The United States has waged three wars since Al Qaeda’s terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001: against Al Qaeda, in Afghanistan, and in Iraq. The first two were forced upon the US, but the third was the result of a willful, deliberate decision by former President George W. Bush, taken on ideological grounds and, most […]
Pakistan is on the verge of an historic moment: This spring, for the first time, an elected administration will hand off power to another one after serving out its term. The Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) government, which came into power in 2008 following reasonably free and fair elections, holds a number of dubious distinctions — […]
U.S. sanctions that went into effect on February 6 also make it nearly impossible for Iran to repatriate foreign currency. India currently buys Iranian oil by paying into an in-country escrow account managed by the Iranian government. India’s oil purchases now act as a kind of domestic stimulus: India used to pay for oil in […]
Instead of continuing their endless battling, the United States and Pakistan should acknowledge that their interests simply do not converge enough to make them strong partners. Giving up the fiction of an alliance would free up Washington to explore new ways of achieving its goals in South Asia. And it would allow Islamabad to finally […]
It wasn’t Barack Obama’s doing — at least not fully. The crowds in Paris and Berlin, and the Muslims in Cairo and Karachi, eager to be done with President George W. Bush, took the new standard-bearer of American power as one of their own, a cosmopolitan man keen to break with the embattled certitude of […]
It is striking that, more than a decade after America‘s 9/11 wars began, the U.S. military has not conducted a probing review of what it did wrong in handling the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and how to do better next time. Even as the Vietnam War wound down, the U.S. Army took a hard […]
In the eyes of the rest of the world, war-torn Afghanistan is a place with a beaten-down infrastructure, the minimum of modern amenities and certainly none of the services made possible by the latest technological advances powering the Internet, financial services and telecommunications. Surprisingly, however, Afghanistan is on the leading edge of the mobile-money and banking revolution sweeping […]
Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari arrives in Iran today to sign a series of economic agreements, including one that finalizes the Iran-Pakistan natural gas pipeline. At the end of January, the two sides agreed to set up a joint construction company to build the portion of the pipeline that will be on Pakistani soil. Iran is […]
Pakistan is in the grips of militancy because of its fraught relationship with India, with which it has fought three wars and innumerable skirmishes since the countries separated in 1947. Militants were cultivated as an equalizer, to make Pakistan safer against a much larger foe. But they have done the opposite, killing Pakistanis at home […]
President Barack Obama begins his second term with a new national security team in the making. Although at this time only John Kerry has been confirmed, its seem likely that most, if not all of his key nominees (former Senator Chuck Hagel, John Brennan and Jack Lew) will secure Senate confirmation in the coming weeks. […]
looking beyond borders 