China recently opened its domestic satellite navigation network to commercial use across the Asia-Pacific region. The move underscored China’s emergence as an independent space power challenging the primacy of the United States, Russia, Europe and Japan. The network offers a still-to-be-proven alternative in the region to the well-established and highly accurate U.S. global positioning system (GPS), […]
Shinzo Abe is known to be staunchly pro-Indian. Not only did he describe strengthening bilateral ties as extremely important to Japan’s interests in his 2006 book Utsukushii Kuni E (Towards a Beautiful Country), but one of his major foreign policy initiatives during his previous tenure as PM was establishing a new vision for bilateral ties with India. […]
As the 2014 date for the withdrawal of most foreign troops from Afghanistan approaches, the country faces two starkly different futures. One is a return to the civil war conditions of the 1990s that brought disaster and disunity. In this scenario Afghanistan is abandoned by the international community before falling prey to the machinations of […]
When a 70-year-old Indian grandmother decided she wanted to spend the rest of her days living with her sons in the disputed province of Kashmir, she probably had no idea that she was about to spark a potentially catastrophic clash between two of the world’s most implacable nuclear foes. For it now appears that an […]
In his new book, “The Great Convergence: Asia, the West and the Logic of One World,” Kishore Mahbubani, dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore, at last rises to the challenge. In a way, it is no surprise that a former UN ambassador from one of the smallest countries in Asia has the largest vision. […]
Diplomatic historians may mark the 1962 war as the beginning of India’s slow ascent to great power status and a force to be reckoned with in 21st century Asian power politics. Yet, to this day, India’s foreign policy is – more than most other emerging titans – constrained by a quest for internal security and […]
2012 was a year of success on the battlefield for the US/ NATO International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and Afghanistan National Security Forces (ANSF), with significant militant retreat. There was decrease in Taliban activities in the hotbed of insurgency in the south — Helmand, Zabul and Kandahar provinces. We saw calm in the region as […]
In late December, on the fifth anniversary of his mother’s assassination and with his family’s mausoleum in view, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari stood before a massive crowd at Garhi Khuda Bakhsh, a village in Sindh province, and was anointed as the last great hope for Pakistan’s most prominent political dynasty. Bilawal’s father, Asif Ali Zardari — […]
The validity of our strategic objectives towards Pakistan should not be allowed to be distorted by any jingoistic reaction to the incident in Jammu & Kashmir on January 8, 2013, in which two Indian soldiers were killed well inside Indian territory by a Pakistani Army group and where one of them was allegedly decapitated. While Pakistan has […]
MARGARET THATCHER said that you cannot buck the market. But if the experience of India’s government over the last few months is anything to go by, you can charm the pants off it. My e-mail inbox is overflowing with missives from the finance ministry that promise a bounce in the economy, assert a step change […]
looking beyond borders 