Pakistan
Is Pakistan On Way from Failing to Failed State?

A theatre of the absurd is on display in Islamabad with the street-fighters of Imran Khan and Tahirul Qadri breaching the barricades to storm the Parliament and lay siege to the Prime Minister’s House. The denouement of this clear collapse of state....

India Can Turn Its Back on Pakistan

The Pakistan High Commissioner (HC) should not have met the Hurriyat leaders when he was asked by the Indian Foreign Secretary not to do so. Diplomatic norms obliged him to take this request communicated at such high level seriously and failure to do....

The Neighbour from Hell - India-Pakistan: Iron in the Soul

The decision to call off the scheduled Foreign Secretary level talks with Pakistan appears to have taken many by surprise, and left many in India quite unhappy. They seem to be unable to understand that a meeting between the Pakistan High Commissione....

Creeping Coup Redux: Civil-Military Relations in Pakistan

A few months before the 1999 military coup, a monthly newsmagazine in Pakistan carried a cover story titled ‘Creeping Coup’. In his second stint as Prime Minister from 1996-99, Nawaz Sharif had started involving the military in all sorts of thing....

Pak Army Ops in North Waziristan is a Tough Challenge

The Pakistan army launched Operation Zarb-e-Azb(sharp and cutting), its much delayed ground offensive against the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) in North Waziristan, on June 15, 2014. Since then, the army claims to have killed 386 TTP and Uzbek terr....

Discussion on Christine Fair’s Book

American scholar and academic Dr C Christine Fair presented her latest book “Fighting to the end: The Pakistan Army’s Way of War” before a distinguished gathering of scholars, soldiers and diplomats at the Vivekananda International Foundation o....

Vaidik - Saeed Meeting: A Case of Self-Appointed Diplomats, Self-Serving Charlatans

The meeting between internationally designated terrorist chieftain Hafiz Saeed and an Indian journalist (?) and political operator, Dr VP Vaidik, in Lahore has caused a veritable storm in not just political circles but also the media. Normally, no ey....

Karachi Airport Attack and its Portents

The terrorist strike on the Jinnah International Airport in Karachi was neither the first nor the worst attack on such a high profile target in Pakistan. Just as similar attacks in the past – the GHQ and the Parade Lane mosque in Rawalpindi, the Na....

The Warrior State: Pakistan in the Contemporary World; T V Paul; Random House India; PP 257; Price Rs 499

A Wonky State Behaving Like Warrior State In recent years, there has been a veritable deluge of books on Pakistan and all that’s wrong with that country. There have also been some books which have tried to argue, even if unconvincingly, tha....

The Message Behind Raheel Sharif Raking up Kashmir

In a speech on the occasion of Martyrs Day, the Pakistan Army chief, Gen Raheel Sharif, parroted a nearly seven decade old, and by now tired and worn out cliché that Kashmir was Pakistan’s ‘jugular vein’ and demanded a resolution to the issue ....

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