Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are each other’s wild cards. Each is the other’s out-of-region game-changer, a factor that must play into the calculations of all other players in the Middle East and South Asia alike. Think you’ve got the complex equation sorted out of Arabs vs. Persians, Sunnis vs. Shi’a, Ba’athists vs. Islamists? Well, if […]
The appearance of Colonel Gulmurod Khalimov in an Islamic State propaganda video on May 27 sent a chill across Central Asia. The head of Tajikistan’s Special Assignment Police Unit (OMON), a key element in President Emomali Rahmon’s security apparatus, had disappeared shortly before. In the video he promised to return to wage violent jihad. Read […]
Forget the loons and the kooks, the puff-chested braggarts and the incorrigible denialists, and ask yourself this: what is the Pak-India relationship really about? At its core, as defined in the present era, stripped of hype and hyperbole, denuded of posturing and silliness, what is it that Pakistan and India need of each other in strategic […]
China’s interest in deepening its involvement in Pakistan is nothing new. What has changed and has enabled the Chinese to intensify their focus on Pakistan, is the effective end of the West’s, and in particular the United States’, military operations in Afghanistan in 2015. Accordingly, NATO’s departure from Afghanistan has had two consequences: it has […]
Residents of Bamiyan got a rare opportunity over the weekend: a chance to once again see giant Buddhas that have been piles of rubble for over a decade. 3-D projection technology has already been used to resurrect dead music legends and pipe busy politicians into campaign rallies, and now it’s been employed to recreate a […]
Is India being increasingly cut out of Afghanistan despite years of sustained engagement and considerable investment in the war-torn country? Is it the way the cookie crumbles? China is moving in and the Americans are moving out while the British mess around the edges. The big gamer and gainer is Pakistan and its military intelligence establishment. […]
The unit best known for killing Osama bin Laden has been converted into a global manhunting machine with limited outside oversight. Read Here – The New York Times
The reasons for the escalating Indian rhetoric against Pakistan are not far to find. First, India is frustrated that Pakistan has not wilted under the pressure New Delhi hoped to generate by cutting off talks and ‘isolating’ Pakistan by its ‘terrorism’ accusations. On the contrary, Pakistan has evolved a more normal relationship with the US, […]
The appointment of a former Director, Intelligence Bureau as envoy for Af-Pak and West Asia indicates that the Modi government is looking at the entire Islamic world to India’s West through an intelligence-security prism and not a diplomatic-cultural construct. Modi’s Pakistan policy is conditioned by a similar mind-set of talking but not negotiating, while building […]
It’s certainly not for lack of power. From 1846 to 1945, the United States had a minuscule peacetime army, but won almost every major campaign. After World War II, Washington constructed the most expensive military machine that ever existed and endured seven decades of martial frustration. Indeed, power is part of the reason the United States […]
looking beyond borders 