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More US Troops to Afghanistan

By:Uzair Salman “With hindsight, it seems evident that the costs of the strategy of preventing defeat were incalculable. But at the time of the crucial decisions, the costs of accepting defeat appeared to be incalculable. The system in this case coped as democracies usually do: by compromising between extreme choices, satisfying the partisans of neither extreme of opinion within the …

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Globalization at a Crossroads, The changing economic world order

By: Dr Ishfaq Ahmad Economic globalization includes the cross-border movement of mainly three factors: capital, goods and people. With the end of the Cold War and demise of the Soviet Union, globalization was celebrated as the intellectual zenith of economic history of the world. Francis Fukuyama, in his book, “The End of History and the Last Man” had claimed that …

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No Kashmir policy

INDIAN Kashmir recently suffered the visits of three delegations, none of which offered even a glimmer of hope. Each showed that it had nothing to offer the people beyond empty words. None offered a policy. Home Minister Rajnath Singh spoke of the need for a ‘political solution’ and a ‘permanent solution’. On neither did he indicate even the broad outlines …

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Trump Offers a Selective View of Sovereignty in U.N. Speech

UNITED NATIONS — President Trump, in declaring Tuesday that sovereignty should be the guiding principle of affairs between nations, sketched out a radically different vision of the world order than his forebears, who founded the United Nations after World War II to deal collectively with problems they believed would transcend borders. Mr. Trump offered the General Assembly a strikingly selective …

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Rival Superpower Strategies: World War III with China

How It Might Actually Be Fought [This piece has been adapted and expanded from Alfred W. McCoy’s new book, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power.] For the past 50 years, American leaders have been supremely confident that they could suffer military setbacks in places like Cuba or Vietnam without having their system …

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The wall of BRICS

IF you hide from reality for long enough, you can land up in a place from where it is next to impossible to find your way back. Something like that may be happening to Pakistan, where for more than a quarter century, our state has come to be virtually held hostage by a reality that we have been denying in …

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Russia’s CPEC dream is Pakistan’s dilemma

Pakistan should feel greatly heartened by the Kremlin statement in its favour after US President Donald Trump announced his new policy on Afghanistan. This is a testament to the growing bilateral relations between Moscow and Islamabad. Recently, there have also been reports of growing ties between Russian and the Afghan Taliban and supply of arms to the latter from the …

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Census and emerging challenges

Political parties and social groups are expressing reservations on the new census results, raising questions on the fairness of this count and the way it was conducted As the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS) gradually reveals the country’s sixth census results, political and social commentary is on the rise with some terming the count as ‘unrealistic’ and ‘unfair’. In its …

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Contractors, Not Troops, Will Save Afghanistan

In 1941, shortly after Pearl Harbor pulled the United States into World War II, a group of volunteer American aviators led by Gen. Claire Chennault known as the Flying Tigers fought Japanese aggression in China. They were so successful that many people believe they were decisive in holding back Japan, eventually leading to its defeat. Although they were paid volunteers …

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Power politics and corruption

Dealing with corruption requires political will and a comprehensive framework With Transparency International ranking Pakistan 116/176 on the Corruption Perception Index 2016, will the decision of Nawaz Sharif’s disqualification contribute to ending the culture of corruption? This is a key question in today’s Pakistan. The way different politicians — both who have been in power and those from the opposition …

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