Publications

Tragic is the word most often used to describe the life of Syed Saleem Shahzad. A celebrated Pakistani investigative journalist, Shahzad nearly became a household name in May 2011 after his mysterious murder made international headlines. Reviled by terrorists and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) alike for his penetrating reporting, months before his murder the forty-year-old reporter repeatedly warned friends of specific threats to his life from Pakistani intelligence agents. One day after publishing a report about militant infiltration into Pakistan’s security services, Shahzad was kidnapped. His body was found, dumped in a canal and bearing obvious signs of torture, two days later. Widespread accusations leveled at the ISI inside Pakistan were privately echoed by U.S. officials, marking another grim chapter in the history of the world’s most notorious intelligence service.

It is something of a truism that in Washington, bad ideas never truly go away. Instead, they keep cropping up at the most inopportune moments. So it is with American policy toward Iran. Stymied in recent months by the resilience of Iran's increasingly mature nuclear effort and complicated by the unfolding turmoil of the “Arab Spring,” policymakers inside the Beltway are once again flirting with the idea that some sort of diplomatic rapprochement with the Islamic Republic is in fact possible.