Pepe, Pakistan and the last of the great foreign correspondents – Middle East Monitor

The problem with spy stories isn’t that they’re unbelievable. This is because in Pakistan, they are often credible for reasons which push any serious person to obtain a notebook, a headache tablet and perhaps a map of the last fifty years.

So when Pepe Escobar, on the Transition Protocol YouTube channel, brought up the allegation that Mossad plotted to assassinate Field Marshal Asim Munir, the reaction was instant, theatrical and mostly unnecessary. Some camps received this claim as a revelation, as if Pépé had come down from the Eurasian mountains with tablets engraved by the gods of intelligence. The other rejected it with the polite little smile of people who confuse skepticism with intelligence. Between adoration and heckling, the thought was quietly escorted from the premises.

It’s a shame, because Pepe Escobar is not a digital fabulist of geopolitical jewelry. He is the last of the great foreign correspondents: nomadic, unfinished, homeless by empire, historically armed, allergic to official stupidity and blessed with that disappearing journalistic vice – having actually been to the places he writes about.

Pepe knew “Af-Pak” before Washington turned it into a bureaucratic cough. It included Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Central Asia, the Pashtun belt, the Baloch wound, the Silk Roads, the interior of Eurasia – not as Pentagon geometry, but as real-life history.

Dust, blood, poetry, betrayal, empire, tea, checkpoints, drone shadows, missing wires and borders drawn by the dead and imposed by living fools.

It matters. This matters a lot. Pepe belongs to an older, nobler, almost disappeared tradition: the reporter as witness, wanderer, translator, dissident, irritant and magnificent nuisance; the man at the border post, at the tea house, at the refugee camp, at the hotel lobby, on the side road where the imperial tongue slips, falls and loses his shoes. Its relationship with Pakistan is not recent, ornamental or opportunistic. It’s long, serious, human and deserved

He went where accredited cowards would not go. He listened where empire only measured. He distrusted power before that distrust became fashionable, profitable, or safe.

He took geopolitical analysis out of the morgue of official narratives and plugged it into an amplifier. He gave us Rock’n Roll Geopolitics before the commentators discovered the story had a pulse.

This is why people in countries torn apart by the “war on terror” trust him. Not because every whispered source is scripture. Not because every complaint must be received on its knees. But because Pepe has gained something that almost no one in his profession has gained: political intimacy with the victims of empire. He spent his life distrusting good criminals.

READ: Thank you, Israel, for overplaying the hand of empire

And it is precisely for this reason that when a friendly Mr. Z of Pakistani origin appears with “inside information” from “impeccable” sources, Pakistanis may wonder – not with contempt, but with civic caution – who exactly is Mr. Z? Favored by whom? Through what channels? How close? In what political atmosphere?

It’s not an insult. It’s a political map. Pakistanis have lived for too long under the grammar of “sources”, “broader interests”, “national security” and “sensitive information”. They saw too many coups presented as corrective measures, too many emergencies presented as necessities, too many generals presented as reluctant saviors while the public was asked to clap quietly and avoid eye contact. In Pakistan, truth is often treated like a classified substance: too dangerous for the public, but miraculously accessible to the powerful.

This is the heart of the problem. As framed, the story carries enormous political force. The Pakistani generalissimo is suddenly no longer simply the central military figure in a bitter national drama. He becomes the man Mossad was supposed to fear, Iran’s secret defender, the Muslim sentinel who watched over Israel. In a cinematic flourish, he was promoted to Lawrence of Rawalpindi.

A good story, yes. Too good, perhaps. Pakistanis have already seen this film. The budget changes. This is not the case with the uniform.

And no, this statement is not absurd on its face.

Israel has not spent its recent history auditioning for the Nobel Peace Prize. Zionism, armed with impunity and applauded by Washington, is not content to cross the red lines; he bulldozes them, builds settlements there, bombs the neighborhood, murders witnesses, starves survivors, then issues a statement on restraint.

Assassination, sabotage, siege, occupation, espionage, blackmail and plausible deniability are not accidents in this system. They constitute its modus operandi.

Nor is Pakistan a throwaway failure box in someone else’s thriller. It is a nuclear power, a Chinese partner, an Iranian neighbor, a military heavyweight and a civilization-state of 240 million human beings that does not exist by appearing in an Israeli security memo. Pakistan is not Bahrain. It’s about 150 Bahrainis with nuclear weapons, ghazals, mangoes, martyrs, paranoia, poetry, memory and a national allergy to foreigners arriving with laminated cards demanding manageable natives.

Washington, meanwhile, is rarely an innocent bystander in Pakistan’s political climate. He has preferences, habits, appetites, and a long history of confusing obedience and command. It rewards maneuverability, punishes independence, treats coercion as “stability,” and treats Pakistani democracy like an exotic houseplant – pleasant to display, dangerous if watered.

The project against Imran Khan was not just a domestic tantrum caused by offended uniforms. This aligned perfectly with the preferences of the power centers in Rawalpindi and Washington: eliminate the unpredictable civilians, restore the manageable men, call it stability, and hope the natives forget what sovereignty looks like. They have not forgotten.

This is why Khan remains central. Not without fault, because politics is not hagiography. But singular. Inevitable. The defining mass figure of Pakistani public life. The name around which millions of people still organize their political imagination. No serious narrative about Pakistan’s present can tiptoe around it like a bad odor at a geopolitical banquet.

READ: The Swiss summit of imperial humiliation

So yes: follow the smoke. Look at the transition protocol. Listen carefully to Pepe, Mr. Z, the former CIA gentleman, the denials, the silences, the timing, the Swiss rooms, the Israeli channels, the Pakistani interceptions, the intermediaries, the motivations and the fog. Ask what happened, what almost happened, what was exaggerated, and what may have been whitewashed through intrigue.

And Pepe, one suspects, will forgive the amateur hour that surrounds him: the overenthusiastic supporters, the bruised Pakistanis, the follies, the exaggerations and the nervous interruptions of those who have lived too long under uniforms applauded from abroad. There was never really any question of putting Pepe in the dock. It was a question of expressing, once again, the old Pakistani wound: the external usefulness of a soldier can blind the world to its internal consequences. Pepe knows Khan. More importantly, Pepe knows the Pakistanis in the peripheries. His love for them will force him, without too much difficulty, to forgive us all.

But despite all the noise, one thing remains gloriously true: Pepe Escobar is not just a journalist. He is one of the last witnesses to the long Imperial crime scene, one of the last men still moving on the map while others write it off in climatic cowardice. It carries the dust of the roads, the murmurs of the bazaars, the sorrow of bombed countries, the laughter of people who survived history’s worst guests, and the stubborn refusal to let the empire write the final legend.

Pakistan needs Pepe Escobar. The world needs Pepe Escobar. Not as Scripture, priest or saint, but as witness – fierce, excessive, loving, dangerous to liars, generous to the wounded, gloriously impossible to domesticate and, thank God, always walking the road.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policies of Middle East Monitor.

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