July 2015

Harbinger of Peace and Security? April 20, 2015 will be remembered as a historic day in the recent history of Pakistan. On this day, Chinese President Xi Jinping reached Islamabad on his first state visit to Pakistan. President Xi came to oversee the signing of agreements aimed at establishing a China-Pakistan Economic Corridor between Gwadar Port on the Arabian Sea …

An enduring feature of international relations in contemporary times has been the high level of bilateral connections between Pakistan and China. Initially, they were strange bedfellows; one a socialist state and the other a Muslim-majority nation. Yet, driven by perceived mutual common interests they managed to achieve such close proximity that the relationship now appears to have become deep-rooted, multi-dimensional …

The Victims of Ethnic Cleansing From the slums of Kenya and refugee camps of Lebanon to the sugar plantations of the Dominican Republic and the far reaches of Myanmar, men, women and children across the world have found themselves living without citizenship rights. Rejected by their countries of birth and unwelcome everywhere else, they are called by international rights organizations …

Though imperialism is now held in disrepute, empire has been the default means of governance for most of recorded history, and the collapse of empires has always been messy business, whether in China and India from antiquity through the early 20th century or in Europe following World War I. The meltdown we see in the Arab world today, with chaos …

Strategies for their Peaceful Repatriation It is more than 35 years that the Afghans have been living in Pakistan. They first came here after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1980 and the ensuing civil war and precarious security situation in the country. The second wave started after the US–led military campaign in Afghanistan in 2001. Hundreds of thousands of …

A Zone of Strategic Competition  “Already the world’s preeminent energy and trade interstate seaway, the Indian Ocean will matter even more in the future. One reason is that India and China, major trading partners locked in an uncomfortable embrace, are entering into a dynamic great-power rivalry in these waters.” Robert D. Kaplan Indian Ocean region, which according to Robert D. …

Form Yesterday to Today and Tomorrow The difference of human development standards between developed and developing countries, makes life luxurious at some places but miserable at some. And that is just because of not acting upon the ages-old proverb “cut your coat according to your cloth,” meaning that population growth should be directly related to resources. And many developed countries …

Jahangir’s World Times (JWT): As the IMF programme is moving ahead, how do you see the performance of Pakistan’s economy in the first eighteen months of the programme? Harald Finger (HF): Pakistan has made significant progress in the first 18 months of the IMF programme in addressing short-term imbalances and risks coming out of economic crisis of 2013. Tremendous progress …

Bigotry settled in India as nowhere else. Many of Modi’s predecessors in BJP were, in fact, as bellicose as he is. Following is the text of a letter written by A. B. Vajpayee to the then US President Bill Clinton in the aftermath of the 1998 nuclear tests upon the lines of which he combined guile with statecraft. He wrote, …

Whether we like it or not, India’s Narendra Modi is in the driver’s seat at least in controlling the ‘temperature’ in Islamabad. He just has to ask his ministers to utter a few irresponsible words to instantly bring us into a ‘reactive’ mode as was seen in recent weeks with our government and media both quickly joining in the war …