Courtesy: Xinhua
China has followed Sun Tzu’s strategy of focussing on alliances - building its own and weakening those of its adversaries. Beijing’s carefully nurtured formations in West and Central Asia are part of this global power projection, especially with Pakistan, Iran and now, the Taliban, through projects like the Belt and Road Initiative. India must recalibrate its China policy and push for concerted regional responses to emerge as a balancing force against it.
In the last few months, South Asia has gone from being just a global security headache, to a region with new possibilities. Teresita C. Schaffer, former US ambassador to Sri Lanka, and Howard Schaffer, former US ambassador to Pakistan and Bangladesh, discuss the major challenges that confront the US in South Asia.
Courtesy: PeteSouza/WhiteHouse
A week after Salman Taseer's murder, US Vice President Joseph Biden flew to Pakistan to "gauge priorities" in the Af-Pak region. India, Ambassador Neelam Deo says, must not allow itself to become a victim of American imperatives and Pakistani maneuvers.
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There are no easy or cost-free ways to escape the current quagmire in Afghanistan. Although it has problems, a de facto partition of Afghanistan, in which Washington pursues nation building in the north and counter terrorism in the south, offers an acceptable fallback.
Courtesy: Brian Ferguson/DoD
Richard Armitage, a former US deputy Secretary of State, believes that the Obama administration should take its partnership with the Afghan and Pakistani government before it proceeds with its proposed troop withdrwal from Afghanistan in July 2011
Courtesy: The White House/Flickr
A report on Stephen Cohen a key South Asia expert‘s lecture titled “Obama‘s Foreign Policy: Focus on South Asia” at Nehru Centre in Mumbai on October 7, 2010
Courtesy: isa_adsr/Flickr
Today, Kashmir is very much part of the cauldron that is "Af-Pak", the storm that is raging across the Pashtun belt in Pakistan and Afghanistan. As in Af-Pak, the base for the jihad that is being waged in Kashmir mainly comprises a small fringe of a single community – the Valley Sunnis.
Conventional wars are won by capturing territory, but counterinsurgencies are won by holding it. Rather than rushing to open new fronts against the Taliban, Pakistan must now focus on keeping the territory it has already cleared
The United States sees India as a guarantor of the liberal international order – The 2010 QDR assumes that India will act in the general interests of the political and economic order that the Atlantic powers have established
