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How big a catch is Abu Faraj al-Libbi, a 40-year-old Libyan married to a Pakistani, fluent in Urdu and Arabic and suffering from lucoderma, whose arrest was announced by the Pakistani authorities at Islamabad on May 4,2005?
While the UP Sunni Central Waqf Board is well within its right to appeal to the Supreme Court against the Allahabad High Court verdict, the VHP's reaction does not represent the people's will at all.
This weekend at Goa Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his foreign policy team will undertake a significant manoeuvre with SAARC grouping gasping for breath
The violent uprising of the people of Andijan in Uzbekistan on May 13,2005, seems to have been crushed for the time being by the Uzbek authorities with heavy force, resulting in the death of at least 20 civilians. The anti-Government elements, which organised the uprising, claim to have captured 30 Uzbek soldiers and to be keeping them in their custody.
The Libyan case is vastly different from that of Syria. The maverick Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi had few friends in the Arab League. Unlike Libya, Syria is a critical element of the regional balance of power in the Middle East.
Saeed Naqvi, Distinguished Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation, traveled to Bahrain, Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, Baghdad, Najaf, Amman, Cairo, Jerusalem and Ramallah after the Arab Spring broke out. Earlier, he visited Tunisia, Iran, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, Western Sahara and Libya. In this paper, he shares his first-hand experiences and discussions with leaders and diplomats, many of whom have requested anonymity. This paper follows
To understand the strategic significance of the second summit meeting between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and US President Barack Obama, it is necessary to look beyond the very important and tangible outcomes that the two leaders have unveiled.
China’s growing footprint in Southeast Asia, the Pacific and Indian Ocean has prompted closer cooperation between the Quad and organisations such as
This paper analyses the domestic compulsions in Australia, India, Japan and the US that are influencing their positions on the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad). The paper notes that as the four countries are becoming increasingly aware of the risks posed by China’s rise over the last few years, they have sought to converge to the Quad. For Australia, the concerns are over trade dependency on China, and China’s sharp power projection and
Whatever be the demands of the Baloch nationalists, the situation now is that of a growing humanitarian crisis that the rest of the world chooses to ignore. Continued indifference will not help the problem go away but will only exacerbate it further and make it more intractable.
Kunduz has a large ethnic mix of Pashtun, Uzbeks, Tajiks, and others - all of whom wish to hold the province. The recent move to capture Kunduz by the Taliban is significant in many ways. It is the first major engagement by the Taliban after Mullah Akhtar Mansour succeeded Mullah Omar.
Though it will be difficult for the Central Government and the States to agree upon certain foreign policy issues, they should work together on issues of national importance-such as terrorism and foreign policy-in order to enact policies that benefit its citizens.
In Moscow’s calculus, the Crocus attacks require a thorough investigation to ascertain the actors involved in the attacks, apart from the Islamic St
From the available facts of the jihadi terrorist carnage at the North Ossetian town of Beslan in Russia on September 3, 2004, the following reconstruction is possible:
The West has finally woken up to something that strategic analysts in India have been saying for decades: Saudi Arabia funded the Pakistani nuclear programme. In this connection, we have three questions to analyse; First, how valid is this information? Second, how is it then that Saudi Arabia gets away with so much? Third, why is Nato and Israeli intelligence taken seriously but not the Indians?
In January 2000, the Government of National Capital Territory of Delhi initiated a 'Bhagidari Programme' as an attempt to resolve the various problems being faced by the city's residents. Smt. Sheila Dikshit, the Honorable Chief Minister of Delhi, visited the Observer Research Foundation campus on April 10, 2008 to make a presentation on the programme. The discussion was facilitated by Ambassador M. Rasgotra. This discourse is an abridged documen
China is looking at their problems and working on them and willing to shift established positions if the situation so demands, while India seems to be trapped in the verities of the past and are unable to move beyond tired slogans and nostrums.
The problem with imposing sanctions on a country which has the world's third largest proven reserves of oil and second largest conventional natural gas reserves is that the implications are felt globally. The price of oil is highly correlated throughout the world due to market arbitrage.
There is no universally accepted international cyber treaty. However, the Council of Europe?s Budapest Convention on Cybercrime, which has been in force for a decade and has been ratified by 44 countries, is the closest.
The good old days of media diplomacy launched by Washington and London to justify the Iraq invasion seem to be getting over.The American and the British administration had successfully hijacked media spaces across the world to build legitimacy for the offensive on Iraq.
On June 22, 2004, over 200 well-armed persons simultaneously raided three towns in the Ingushetia Republic of Russia, adjoining Chechnya, and attacked police stations, government buildings and checkpoints with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades. The Russian and the local security forces were totally taken by surprise. Ninety-five persons were killed, the majority of them members of the security forces and other Government officials,
There is an urgent need for the appointment of a new commission, on the footsteps of the Sarkaria Commission and the Justice E Venkataramaiah Commission, to review Centre-State relations, and State-to-State relations.
If the Obama Administration avoids the temptation of returning to business as usual with Rawalpindi, it has an opportunity to get both Afghanistan and Pakistan right.
India needs to take a broad approach to its foreign policy. One of the biggest mistakes Delhi could make would be to see the Indo-Vietnam relationship as simply a means for countering China.
China looms large in the trilateral in most matters from security to trade
Previous attempts at building alternate multilateral institutions like the New Development Bank and Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank have been hij
The idea of energy security which was hitherto rooted in the supply and price of oil has now been expanded to include concerns over the availability and trade of coal. The key concern is the demand growth from China and its impact on coal price and availability, given the level of concentration in its sources of supply.
China is touting its vision of linking two Indian projects (Mausam and Spice Route) with its One Belt One Road (OBOR) initiative. China's main goal is to coordinate regional policy so that each country's economic development plan becomes part of a larger regional vision.
While West Asia is volatile, the Chinese are beginning to get more active in Afghanistan, retain their pre-eminence in Pakistan and strengthen ties with Iran. In fact, Iran is the third leg of China?s policy in our immediate western neighbourhood. The Chinese are obviously making preparations for the time when peace returns to the Arab world, which might leave a stronger Iran.
The fall in the value of the dollar would be worrying the central bankers in China because the value of their reserves also declines simultaneously. The promotion of the SDR agenda by the Chinese is certainly no coincidence given the position of the dollar today.
Chittagong Port is a step towards strengthening India-Bangladesh bilateral ties and is mutually beneficial to both the South-Asian nations.
Despite the current economic and political upheaval in Pakistan, the Sino-Pakistani strategic nexus remains stable
Yemen is the cradle to the Arabs, Iraq their grave. So goes an Arab proverb. Since March 2003 Iraq has certainly been the grave of a great many Arabs ¿ men, women, and children caught in the crossfire of a conflict wantonly unleashed to sustain a misbegotten thesis.
The Congress is confronted with an existential crisis that on the one hand threatens to make the country’s oldest party extinct and on the other pro
The Centre has chipped in by banning the export of beef and cows, thereby minimising the incentive for cow slaughter.
Libya, in the throes of a civil war, now represents the ugly facet of the much-hyped Arab Spring.
India and China, the two pillars of the dawning Asian century, are still prisoners to their perceived insecurities and imagined magnificence. They seem condemned to "never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity," as one wise man had once remarked. And Mr Manmohan Singh's China visit has added yet another chapter to this narrative.
The decline has gone unnoticed because of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War
The three synchronised Delhi blasts of October 29,2005, have proved¿¿if further proof was needed¿¿that the motivation and the morale of the pan-Islamic jihadi terrorists belonging to the International Islamic Front (IIF) formed by Osama bin Laden in 1998 continue to remain undamaged, despite the successes scored by our security agencies in neutralising many of their sleeper cells.
