transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] Here's a secret. The fastest growing businesses aren't doing more. They're delegating smarter. Upwork helps you bring in expert freelance help fast, so you can delegate and keep moving. Upwork is a one-stop platform to find, hire, and pay expert freelancers across web and software development, data and analytics, marketing, business operations, and more. It helps you grow your business by giving you fast access to specialized talent across 125 categories. So you can fill skill gaps, launch projects faster, and scale support up or down without committing to full-time headcount. You can browse profiles, review past work, and get help scoring the role, so you can hire with competence and get started quickly. Upwork also cuts down operational hassle by handling things like contracts and payments in one place, so you can spend more time running the business. Thousands of growing businesses already trust Upwork to hire flexible, high-quality freelance talent for everything from one-off projects to ongoing support. It's free to sign up and posting a job is really easy. Visit upwork.com right now and post your job for free. That is upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. That's upwork.com. upwork.com.

Speaker 2:
[01:25] Hi, and welcome to Ones and Tooze, FP's economics podcast. Every week, we take a couple data points, use them to try to explain the world. I'm Cameron Abadi, FP's Deputy Editor with you in Berlin, Germany. Joining us as always is Adam Tooze, FP's economics columnist and Columbia University professor with us in New York. Hi, Adam.

Speaker 3:
[01:45] Hi, Cam.

Speaker 2:
[01:46] So, two segments for you all today. In the second half of the show, we're going to be talking about the city of Islamabad. Islamabad, of course, is hosting the negotiations or it will host if the negotiations, in fact, take place between Iran and the United States. Those talks designed to bring an end to the war which is currently cease-fired. Stick around for that conversation about Islamabad. It turns out to be a pretty interesting city. But first, another data point, and that is three, as in three years, that is the amount of time that the ongoing war in Sudan has been taking place. We just passed that three-year milestone.

Speaker 4:
[02:35] The Sudanese struggle erupted on April 15, 2023 between the Sudanese army and the paramilitary and rapid support forces. Sudan has been gripped by one of the world's worst humanitarian crises. Tens of thousands of people have been killed and around 12 million displaced.

Speaker 5:
[02:51] Widespread allegations of ethnic cleansing and acts amounting to genocide. Despite the scale of suffering, the war receives limited global attention and aid agencies say only a fraction of required funding is reaching Sudan.

Speaker 2:
[03:06] The war does not get nearly as much attention as it should. Certainly not compared with other wars happening in the world that we could think of, including that war in Iran that we just mentioned. But it is a significant war and we thought we would devote a segment to unpacking what exactly it's about and what's been happening there. So to start off with Adam, the conflict itself, obviously, we passed this three-year anniversary and it is usually foreshadowed, at least in the Western media, by conflicts in Gaza, say, in Ukraine, obviously, that's an ongoing war. Can you give us some sense of the dimensions of the Sudanese war exactly?

Speaker 3:
[03:52] Yeah, they're dramatic. And I do think, I like the way you set this up, that it's just important to insist on the significance of this, of this conflict. Some people may have seen that in September 2025, the cover story of the Atlantic magazine was a piece by Anne Applebaum about the Sudan conflict, which of course in and of itself is very much to be welcomed. This may in fact be the longest piece in the most significant Western outlet ever written about Sudan in recent history. But the title of the piece emblazoned on the cover against the backdrop of the image of a pop marked bullet riddled Sudanese building was, could you not, a war about nothing, the world that America left behind. That was literally the cover story of the Atlantic magazine with regard to the Sudan crisis in September 2025. Now, as I say, it's to be welcomed, obviously, but outlets like Atlantic are talking about Sudan. I'm glad we've come back to the story. But there's also in that presentation, extraordinary failure of grasp of the fact that there is a world outside the United States and that when America goes off to be preoccupied with its own things, the result is not nothing or a vacuum or just merely chaos and anarchy, but the playing out of a rich and incredibly complex history affecting, in this case, tens of millions of people which, of course, absolutely has its own logic and is not simply nothing. But yes, to go back to this question of scale, it's gigantic. So Sudan is a nation, this is after the separation of South Sudan, 53 million people, so that compares to about 40 million people in Ukraine, 37 to 39 million. Sudan's population is similar to the population you'd get if you added up Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Palestine all together. So it's that kind of a unit. And the consequence of this war have been absolutely devastating. The military casualties are not where the drama is to be found here. The official numbers are hugely under reported. The immediate conflict casualties we think are in the order of 100,000 to 150,000. But the real question here is because Sudan was not a rich country to start with, is excess death as a result of the chaos, the destruction that has been brought on Sudan by the war. And so we're talking about maybe 12 million people displaced at various points, 4.5 million people crossing into Egypt, South Sudan and Chad, none of which are rich places that can accommodate migrants in the same way. So refugees from Ukraine were in this kind of order of magnitude, but they're going to rich Western Europe. Refugees from Syria go to Turkey, which is also a high middle income country, not Egypt, South Sudan or Chad. So this is a huge disaster happening in a poor part of the world and affecting millions of people. The most devastating numbers is that 34 million people in Sudan have been reduced to the state of needing aid and pockets. We're talking about outright hunger, catastrophic hunger scenarios. So situations of people literally starving to death, of emaciated children with their ribs protruding, a total disaster. It's all the more important because it's taking place in a region in East Africa which is itself hugely under strain. Because neighboring Sudan is Somalia, Ethiopia recovering from war. The entire section of East Africa of which Sudan is a key part has since the late 2010s become one of the great disaster zones. And what is at stake here is politics. It's absolutely politics. The conflict is not about nothing. It's not just simply about the egos of the commanders of the Sudanese Armed Forces or Hameti, the commander of the Rapid Response Forces, the RSF. It's about the question of what will succeed in terms of politics in Sudan, the collapse or the overthrow of Amal Bashir's long time dictatorship, which was completed in 2019. And there was a democratic transition ongoing against which the military, both wings of the military launched a coup. And it is then the putschists, the coup parties that fell out in 2023 and resulted in this disaster, which has now sucked in not just a wider region in terms of the shatter field of the destruction done, but in terms of regional players from around the broader geopolitical field and indeed also Western interests as well.

Speaker 2:
[08:56] Yeah, I really would just underscore your point about the scale of this, because it seems to be essentially the largest humanitarian disaster that's happening in the world right now.

Speaker 3:
[09:07] At the moment, without question, yeah. It's not as lethal as the war in Ethiopia, which was really extraordinarily lethal, but Ethiopia is currently not at war. But in terms of its scale, in terms of the millions of people affected, it's truly devastating.

Speaker 2:
[09:25] Yeah. Tens of millions, over 30 million, I saw an estimate in terms of people in need of aid, and the refugees in total are over 10 million. If you take those who have fled to neighboring countries and those displaced internally, and yeah, then there are the deaths, and that's in the hundreds of thousands, at least. So all of that is remarkable as a result of this civil war, but I do think it raises the question of, what is the material basis for the war? There so often is in these kinds of civil conflicts. And Sudan has gone through iterations of war prior to this current civil war. But in those earlier conflicts, I think maybe listeners would be familiar with the role oil was playing and that as a natural resource in Sudan. Right now, actually, gold has replaced oil as Sudan's greatest export. And so, I'm curious, is this current civil war a resource-driven conflict with gold playing the role of conflict diamonds that listeners may have heard of in other countries? And yeah, is gold the dimension in which other countries are getting involved? Like the United Arab Emirates are very prominently involved in this conflict as an outsider. Is it because of the role of gold here?

Speaker 3:
[10:56] Yes, you're right. I mean, oil was the driver. Oil is principally located in South Sudan, which is the predominantly black African and Christian part of the former United Sudan, which was split. So oil is principally located there in the rump of Sudan, this giant country, which has been convulsed in Civil War since 23, is a much more diversified economy. We'll speak about agriculture in a minute. The fact that gold has become the key export that it has is a symptom of crisis, if you like. And it's a particular type of gold economics. So it's really fascinating. There is a gold belt that runs along the Sahel. And if you think about the Islamic insurgencies that are happening in the Western Sahel, they are also fueled essentially by artisanal gold mining. Artisanal in the sense that it's small scale, it's not large scale, it's not like Anglo-American in South Africa or something like that. But it's artisanal, it's huge in scale. So it involves millions and millions of people digging. It produces a huge import of the basic equipment necessary for it. And that then is organized by power blocks as a source of funding. So the UAE is not involved in Sudan because of the gold, but the gold in Sudan in the areas controlled by the ISF helps to fund the highly sophisticated weaponry that UAE has been willing to supply to the ISF. Likewise, the Sudanese army is channeling its gold exports by way of Egypt. So most of the official exports of gold go to Egypt, the unofficial exports go to Dubai. The advantage of gold of course is it can be smelted down, it therefore becomes fungible, it's almost impossible to trace. It's not like diamonds which can be traced, gold really can't be once it reached the smelters. And because gold prices have surged so dramatically since the post-COVID inflation, this has become obviously a major source of revenue. The stakes for the UAE, I think, are much broader. They're about establishing spheres of influence, and the UAE is a major player in Libya, it's a major player in the Somali conflict, it's a major player, of course, in Yemen. And if you look at the investments in Sudan, they're very considerable from the UAE side. They run into the $20-plus billion over time, and this has enabled also the war to transition. So we think of the classic wars of Africa, essentially the Sahel since the late 1990s to be these Toyota wars. So these are wars waged by fast moving units with heavy 20-millimeter guns and cannon mounted on the back of fast moving Toyota pickup trucks. That's the kind of classic model of the 90s and the early 2000s and reinforced in the 2010s by the collapse of Libya and the export of weapons from there. The UAE and what's going on in Sudan has moved to the next level. So they are providing the RSF and these Sudanese armed forces themselves also importing affordable heavy weaponry from China, including of a serious artillery. None of that works now, as we know from Ukraine, we've spoken about this many times without drones. So the Sudanese war has become a drone war like the war in Ukraine, like the war in Iran, and all of that technology is coming via the UAE, paid for by gold and other exports ultimately from Chinese sources. So this war has not just expanded in scale and linked in an entire regional economy and an entire logistical infrastructure, but has also technologically mutated from the African war model of the 1990s and the 2000s into something much more complex, much more fast moving, very sophisticated.

Speaker 2:
[14:48] Yeah, I do think one of the confusing things about this outside influence is that in the way that you're describing, it's about expanding UAE's influence, say, but it's also divorced from ideological stakes, seemingly, or it's not embedded clearly in some kind of broader ideological dispute or conflict. It's about the expansion of influence for its own sake, seemingly, and makes it difficult or relatively less legible, I think, from the outside, about what exactly is going on.

Speaker 3:
[15:27] I mean, this might be where Applebaum gets her war about nothing or the Atlantic. Headline writers get it from. I mean, that misses the fact that this is a war over how to repress Sudanese democracy. I mean, that's what the war fighting parties have in common and the UAE likewise, is the aim of the game here is to block the development of a independent, autonomous, democratic Sudanese state. And then in the process of doing that, the military sides fell to warring, essentially, the Sudanese army wanted to fully integrate the Gwangju We derived militias that were in the RSF, and then the power struggle ensued. But the stakes here are not trivial, the ideological stakes are really over the future of the possibility of democratic politics in Sudan.

Speaker 2:
[16:21] Yeah, what's very clear is that there's enormous humanitarian need now in Sudan. And this, you know, comes at a time when America's humanitarian aid infrastructure has very notoriously collapsed. You know, the United States has essentially actively collapsed its own humanitarian infrastructure. So I'm curious how this plays out in Sudan. Is there anything that has taken the place of America on the ground in Sudan?

Speaker 3:
[16:51] Yeah, I mean, the Americans have still earmarked a budget for Sudanese aid. But people who reported from the ground reported traveling the length and breadth of the country that they were able to access and seeing aid delivered by the full roster of people that you expect, the European Union, Italy, the UK, Qatar, UNICEF, and a striking and absence of any presence of official American assistance. One effort to pull together support for Sudan has come through Germany, which presided over a large donor conference from which both sides in the Sudanese war were in fact excluded, which was then itself a source of considerable scandal. But I don't think there's any reason to mince words about this. The United States has chosen the position of, well, rhetorically, of course, Trump would like to be the great peacemaker. But in practice, there's no resource or very little.

Speaker 2:
[17:53] Yeah. I mean, what there is is expressions of concern and in some sense, the sort of symbolism of humanitarianism, you know, that one sees around the world, including in the United States. But yeah, it seems like the actual material provision of aid is no longer in place. And yeah, I suppose all of this is as tragic as it is, in part because Sudan itself has been, you know, referred to potentially as the breadbasket of Africa. I mean, this is a country with resources and not only gold and oil, but it does seem to have been cut off from other development pathways it could have taken as a result of this kind of warfare. And, yeah, I guess I'm curious what those other development pathways could have been or could still be, perhaps. And, you know, given that, what does that tell us about Sudan's elites? I mean, that they are indulging in this kind of conflict, which is clearly, you know, a zero-sum militarized conflict. Instead of pursuing development, you know, how do we make sense of those kinds of decisions by Sudan's own elites?

Speaker 3:
[19:13] I mean, it's truly, it's truly tragic, yes, because if you look into this, you realize, well, just look at whether Sudan is on the map, right? I mean, it's at the headwaters of the Nile, essentially. So it's actually some of the most fertile agricultural regions of Africa. Even for 2022, if you look at the statistics for land under cultivation in Sudan, it's ginormous. It's the largest agricultural player in Africa, in its part of Africa. This is the 10th in the world for total agricultural land, 110 million hectares roughly, which puts it in the same sort of ballpark as the American Midwest or twice the size of Ukraine. So it's potentially a gigantic and prosperous agricultural region with huge potential both for pasturage, for animal cultivation and for land development. I recently came across a story that it's responsible for 80 percent of the world's gum Arabic, which is used as an additive in paints and cosmetics, in I think Coca-Cola. So it's naturally a potential powerhouse of agriculture. Not only agriculture though, one of the stories that I came across with regard to Sudan during the Gaza conflict, people would often criticize folks like myself that spoke out about Gaza for the fact that we weren't speaking out about Sudan at the same time. So double standards, suggestion of anti-Semitism, that we were prioritizing Israel's violence in Gaza over that being done in other places. So I thought I would actually go into the question of what is the destruction of the Sudanese university system, to compare it to what was being done by the Israelis in Gaza. And the result of that is that the concentrated violence delivered to Gaza was much more intense. But the damage in Sudan to the university system is spectacular and devastating. So Sudan had a university system which from the early 1990s had grown to provide tertiary education to 700,000 students. So this was a huge hub of graduate education for East Africa. And critically, above all, not perhaps surprisingly, given that it's in the Islamic world, in medicine. So it was one of the great training centers for medics, for doctors, for nurses, and was enrolling very large numbers of women students as well. So this is a society which is given a chance, absolutely capable of diversified economic growth, human development, human capital formation, everything. How's everything going for it? Unsurprisingly, it's a great and complex society. And I do, your question is, is the one being asked insistently by those brave Sudanese who are still willing to force the issue of democratic politics, which is what on earth is going on where you have elite groups who see it, one has to describe them after all, as rational actors, as in some sense in their interest, not to grow this pie, but to war in this zero-sum way. And it's a sort of classic failure, therefore, of the incorporation of powerful and potentially disruptive elites into institutions that would give them an incentive to turn their baser impulses towards projects that would actually benefit society as a whole. And that, I think, is really the reconstruction project that needs... That has to be presumably part of any eventual peace process, is not just to end the fighting, but to harness the energies of the war fighters in ways which are constructive for the development of Sudan with all its potential and not basically just a kind of rapacious resource extraction so as to pay for war.

Speaker 2:
[23:12] Yeah, I do think that that is a plausible way of thinking about this, that essentially development is something that's deferred in wartime, and that is eventually Sudan will return to these questions of development, and it's only a matter of time.

Speaker 3:
[23:29] But why don't you think you could say that development is not a single straight path of nothing but good? Because what we're seeing in the military level, that I guess was also what was in the back of my mind when I was talking about the drones, is like Sudan is developing, but just in a cannibalist, I don't want to call it cannibal, that's ridiculous, but it's cannibalizing itself. The potential for development is taking the form of far-flung logistical black market gold routes to the UAE, or a generation of warfighters who are now highly skilled in the use of Chinese-made drones rather than the development of a medical education hub for East Africa, which is also what Khartoum can be. It's just the development doesn't offer a single path, and all of these people will be in their own way, or the warlords as well will be in their own way doing development because better to be a developed warlord than an underdeveloped warlord. But that's not from the point of view of tens of millions of Sudanese. The question is, how do you turn this into a series of vectors? The real risk there is that like many other states in Africa, it's made up of hundreds of separate ethnic and cultural groups. And the worst scenario is that this becomes more and more balkanized as resource constraints become more and more intense, you get real disintegration. Whereas building a university system which recruits students from all over the country has the reverse kind of effect or building complex agricultural supply chains. It's not without its conflict, of course, it will create inequality, it will create struggles over land, but it produces conflicts and stresses and bids for power, prosperity and privilege, which in a kind of mandevillian sense, you know, in the sense of Bernard Mandeville, no one, people don't have to be virtuous for things to go in a good direction. It's a question of how you orchestrate vice, if you like, so that things move in a more positive direction.

Speaker 2:
[25:42] Yeah, that is a hopeful way of putting it. And yeah, hopefully we can talk about peace in Sudan at some point before we talk about the continuing war again. But for now, we will take a break and be back in a second to talk about Islamabad.

Speaker 6:
[26:17] This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Hi, I'm Laura Ross Browtelem, a producer at Foreign Policy. It's tax season. I know that I hate it. Beyond the bureaucracy, taxes also just bring up all these tough feelings about money. Everything is so expensive these days, this probably doesn't surprise you. At the start of 2026, nearly nine in 10 Americans felt some form of financial stress. This can impact everything. Sleep, anxiety, relationships. It's also one of the leading sources of depression and suicidal ideation. Therapy can help unpack your relationship with money, build healthier coping strategies, and let you feel less alone. With over 30,000 therapists, BetterHelp is the world's largest online therapy platform. It's convenient, it's flexible, and BetterHelp does the initial matching work for you. When life feels overwhelming, therapy can help. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com/onestooze. That's betterhelp.com/onestooze. Thanks. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Hi, I'm Laura Ross Browtellum, a producer at Foreign Policy. It's tax season. I know that I hate it. So, I'm going to start with a little bit of a little bit of a summary of the There are a lot of these tough feelings about money. Everything is so expensive these days, this probably doesn't surprise you. At the start of 2026, nearly nine in 10 Americans felt some form of financial stress. This can impact everything, sleep, anxiety, relationships. It's also one of the leading sources of depression and suicidal ideation. But I want you to make your relationship with money, build healthier coping strategies, and let you feel less alone. With over 30,000 therapists, BetterHelp is the world's largest online therapy platform. It's convenient, it's flexible, and BetterHelp does the initial matching work for you. When life feels overwhelming, therapy can help. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com/onestooze. That's Better, H-E-L-P ,.com/onestooze. Thanks.

Speaker 2:
[28:43] Hi. Welcome back. So Islamabad is the capital of Pakistan. It is in the news as the host of the peace talks between the United States and Iran, which may or may not be happening as we release this podcast. But it is a city that is worthy of discussion itself and on its own terms. And we thought we would take a closer look at the city and its history, as it serves as this site for international diplomacy. So Adam, to start off with, Pakistan as a country was founded famously in 1947, out of the partition with India. Famously, that year, Islamabad, the capital today, was actually built some years later in the 1960s. So this was a choice to build this city, to serve as the capital. And I'm curious what informed that choice, because Pakistan had cities. Most prominently, Karachi still exists today. In fact, it's the largest city in Pakistan. Still, it is home to 20 million people, and it's one of the largest cities in the world. I believe, 12th largest city in the world. So why did Pakistan decide to create a city out of whole cloth, Islamabad?

Speaker 3:
[30:06] Yeah, this is really a great question. And this idea of yours to talk about Islamabad is genius. It's really, it's such a fascinating story, because Karachi was indeed the obvious large city. And it did serve as the de facto, in fact, I think, de jure capital of Pakistan in its early years. But Pakistan was born in trauma, right? On the one hand, it's the realisation of the dream of an Islamic state, which Jinnah and others had formulated from the 30s onwards, if not going back before that, but in rivalry with the Indian National Congress had formulated this idea. But on the other hand, it was also born in, it was born in trauma. It was torn out of India. And the result was a hugely painful and violent partition, roughly superintended by the British Imperial authorities. And the Islamic state of Pakistan was split between what we now think of as Pakistan and East Pakistan, which is now what we think of as Bangladesh, which finally split away in the early 1970s. And Karachi was indeed the largest city, but it was also the natural site for refugee flight of what were now Indian Pakistanis or Muslim Indians who were fleeing to Pakistan, the Muhajirs, I hope I'm pronouncing that right. And Karachi becomes, in the 50s, the center of intensely complex and sometimes violent struggles in the emerging and new Pakistan state. And in October 1958, Ayub Khan, Senior General, become Field Marshal in Pakistan, seized his power. And he wanted quite deliberately to create a center of government that could sit above this melting pot turmoil of early Pakistan and represent the pure ideal of Pakistan, which is what Pakistan was not. Pakistan was a patchwork, overwhelmingly 95% plus Muslim, but different ethnicities from all over this incredibly complex region. One of the largest Shia populations in the world after Iran, so not even unified in their Islam. And he wanted to create a power center that would be separate from this cauldron of complex politics, that would be separate from the business influence in Karachi, that would also not be to the same extent under the influence of East Pakistan, Bengali Pakistan, which Ayub Khan regarded with real distrust. Because in the early history of Pakistan, there's an open question as to whether or not what we now think of as Bangladesh or what we now think of as Pakistan will in fact be the dominant center. And in terms of demography, Bangladesh, future Bangladesh actually dominates, this is totally unacceptable to the Punjabis who are, you know, who are the leading political elite, the military elite of the new Pakistani state. So when he comes to power in 58, as the dominant military figure who will shape kind of modern Pakistan, the Da'is cast and the decision is taken to build a new capital city within striking distance of the classic center of the Pakistani military, which is the imperial military hub of Raul Pindi in the Punjab. And so Islamabad from the very beginning has this odd feature of representing the ideal of Pakistan precisely by way of its separation from actual Pakistan. So it's an absolutely fascinating capital city project, not unique at this point. Many of the newly independent states and quite a few of the military dictatorships of the 50s and 60s liked the idea of building capitals. But in Pakistan, as the largest in the end of these states, the stakes are particularly high.

Speaker 2:
[34:14] Yeah, I'm glad you point that out, that Islamabad is not unique in this sense as a planned city. But in Islamabad's case, it turned to a Greek urban planner at the time for the design of this city. His name was Constantinos Doxiadis. I had not been familiar with him before. But in part, he seemed to be quite well known, not only for the planning of cities, but for theorizing about them. And in approaching the building of Islamabad, he seemed to be relying on his theory of Akistics that he had written about. And this was an idea that apparently appealed to Pakistan's military leaders. But not only them, also apparently to foreign aid donors like the US-based Ford Foundation, which helped fund the building of Islamabad. So curious what this concept of Akistics is, and why might it have been appealing to those various figures that played a role in the building of Islamabad?

Speaker 3:
[35:25] Yeah, this guy, Doxardis, that we've turned up by this question is totally fascinating. It makes me think we should do like a mini-series on plans, this is, or city planners, or technocrats of the high modern period.

Speaker 2:
[35:38] I was amazed because he also disappeared into history. I'd never heard of him.

Speaker 3:
[35:43] He was on the cover of Time magazine in the 60s. He did like a plan for Washington DC and for the Great Lakes region in the US. Totally fascinating figure. But it isn't as weird again. This is like such a great sort of window. Maybe this should be the fact to incorporation of things that have economic histories that you didn't know. So Pakistan under Ayub Khan from 58 through the 60s, is not the problem case that we think of Pakistan today. Pakistan at that point had a higher rate of growth than India, and was thought of as the model authoritarian developmental scheme. In fact, it's not just that in the late 50s and 60s under Kennedy, the Americans start doing development policy. If you look at the places where they're doing development policy, Pakistan is very close to the top of the list. So it's an absolutely key site of cold war struggle over visions of development between 58 and 65, which is the war against India. So in that period, the Pakistani example is really key. And Ford Foundation, American Foundations, American Money, flooding. And the Pakistani Army was no stranger to the idea of city planning because urban planning was something the British imperial power did. And there isn't an institution more influenced than that by the military, which of course the Pakistanis and the Indian armies both inherit. If you listen to, if you watch YouTube of Pakistan and Indian military folks in the sixties, which I sometimes do, they are, they just sound like this extraordinary Raj accent, which is this combination of an upper-class English accent with Indian Punjabi or dialects or accents rather not dialects. Very few people in Pakistan speak Urdu actually as a first language. So Pakistan is really a creation of this kind of modernist fantasy. And this was powerfully informed also by what was going on in India. So another great, you know, for architecture buffs, Punjab is split in the partition and, you know, the great powerhouse North Indian state and Lahore, its classic, you know, fabled capital, natural capital is in Pakistan. So Nehru, in charge of India, has to find a new capital for this huge. And we're talking, these are provinces the size of European nation states at the time, and they grow far, far bigger over time with the population growth. And who do they hire? They hire Le Corbusier to do famously, to do Chandigarh, which becomes one of the great pilgrimage sites of global south modernism in the 1950s. So I. Kahn says, right, I'm going to do this for the nation's capital. And who are we going to get? Well, we're going to get this guy, Doc Ciades, who was not an unknown at the time. He was a guy who'd come through the German architectural schools. It's amazing. He was in the Third Reich. He got his PhD, I think, from Berlin in 37. He'd worked with all of the key figures in the German architectural scene, famously had ambiguous relations with the Nazi regime. He then comes back to Greece. He's a member of the monarchist wing, I think, of the Greek resistance. Certainly, the anti-communist wing of the Greek resistance is decorated for his services to the Greek resistance by the Brits, and by the Greeks, but by the Brits notably. And as such, as a reliable pair of hands, then becomes a key Greek administrator of the Marshall Plan after 47 in Greece. And on the back of that, Cameron begins to build this international urbanistic praxis, which is based on this incredibly adventurous sort of conceptual scheme. And his first big gig is 58, where he gets the commission to do Baghdad's urban development plan. So the city that the Americans invade is one that he actually, in crucial ways, helped to shape. And he has this, he's kind of like a soft middle ground, I would say, between Le Corbusier and some of the Germans. This idea of ecistics that he has is a kind of holistic idea of architecture and urbanism as based in social interconnections and flows. It had such exorbitant demands on the planners for doing knowing about anthropological knowledge and natural knowledge that became a kind of driver of this demand for omniscience. But the actual planning itself is much more open-ended than you would normally expect. So and it's nested within a global vision. So Doxiatris' ultimate idea was that all of the world's population was going to end up in mega cities. If that's the case, we're going to the only sort of plan that makes sense is a plan that's a dynamic plan because the central feature of global urbanism is not going to be following a template, it's going to be growth. So what you need to do is build templates which can expand. And so it's modular, it allows for axes of growth in the planning itself. It turns out Islamabad is not actually a particularly dramatic instance of this, because it actually doesn't grow that much compared to a Karachi, for instance. But it's a very interesting development of urbanism out of the interwar modernists towards a much less static, much more dynamic, much more global South centered vision of how urban spaces are going to develop. And this is the guy that Ayub Khan hires, brings on board. He does ground plans for Islamabad. They start building. Inevitably, they fall out by the early 60s. He's been fired, but he and being replaced by some British designers and development goes on from there. But as we were saying, I mean, by the mid 60s, this guy is a totally a huge celebrity. He's literally on the cover of Time magazine doing plans for, you know, huge developmental urban developments of a, you know, they're kind of post. It's not a conventional city vision. It's about an entire, an entire expanse. And he has, he has one of the largest collections of supercomputers in the world in his like, he's like a figure from James Bond. Like he, he has like in his computer center, he has a Univac DACC. He has one of the largest assemblies of computing power in the world in the late 60s to do these urban models and hosts the thing called the Delos symposium, which looks like it's a forerunner to, well, certainly a forerunner to the Delphi Forum, which I've done in Greece, but a forerunner maybe to Davos as well. So really a truly, truly fascinating figure for whom Pakistan was a, and Islamabad was a, and this is the crucial point, not obscure, not out of the way, not off the beaten track, but obvious launching pad for a global career, because this state building project in Pakistan then really still was a glossy modernity rather than the troubled project that we know Pakistan as today in the 21st century.

Speaker 2:
[42:52] Yeah, fascinating figure, this doxiatus. And yeah, I agree that I also sort of thought of him as some kind of like milder form of Le Corbusier and the sort of, yeah, sort of softer around the edges in sort of, and perhaps that's why he was appealing in that way as well.

Speaker 3:
[43:13] It's low rise as well. He's not doing the giant unitate habitation type projects.

Speaker 2:
[43:18] Exactly, the towers in the park.

Speaker 3:
[43:19] Chandigarh is not high rise either, but the Lamabade is like laid out quite, it's quite flat and it's nested into this really dramatic because it's up against the Himalayas basically. So it's nested in this extraordinary natural amphitheater and relies really heavily on its proximity to, you know, other urban areas.

Speaker 2:
[43:43] And the way you describe Pakistan as the kind of symbol of development, first of all that reminded me also in the way of New Haven, Connecticut, which also became the sort of recipient of by far more than any other city in the United States of sort of urban redevelopment funds and also became the laboratory for these ideas. And then later became a kind of symbol of the way these ideas went wrong. New Haven, Connecticut, and also, frankly, Pakistan in some sense, these ideas of development that we've been discussing eventually became the objects of criticism. They earned poor reputation and Pakistan itself, I think similarly over the course of the 1970s, became, one could say, maybe continued to be a poster child of development, but in perhaps in the wrong way. And I'm curious how Islamabad fared specifically as a city along the way in this process.

Speaker 3:
[44:46] Well, I think the crucial thing to say is that unlike New Haven, Connecticut, what a comparison, maybe only on this show. You know, it's not a declining post-industrial, I'll stop right there, because it's located, unlike New Haven, Connecticut, on one of the oldest thoroughfares, highways in human civilization, right? So it may be a new town, but it is built on the Great Trunk Road. This is the Great Trunk Road that Alexander the Great's armies travelled down. So this is the Trunk Road that connects Tehran to Kabul to Islamabad, to Lahore, across to Delhi, and then to Calcutta, and then up to Dhaka. So this is like, you know, one of the great highways of human existence and human civilization. And so you build a new town on there, and it's not quite the same thing as reconstructing New Haven. It's a, you know, you get growth, and yes, indeed, Pakistan falls on the hard times. But politically, of course, it's absolutely central. And in the 80s, with the ramping up of the joint US-Saudi effort in Afghanistan, Pakistan becomes the strategic base for that project. That attracts a lot of money resource to the political capital of Pakistan, and crucially, also very large amounts of Saudi money. So what sort of country in Islamic state is going to be, because Pakistan identifies as such, is of course dependent on the flux of Islamic theology and Islamic politics. And one of the things that happens with the great oil boom of the 70s and the huge increase in the standing of Saudi is a reorientation. I mean, it's important to recognize that Pakistan, one of the reasons why Ayub Khan wanted to face west is he wants to face away from India and Bangladesh and Bengal and towards Medina, right? It wants to face towards Mecca. It wants to face towards the great center of Islamic culture in the Gulf. And Pakistan, if you look on the map, right, it shares a border with Iran. It's a short hop from Karachi to the Gulf. It's just across the Arabian Sea. So that was a natural kind of development as well. And Islamabad becomes the beneficiary, if one can put it like that, of very large scale Saudi investment, the building of giant mosques. We've seen this around the world. The Saudis are great sponsors of mosque building, but it also goes with Wahhabism and the particularly hard branch of Islam that the clerical faction in Saudi Arabia pushes. And by the standards, I've never had the privilege of going to Pakistan, so I just went on the tourism websites. And it seems as though Islamabad is the chill city in Pakistan, in an otherwise hubbub driven, incredibly dynamic, 24-7, extraordinarily population-dense, dynamic. I've seen the other end of the Great Trunk Road. I've actually been up the route from Calcutta by way of Bihar, across the plain to Delhi. So I've seen that slice of the Great Trunk Road. And apparently Islamabad is like a haven of haven, inverted commas of calm, of low density. By comparison, its official population in the early 2020s is still only, it's extraordinary, one million people. But it's part of a conurbation which includes the military great hub of Walpindi, which is five or six million people and serves in a sense as a kind of low wage labor center for Islamabad. And I think this perpetuates this question of what is it? Like, is it the most Pakistani city? Or apparently as one of the drive goes, well, no, it's like Pakistan starts 12 miles down the road in Walpindi. So it's the least Pakistani city. It sounds in any case fascinating. And currently, I think, dominated by security architecture. So hard to travel around the city because of massive concrete blockades everywhere. Obviously, Pakistan is the hub of a violent politics that really began in earnest with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and hasn't really settled ever since. So a truly dramatic story with a war with India last year, like a smoldering war with the former protégés of the Pakistani Secret Service, the Taliban in Afghanistan. So a true cauldron pressure cooker.

Speaker 2:
[49:42] Yeah. I wonder if this qualifies as Duxiades' plan, yeah, working the way he envisioned, or is this, in a way, yeah, the city adapting its needs over time, and, yeah, maybe getting more securitized necessarily as a result of these tensions in the country and the region. But I guess I do want to end by asking about its current role now as the venue for peace talks between the United States and Iran, and I'm curious if we should be surprised by that role. I mean, on the one hand, you know, Pakistan is assuming this international role at a time when itself it's in political crisis. Its opposition leader is in jail, Imran Khan, famously, and, you know, its country is struggling economically and partly a direct result of the war. So perhaps maybe that makes it an obvious place to host these talks and I guess projecting forward, you know, does this war offer some silver linings in terms of where Pakistan and its government may move going forward?

Speaker 3:
[50:57] Yeah, I mean, it was perhaps typically, it turns out that he's not in jail, Imran Khan in Islamabad. He's in jail down the road in Raalpindi. So like that, I think might be symbolic of the way in which this relationship works. Dirty work is done somewhere else. I mean, it's really fascinating. I want to kind of give a variety of different political and historical angles on this current situation because it is just so fascinating. I mean, on the one hand, the role of Pakistan as a go-between in the good old days of early Pakistan development was totally obvious, right? Pakistan was a key ally of the United States in the Cold War. It wasn't India crucially because India was non-aligned and right that actually de facto meant quite closely aligned with the Soviet Union, Pakistan squarely wasn't. But Pakistan, on the other hand, because of its beef with India also had good relations with China. And so in the Kissinger-Nixon historic opening towards China, the Pakistanis played the key intermediating role. So this isn't the first time that Pakistan has done complicated diplomatic business for the US. And in the war in Afghanistan, the secret war in Afghanistan, American collaboration with the ISI, with the Pakistanis' notorious intelligence service was super close. So Pakistan historically has had this position of being a key player. On the other hand, it is a lethally dangerous also for Pakistan. So bring us all the way up to the present moment. On the day after the Israeli-American attack on Iran, there was a huge riot in Karachi, and the Marine Guard of the US Consulate in Karachi shot down to death in cold blood, 10 Pakistani protesters and wounded 60. It was kind of unreported story at the beginning of the war. That's more Pakistanis killed in this war than there were Americans at that. So the war came home to Pakistan straight away because there's a big, big, big, sheer minority and in general sympathy, of course, the Iranians and the Gulf States in this horrible conflict. So in a sense, they had to react. They didn't have a choice, right? They have a 900 kilometer border with Iran. This is not, you know, there's no, there's no safe space here for Pakistan. And then take a third kind of slice at this. And when you reconstruct the Pakistani timeline of the last five years and where the key figures come from, and you say the Pakistani government, what is the Pakistani government right now? Where did this Field Marshal Minier come from who apparently is like Trump's favorite Field Marshal? Does he, well, I don't think America has any Field Marshals right now and he doesn't like America's generals very much anyway. But like, where did they come from? It's like a, if you had the script, a polycrisis movie, it would be Pakistan. It's truly amazing, like how the forces of crisis have come together there. So coming out of COVID, which back to Pakistan because they have huge remittance income. Like in a good year, they get 40 billion, 50 billion dollars in remittance income from workers, overwhelmingly working in the Gulf, right? It's this Islamic world that's centered around the Gulf labor market. So they lose that. Then in 2021, there's the gas price shock well before the Russian invasion, which destabilizes all of the poorer gas importers. So the Pakistani electricity system starts to fail. Inflation spikes. In the spring of 2022, there's essentially a parliamentary coup against Imran Khan as Prime Minister, which destabilizes the political system. The current administration takes over at that point. So Prime Minister Sharif with the military in the background. Then in the summer of 2022, there are those epic floods, which basically submerge, I think, about a third of Pakistan, which are totally devastating. By the winter of 2022-23, Pakistan is on the brink of sovereign default. The most severe financial crisis it's suffered since really the founding in 47. And in May 2023, there are street battles between Imran Khan supporters and the military. And the guy who is commanding the military is, guess who? Trump's favorite field marshal, Field Marshal Muneer, who then locks down, they arrest Imran Khan, they send Imran Khan to jail. And then in 2025, fight a shooting war with India, which they kind of win. Only then for the Israelis to assault Qatar and the Saudis to turn to Pakistan to sign a nuclear weapons deal. And then we're here sitting asking ourselves, why are the Pakistanis negotiating this? Well, I think if you're in Islamabad, you're going, someone's got to take charge of this situation, right? Someone's got to somehow calm this down because whichever way we move in the current moment, if oil prices spike, we're in a pickle, right? We end up asking the Saudis for money. If the Saudis are struck, we notionally have a security alliance with them. If the Americans are striking Iran, we can't vouch for safety and security in Karachi. And if the American consulate is attached, American marines will rampage and shoot down our own citizens in cold blood, which we're not at all confident of being able to control anyway, because the most legitimate politician in the country, such as he is, is in jail because we put him there. And only last year we were fighting a full on multiple missile exchange war. This is a novel level of escalation. Previously, it's been ground troops or aircraft, but this was missile exchanges between two nuclear armed powers. Like, you know, this is just the point. Like the polycrisis is Pakistan's experience, literally everything and the whole voodoo. So yeah, and the current people are serious players. Field Marshal Muneer is obviously somebody who's got, you know, he's an impressive character and he wants to try and broker some kind of deal. So I don't know whether we can call it a silver lining, but it's agency. This is the new world of polycentric agency in which a player like Pakistan, even as stressed as Pakistan, can't simply sit back and take the shocks, right? They need to be proactive. They need to be in some way trying to shape their environment because otherwise the intensity of disruption that they can be subject to is just mind-blowing. It's hard to think of any place which has gone through that combination of war, political upheaval, economic shock, and climate hit in a shorter space of time as this.

Speaker 2:
[57:51] Yeah. It's a good reminder that when these negotiations happen and that the places they happen in are not just the background, they are also the active setting for these events. And, yeah, Islamabad is no exception. I don't know if JD Vance and Muhammad Qali Buff, the Iranian negotiator, will have an occasion to tour the city. Probably not. Probably not together, I'm guessing. But in any case, we should stop this conversation here for now. And we will be back, of course, in a week with new data points. Ones and Tooze is written and edited by Adam and me and produced by Claudia Tady. The show is made possible through the support of foreign policy readers and Ones and Tooze listeners. As always, we love getting listener feedback. You can leave voice messages on the Ones and Tooze home page on foreignpolicy.com, or email us, that's podcasts at foreignpolicy.com, or you can tweet us, that's at Ones and Tooze pod. I'm Cameron Abadi. Thank you very much for listening, and we'll be back in your feed next week. Every year, the Lionel Gelber Prize honors the world's best book on international affairs published in English. The prize is presented by the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. The 2026 winner is Francis J. Gavin for his examination of how history can help us understand and navigate the complex and confusing world around us. It's called Thinking Historically, The Guide to Statecraft and Strategy, published by Yale University Press. Gavin will deliver the 2026 Lionel Gelber Prize Lecture on April 15, 2026, and you can register to attend online. Visit gelber.munkschool.utoronto.ca for more details on the 2026 Lionel Gelber Prize.