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There was space in Pakistan for open discourse upto the Zia period. It is from Zia's Pakistan that poets like Faiz Ahmad Faiz and Ahmad Faraz began to leave for other countries. From London, Farigh Bukhari wailed: "God, forgive me: these days it seems that Islam was only for tyrants and murderers like Yazid"
The Observer Research Foundation, in partnership with the Center for Contemporary Conflict (CCC), Naval Post-graduate School, California, USA, and the Islamabad Policy Research Institute (IPRI), Pakistan undertook a project, Crisis and Escalation in South Asia: The 2002 India-Pakistan Military Standoff....
Speaking at an interaction with visiting former diplomats from Pakistan, at Observer Research Foundation (ORF), New Delhi, on April 7, 2005, Vice Admiral (Retired) K.K. Nayyar called for a complete "U-turn" in the policies of both India and Pakistan for normalising relations between the two neighbours.
One of the questions that neither the Bush administration nor the Musharraf government has so far investigated is the involvement of Pakistan's military in the proliferation activities of nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan.
If the Pakistan-TTP talks succeed Pakistan may actually metamorphose from a hybrid theocracy to a complete theocracy, as Ayesha Siddiqa argues, because the Taliban, good or bad, want implementation of the Sharia. Thus all would depend on how far Pakistan's military and civilian leadership want to go to accommodate Taliban demands or prefer to wage war against TTP.
The US Treasury Department's decision to designate the gangster based in Pakistan, Dawood Ibrahim, as a terrorist on October 16, 2003, was undoubtedly belated but could still prove to be a milestone in the War on Terrorism if Washington could arm-twist President General Pervez Musharraf to hand over the criminal to the interrogators for questioning about his links with al Qaida and other terrorist groups.
Despite the positive connotations of a de-radicalisation initiative in Pakistan's Swat, lead by Pakistan's army, the relationship between the military and terrorist groups still remains unclear.
History is all set to repeat itself in the subcontinent. As usual, the search for a permanent thaw in the India-Pakistan relationship seems to be hitting a big bump in the days ahead that might possibly derail the bilateral negotiation process initiated during the Islamabad SAARC Summit in January this year.
The killing of Punjab Governor Salman Taseer on January 4 in Islamabad and the wide-spread adulation of his killer, a Punjab Police commando, has raised a whole litany of fears and dilemma in, and about, Pakistan.
The nature of nuclear threat that India faces is not "binary" as India's concerns related with Pakistan and China are intertwined. The history behind China-Pakistan nuclear collusion makes it important to look into the "interlink".
As an emerging power in the current multipolar global order, India can use the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) to protect, promote, and project its geostrategic and geoeconomic interests. The SCO is also a platform for India to reaffirm its commitment to revive and deepen its centuries-old civilisational, spiritual, and cultural ties with other member countries. This paper explores India's priorities at the SCO, chiefly connectivity, coun
Monday's terrorist attack on Dinanagar police station in Gurdaspur district, the first major terror attack in Punjab since 2002, and that took the lives of 11 persons, is a puzzle. This could be a routine warning from the LeT to both the Indian and Pakistani governments against getting too close to each other.
The defence component of the national budget accounts for 14% of central government expenditure, but gets less than 5% of media space. Virtually no discussion on the issue takes place in Parliament either. A call for increased resources for national defence usually goes out only when defence spending by Pakistan and China makes headlines.
India is ranked third only to Bangladesh and Pakistan for worst air quality. PM 2.5 concentration in India is 5.2 times above the WHO annual air quality guideline.
Indo-Pak rapprochement has been stuck in a rut for some time with Pakistan insisting on tangible progress on Kashmir and India reiterating that it is necessary to first build confidence by resolving relatively less intractable problems.
Pakistani establishment would have to be out of its mind to enter Osama bin Laden's Abbotabad hideout on a white charger. Such foolhardiness would swell the ranks of Jihadi outfits in Pakistan. Murderer of Punjab Governor, Salman Taseer would resurface as a model.
Asim Munir’s power grab in Pakistan makes South Asia a more dangerous neighbourhood. The Pak military is no longer a state within a state. It is the state
China's decision to sell two additional nuclear power reactors to Pakistan has dimensions that need to be better understood. China is persisting with its internationally destabilizing proliferation activity.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has given enough reasons for President Pervez Musharraf to feel at ease. His unambiguous expression of not letting the peace process between the two countries flag should lay to rest speculations and allegations in Pakistan about India's commitment to peace in the region.
As Pakistan struggles to prod the Taliban to act on militant groups, its dual policy of supporting extremist groups has come back to haunt it
Indo-Pak relations appear to be on hold largely because of complications created by the Afghan situation. Part of the problem are Pakistani suspicions about Indian ambitions in Afghanistan. Former Foreign Minister Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri believes there are misperceptions on both sides.
On the eve of the February 18 elections, no two people in Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi were agreed on the certainty of elections taking place. Elections cannot take place, it was argued then, because the establishment will not risk an open-ended process which might produce inconvenient results. In the Pakistani context, the establishment has always meant the Army, the bureaucracy, big landlords and the United States.
The United States (US) is recalibrating its strategy in the Indian Ocean, driven by the region’s rapidly evolving geopolitical and geostrategic landscape. The US approach has moved from unilateral dominance to a more collaborative strategy that emphasises shared leadership through a technology-driven security paradigm. This paradigm supports a rule-based order where regional stakeholders are empowered to adopt more significant roles. The founda
India has many reasons to nurse a nuclear grievance against China. For, Beijing's decision to arm Pakistan with nuclear weapons has given Rawalpindi the impunity to pursue cross-border terrorism against India. But Delhi has no reason at all to blame Beijing for its own failures on the nuclear policy front.
No one believes that India would wipe out Lahore, if Pakistan used a low yield nuclear weapon against an Indian military formation, and that, too, in Pakistan.
There is a sort of consensus among the security agencies that this attack couldn’t have happened without the Pakistani army’s involvement.
Neither the drone attacks - a significant technological innovation in air power - nor direct cross-border military raids address the ultimate source of terror, the Pakistan army. They merely target the manifestation of the problem.
Why do Indian and Pakistani leaders succumb to the predictable? There's so much déjà vu about their peace process being derailed by border firings and terrorist strikes that the wider world has begun to yawn
With Al Qaeda far from being vanquished, and Pakistan and Bangladesh inevitably turning into jihadi outposts in the emerging pan-Islamist network in Asia, India is more than likely to be caught in the vicious tail-wind of the next wave of terrorism, gathering momentum since 9/11.
The SCO is not another SAARC, and its member states will most likely not sit by and watch their agenda hijacked by a bilateral dispute.
The Af-Pak conflict's center of gravity has over the past five years shifted decisively to the very heart of Pakistan. Hence, the ultimate ace up Pakistan's sleeve is to search seriously for peace with India, step by step, but sincerely.
The US Quadrennial Defense Review panel's recent (July 29, 2010) report to the US Congress had a very telling remark about Pakistan Army and its intelligence agencies which raises a whole new spectre of violence the world is likely to confront in the years ahead.
President Bush notified the US Congress on March 25,2005, of the intention of his administration to clear the sale of F-16 aircraft to Pakistan.
The activities of Ghulam Nabi Fai of the Kashmiri American Council, which became public after his arrest, show how vulnerable the India-Pakistan engagement could be to Pakistan Army?s dogged pursuit of anti-India policies.
The terrorist bombing of Shahbaz Qalandar shrine on 16 February is an act of infamy for which the Islamic State has claimed responsibility.
In January 2000, when I spoke about the concept of limited conventional wars under the nuclear threshold at an international seminar in New Delhi, there was considerable uproar in the media and the strategic community, particularly in Pakistan.
As Delhi and Washington try to develop separate, special relationships with Beijing, there is a danger of misreading each other's intentions. Both India and the US want a secure Afghanistan and moderate Pakistan, but their approaches are not always in sync. An honest conversation between Joe Biden and the Indian leaders is critical at this juncture to prevent misperceptions from derailing India-US security cooperation in Asia.
President Pervez Musharraf wrested power from Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in a bloodless coup on October 12, 1999. In the five years since then, Pakistan has found itself increasingly enmeshed in sectarian violence, economic disaster, political collapse and diplomatic isolation.
For Modi, Nawaz Sharif's willingness to show up at the launch of his government is a political bonus. If Modi is luckier than Manmohan Singh and Atal Bihari Vajpayee, he might make some sustainable progress with Pakistan.
AS THE Foreign Ministers of India and Pakistan hold their first structured political dialogue in four decades, the question of building trans-border natural gas pipelines is likely to figure prominently in the bilateral agenda.
Since September 11, 2001, Pakistan has been widely, and publicly, acclaimed as an ally in the Global War on Terrorism by the United States. Early this year, the Bush Administration presented a Bill titled Targeting Terrorists More Effectively Act of 2005 to the Congress for budgetary approval.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh could not have been more categorical when he said, in his Independence Day speech on August 15, that Pakistan was only making half-hearted attempts to dismantle terrorist infrastructure.
Someday, Gwadar port in Pakistan might well emerge as a full-fledged Chinese naval facility. For now, Karachi already serves as a major facility for the projection of Chinese naval power into the Indian Ocean.
India’s relations with China involve the four C’s — conflict, competition, cooperation and containment. The areas of conflict are well known — the border, and China’s relationship with Pakistan.
If the ISIS is not brought under control, the chances are that it could spread to Pakistan, especially Waziristan, a tribal region which plays host to most terror outfits. This could in turn affect India by means of border infiltrations.
The Taliban, ably helped by Pakistan, the US’s frontline ally in its global war on terror, has badly dented the notion of US invincibility. Despite President Joe Biden’s efforts in recent months to reassure allies that “America is back”, there is a wariness about both US commitment and its competence.
