US President George W Bush launched the so-called ‘war on terror’ following the September 11, 2001 attacks IMAGE/ File: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters]
The US has waged its ‘war on terror’ for 25 years now, sowing death and destruction across the world.
The year 2025 has come to an end, and along with it, the first
quarter of the 21st century. Reflecting on the course of the past 25
years, it is hard to understate the extent to which global events have
been shaped by the military excesses of the United States – not that the
same cannot be said for the 20th century, too.
Shortly after the new century kicked off, the US launched the so-called “global war on terror” under the enlightened guidance of President George W Bush,
who offered the professional call to arms following the 9/11 attacks of
2001: “We have our marching orders. My fellow Americans, let’s roll.”
According to Bush, the US had undertaken to “wage a war to save
civilisation itself”, which ultimately entailed pulverising various
parts of the world and killing millions of people.
On September 11, 2001, I was enrolled as a junior at Columbia University
in New York City, the site of the World Trade Center attacks. However,
as I was scheduled to study in Italy that fall, I was not in New York at
the time but rather in Austin, Texas, where my family then resided.
I
spent the day at the office where I had been employed for the summer,
watching apocalyptic replays of the incoming planes on a large projector
screen set up by my colleagues specifically for that purpose.
Outside,
American flags began to proliferate across every available surface, as
the country went about appointing itself the number one victim of
terrorism in the history of the world – and never mind the quite literal
terror the US had been inflicting on other nations for decades, from Vietnam and Laos to Nicaragua and Panama.
He had a disarming frankness, a toothy grin, a dazzling mind that never rested.
He always felt completely out of tune with the world. At ten, he
published his first article (in the school paper) – a lament on the fall
of Barcelona to Franco. At thirteen, he was haunting anarchist
bookstores in New York City and working a newsstand with his uncle,
eagerly soaking up everything a brilliant mix of immigrant minds had to
offer, by far the richest intellectual environment he was ever to
encounter. At sixteen, he went off by himself at the news of Hiroshima,
unable to comprehend anyone else’s reaction to the horror. At
twenty-four, he abandoned a Harvard fellowship to live on a kibbutz,
returning only by chance to fulfill an academic career. At
twenty-eight, he revolutionized the field of linguistics with his book, Syntactic Structures.
At twenty-nine, he became associate professor at Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (and full professor three years later), though
his competence with technology was limited to the tape recorder. At
thirty-five, he threw himself into anti-war protest, giving talks,
writing letters and articles, promoting teach-ins, and helping to
organize student demonstrations and draft resistance against the Vietnam
War. At thirty-eight, he risked a five-year jail term protesting at the
Pentagon, spending the night in jail alongside Norman Mailer, who
described him in Armies of the Night as “a slim sharp-featured man with an ascetic expression, and an air of gentle but absolute moral integrity.”[1]At
forty, he was the only white face in the crowd at Fred Hampton’s
funeral, after the young Black Panther leader was gunned down by the FBI
in a Gestapo-style raid.[2]
Such was the early life of America’s greatest dissident intellectual,
raised in a deeply anti-Semitic German-Irish neighborhood in Quaker
Philadelphia, later awarded an elite linguistics professorship at the
center of the Pentagon system at MIT.
(Figures: from left to right) Former prime minister Liaquat Ali Khan, his killer Said Akbar, and Maj Gen Akbar Khan — who plotted a coup against Liaquat Ali Khan. (Background) The public rally at Rawalpindi’s Company Bagh on October 16, 1951, during which Liaquat Ali Khan was assassinated
In a mystery, the sleuth must be believably involved and emotionally invested in solving the crime.
— Diane Mott Davidson
On Tuesday, 16 October, 1951, around 4 pm, the first prime minister
of Pakistan, Liaquat Ali Khan, was going to address a public meeting in
Company Garden in Rawalpindi. As he walked to the microphone and uttered
the words“Baraadaraan-i-Millat” [Brothers of the Nation], a man named
Said Akbar, sitting on the ground near the dais, fired two bullets at
him in rapid succession with a 9mm semi-automatic pistol.
Chaos and mayhem suddenly erupted in the meeting. Khan Najaf Khan, the Deputy Superintendent of Police who had personally supervised the security arrangements, yelled in Pashto, “Who fired the shots? Shoot!”. Within seconds, a police inspector, Mohammad Shah, came running with his service revolver drawn and shot Said Akbar five times at close range, in such a haphazard manner that he missed one shot altogether.
As Said Akbar was lying on the ground dying, he was also stabbed more
than 26 times with spears by Muslim League volunteers. The recording
equipment of Radio Pakistan was on and captured the sounds of the firing
and the chaos for one minute and 13 seconds, and then fell silent. The
entire shooting episode ended within 48 seconds. The recording is
available online. Liaquat Ali Khan was taken to the Combined Military
Hospital, where he succumbed to his injuries.
The assassin, Said Akbar, was my father, who had come to Rawalpindi from Abbottabad on 14 October.
One of Pakistan’s founding fathers and the country’s first prime
minister was assassinated at a public gathering 74 years ago. Despite
the formation of an Inquiry Commission and two other police
investigations — one by Scotland Yard — until today, there has been no
satisfactory closure regarding those tragic events. Now, the son of the
assassin has penned his own investigation into the events in the shape
of a book, which provides, for the first time ever, his family’s
perspective as well as delves into the weaknesses of the official
accounts and spans Pakistan’s tumultuous history — from the first war
over Kashmir, the Rawalpindi Conspiracy and internal friction within the
new state’s functionaries. Eos presents, with permission, excerpts from
The Assassination of Liaquat Ali Khan: 1947-1952 by Farooq Babrakzai,
published by Vanguard Books…
Intelligence failures
Neither the CID (Criminal Investigation Department) nor the police
personnel had any prior knowledge of Said Akbar’s presence in
Rawalpindi, let alone at the public meeting. All police and CID claims
about keeping Said Akbar under surveillance in Rawalpindi for three days
prior to the murder, upon close examination, turned out to be false;
stories that were fabricated after the tragedy. No CID or police
official was able to establish Said Akbar’s identity in the public
meeting
The Saudi-backed forces that took control of the Second Military Region Command on the outskirts of Mukalla, the capital of Yemen’s Hadhramaut, are pictured on 3 January 2026 IMAGE/AFP
A tectonic shift is taking place in the Arab world. It has nothing to
do with the temporary and patchable squabbles of princes, imperial
spoils, or jostling alliances of proxies.
Nor has it any relevance to the two traditional bugbears of the Sunni Arab ruler: Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood.
It has not been triggered by a trader immolating himself after having his food carts confiscated by officials in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia. No mass demonstrations have taken place in Cairo calling for the downfall of a dictator.
And yet, this shift could have as wide repercussions as the Arab Spring once had, 15 years ago.
What is commonly referred to in the Middle East as the “real” nations
of the Arab world – meaning those countries with significant
populations – have woken up to what has been happening all around them.
The Israeli-Emirati plan is simple: fragment once-formidable Arab
states, control key trade routes like the Bab al-Mandeb Strait between Yemen
and the Horn of Africa, plant military bases all around the region, and
you will ensure lucrative military and financial control for the rest
of the century.
Policy of fragmentation
In Israel, this plan was explicit. It’s the formula Tel Aviv is trying in Syria,
with their creation of a protectorate of the Druze in southern Syria,
and attempts to do the same to Kurdish areas in the north. This strategy
is open and declared.
The blinkers had fallen from Saudi eyes. They felt that they were
being surrounded, and if they did not act now, the kingdom itself could
be the next target
It was the same policy in Sudan, where the Emiratis funded and armed the Rapid Support Forces and their commander, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (Hemedti), who is under US Treasury sanctions. Of course they deny it, but the Sudanese civil war would not be happening without massive Emirati involvement.
From humanoid assistants and service robots to machines designed for healthcare, logistics and everyday tasks, CES offers a glimpse into a future where robots are no longer experimental curiosities but working companions.
Robots took centre stage at the Consumer Electronics Show
(CES) 2026 in Las Vegas, Nevada, on January 6, as the annual technology
show opened to the public. CES is being held in Las Vegas from January 6
to 9.
The bots roamed the exhibition floors as symbols of how artificial
intelligence is moving from screens into physical space. From humanoid
assistants and service robots to machines designed for healthcare,
logistics and everyday tasks, CES offers a glimpse into a future where
robots are no longer experimental curiosities but working companions.
This photo essay documents the machines, their makers and the moments of interaction that reveal how near that future may be.
Stills from Harsh Mander’s favourite films of 2025.
As always, Harsh Mander lists his favourite Indian films of the year and discovers gems not just in Hindi but in other languages too.
In our land – still swept constantly by the poisonous hot winds of hate and grievance – 2025 was one more broken year.
Hateful speeches exhorting the cleansing of the country of its Muslim populace continued to thunder. Bulldozers continued to rumble razing Muslim homes and shrines. Temples continued to be discovered or imagined under medieval mosques. Churches and chapels continued to be vandalised by raging mobs. Crowds continued to thrash and stone men to death claiming they had slaughtered a cow or romanced a Hindu girl. Security forces continued to muzzle dissent and rebellion with bullets. Some of our finest hearts and minds continued to be locked away in prison barracks.
Piercing through the toxic haze of
loathing, iniquity and fear that enveloped us all in 2025 were a handful
of films of exceptional humanism. Films rose daring to voice difficult
and dangerous truths about injustice and suffering and resistance. Films
lit up with the audacity to imagine kindness. Films tender with the
fortitude of hope.
Heading my list of the most
consequential films of the year is a film that most Indians have not
been given the chance to watch. This is Panjab 95.
Intensely troubling and profoundly stirring, Honey Trehan’s film is a
tribute to one of free India’s great heroes Jaswant Singh Khalra, a man
sadly little known outside Punjab.
Trehan’s film hurtles us back to one
of the darkest, most traumatic chapters in the journey of our republic,
but one that most have completely forgotten. This was the decade from
the mid-1980s of militancy in Punjab. The film recalls for us a regime
in which the police was not just given a free hand but actively
incentivised to murder innocent people. Policemen who killed enough
numbers of unarmed men and women in cold blood were rewarded with
out-of-turn promotions. It was a time of terror, in which no family in
Punjab was safe. Young men were disappearing in droves, and their bodies
burnt in covert mass cremations or thrown into the canals that dissect
the state. Policemen would extort fortunes from parents threatening that
their sons would otherwise be murdered. No one knew whose turn was
next.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi paying respect to the Indian Constitution while visiting Samvidhan Sadan (Old Parliament House) in New Delhi on June 7, 2024 IMAGE/The Telegraph
Humble being
Modi has cultivated a persona of a humble being who was selling tea in a railway compartment from where he rose to the top post. In May 2015 interview, the Time magazine asked him as to “what influences him?” According to Time, before replying, he “chokes and tears up:”
“This touches my deepest core. I was born in a very poor family. I used to sell tea in a railway coach as a child. My mother used to wash utensils and do lowly household work in the houses of others to earn a livelihood. I have seen poverty very closely. I have lived in poverty. As a child, my entire childhood was steeped in poverty. For me, poverty, in a way, was the first inspiration of my life … I decided that I would not live for myself but would live for others.”
The fact is, Dhruv Rathee, a social media activist and YouTuber, points out in his video, that Modi was from a middle class who wore suits and such clothes .
On democracy, Modi told Time magazine, the US and India should work together to strengthen “democratic values all over” the world. Answering whether he would want autocratic power like Chinese leader, he said “democracy” “is in our DNA,” and he would prefer “democratic values” over “wealth, power, prosperity and fame.” He further said his administration “will not tolerate or accept any discrimination based on caste, creed and religion.” His and his government’s philosophy is “Sabka Sath, Sabka Vikas“, which essentially means, “Together with all, progress for all”.
Nine years later, Modi’s party was planning to change that “holy book”‘s secular nature and turn India into a Hindu theocracy by winning over 73% seats. The opposition charged that Modi’s election slogan of “ab ki baar, 400 paar,” that is, in 2024 election Modi’s party wants to win over 400 seats out of total 543 seats, in order to have enough power to change the constitution. In June 2024, Modi visited Samvidhan Sadan (Old Parliament House) and paid respect to the Indian constitution placate opposition’s fear. Anyway, Modi’s party didn’t perform well in the election; with only 240 seats it had to rely on allies to form a government.
Modi’s party BJP didn’t get enough seats to change the constitution but its agenda to make India a “Hindu Rashtra” or Hindu Nation is being implemented through other means.
Unlike Trump, who uses his oral member all the time, Modi knows when to use it and when not to, who to hug and who to avoid, from whom to accept and from whom to refuse.
Modi always hugs foreign leaders, even if they’re reluctant, such as Trump, but refused to accept a cap (worn by many Indian Muslims) from a Muslim leader in India.
Minorities
Modi who belongs to RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh), a communalist paramilitary group, became Chief Minister of Gujarat in October 2001. In less than five months, he strengthened his position by presiding over a pogrom in which more than 2,000 people, mostly Muslims, were killed. For Modi, there was no looking back. The next stop from chief minister-ship was the premiership. In May 2014, he became India’s Prime Minister. Now most Muslims, Christians, and other minorities who had some rights has been turned into second or third class citizens, or non-citizens nationwide.
A Muslim student activist Afreen Fatima describes the plight of Muslims in these words in July 2022:
“Ever wondered what is it like to be a Muslim in the undeclared Hindu state that is India? To be constantly humiliated, demeaned, and brutalized? To have your soul destroyed by the state? And sometimes, your home, too?
“From our faith and history to our eating habits and clothes, the Hindu supremacists ruling India today have spared nothing in their campaign against our community. During the eight years of Narendra Modi’s government, they have taken a sledgehammer to our country’s secular foundations by routinely finding ever newer ways of targeting us. Last month they brought a bulldozer to my home.”
In May of that year, on live TV, a BJP national spokeswoman Nupur Sharma spoke disparagingly of Islamic Prophet Muhammad. There were protests in many Indian cities. Fatima’s father was illegally arrested, without any warrant, her mother and sister were picked up in the middle of the night and spent more than 35 hours at police station. None of them were involved in the protests, Fatima informs Al Jazeera TV in an interview. Their house in Prayagraj (erstwhile Allahabad), Uttar Pradesh, was demolished in what is known in India as “bulldozer justice.” (Uttar Pradesh is India’s most populous state and its Chief Minister is Yogi Adityanath, a roguish politician.)
Javed Mohammad, Fatima’s father, was released after 21 months.
No action was taken against Nupur Sharma until Iran and Arab Gulf monarchies protested. BJP now had to take some action; they just suspended her from the party.
Many other means are used to harass, malign, and humiliate Muslims. Just one example: Muslim women’s vocal opposition to Modi’s anti-Muslim policies saw his followers create an app “Sulli Deals” where Muslim women were auctioned off.
According to India Hate Lab, 2025 saw 13% increase in hate speech events compared to 2024 — more than 88% of them targeted Muslims. (See the full report here.)
Muslims in Gujarat
Saiyed Minhajuddin, a former resident of Siyasat Nagar, looks at the wide expanse of demolished buildings next to Chandola Lake. IMAGE/Tarushi Aswani/The Wire
Last year in April and May, a “mega demolition drive” was undertaken by the Gujarat government against what they called illegal Bangladeshi settlements in Ahmedabad’s Chandola Lake area.
At least 12,000 houses were razed, including that of Mumtaz who lamented:
“Everything that I bought with my hard-earned money, and the home I raised my children in, doesn’t exist anymore.”
South Asia has a joint family system. Besides, these houses belonged to very poor people. At the minimum, if you count five persons per house, 60,000 people were turned homeless by the communalist government. What was people’s fault? Their Muslimness.
“They have pushed us 20 years back. They’ve robbed roofs from widows, orphans and the poor).”
Prior to demolition in one of the areas, Bengali Vas, 457 men were accused of being from Bangladesh who had entered India illegally. They were paraded for 4 kilometers.
It’s nine months since Saiyed Minhajuddin lost his house. He has to keep passports and ration card in his scooter because there is no safe place in the room he and his wife are renting.
“You know they called me ‘Bangladeshi’, dragged my wife away, calling her a Bangladeshi too. Our passports saved us.”
Several cities in Gujarat have seen houses and shops belonging to Muslims and their mosques and shrines being destroyed.
Muslim shrines are one place which Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, and Muslims visit for the fulfillment of their wishes and intermingle with people of other faith. But when the government demolishes them, a dual purpose is served: a Muslim shrine is gone and so are the interfaith-mingling.
The other factor, besides communalism, is capitalism. A social activist Kaleem Siddiqui, who devoted his time and efforts to help the people who lost their homes in Chandola, pointed out the link between the AMC (Ahmadabad Municipal Corporation) and the builder lobbies:
“A communal narrative was created to kick people out of their homes, using allegations like Bangladeshi, drug peddling etc. [and] Chandola was emptied.”
B. R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com
The Indus River was the lifeblood of the civilisation.
The Indus Valley Civilisation (IVC), also called the Sindhu-Saraswati civilisation, flourished between 5,000 and 3,500 years ago in what is now northwest India and Pakistan.
One of the greatest mysteries of India is how and why the flourishing
Indus Valley Civilisation disappeared. Now, researchers from IIT
Gandhinagar propose that it was a series of extended droughts that
forced the people of the region to abandon the urban cities of Harappa,
Mohenjo-Daro, Rakhigarhi and Lothal.
The Indus Valley Civilisation
(IVC), also called the Sindhu-Saraswati civilisation, flourished
between 5,000 and 3,500 years ago in what is now northwest India and
Pakistan, and was one of the world’s earliest urban societies. So
advanced that cities had drainage systems and the metal craft so
advanced that beauties like the ‘Dancing Girl’ were crafted 5,000 years
ago.
Renowned for its advanced cities, water management, and trade
networks, the IVC’s decline has long puzzled archaeologists and
historians. Recent research led by Vimal Mishra of IIT Gandhinagar and
colleagues provides compelling evidence that successive, severe droughts
played a central role in the civilisation’s gradual disappearance. An
eleven-page research paper in the journal ‘Communications Earth and
Environment’ suggests it was water scarcity that killed the flourishing
civilisation.
Climate Change and Water Scarcity
The
Indus River was the lifeblood of the civilisation, supporting
agriculture, trade, and daily life. However, historical climate records,
called paleoclimate records and climate simulations, reveal that the
region experienced significant hydro-climatic variability, driven by
changes in both the Indian summer and winter monsoons. Using
high-resolution climate models and geological proxies (such as cave
stalactites and lake sediments), researchers reconstructed rainfall and
river flow patterns over thousands of years.
The so-called aqueduct de les Ferreres, also known as Puente del Diablo, is a Roman arcade that is part of the aqueduct that supplied water from the Francolí River to the city of Tarraco (Tarragona in present-day Catalonia in Spain) from a distance of 25 kilometers. IMAGE/Sergi Reboredo/VW Pics/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Lime granules trapped in ancient walls show Romans relied on a reactive hot-mix method to making concrete that could now inspire modern engineers
Ancient Romans built arched bridges,
waterproof port infrastructure and aqueducts that enabled the rise of
their empire and that are still standing—and often still used. They did
so with a type of cement that is far sturdier than what is used today,
but exactly how Roman cement was made was something of a mystery. Now
researchers have found proof of an explanation they had proposed in 2023
that could offer insights into how to build longer-lasting concrete
today.
In his first-century B.C.E. work De Architectura,
Vitruvius, one of the most famous architects of the Roman Empire,
described Roman cement as being made with what we today call slaked
lime, or hydrated, heated limestone. But based on the discovery of the
makeup of chunks called “lime clasts” found at a previous excavation in Pompeii,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology environmental engineer Admir
Masic and his colleagues proposed in a 2023 paper that ancient builders
instead used a process called “hot mixing.” In this method, highly
reactive quicklime (dry heated limestone) is mixed with volcanic ash and
water, setting off a chemical reaction that produces heat and gives the material self-healing capabilities.
To reaffirm his discovery, Masic and his team returned to Pompeii in 2024 and visited a house that was under renovation when Mount Vesuvius erupted, freezing the place in time. “I literally felt like I was a worker in 79 C.E.,” Masic says.
Inside one of the rooms, among stones, roof tiles and tools, the researchers found large piles of dry, premixed mortar ingredients—a blend of volcanic ash and granules of quicklime—waiting to be hydrated and applied to walls, Masic says.
