Int’l Affairs

The parallels are spooky. In Syria, as in Afghanistan, CIA officers are operating at the borders (in this case, mostly in Jordan and Turkey), helping Sunni insurgents improve their command and control and engaging in other activities. Weapons are coming from third parties (in Afghanistan, they came mostly from China and Egypt; in Syria, they’re mainly bought on the black …

Many Israelis, particularly in the military and defense establishment, understand that an Israeli strike would delay, not destroy, Iran’s programme. The programme could be rebuilt, probably quickly and with greater determination. Colin Kahl is among several scholars who have documented how, contrary to conventional wisdom, Israel’s 1981 attack on Iraq’s Osirak reactor actually accelerated Saddam Hussein’s determination to build nuclear …

In the years after 9/11, anti-Muslim rhetoric simmered on blogs, YouTube videos and a stream of inflammatory best sellers. But not until Barack Obama’s presidency was it allowed to erupt into prominent corners of mainstream politics. Mitt Romney, to his credit, has shunned notions of American Muslim disloyalty, but Republican political and media figures have tolerated or even advanced these …

A recent study of Global Attitudes by Pew Research Center concluded that most Muslims want democracy, personal freedoms, and Islam in political life, while few believe that the US backs democracy. Support for an institutionalised democracy and a re-orientation of the US foreign policy in order to negotiate with the Islamists is pertinent.   President Barack Hussain Obama accepted nominations …

Mr. Obama explicitly shifted from his 2008 appeal of hope and change to talk of tough choices and tough paths. ‘You didn’t elect me to tell you what you wanted to hear,’ he said. ‘You elected me to tell you the truth. And the truth is, it will take more than a few years for us to solve challenges that …

We just had the 16th three-yearly NAM Summit held in Tehran attended by leaders of 120 states but no one even heard of what it decided. The event was no different from the earlier 15 summits in terms of heavy agenda, high-sounding rhetoric and voluminous documentation with little readable substance. Nothing earth-shaking came out from the Tehran Summit to change …

Despite the failures of the UN and its inherent shortcomings, it is difficult to imagine a world without such multilateral organisation in which the values of peaceful coexistence through political independence, mutual self-respect and territorial integrity of each country, at least, exist on paper. The United Nations ‘a successor of the League of Nations’ was created in an attempt to …

Assam, located next to Bangladesh on the north-east corner of India, has a long history of recurring violence targeting minority Bengali-speakers. In 1983, Nellie massacre when Indira Gandhi ruled India, the pogrom, carried out with crude weapons in a matter of a few hours, left some 5,000 people dead. The killers didn’t even spare young babies. South Asia is really …

From the Geneva recommendations to the six-point peace plan proposed by Kofi Annan, nothing was endorsed with consensus. It is interesting to highlight that both the drafts had a common agenda which favoured a democratic transition at the cost of dismantling authoritarian rule. For this purpose, the notion of a government of ‘national unity’ (which allows the opposition and those …

According to analysts on the Middle East, if Iran goes nuclear, Israel would no longer be able to continue its ambiguous nuclear policy and will have to declare its nuclear weapons. Also, it may ignite a nuclear warfare in the region which will ultimately pose existential threat to Israel. Despite the close alliance between the US and Israel, there appears …