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By:  Edward Jay Epstein  Date:  9 Jan 2014 ​ The death of President Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq of Pakistan and his top deputies in August 1988 altered the face of the country's politics in Pakistan in a way in which no simple coup d’état could have done. Pakistan is the only country named after an acronym: “P" stands for Punjab, “A" for Afghanistan, and the “K" for Kashmiri. It once reflected the dream of a trans-Asia Islamic state; only the “P" actually became part of Pakistan when it was carved out of British India in 1947 as a haven for Muslims. General Zia was mindful of this dream when he organized a military coup in 1977 and seized power. Zia moved almost immediately to placate the mullahs in his country by pursuing a policy of Islamization  and reinstating the law of the Koran. In an extraordinary balancing act, he also strove to build an ultra-modem military machine, complete with nuclear arms, and also to use his intelligence service, the lSI, to wage war ...

AP Photo Shane Harris DEVIL’S DUE 07.14.15 7:00 PM ET John Kerry denied it. So did Iran’s foreign minister. But the world’s most notorious spymaster stands to benefit—big time—from the accord with Tehran. Among the big winners in the  agreement  to curtail Iran’s nuclear program, count a notorious and shadowy Iranian general who helped Shiite militias in Iraq kill American soldiers and who has come to the rescue of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. You’ll find his name,  Qasem Soleimani , buried in an annex ( PDF ) of the unremittingly dense  Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action , along with some of his colleagues from the senior ranks of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, as well as its various divisions and corporate fronts. They’ll all be granted some sanctions relief as part of the U.S.-brokered deal to  curtail Iran’s development of a nuclear weapon . That Soleimani—who runs Iran’s elite paramilitary and covert operations group, the Quds F...

As the fallout from Nov'08's bloody siege in Mumbai focuses the world's attention on Pakistan's ability to control insurgents within its own borders, Al Jazeera investigates Pakistan's role in the so-called 'war on terror'. In this exclusive 4 part series, Rageh Omaar travels from the capital, Islamabad, to the tribal heartlands to chart the spread of suicide bombings and the escalation of violence that has turned Pakistan into a war zone. Pakistan's War: The Battle Within Rageh Omaar revisits the scene of the military assault on the Red Mosque, which he witnessed in July 2007. Rageh and his team had been the last television crew inside the mosque before the siege began and filmed the last interview with mosque leader Abdul Rashid Ghazi before his death. Rageh learns that the showdown for control of the Red Mosque marked a turning-point in Pakistan's war with the insurgents - the moment when the Taliban-backed insurgency moved from the tribal areas o...