Whether the Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, should meet his Pakistani counterpart, Nawaz Sharif, in New York in September has become a politically controversial issue. The government is being cautious in not ruling in or out such a meeting at this
2014 will be a turning point in Afghanistan. Power will be handed over to a new President after elections. The US military will complete its withdrawal. The Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) will take over the security responsibility for the cou
A moderate and balanced Afghanistan is not only an absolute necessity for regional security but is equally imperative for rest of the world. A radicalised and unstable Afghanistan, imbued with an intolerant jehadi fervour, has implications for US or
Conflict does not end for all the time once it breaks up in a country. It happened so in Africa, Latin America, Asia and other parts of the world. Experience shows that conflict re-emerged in at least 40 per cent of the countries that at one or the o
Even though there have been occasional violations by Pakistani troops of the ceasefire agreement on the Line of Control (LoC) in Jammu and Kashmir, the recent flare-up has placed an enormous strain on the Confidence Building Measure (CBM) that had be
Our response to the killing of five Indian soldiers last week by the Pakistanis inside our Line of Control has again shown our inability to deal effectively with the dual issue of dialoguing with Pakistan and scotching the terrorist threat from it. T
As tensions rise between India and Pakistan, the usual arguments are being repeated on both sides of a serious divide in India on how to deal with that country. The reason we are unable to get the relationship right is that the country and the public
In recent months, the Pakistan army has been behaving in a rather aggressive manner on the Line of Control (LoC) in Jammu and Kashmir in blatant violation of the mutually observed cease-fire. Following closely on the heels of the beheading of an Indi
Many in India believe that we have failed in our policy towards our neighbours. For them the hall mark of any successful foreign policy is good relations with neighbours. Because we are so big, many think that we must make an extra effort to win the
The so-called Afghan endgame is really nothing more than the US endgame in Afghanistan. For the Afghans, there is unlikely to be any endgame. Even the Americans suspect, even fear, that their exit from, nay abandonment of, Afghanistan will most likel