Archive for June 7th, 2023

Pivotal States: What Direction for the U.S.-India Partnership?

After decades of estrangement, cooperation between the United States and India has boomed in recent years, driven to a significant degree by rising tensions with China. Yet for all the optimism about the trajectory of U.S.-India relations, important questions remain unanswered. Does strategic competition with China simply mask more difficult problems in the U.S.-India relationship, like disagreements on trade or […]

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Hawks hallucinate a US-China détente policy that doesn’t exist

They’re distorting Biden’s position to score ideological points while also presenting the more aggressive approach as the answer. The China policy debate in this country is increasingly detached from reality. Confronted with a Biden administration policy that is quite hawkish and confrontational, some China hawks have decided to invent an imaginary détente policy to attack. Last week, A. Wess Mitchell […]

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Colonial Overhang: Pakistan’s Administrative Bureaucracy – OpEd

The British directly ruled the subcontinent for nine long decades, all the way from 1857 till 1947. Their colonial rule ended in 1947 with the partition of the Subcontinent into two sovereign nation states: Pakistan and India. Even though it has been seventy-five years since the colonial rule ended, it has left a significant influence over the indigenous and systematic […]

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Turkmenistan: Plugging The leaks

Following months of embarrassing stories in the international press documenting the scale of its methane emissions, Turkmenistan has consented to accept foreign help in solving the crisis. Signs are, though, that Ashgabat is reluctant to spend too much of its own money in addressing the problem. On May 31, Bloomberg news agency reported that U.S. officials are in negotiations with […]

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Pakistan’s embattled Imran Khan faces blackout on local media

Coverage of Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Imran Khan has disappeared from all mainstream news channels in the country after the media regulator asked networks to block out people involved in rioting last month, a Reuters survey showed on Monday. A directive, seen by Reuters, was put out by the regulator last week referring to violent protests in Pakistan last month […]

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Badakhshan’s deputy governor killed in car bomb

A car bomb in Afghanistan’s northern Badakhshan province on Tuesday morning, killed two people including the provincial deputy governor. Six others were injured in the blast which happened around 8:15 am near the court building in the provincial capital, Faizabad, said Muezuddin Ahmadi, the provincial director of information and culture. He said that the official was traveling in his car […]

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Recognition of IEA would be decided by UNSC permanent members: Pakistan envoy

Recognition of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) would be a decision that five permanent members of the UN Security Council would make, Asif Ali Durrani, Pakistan’s new special envoy for Afghanistan, said. “I think it would be a decision by the major countries, especially P 5. They are looking towards that. If the permanent five members of the Security […]

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Afghanistan sees significant drop in opium cultivation: BBC

The BBC reported on Tuesday that an investigation by the media outlet has found a marked decrease in poppy cultivation across Afghanistan this year. The BBC reported that it traveled in Afghanistan – and used satellite analysis – to examine the effects of a decree issued in April 2022 by the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan’s (IEA) supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada […]

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