile region. The 2026 Balikatan military exercise itself can no longer be described as an ordinary conventional military training exercise. It has evolved into a rehearsal preparation for a coordinated conventional warfare against China’s military bases in the South China Sea and a planned rescue of Taiwan by the US and its allies in the event of a Chinese attempt to invade the island, the consequences of which could engulf the entire region into a political quagmire. If a real conflict were to happen, it could hasten the collapse of the US military preeminence, already imperiled by the inconsistent foreign policy of the Trump administration.

Such a conflict would also fracture Asean security architecture and undermine its importance as a regional institution which has been experiencing internal fissures even before Trump imposed tariffs and sanctions on the member states more than a year ago. The ongoing tensions in West Asia that led to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz have disrupted energy supplies across Southeast Asia exposing their vulnerabilities. Countries like Indonesia and the Philippines have taken unpopular steps to mitigate dependence on oil from Iran whose rising prices have put a strain on government popularity in many other Asean member countries. Many view the unpopular policies as necessary to contain public dissatisfaction and protect regime legitimacy.

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr was the first in the region to declare a state of national emergency after local diesel and petrol prices more than doubled since the war in Iran broke out on 28 February. Filipinos are generally unhappy with government policy, with some civil society groups staging strikes against the presidency. This situation has complicated the fragile political situation as the country prepares for the next general election in June 2028.

The war in West Asia has also forced Jakarta to navigate the global power rivalry as it seeks to ensure stable oil supplies amidst a chaotic economic downturn marked by weak currency, widening fiscal deficit, rising unemployment, and capital flight which could undermine the authoritarian leadership of President Prabowo Subianto. The decision that looks like it is to curry favour with Washington by giving a blanket overflight clearance (later denied by Departmen Luar Negeri) to the US military has unsettled many in the region.

Some believe the overflight arrangement is in exchange for a highly confidential defense arrangement with Washington that has not gone down well with some critics in Indonesia. The defence arrangement with the US has also raised eyebrows in Beijing which funded the construction of the Jakarta-Bandung High Speed Railway, a flagship infrastructure project under China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

By itself, the Balikatan Exercise doesn’t change the geopolitical equation in this part of the world just yet. However, over time, the involvement of external parties at the time of rising tensions between the US and China that could clash over Taiwan is unsettling. Behind closed doors, several ASEAN policymakers worry that Exercise Balikatan has evolved beyond traditional alliance military exercises into a form of operational rehearsal against China, which does not augur well with regional geopolitical dynamics.

B A Hamzah comments regularly on Southeast Asian military and diplomatic affairs.