Pakistan

Taliban represent a present and clear danger to Pakistan. This is because, firstly, they seem to have finally lost faith in Pakistani commitment towards their cause and are not willing to accommodate any more its policy of running with the Talibani hare and hunting with the American hound.

• P. K. Upadhyay
• July 02, 2009
• Comment

On February 6, 2009, the Pakistani judiciary acquitted Abdul Qadeer (AQ) Khan, the symbol of Pakistani involvement in clandestine nuclear commerce. Since 2004, he had been under house arrest after the proliferation network, linking several countries, including Pakistan, was uncovered. Though he has been put under ‘unspecified security measures’, yet the release of AQ Khan – dubbed by the United States State Department spokesman Gordon Duguid as a ‘serious proliferation risk’ – is considered to be a disturbing development for the non-proliferation regime.

• Rajiv Nayan
• July 2009
• Strategic Analysis

Religious places are being increasingly used by fundamentalists and terrorists as their hideouts and strongholds to propagate their subversive ideology and launch attacks. This has often compelled states to use the military to flush them out. This use of the army has far-reaching consequences and can even alienate the population. To check and prevent such adverse fallout, a state needs to take decisive action at an early stage.

• S. K. Saini
• July 2009
• Strategic Analysis

In recent months the international media has focused on the issue of Pakistan becoming a failed state soon. A top US counter terrorism expert David Kilcullen who advised David Petreaus in Iraq on counter terrorism strategy has opined that Pakistan may fail within six months. Concerns about stability in Pakistan became more acute when Taliban began their advance out of Swat towards Punjab earlier this year. The media highlighted the fragility of Pakistan by pointing out that the Taliban had come within 100 miles of Islamabad.

• Arvind Gupta
• June 16, 2009
• Comment

The European Union (EU) is going to have its first-ever summit with Pakistan on June 17 in Brussels. In Asia the EU has only three strategic partners, namely China, India and Japan, with whom it holds standard annual and occasionally half-yearly summits. Britain is the only country in Europe that holds annual summits with Pakistan. However, even these purportedly annual summits are irregular and have often been mired in controversy whenever a terrorist attack takes place in the UK or terrorist plots are unraveled and foiled by British agencies.

• Alok Rashmi Mukhopadhyay
• June 12, 2009
• Comment

The threat from the Taliban could be in the form of heightened infiltration attempts across the Line of Control or see a new breed of Talibanised Pakistani militants targeting the Indian hinterland or a combination of both.

• Harinder Singh
• June 02, 2009
• Issue Brief

Terrorism, maritime security and border management are the key challenges in India's neighbourhood

• Untitled
• May 28, 2009
• Policy Brief

Consequent to the peace deals signed by the Pakistani state with Taliban, the number of terror-related incidents in March came down in regions, which have been afflicted with violence in the recent past such as NWFP, FATA and Balochistan. However, there was an increase in terrorist violence in other parts of Pakistan, thereby indicating a shift of Taliban’s theatre of operations from its traditional conflict zones to the heartland of Pakistan.

• T. Khurshchev Singh , Alok Bansal
• May 14, 2009
• Comment

Rise of the Taliban in the frontier provinces of Pakistan portends several challenges to the Pakistan establishment, a fact that has lately raised much alarm and concern amongst the international community and in the region. The speed and vengeance with which several militant groups have rallied under the leadership of Baitullah Mehsud and Mullah Falazullah undoubtedly puts Pakistan’s military on an acid test. The Pakistan Army to date has tackled the problem half heartedly in the troubled region.

• Harinder Singh
• May 01, 2009
• Comment

A decade after the Kargil conflict and over seven years after the major Indian military mobilization along the Line of Control (LoC) with Pakistan, both countries were yet again on the verge of a military confrontation following the revelation of Pakistan's complicity in the Mumbai terror attacks of November 2008. Islamabad's recalcitrance in taking action against groups responsible for this attack forced New Delhi to plan punitive responses against terror camps within Pakistan, prompting the latter to mobilize troops and project a capability to repulse an Indian attack.

• A. Vinod Kumar
• May 2009
• Strategic Analysis