Ibrahim Abdul-Qayyum

If this is true, literally every actor in Syria is bought. Which is a point you may or may not support, but it is far easier to dunk on Turkey with knowing smugness than it is US, Russia, Iran, etc etc.https://twitter.com/KarlreMarks/status/1189889343416090625…

astroturf activist, set up and sponsored by malignant states in the service of their interests, seems to unfortunately be a common tool nowadays. See Masr's sham "Tamarod" bunch who paved the way for the 2013 coup.

I (stupidly) thought for years that the claims about him being an Indian tool were army propaganda and he was an activist with a cause. A major part of intelligentsia/media/activists said the same thing. Turns out he's a Modi-sucking snake spoiling for a fight. Shaitan ka batchahttps://twitter.com/waqas_x/status/1189896257566887936…

If Allah is with you, no misfortune can befall you and even that which may seem a setback is a fortune ultimately.https://twitter.com/Afghangster/status/1189911588515569665…

EVERY day is a good day to hate on ethnonationalists who claim to represent and champion their OtHeNtIc CuLtURe but in fact just represent their would-be conquerors' ideas in native bodies to rip apart Muslim bradran

It's never NOT a good day to remind people that the ugly ethnonationalism found in Central Asia & South Asia was directly astroturfed by first the Soviets/Brits and later the Yanks as an efficient way of divide-and-conquer.

Tikka was even imprisoned in the 1980s during his successor Ziaul-Haq's crackdown on People's Party; the army very rarely does that to its own. Along with Naseerullah Babar, one of the very few senior officers who were loyal to People's Party.https://twitter.com/SyedIbrahim1137/status/1189601198275477504…

threadhttps://twitter.com/imadaldinz/status/1189864079101284352…

actually this wasn't a good idea since it involves people divulging their ages and therefore I shall end it now

But Ayyubids fall under Abbasids, hence if you wanna study the latter you must study the former toohttps://twitter.com/_Ugaaz/status/1189697245031096320…

But the idea that it's an elemental battle - between the democracy with which they synonymize themselves, and the evil ironfisted army - is utter nonsense. Support them if you want but don't believe the self-serving hype.

They're not wrong insofar as the struggle for the centre has shifted to the army's general benefit, nor that court cases have tended to heavily target them (though it should be noted that Insaf's eminence grise, Jahangir Tareen, was also targeted).

Hence these various parties, incl. liberals who've spent their lives sneering at and vilifying mullas and whatnot, throwing their weight behind the ultimate opportunistic mulla FazalurRahman, in his attempt to oust Imran

Add this to the corruption crackdowns against various members of these parties and it's easy to see the tumult about Imran being "selected" and army stage-managing Insaf, even though several (lesser) army officers have also been targeted.

Nawaz's government employed patronage on a grand scale, largely papering over divisions with Bhutto/Zardari lot. Zardari's government had earlier employed similar tactics to form links with other parties, incl same centrifugal ones despised by army (and by Bhutto snr earlier)

Censorship by Imran's interior minister Ijaz Shah (a retired officer, key aide to Musharraf, and hardline opponent of Zardari/Bhuttos in particular) has only lent itself to this interpretation, exaggerated and self-serving though it is.

Corruption was long a key flashpoint for many of these folks and the removal of Nawaz Sharif in 2017 threw many of the army's rivals, in both the parties and the media, into panic and convinced them that the army was stage-managing Insaf as a way to regain power.

Insaf secretary Jahangir Tareen, whose uncle Akhtar AbdurRahman had been Ziaul-Haq's right-hand man and practically founded army intelligence's expansion in 1980s, was a key liaison and helped Insaf attract defections from other groups to go with the whole populist shebang.

is that army was far more sympathetic to Imran (who tended to share most of its fundamental aims, but not its tactics and military-dominated directions). Musharraf had even offered Imran a ministry which Imran had refused, and Imran's cabinet overlaps heavily with Musharraf's.

meantime disaffection with the main parties led to the rise of the Insaf party led by Imran Khan, which mirrored sorta populism that had been rife in 1970s' era PPP. While claims that army was engineering this to subvert "democratic" groups were widely exaggerated, what is true

that suspected coup never transpired (although in fact there was a plot in the army by Hizbut-Tahrir around the same period to take power, around 2011-12) but central factions (army and parties) again diverged steadily, esp during Nawaz Sharif's tenure

(and remains) much less transactional than army, which was always leery of US war in Afg plus US-India ties. Hence it was Zardari's lieutenant Yusuf Gillani who approved US strikes in Pakistan, and him who called in US to help prevent a suspected army coup after UBL was killed

And indeed this is what happened in the early 2010s. H/ever large factions rarely cooperate for long. Both Zardari/Nawaz milked anti-Musharraf line to its fullest extent, so that any opposition was portrayed as being an army-backed coup against democracy. Their relation to US was

Furrukh Ali has since been a trenchant and critical and quite perceptive commentator on Pakistani politics and is a chap with outstanding integrity. He described Zardari's regime as the one where the competing factors over the centre decided merely to share the pie b/w them

Now I shall quote Furrukh Ali, army officer who led 1971 mutiny that ended first military regime. He later plotted to overthrow autocratic Bhutto and was imprisoned (Ziaul-Haq was prosecutor, but softened Bhutto's orders to kill Furrukh). Later Bhutto was jailed next to Furrukh

Musharraf had lost both civil/military relevance by 2008 & slipped into exile. centre was now again divided between army and major parties, and though both dealt w Yanks US clearly preferred latter on account of former's links to Taliban insurgency (plus Kashmiri insurgents etc)