Making Israel look bad doesn’t help the Palestinians The organisers of the “Freedom Flotilla”—a convoy of ships that intended to bust the Israeli blockade of Gaza—presented the Israeli government with a stark choice: stop the convoy and lose the global PR battle, or permit it and lose that and a whole lot more. In the ...
Bigotry was an unlikely trigger “How can anyone blame a Muslim,” the Supreme Court of Pakistan asked rhetorically in a landmark 1993 judgement, “if he loses control of himself on hearing, reading or seeing such blasphemous material as has been produced (by the Ahmadis).” Initial reactions to the terrorist attack on two Ahmadi mosques in ...
Strategy in a triangular predicament In today’s Pax Indica column, I argue “that despite an alignment of interests, (India) must not always side with the United States. It must swing.” To paraphrase Henry Kissinger, India’s options toward the United States and China must always be greater than their options toward each other. It serves “our ...
Elixir of Long Life and the recipe for sugar In The Real Tripitaka: and other pieces Arthur Waley narrates an interesting episode, a side-story in the aftermath of the first armed conflict between Chinese and Indian forces (see these two posts for the background). In the summer of 648 the Chinese envoy Wang Xuance returned ...
A good chance that it has In March, Sultan Amir “Colonel Imam” Tarar and Khaled Khawaja—men deeply mixed up in the Pakistani military-jihadi complex—were kidnapped. By the end of April, Mr Khawaja was found dead. This week the government of Pakistan’s Punjab province announced that Hafiz Mohammed Saeed, the chief of the Pakistan army-linked Lashkar-e-Taiba, ...
Lula and Erdogan have cleared Tehran’s clouds In approximately one year two men will have red faces. That’s when the world will know that Brazil’s president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Turkey’s prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan were suckered by the leaders of Iran. It took Iran around 8 months to double its stockpile ...
Just say the word That Saudi Arabia and Pakistan have a secret nuclear deal is not exactly a secret. But the Guardian‘s Julian Borger has some details: According to western intelligence sources (the meeting was under Chatham House rules so I am not allowed to be more specific) the Saudi monarchy paid for up to ...
Of Vijay Chauhan, Voldemort and the Realist perspective Over at Yahoo! India columns I introduce Pax Indica, my fortnightly column. Excerpts: The underlying point is that countries operate in an anarchy, an environment where there is no overarching authority that can constrain their actions. Here, as the charismatic Vijay Dinanath Chauhan vividly explains to Commissioner ...
Why patriotic Pakistanis must channel their anger against the military-jihadi complex It is reasonable to argue that patriotic Pakistanis are angry with the United States for conducting a campaign of drone attacks in their country, even if the intended targets of the attacks are taliban militants and if the impact on innocent civilians (via the ...
…might work In today’s Viewfinder at Yahoo! India columns Amit Varma says he sees “three distinct kinds of forces in Pakistan.” One, the jehadi groups, which grow larger and more extreme because of self-perpetuating feedback loops, but are by no means the whole country. Two, the military establishment, whose incentives, as I wrote in a ...