The silent majority in Pakistan is not moderate Move over Wikileaks, the sit-back-and-take-notice piece of information comes from Pew Global Attitudes Project. It’s latest report on attitudes towards extremism shows just how bad the world’s Pakistan problem is. We are used to hearing the cliche that the majority of Pakistanis are moderate. Well, this is ...
The new British prime minister is right to start with trade and right to start with Bangalore Most commentators are putting it mildly, but the numbers show that India-UK trade atrophied in the last decade. From being India’s third largest trading partner at the beginning of this decade, the UK is now the thirteenth, and ...
Despite the Wikileaks documents, US policy on Pakistan is unlikely to change The immediate response by President Barack Obama’s media managers to the release of thousands of war logs has been to blame the Bush administration. “The period of time covered in these documents (January 2004-December 2009)” the White House says “is before the President ...
It’s all downhill for Kayani now You would be foolish to think that you can rub off the entire top echelon of the Pakistani army’s general staff on the wrong side and get on with life as usual. Look at the last two power transitions in that country—Nawaz Sharif was ousted because he made the ...
The home ministry finally has a spokesman. But there’s a long way to go In an op-ed in the Indian Express in October 2009, Sushant K Singh and I had called for the government to “release accurate and factual information to the public with unprecedented timeliness. In this age of inexpensive technology and connectivity, there ...
A pessimistic prognosis regarding Pakistan’s transformation Imagine that General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani wakes up one fine morning and decides that the Talibanisation of his country now risked destroying the military establishment that nurtured it since 1947. The militant groups that the army had used to attack India and Afghanistan on the cheap were not only ...
Highlighting the futility of engaging Pakistan’s civilian officials is a good thing “(People) on the Indian side need to ask” writes Siddharth Varadarajan in The Hindu “what the home secretary hoped to achieve by saying the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate of the Pakistan army had been involved in 26/11 “from the beginning till the end.”” To ...
New Delhi should realise that it can’t do business with the impotent, flippant and tiresome characters in Islamabad. Let’s face it: After Asif Ali Zardari was marginalised by the Pakistani military-jihadi complex through the device of the 26/11 attack on Mumbai there is no purpose—save ‘political rationality’—in talking to the motley bunch of slick political ...
Why India-Pakistan ‘talks’ are like penalty kicks in football In a study published in 2009, Michael Bar-Eli, Ofer H Azar, and Yotam Lurie found that when it came to penalty kicks in football, the optimal strategy for the goalkeeper was to stay put (and not dive in either direction). For the kicker, the optimal strategy ...
Until we know what the game is about, cyber strategy must be stewarded by the civilian authorities George F Kennan, whose views shaped US foreign policy towards the Soviet Union in the aftermath of the Second World War had this to say in 1996. “My thoughts about containment were of course distorted by the people ...