Arab unrest: perspectives – XVI
"Russia, China and India abdicated their responsibility in the Security Council by giving Susan Rice [US ambassador to UN] the leeway to use loose language to get into Libya. We…
Governments have given up on Earth
It is, perhaps, the greatest failure of collective leadership since the First World War. The Earth’s living systems are collapsing, and the leaders of some of the most powerful nations…
The forgotten sea frontier
In an unprecedented development, Russia recently signed a deal to procure at least two of France’s advanced Mistral-class amphibious warships at an estimated cost of $750 millions each, with option…
Egypt’s Zia ul Haq?
Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi has been dubbed Egypt’s new pharaoh, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Cincinnatus, Benito Mussolini, Abraham Lincoln, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and even another Hosni Mubarak. Comparisons and juxtapositions are being…
Putin’s snub to India
Ever since coming into office again in May this year, Russian president Vladimir Putin has been snubbing countries like an archetypal snob. After turning down the chance of becoming the…
Imagining a different future
The next phase that the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan are entering is likely to usher in another deadly period of counter-terrorism operations and intense maneuvering between the US, Russia,…
Gorky Park shines again
Behind majestic columns adorned with hammers and sickles, Moscow’s Gorky Park once stood as a testament to Russia’s post-Soviet decay: dirty and forgotten, tinny techno pumping from its loudspeakers as…
General in his labyrinth
Celebrated Prussian military analyst Carl von Clausewitz described how the `fog of war` causes facts to be fudged. Indian army chief Gen V.K. Singh has surely studied von Clausewitz. How…
New trends in global politics
RUSSIA’S recent move to send its troops into Georgia in support of the separatist regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia has given rise to a new debate at the international…
The generation that failed
Like Russians, we Pakistanis remain obsessed by two great questions formulated by 19th-century Russian writers Alexander Herzen and Nikolai Chernyshevsky: who is to blame and what is to be done?…
