Author: Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury
For more than three decades, Pakistan has remained at the centre of global concerns over terrorism financing and money laundering. Despite repeated assurances to the international community, Islamabad’s record reveals a troubling pattern: cosmetic compliance, selective prosecutions, and a persistent failure to dismantle the financial ecosystems that sustain jihadist violence. As scrutiny has increased, terrorist organisations operating from Pakistani soil have not disappeared. Instead, they have adapted quietly, creatively, and dangerously. Groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Jaish-e-Muhammad (JeM), both internationally designated terrorist organisations, are no longer dependent on traditional banking channels. Under pressure from the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) and other multilateral…
For decades, Washington has proclaimed a global crusade against terror, narco-trafficking and money laundering. Yet a growing body of evidence and longstanding allegations suggest a very different pattern: that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), operating under the cover of “covert action”, has repeatedly tolerated, enabled, or even fostered illicit economics when it served narrow geopolitical goals. From the poppy fields of Afghanistan to the Golden Triangle of Southeast Asia, and now into the borderless realm of cryptocurrencies, the same shadow play of strategic expediency and plausible deniability is visible. What passes in official rhetoric as the “war on drugs” often appears, to critics, less like eradication than like management —…
Twenty-five years after the IC-814 hijack exposed Kathmandu as a soft entry point for jihadist operatives, Nepal is once again emerging as the region’s most vulnerable flank. What was once an episodic threat has now matured into a sustained, multi-layered infiltration, driven by Islamist networks: Pakistan’s ISI and ideological patrons in Turkey and the Gulf. The danger for India is no longer speculative; it is structurally higher than anything seen in the past. For generations, Nepal’s small Muslim population, roughly five per cent, lived in quiet coexistence with its Hindu-Buddhist majority. Precisely this social innocence has turned the Himalayan republic…
The interim administration in Bangladesh under Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus has created a power vacuum that foreign actors are exploiting at an alarming rate. Among them, Pakistan’s notorious Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) is expanding its footprint in Bangladesh, using one of South Asia’s most marginalised communities as its newest proxy. The Urdu-speaking Bihari community, commonly known as “Stranded Pakistanis”, has lived for decades in limbo inside Bangladesh. Descendants of migrants who sided with Pakistan during the 1971 Liberation War, they were rejected by both Islamabad and Dhaka. Today, hundreds of thousands still inhabit cramped camps, facing unemployment, discrimination and statelessness. According…
