Features

Dinner with daddy: The Motwani dinner table with Kewal, Clara and two daughters

Published

3 years ago

2023/05/28

At a dinner honouring Mother. L to R - Dr. Kewal Motwani, Mrs. L. J. de S. Seneviratne, Unknown person, Mother and Mr. L. J. de S. Seneviratne, Permanent Sec. of Education

Excerpted from Chosen Ground: The Clara Motwani Saga by Goolbai Gunasekera

One thing I can say about life with my parents is that it was never dull. One parent was a school Principal and the other a Professor, and their united efforts ensured that every shining moment of the day was gainfully employed by their two daughters in learning something. This fact alone made for activity, if not for thrills or excitement.Father had a thing about dinner time conversation.

“Food digests better when we talk of soothing subjects,” he would decree, launching into a debate with Mother about the state of America’s foreign affairs. Mother, being American, and having lived out of the USA from the time of her marriage, was always up to date on what American Presidents were doing. America was the ultimate to her in just about everything, and it was a constant joy to her irreverent family to needle her on the subject whenever possible. She had a low tolerance for criticism of her motherland.

Su and I took sides indiscriminately, and a lively evening was had by all. I don’t know what all this argument did to our digestions, but obviously we flourished. Eventually my sister and I privately decided that the time had come to infuse dinner time chats with topics more to our liking. Accordingly, one night, Su led off.

“I saw a cute boy at the Barnes Place junction today,” she said brightly.

Our parents looked at her blankly. It hadn’t occurred to them that we’d ever noticed such unlikely beings as boys. We were aged thirteen and sixteen respectively, but such were the norms of the times in which we were raised.

Father slapped the table.

“Not of general interest,” he roared. “Now if Su had seen a comet passing overhead — that would be of general interest.”

“Honestly, Daddy,” I said, backing up my sibling, “our dinner conversations are so literary. Why can’t we relax?”

“I’m relaxed,” boomed Father. “Aren’t you relaxed?” he asked Mother across the table. “And what’s your problem in relaxing?”

This last was to me. Father had just read the latest Time on the Vietnam war, and was itching to get going on the subject.

“What would you two like to talk about?” Mother asked diplomatically.

Father looked frustrated, and began to fidget. Now, I’d reached the age of discretion, and hadn’t the slightest intention of revealing to my parents that Dearly Beloved (then Dearly to be Beloved) and I were having what my friends grandly termed an ‘affaire’, but which in reality was just a series of romantic phone calls usually made when everyone was out of the house. I simply smiled and let my sister carry on. She did.

“I want to know,” demanded Su, forthright to the point of lunacy, “if that cute boy I mentioned earlier can come and visit me at home. To chat about books and things,” she added hastily, seeing Father’s face begin to darken.

Mother and I watched apprehensively as his whole body seemed to swell with indignation. Mixing of the sexes was not yet allowed in the Sri Lanka of that time — and even less in sleepy Arazi, his home town, from where he had drawn his ideas on boy/girl relationships.

“Are you actually telling me you have spoken to this young ….” he paused, searching for suitable words, “this young despoiler of innocent girls, this depraved Romeo, this unethical whippersnapper, this……He was well launched.Su was not easily intimidated.

“What are you carrying on like that for?” she asked in honest bewilderment. “All my friends talk to boys at the Barnes Place corner. They cycle with us to school and then they go on to Royal … and stop kicking me, ” she added impatiently, to me.

It will be remembered that, unlike me, Su was a Bridgeteen. Following Mother’s educational theories that sisters should not attend the same school, we had been separated — though, frankly, I feel Mother might have been more concerned for the well-being of the schools rather than for the welfare of her two daughters. The vision of Su and her friends cycling up to the gates of St Bridget’s Convent in convoy, with the young stars of Royal College in attendance, quite shattered my parents.

“It’s boarding school for you, Miss,” Father roared at an indignant Su. “And don’t think I don’t mean it.”

At this point he recalled last month’s telephone bill and gave me a suspicious glare, to which I returned a perfectly bland look.

Following this incident, our parents paid Reverend Mother Superior of St. Bridget’s a visit, and if Father had had his way, one of the nuns would have been permanently stationed at an upstairs window with a telescope trained on all roads leading to the school, to ensure the future and continuing purity of the Convent’s teenage cyclists. Hearing of this exchange betwixt authority and her parents, Su groaned.

“Good grief,” she lamented. “The nuns are sleuths and bloodhounds at the best of times. They’ve got eyes at the back of their heads.”

Actually things did not turn out half as badly as she feared. One of the nuns was an American, like Mother, and she did not view the whole episode with undue alarm. She wigged Su in school.

“Enjoyed your ride to school today, my dear?” she would ask Su, when she passed in the corridor. Su would smile weakly.

“Honestly,” she fumed to me, “to think a damn dinner conversation would lead to all this. Father can carry on about world affairs all he likes. I’m not going to say one word at meal times to anyone about anything.”

Father ignored her sulks, and Su kept her vow of silence for a week. Our sire carried on his soliloquy on topics of his choosing, but the salt of his conversational meal was lacking. Without the thrust and parry of my sister’s witty questions and cheeky opinions, he found dinner time pretty damn dull. Finally, he addressed himself gruffly to his younger offspring:

“Come now, Miss Grumpy, I’ve forgiven you.”

Truth to tell, Su, who loved talking, was finding her self-imposed silence unexpectedly hard to cope with. Matters returned to normal, but Su being Su, this happy state did not long continue.

One month to the day after the previous disaster she upset the dinner equilibrium all over again.

“I want to know,” she demanded of Father, “when I can learn to ballroom dance properly.”

Mother and I froze in our seats, and watched Father turn that familiar shade of puce. He opened and shut his mouth several times.

“At thirteen?” he said in a strangled voice. It was more a statement than a question.

“At thirteen?” he bellowed again, finding his usual tonal timbre, and she wants to dance with other equally silly 13-year-olds, I suppose?”

I sat looking demure, my halo shining brightly in contrast with what I thought was Su’s less than scintillating performance. But life is so unfair. A fortnight later, my cheeky younger sister joined Frank Harrison’s School of Dancing, and went on to win the odd medal here and there too. I was speechlessly envious.

“The thing is,” she told me, “the thing is to ask Father for the impossible. Then he settles for what you really want.”

Considering Father’s views on friendship between teens of opposite sexes, he was surprisingly non-vocal when it came to marriage. Both he and Mother realized the impracticability of arranging marriages for us in India.But one story needs be told.

One day Father received an agitated letter from a wealthy Sindhi merchant who had been his playmate in the village of Arazi. The merchant’s only son (the apple of his eye) was now practicing medicine in the USA, and was refusing to marry a Sindhi girl, claiming that he was too ‘westernized’ to settle down in India with an Indian wife. He wanted to marry an American colleague – also a doctor.

“Just think, Kewal, only my foolish son would think that an American would like India,” lamented the merchant, quite forgetting that Kewal’s own wife felt quite at home in Asia.

It transpired that the wayward son would consider marrying an Indian girl if she were educated and ‘westernized’. His distraught father suddenly remembered that his boyhood friend had an American wife and also two half-American daughters. He assumed that at least one daughter must be of marriageable age, hence the letter to Father asking permission for his son to meet one of them.

Father summoned me. His success with Mother over his attempts at arranging marriages for us had so far been minimal. She had washed her hands of the whole affair, thinking Father must really be out of his mind to be doing something so uncharacteristic. Father just could not get away from Arazi influences at times. In any case, she had a pretty shrewd idea how I would react.

Clearing his throat and looking at a point over my head, Father said gruffly:

“Er, would you like to meet a nice young man when you go to University in Bombay?”

I could hardly believe my ears.

“What?”

“A doctor is looking for a wife.”

Truly, Father’s personal persuasive skills were nil. “So?”

“Well … er … would you like to meet him?”

The chance of paying Father back was too good to miss. “Daddy! Are you arranging for me to speak to a BOY?”

“Well, he is a mature and well-qualified individual. Not the sort I see hanging around near post-boxes, that your sister seems to find so exciting.”

“Daddy, are you SURE? He might have only one thing on his mind.”

(One of Father’s pet phrases at this time was: “Young men have only one thing on their minds, and that one thing is not repeatable.”)

Father knew he had to accept the wigging. He accepted our pretended shock with good grace, and told me it was entirely up to me.

In point of fact I did meet the young man in question. He took me out to dinner when I was at university in Bombay, but both of us had other romances going and marriage between us was not an option. However he has always been a convenient peg on which to hang a winning argument with my husband. During any disagreement I can always say:

“And to think I gave up a doctor for you!”

Father wrote to his friend. According to Mother, he gave his usual excuse.

“Who am I, a mere father, to know what goes on in the heads of women. Let your son marry his American. He will probably be very happy. After all – I am.”

Riot over the diet

Father’s long lecture tours distanced him from his growing family for much of the time. He was thus spared the sight and company of squealing babies, which in his eyes was all to the good. Father never learnt to carry an infant. “Squirming little creatures,” was his comment on all new borns.

Not given to panegyrics, he viewed his two daughters with a judicial eye. He seemed to regard any successes of ours as accidental and unexpected. Fortunately, Mother was the opposite. My sister Su and I grew up in an alien land, but not once did we feel anything but totally Sri Lankan. For this we had our parents to thank, for we were brought up as Sri Lankans first, and Asian/Americans as an afterthought.

Our school friends had parents who had fallen into the traditional roles of courtship and marriage. Our own parents, on the other hand, had fallen into a quite unique category. We never tired of hearing the tale. “So tell us, Daddy,” Su would say, “Tell us the story of how you proposed?”

Father loved the narrative. “What do you mean, ‘propose’?” he would ask. “Your Mother saw this superbly romantic-looking Indian and I hadn’t a chance in hell. I was at the altar before I knew it.”

Mother would sigh resignedly. She knew, and we both knew too, that the reality had been very different.

Father was 28 and Mother just 18 when they got engaged. At 19 Mother was married, and half way through her degree in Languages and Music at the University of Iowa. Just after their marriage, Father transferred from Yale in order to be near her. When the financial debacle of the Wall Street crash wiped out Father’s American bank account, it meant that our parents could not afford to live together on campus since married quarters were expensive.

Accordingly they simply pretended they were single. When Mother was awarded her degree, Father insisted that she do a Master’s in Education. “The British will go,” he predicted, “and India’s schools and colleges will need qualified Principals.”

Mother thereupon enrolled in Professor Ensign’s class and began her thesis. Professor Ensign was an avuncular type of person, and had given Father quite a lot of added correction work by way of helping him earn extra income. One morning, he called Father aside. “Kewal,” he began, “I have a young girl from Kentucky in my class who is interested in the East. I think you should meet her and tell her about India.”

Father agreed, of course, and found himself being introduced to Mother. They shook hands gravely, trying not to meet each other’s eyes. To the end of his days, Professor Ensign thought he had played Cupid. Father never enlightened him, and the story of his matchmaking success enlivened the good Professor’s dinner table for many moons after that.

Mother took me to see Professor Ensign when I was four years old, as she was back in America on furlough. He patted my head, and gave me a photograph of himself with Mother on one side of him and Father on the other. It was a picture I treasured for many years but alas, cannot trace at this moment.

“You wouldn’t be here if not for me,” he is supposed to have said to me. Mother smiled her gentle smile. “Very true,” she said, telling one of the few untruths she ever uttered.

One wonders how a bond was forged between a youngAmerican girl and an already mature Indian Doctor of Sociology. What similarities existed that resulted in this unusual yet successful partnership? Su and I would endlessly discuss the matter. Both of us expected to marry in Sri Lanka or India (which we did), and both of us wondered what it would be like if we fell in love with an American.

“You won’t have the chance,” Father told us grimly once, when Su had been foolish enough to voice her views on matrimony. “Perish the thought. You’ll marry here, and like it.”

So what was the glue that held the bond between our parents firm? Firstly, both were Theosophists. My American grandmother was so much into Theosophy that she even influenced Mother to become a vegetarian at 17. Father had been a vegetarian from birth and through Jamshed was an ardent Theosophist himself, so it does seem as though similar food habits and similar religious beliefs formed that first strong link between them. Secondly, they were both highly educated. A third factor was the difference in age between them: Father did not find it difficult to mould his young wife into his ways of thinking.

He found Su and me, his two daughters, far more of a challenge than he liked. “Where has your Mother’s gentleness gone?” he would demand, glaring at Su’s rebellious face. On principle Su objected to everything. “I’m going to eat meat the minute I marry,” she would declare. Father would blench.

“And I’ll drink, too,” she would add. He would go even paler.

“We’ve begotten a changeling,” Father would tell Mother, who would smile and tell him to bear in mind that adolescence was generally a trying time. “If those two young ingrates want to make graveyards of their stomachs, who am I, a mere Father, to stop them?” he would say plaintively, hoping Su would overhear him. “And if liquor addles their brains, it doesn’t matter. They are addled already. Curdled would be a better description,” he would add.

Father’s aversion to meat and liquor certainly led us into some strange situations. Travelling together in America had Su and me cringing in our seats at restaurants. “The steak is excellent, sir,” the waiter would say, handing Father the menu. Father felt called upon to inform the entire restaurant, of his dietary preferences.

“Not a piece of meat has ever passed my lips,” he would declare in ringing tones. “And I don’t intend to start now.”

“Perhaps a nice Dover sole, then?” the waiter would say soothingly. Father’s voice would rise several notes. “And what, pray, is the difference?” he would ask the unfortunate waiter. “They are both flesh of living creatures, are they not? Nasty bloody business, all this meat guzzling.”

Diners at other tables began to lose their appetites. Father was in full spate. “Just order, dear,” Mother would say tactfully and, truth to tell, the manager of the restaurant was by now ready to give us all a free meal just to get Father out of there. Everyone settled for omelettes and salad. Fortunately no one had yet heard of the cholesterol scare, and we must have eaten enough eggs to start a poultry farm upon our return home. Father did not think eggs violated any Brahmin laws of ethics or dietetics.

His attitude to liquor was even worse. He had dinner one night with Mr. and Mrs. Argus Tressider, American diplomats in Colombo in the 1950s. A week later, Nancy Tressider met Father again and he complimented her on her dessert.

“Oh, you liked my brandy souffle, did you?” she asked innocently, not realizing that she was virtually hitting Father in the solar plexus. He went pale, and his stomach churned. He collected Mother, and hightailed it out of there so fast she had hardly any time to make her excuses to her hostess. He went home and was sick for twenty-four hours.

“I’m poisoned, poisoned,” he groaned hollowly every few minutes. “My entire system has been polluted.” He went on a water diet of detoxification. He was a psychological mess. Nancy rang up the next day to find out how Father was getting along after his hasty exit the previous night. Mother told her the truth. “But Clara, my dear,” Nancy said, “I only used brandy flavouring for the pudding.”

Father faced our gales of glee with fortitude. He admitted shamefacedly that it was a case of mind over matter, but when the day eventually came that Su married an officer of the Indian Army and did take the occasional glass of wine, Father was genuinely upset. “Your pure bodies,” he would lament. “What a great, great pity.” I never had the courage to admit that I did likewise. “Poppycock,” Su would mutter.

But now that I am a grandmother myself, and face dietary and health problems as do we all, I wonder: did Father have a point?

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Features

The NPP Government is more than a JVP offspring:

Published

5 days ago

2026/04/12

Thilina Walpola

Rohana Wijeweera

It is also different from all past governments as it faces new and different challenges

No one knows whether the already broken ceasefire between the US and Iran, with Israel as a reluctant adjunct, will last the full 10 days, or what will come thereafter. The world’s economic woes are not over and the markets are yo-yoing in response to Trump’s twitches and Iran’s gate keeping at the Strait of Hormuz. The gloomy expert foretelling is that full economic normalcy will not return until the year is over even if the war were to end with the ceasefire. That means continuing challenges for Sri Lanka and more of the tough learning in the art of governing for the NPP.

The NPP government has been doing what most governments in Asia have been doing to cope with the current global crisis, which is also an Asian crisis insofar as oil supplies and other supply chains are concerned. What the government can and must do additionally is to be totally candid with the people and keep them informed of everything that it is doing – from monitoring import prices to the timely arranging of supplies, all the details of tender, the tracking of arrivals, and keeping the distribution flow through the market without bottlenecks. That way the government can eliminate upstream tender rackets and downstream hoarding swindles. People do not expect miracles from their government, only honest, sincere and serious effort in difficult circumstances. Backed up by clear communication and constant public engagement.

But nothing is going to stop the flow of criticisms against the NPP government. That is a fact of Sri Lankan politics. Even though the opposition forces are weak and have little traction and even less credibility, there has not been any drought in the criticisms levelled against the still fledgling government. These criticisms can be categorized as ideological, institutional and oppositional criticisms, with each category having its own constituency and/or commentators. The three categories invariably overlap and there are instances of criticisms that excite only the pundits but have no political resonance.

April 5 anniversary nostalgia

There is also a new line of criticism that might be inspired by the April 5 anniversary nostalgia for the 1971 JVP insurrection. This new line traces the NPP government to the distant roots of the JVP – its April 1965 founding “in a working-class home in Akmeemana, Galle” by a 22-year old Rohana Wijeweera and seven others; the short lived 1971 insurrection that was easily defeated; and the much longer and more devastating second (1987 to 1989) insurrection that led to the elimination of the JVP’s frontline leaders including Wijeweera, and brought about a change in the JVP’s political direction with commitment to parliamentary democracy. So far, so good, as history goes.

But where the nostalgic narrative starts to bend is in attempting a straight line connection from the 1965 Akmeemana origins of the JVP to the national electoral victories of the NPP in 2024. And the bend gets broken in trying to bridge the gap between the “founding anti-imperialist economics” of the JVP and the practical imperatives of the NPP government in “governing a debt-laden small open economy.” Yet this line of criticism differs from the other lines of criticism that I have alluded to, but more so for its moral purpose than for its analytical clarity. The search for clarity could begin with question – why is the NPP government more than a JVP offspring? The answer is not so simple, but it is also not too complicated.

For starters, the JVP was a political response to the national and global conditions of the 1960s and 1970s, piggybacking socialism on the bandwagon of ethno-nationalism in a bi-polar world that was ideologically split between status quo capitalism and the alternative of socialism. The NPP government, on the other hand, is not only a response to, but is also a product of the conditions of the 2010s and 2020s. The twain cannot be more different. Nothing is the same between then and now, locally and globally.

A pragmatic way to look at the differences between the origins of the JVP and the circumstances of the NPP government is to look at the very range of criticisms that are levelled against the NPP government. What I categorize as ideological criticisms include criticisms of the government’s pro-IMF and allegedly neo-liberal economic policies, as well as the government’s foreign policy stances – on Israel, on the current US-Israel war against Iran, the geopolitics of the Indian Ocean, and the apparent closeness to the Modi government in India. These criticisms emanate from the non-JVP left and Sinhala Buddhist nationalists.

Strands of nationalism

To digress briefly, there are several strands in the overall bundle of Sri Lankan nationalism. There is the liberal inclusive strand, the left-progressive strand, the exclusive Sinhala Buddhist Nationalist (SBN) strand, and the defensive strands of minority nationalisms. Given Sri Lanka’s historical political formations and alliances, much overlapping goes on between the different strands. The overlapping gets selective on an issue by issue basis, which in itself is not unwelcome insofar as it promotes plurality in place of exclusivity.

Historically as well, and certainly after 1956, the SBN strand has been the dominant strand of nationalism in Sri Lanka and has had the most influential say in every government until now. Past versions of the JVP frequently straddled the dominant SBN space. Currently, however, the dominant SBN strand is in one of its more dormant phases and the NPP government could be a reason for the current dormancy. This is an obvious difference between the old JVP and the new NPP.

A second set of criticisms, or institutional criticisms, emanate from political liberals and human rights activists and these are about the NPP government’s actions or non-actions in regard to constitutional changes, the future of the elected executive presidency, the status of provincial devolution and the timing of provincial council elections, progress on human rights issues, the resolution of unfinished postwar businesses including the amnesia over mass graves. These criticisms and the issues they represent are also in varying ways the primary concerns of the island’s Tamils, Muslims and the Malaiyaka (planntationn) Tamils. As with the overlapping between the left and the non-minority nationalists, there is also overlapping between the liberal activists and minority representatives.

A third category includes what might be called oppositional criticisms and they counterpose the JVP’s past against the NPP’s present, call into question the JVP’s commitment to multi-party democracy and raise alarms about a creeping constitutional dictatorship. This category also includes criticisms of the NPP government’s lack of governmental experience and competence; alleged instances of abuse of power, mismanagement and even corruption; alleged harassment of past politicians; and the failure to find the alleged mastermind behind the 2019 Easter bombings. At a policy and implementational level, there have been criticisms of the government’s educational reforms and electricity reforms, the responses to cyclone Ditwah, and the current global oil and economic crises. The purveyors of oppositional criticisms are drawn from the general political class which includes political parties, current and past parliamentarians, as well as media pundits.

Criticisms as expectations

What is common to all three categories of criticisms is that they collectively represent what were understood to be promises by the NPP before the elections, and have become expectations of the NPP government after the elections. It is the range and nature of these criticisms and the corresponding expectations that make the NPP government a lot more than a mere JVP offspring, and significantly differentiate it from every previous government.

The deliverables that are expected of the NPP government were never a part of the vocabulary of the original JVP platform and programs. The very mode of parliamentary politics was ideologically anathema to the JVP of Akmeemana. And there was no mention of or concern for minority rights, or constitutional reforms. On foreign policy, it was all India phobia without Anglo mania – a halfway variation of Sri Lanka’s mainstream foreign policy of Anglo mania and India phobia. For a party of the rural proletariat, the JVP was virulently opposed to the plantation proletariat. The JVP’s version of anti-imperialist economics would hardly have excited the Sri Lankan electorate at any time, and certainly not at the present time.

At the same time, the NPP government is also the only government that has genealogical antecedents to a political movement or organization like the JVP. That in itself makes the NPP government unique among Sri Lanka’s other governments. The formation of the NPP is the culmination of the evolution of the JVP that began after the second insurrection with the shedding of political violence, acceptance of political plurality and commitment to electoral democracy.

But the evolution was not entirely a process of internal transformation. It was also a response to a rapidly and radically changing circumstances both within Sri Lanka and beyond. This evolution has not been a rejection of the founding socialist purposes of the JVP in 1968, but their adaptation in the endless political search, under constantly changing conditions, for a non-violent, socialist and democratic framework that would facilitate the full development of the human potential of all Sri Lankans.

The burden of expectations is unmistakable, but what is also remarkable is their comprehensiveness and the NPP’s formal commitment to all of them at the same time. No previous government shouldered such an extensive burden or showed such a willing commitment to each and every one of the expectations. In the brewing global economic crisis, the criticisms, expectations and the priorities of the government will invariably be focussed on keeping the economy alive and alleviating the day-to-day difficulties of millions of Sri Lankan families. While what the NPP government can and must do may not differ much from what other Asian governments – from Pakistan to Vietnam – are doing, it could and should do better than what any and all past Sri Lankan governments did when facing economic challenges.

by Rajan Philips

Features

A Fragile Ceasefire: Pakistan’s Glory and Israel’s Sabotage

Published

5 days ago

2026/04/12

Thilina Walpola

Smokes over Beirut: Israel’s Ceasefire Attack on Hezbollah in Lebanon

After threatening to annihilate one of the planet’s oldest civilizations, TACO* Trump chickened out again by grasping the ceasefire lifeline that Pakistan had assiduously prepared. Trump needed the ceasefire badly to stem the mounting opposition to the war in America. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu wanted the war to continue because he needed it badly for his political survival. So, he contrived a fiction and convinced Trump that Lebanon is not included in the ceasefire. Trump as usual may not have noticed that Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Shariff had clearly indicated Lebanon’s inclusion in his announcement of the ceasefire at 7:50 PM, Tuesday, on X. Ten minutes before Donald Trump’s fake deadline.

True to form on Wednesday, Israel unleashed the heaviest assault by far on Lebanon, reportedly killing over 300 people, the highest single-day death toll in the current war. Iran responded by re-closing the Strait of Hormuz and questioning the need for talks in Islamabad over the weekend. There were other incidents as well, with an oil refinery attacked in Iran, and Iranian drones and missiles slamming oil and gas infrastructure in UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Qatar.

The US tried to insist that Lebanon is not part of the ceasefire, with the argumentative US Vice President JD Vance, who was in Budapest, Hungary, campaigning for Viktor Orban, calling the whole thing a matter of “bad faith negotiation” as well as “legitimate misunderstanding” on the part of Iran, and warning Iran that “it would be dumb to jeopardise its ceasefire with Washington over Israel’s attacks in Lebanon.”

But as the attack in Lebanon drew international condemnation – from Pope Leo to UN Secretary General António Guterres, and several world leaders, and amidst fears of Lebanon becoming another Gaza with 1,500 people including 130 children killed and more than a million people displaced, Washington got Israel to stop its “lawn mowing” in southern Lebanon.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed to “open direct negotiations with Lebanon as soon as possible,”. Lebanese President Joeseph Aoun has also called for “a ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon, followed by direct negotiations between them.” Israel’s involvement in Lebanon remains a wild card that threatens the ceasefire and could scuttle the talks between the US and Iran scheduled for Saturday in Islamabad.

Losers and Winners

After the ceasefire, both the Trump Administration and Iran have claimed total victories while the Israeli government wants the war to continue. The truth is that after more than a month into nonstop bombing of Iran, America and Israel have won nothing. Only Iran has won something it did not have when Trump and Netanyahu started their war. Iran now has not only a say over but control of the Strait of Hormuz. The ceasefire acknowledges this. Both Trump and Netanyahu are under fire in their respective countries and have no allies in the world except one another.

The real diplomatic winner is Pakistan. Salman Rushdie’s palimpsest-country has emerged as a key player in global politics and an influential mediator in a volatile region. Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Chief of Defence Field Marshal Asim Munir have both been praised by President Trump and credited for achieving the current ceasefire. The Iranian regime has also been effusive in its praise of Pakistan’s efforts.

It is Pakistan that persisted with the effort after initial attempts at backdoor diplomacy by Egypt, Pakistan and Türkiye started floundering. Sharing a 900 km border and deep cultural history with Iran, and having a skirmish of its own on the eastern front with Afghanistan, Pakistan has all the reason to contain and potentially resolve the current conflict in Iran. Although a majority Sunni Muslim country, Pakistan is home to the second largest Shia Muslim population after Iran, and is the easterly terminus of the Shia Arc that stretches from Lebanon. The country also has a mutual defense pact with Saudi Arabia that includes Pakistan’s nuclear cover for the Kingdom. An open conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia would have put Pakistan in a dangerously awkward position.

It is now known and Trump has acknowledged that China had a hand in helping Iran get to the diplomatic table. Pakistan used its connections well to get Chinese diplomatic reinforcement. Pakistani Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar flew to Beijing to brief his Chinese counterpart and secured China’s public support for the diplomatic efforts. The visit produced a Five-Point Plan that became a sequel to America’s 15-point proposal and the eventual ten-point offer by Iran.

There is no consensus between parties as to which points are where and who is agreeing to what. The chaos is par for the course the way Donald Trumps conducts global affairs. So, all kudos to Pakistan for quietly persisting with old school toing and froing and producing a semblance of an agreement on a tweet without a parchment.

It is also noteworthy that Israel has been excluded from all the diplomatic efforts so far. And it is remarkable, but should not be surprising, the way Trump has sidelined Isreal from the talks. Prime Minister Netanyahu has been enjoying overwhelming support of Israelis for starting the war of his life against Iran and getting the US to spearhead it. But now the country is getting confused and is exposed to Iranian missiles and drones far more than ever before. The Israeli opposition is finally coming alive realizing what little has Netanyahu’s wars have achieved and at what cost. Israel has alienated a majority of Americans and has no ally anywhere else.

It will be a busy Saturday in Islamabad, where the US and Iranian delegations are set to meet. Iran would seem to have insisted and secured the assurance that the US delegation will be led by Vice President Vance, while including Trump’s personal diplomats – Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner. Iran has not announced its team but it is expected to be led, for protocol parity, by Iran’s Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, and will likely include its suave Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi. Vice President Vance’s attendance will be the most senior US engagement with Iran since Secretary of State John Kerry negotiated the 2015 nuclear deal under President Obama.

The physical arrangements for the talks are still not public although Islamabad has been turned into a security fortress given the stakes and risks involved. The talks are expected to be ‘indirect’, with the two delegations in separate rooms and Pakistani officials shuttling between them. The status of Iran’s enriched uranium and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz will be the major points of contention. After Netanyahu’s overreach on Wednesday, Lebanon is also on the short list

The 2015 nuclear deal (the Joint Comprehensive Action Plan) took months of negotiations and involved multiple parties besides the US and Iran, including China, France, Germany, UK, Russia and the EU. That served the cause of regional and world peace well until Trump tore up the deal to spite Obama. It would be too much to expect anything similar after a weekend encounter in Islamabad. But if the talks could lead to at least a permanent ceasefire and the return to diplomacy that would be a huge achievement.

(*As of 2025–2026, Donald Trump is nicknamed “TACO Trump” by Wall Street traders and investors as an acronym for “”. This term highlights a perceived pattern of him making strong tariff threats that cause market panic, only to later retreat or weaken them, causing a rebound.)

by Rajan Philips

Features

CIA’s hidden weapon in Iran

Published

5 days ago

2026/04/12

Thilina Walpola

We are passing through the ten-day interregnum called a ceasefire over the War on Iran. The world may breathe briefly, but this pause is not reassurance—it is a deliberate interlude, a vacuum in which every actor positions for the next escalation. Iran is far from secure. Behind the veneer of calm, external powers and local forces are preparing, arming, and coordinating. The United States is unlikely to deploy conventional ground troops; the next moves will be executed through proxies whose behaviour will defy expectation. These insurgents are shaped, guided, and amplified by intelligence and technology, capable of moving silently, striking precisely, and vanishing before retaliation. The ceasefire is not peace—it is the prelude to disruption.

The Kurds, historically instruments of Tehran against Baghdad, are now vectors for the next insurgency inside Iran. This movement is neither organic nor local. It is externally orchestrated, with the CIA as the principal architect. History provides the blueprint: under Mohammad-Reza Shah Pahlavi, Kurdish uprisings were manipulated, never supported out of sympathy. They were instruments of leverage against Iraq, a way to weaken a rival while projecting influence beyond Iran’s borders. Colonel Isa Pejman, Iranian military intelligence officer who played a role in Kurdish affairs, recalled proposing support for a military insurgency in Iraq, only for the Shah to respond coldly: “[Mustafa] Barzani killed my Army soldiers… please forget it. The zeitgeist and regional context have been completely transformed.” The Kurds were pawns, but pawns with strategic weight. Pejman later noted: “When the Shah wrote on the back of the letter ‘Accepted’ to General Pakravan, I felt I was the true leader of the Kurdish movement.” The seeds planted then are now being activated under new, technologically empowered auspices.

Iran’s geographic vulnerabilities make this possible. The Shah understood the trap: a vast territory with porous borders, squeezed by Soviet pressure from the north and radical Arab states from the west. “We are in a really terrible situation since Moscow’s twin pincers coming down through Kabul and Baghdad surround us,” he warned Asadollah Alam. From Soviet support for the Mahabad Republic to Barzani’s dream of a unified Kurdistan, Tehran knew an autonomous Kurdish bloc could destabilize both Iraq and Iran. “Since the formation of the Soviet-backed Mahabad Republic, the Shah had been considerably worried about the Kurdish threat,” a US assessment concluded.

Today, the Kurds’ significance is operational, not symbolic. The CIA’s recent rescue of a downed F-15 airman using Ghost Murmur, a quantum magnetometry system, demonstrated the reach of technology in intelligence operations. The airman survived two days on Iranian soil before extraction. This was not a simple rescue; it was proof that highly mobile, technologically augmented operations can penetrate Iranian territory with surgical precision. The same logic applies to insurgency preparation: when individuals can be tracked through electromagnetic signatures, AI-enhanced surveillance, and drones, proxy forces can be armed, guided, and coordinated with unprecedented efficiency. The Kurds are no longer pawns—they are a living network capable of fracturing Iranian cohesion while providing deniability to foreign powers.

Iran’s engagement with Iraqi Kurds was always containment, not empowerment. The Shah’s goal was never Kurdish independence. “We do not approve an independent [Iraqi] Kurdistan,” he stated explicitly. Yet their utility as instruments of regional strategy was undeniable. The CIA’s revival of these networks continues a long-standing pattern: insurgent groups integrated into the wider calculus of international power. Israel, Iran, and the Kurds formed a triangular strategic relationship that terrified Baghdad. “For Baghdad, an Iranian-Israeli-Kurdish triangular alliance was an existential threat,” contemporary reports noted. This is the template for modern manipulation: a networked insurgency, externally supported, capable of destabilizing regimes from within while giving foreign powers plausible deniability.

Iran today faces fragility. Years of sanctions, repression, and targeted strikes have weakened educational and scientific hubs; Sharif University in Tehran, one of the country’s leading scientific centres, was bombed. Leaders, scholars, and innovators have been eliminated. Military readiness is compromised. Generations-long setbacks leave Iran exposed. Against this backdrop, a Kurdish insurgency armed with drones, AI-supported surveillance, and precision munitions could do more than disrupt—it could fracture the state internally. The current ten-day ceasefire is a mirage; the next wave of revolt is already being orchestrated.

CIA involvement is deliberate. Operations are coordinated with allied intelligence agencies, leveraging Kurdish grievances, mobility, and ethnolinguistic networks. The Kurds’ spread across Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Syria provides operational depth—allowing insurgents to strike, vanish, and regroup with impunity. Barzani understood leverage decades ago: “We could be useful to the United States… Look at our strategic location on the flank of any possible Soviet advance into the Middle East.” Today, the calculation is inverted: Kurds are no longer instruments against Baghdad; they are potential disruptors inside Tehran itself.

Technology is central. Ghost Murmur’s ability to detect a single heartbeat remotely exemplifies how intelligence can underpin insurgent networks. Drones, satellite communications, AI predictive modeling, and battlefield sensors create an infrastructure that can transform a dispersed Kurdish insurgency into a high-precision operation. Iran can no longer rely on fortifications or loyalty alone; the external environment has been recalibrated by technology.

History provides the roadmap. The Shah’s betrayal of Barzani after the 1975 Algiers Agreement demonstrated that external actors can manipulate both Iranian ambitions and Kurdish loyalties. “The Shah sold out the Kurds,” Yitzhak Rabin told Kissinger. “We could not station our troops there and keep fighting forever,” the Shah explained to Alam. The Kurds are a pivot, not a cause. Networks once acting under Tehran’s influence are now being repurposed against it.

The insurgency exploits societal fissures. Kurdish discontent in Iran, suppressed for decades, provides fertile ground. Historical betrayal fuels modern narratives: “Barzani claimed that ‘Isa Pejman sold us out to the Shah and the Shah sold us out to the US.’” Intelligence agencies weaponize these grievances, pairing them with training, technological augmentation, and covert support.

Geopolitically, the stakes are immense. The Shah’s defensive-offensive doctrine projected Iranian influence outward to neutralize threats. Today, the logic is inverted: the same networks used to contain Iraq are being readied to contain Iran. A technologically augmented Kurdish insurgency, covertly backed, could achieve in months what decades of sanctions, diplomacy, or repression have failed to accomplish.

The operation will be asymmetric, high-tech, and dispersed. UAVs, quantum-enhanced surveillance, encrypted communications, and AI-directed logistics will dominate. Conventional Iranian forces are vulnerable to this type of warfare. As Pejman reflected decades ago, “Our Army was fighting there, rather than the Kurds who were harshly defeated… How could we keep such a place?” Today, the challenge is magnified by intelligence superiority on the insurgents’ side.

This is not a temporary flare-up. The CIA and its allies are constructing a generational network of influence. Experience from Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon proves these networks endure once operationalised. The Shah recognized this: “Iran’s non-state foreign policy under the Shah’s reign left a lasting legacy for the post-Revolution era.” Today, those instruments are being remade as vectors of foreign influence inside Iran.

The future is stark. Iran faces not simply external threats, but a carefully engineered insurgency exploiting historical grievances, technological superiority, and precise intelligence. The Kurds are central. History, technology, and geopolitical calculation converge to create a transformative threat. Tehran’s miscalculations, betrayals, and suppressed grievances now form the lattice for this insurgency. The Kurds are positioned not just as an ethnic minority, but as a vector of international strategy—Tehran may be powerless to stop it.

Iran’s containment strategies have been weaponized, fused with technology, and inverted against it. The ghosts of Barzani’s Peshmerga, the shadows of Algiers, and the Shah’s strategic vision now converge with Ghost Murmur, drones, and AI. Tehran faces a paradox: the instruments it once controlled are now calibrated to undermine its authority. The next Kurdish revolt will not only fight in the mountains but in the electromagnetic shadows where intelligence operates, consequences are lethal, and visibility is scarce.

by Nilantha Ilangamuwa