Sixty years for a human being may mean looking back, 1 taking stock of things and preparing to retire from active life. But for a nation it means more than just looking back to the path traversed. It involves looking to the future with confidence. Sixty years of India–China relations raises the significant question whether the two Asian giants could look to their bilateral relations with confidence.

• Abanti Bhattacharya |
• September 2010 |
• Strategic Analysis

• Smruti S. Pattanaik |
• September 2010 |
• Strategic Analysis

The SAARC (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation) summit is often described as being a mere photo opportunity for south Asian leaders who should actually be using the comatose organisation to reinvent regional cooperation in a globalised world. Such pessimism is inevitable if one takes stock of the progress that SAARC has made over the period of time. There exists a SAARC convention to deal with all issues that have a certain salience in the regional context.

• Smruti S. Pattanaik |
• September 2010 |
• Strategic Analysis

Mary Ann Weaver, Pakistan: Inside the World's Most Frightening Place , Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2010, pp. 292, $16.00, ISBN 978-0374532253

Fatima Bhutto, Songs of Blood and Sword: A Daughter's Memoir , Penguin Viking, India, 2010, pp. 470, Rs. 699, ISBN 9780670082803

Ira Pande (ed.), The Great Divide: India and Pakistan , Harper Collins India, New Delhi, 2009, pp. 380, Rs. 495, ISBN 978-81-72238360

• Priyanka Singh |
• September 2010 |
• Strategic Analysis

Rivers are more than what Samuel T. Coleridge poetically expressed in Kubla Khan: ‘meandering with mazy motion’ and falling into the ‘sunless sea’. Rivers are life-givers, carrying a mystic and sacred quality about them. That they are oft described as being ‘mighty’—the mighty Amazon; the mighty Nile; the mighty Brahamaputra; the mighty Murray; the mighty Mississippi and Missouri—is hardly mystifying. Civilizations have grown around it and flourished. In contemporary politics the salience of rivers cannot be overlooked both in terms of being drivers of cooperation and conflict.

• Uttam Kumar Sinha |
• September 2010 |
• Strategic Analysis

The changing nature of warfare, as the twentieth century drew to a close, saw the increased proliferation of conflict between non-state actors and the state. Small wars, wars of liberation, insurgencies, terrorism, proxy wars, sub-conventional warfare and a host of other terminologies emerged that attempted to fingerprint this genre of low spectrum warfare. Initially, it was felt that it was risky to use air power in this kind of warfare and that surface forces were best equipped to fight these wars with only superficial support from air forces.

• Arjun Subramaniam |
• September 2010 |
• Strategic Analysis

Both the Chinese government and the Tibetans are in agreement over the impending issues relating to the adverse impact of climate change on Tibet while the India-specific data on glacier melt is as yet inconclusive. There is, however, a difference of perception in Sino-Tibetan discourse over the capitalist model of economic development being undertaken by China which is at variance with the cultural practices of Tibetans, informed and regulated as they are with the Buddhist values of oneness with nature. Nomadism is also fundamental to the preservation of the ecology of Tibet.

• P. K. Gautam |
• September 2010 |
• Strategic Analysis

The Bay of Bengal is the largest bay off the coast of Bangladesh, India, Myanmar and Sri Lanka. With the exception of Bangladesh all the littoral states have reached agreements over their bilateral maritime boundaries. As signatories to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, India and Myanmar had to file their claims by June 29, 2009 and by May 21, 2009 respectively, and Bangladesh has to file its claim by July 27, 2011 to the Commission on the limits of the continental shelf.

• Sreeradha Datta |
• September 2010 |
• Strategic Analysis

Of the members of the America-Russia-China triangle, the Soviet Union is the least enthusiastic about its existence. It is open to question whether it is as obsessed as it is said to be with the historic memories of the golden hordes who devastated Russian lands, and whether it equates the Chinese with the dreaded Mongol invaders of previous centuries. But there can be little doubt that it fears a Sino-US collusion against itself.

• Girilal Jain |
• September 2010 |
• Strategic Analysis

As high-profile incidents of piracy become more common off Somalia, strategists have taken to urging the US government to send expeditionary forces ashore. The article uses history and Clausewitzian theory to estimate the nature of the threat and the likely efficacy of a land campaign. Even successful operations would entail costs exceeding the value of the political stakes. For this reason alone, going ashore is inadvisable.

• James R. Holmes |
• September 2010 |
• Strategic Analysis