The trouble with spy stories is not that they are unbelievable. It is that in Pakistan they are often believable for reasons that make every serious person reach for a notebook, a headache tablet, and perhaps a map of the last fifty years.

So when Pepe Escobar, on the YouTube channel Transition Protocol, discussed the allegation that Mossad had plotted to assassinate Field Marshal Asim Munir, the reaction was instant, theatrical, and mostly pointless. One camp received the claim as revelation, as if Pepe had descended from the Eurasian mountains carrying tablets engraved by the intelligence gods. The other dismissed it with the polished little smirk of people who confuse scepticism with intelligence. Between adoration and heckling, thought was quietly escorted from the premises.

This is unfortunate, because Pepe Escobar is not some digital fabulist in geopolitical costume jewellery. He is the last of the great foreign correspondents: nomadic, unbought, unhousebroken by empire, historically armed, allergic to official stupidity, and blessed with that vanishing journalistic vice — having actually been to the places he writes about.

Pepe knew “Af-Pak” before Washington flattened it into a bureaucratic cough. He understood Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Central Asia, the Pashtun belt, the Baloch wound, the Silk Roads, the Eurasian interior — not as Pentagon geometry, but as lived history.

Pepe knew “Af-Pak” before Washington flattened it into a bureaucratic cough. He understood Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Central Asia, the Pashtun belt, the Baloch wound, the Silk Roads, the Eurasian interior — not as Pentagon geometry, but as lived history.

Dust, blood, poetry, betrayal, empire, tea, checkpoints, drone shadows, vanished sons, and borders drawn by dead men and enforced by living fools.

That matters. It matters immensely. Pepe belongs to an older, nobler, nearly vanished tradition: the reporter as witness, wanderer, translator, dissident, irritant, and magnificent nuisance; the man at the border crossing, the tea house, the refugee camp, the hotel lobby, the back road where imperial language slips, falls, and loses its shoes. His relationship with Pakistan is not recent, ornamental, or opportunistic. It is long, serious, human, and earned

He went where the credentialed cowards would not go. He listened where empire only measured. He distrusted power........

© Middle East Monitor