Trying to understand why terrorists are attacking Lahore
As Pakistan’s internal jihadi civil war intensifies, it is important to note that the groups targeting Pakistani cities—specifically the Pakistani army and law-enforcement agencies—are not the same ones as those that the Pakistani military establishment uses to attack India.
It is highly likely that the perpetrators of this [...]
Getting Saudi Arabia to take responsibility for Pakistan’s actions is in India’s interests
At a recent conference in Abu Dhabi on emerging powers and the Middle East, one of the arguments I made was that a stable Afghanistan requires a balance of two distinct sets of powers—India-Iran-Russia on the one hand, and China-Pakistan-Saudi Arabia on the [...]
Shouldn’t he tell his boss “to be alive to the impact of his government’s counter-terrorism strategies on minorities?”
The New York Times reports that a “radical Islamic group planning a protest march through the streets of a town that has achieved iconic status in Britain for honoring the passing hearses of British soldiers killed in [...]
And can we not get distracted please!
At a time when the astute businessmen running the Times of India are exploiting (via Oh, Teri!) the quintessentially Indian tendency to allow hope to triumph over experience, it is all the more important not to lose sight of reality. At the core of one of the most significant [...]
India must expand its intelligence capacity in Western countries
Until US authorities arrested David Coleman Headley/Dawood Gilani and Tahawwur Hussain Rana no public account of India’s investigations into the 26/11 attacks on Mumbai even mentioned the Chicago connection. It is highly likely that Indian investigators had no clue as to Headley and Rana’s existence, leave alone [...]
One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom-fighter, as they don’t say these days
Those of us who first started reading Pakistani newspapers in the late 1990s—Jai Ho internet!—will remember that in ‘Held Kashmir’, ‘mujahids’ frequently used to ‘embrace martyrdom’ or ’shahadat’, often while carrying out ‘fidayeen’ attacks on the Indian army. So it is amusing to [...]
Complicated, the matter is
One more country has joined the queue. “We have heard,” said Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, Iran’s president, “that certain officials in Pakistan cooperate with main agents of these terrorist attacks in the eastern part of the country.”
The Iranian government summoned the Pakistani charge d’affaires in Teheran and protested against the use of Pakistani [...]
If Pakistan doesn’t go after the jihadis now…
Any sensible government would respond to the kind of pummelling Pakistan has received at the hands of its jihadis this week by going on an all out campaign to pulverise its attackers. In Pakistan’s case, the sensibility of the government vitally depends on the sensibility of the top [...]
Washington and New Delhi must understand how the jihadis have drawn their battle lines
The first message, mainly for those in the Obama administration who use catchy phrases like ‘offshore strategy’ and ‘light footprint counter-terrorism’, is that with drone attacks, you can never really be sure whether the target was taken out. Baitullah Mehsud is probably [...]
Recent Comments