Pepe, Pakistan, and the last of the great foreign correspondents

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 […]