South Asia was globally important during the Cold War era and remains relevant to world’s peace and security even in today’s changed environment. The recent India-Pakistan peace process has offered no results as the two sides did not go beyond reiterating their respective positions on Kashmir and agreeing to continue discussions for a ‘peaceful negotiated’ settlement of this issue. After …

Surely no philosophical discourse is needed to understand or agree that nuclear weapons are never meant to be used. Once driving on a busy New York street a few years ago, I was struck by a bumper sticker with a strange message. It read: ‘One nuclear bomb can ruin your whole day.’ This appeared rather childish if not an ultimate …

After prolonging the military conflict at huge cost in lives and dollars, Obama now admits ‘peace cannot come to a land that has known so much war without a political settlement.’ President Obama, it seems, is beginning to earn his 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. His June 22 speech on the US troops’ drawdown was the anticlimax of the one he …

It is in its vital interest to have peace and stability in an independent Afghanistan that is friendly towards Pakistan and is free of foreign influences taking advantage of the transition process. Obama is indeed a miracle man. Getting elected as America’s first-ever black president was in itself a miracle, and then becoming a Nobel peace laureate as head of …

At the onset of this century, we found ourselves to be dying to one world, and not yet being able to be born into another. We are today adrift in a more uncertain and surely more chaotic world burdened with the same old problems, perhaps in their acutest form. Wars of aggression and attrition, invasions in the name of self-defence, …

Diplomatic immunity is not meant to benefit individuals personally; it is meant to ensure that foreign officials can do their jobs. As if we did not have enough problems at hand, here we are sunk in yet another self-made crisis over a former US special forces soldier ‘on contract’ with Department of Defence sent on a ‘special mission’ to Pakistan …

There is no doubt that the future of our State will and must greatly depend upon the type of education and the way in which we bring up our children as the future citizens of Pakistan. Education does not merely mean academic education, and even that appears to be of a very poor type. What we have to do is …

For some reason, nuclear and security-related issues have remained a no go area for Pakistani researchers and academics.No wonder, we have not had any meaningful literature on India-Pakistan nuclear stand-off and its regional and global implications. In an unlettered society where one rarely comes across people genuinely into writing or reading and where books are sold not by content but …

The foreign policy of a nation is the face that it wears to the outside world. Shamshad Ahmad Khan, Pakistan’s former foreign secretary and veteran diplomat, is now a leading political analyst, who through his writings and lectures frequently expresses his views about the problems and challenges facing our country. In a recent lecture arranged by World Times on Pakistan …