Opposition battlefield gains are not just a military setback for the junta, but an important economic blow that is compounding their already dire fiscal straits – something China should ponder as it moves to bail out the military regime in Myanmar. The junta’s egregious economic mismanagement had been a greater threat to their rule than any potential military challenge, until […]

The United Nations Security Council said in a recent report that there is some division among its members over how to deal with the situation in Afghanistan. The Security Council’s September 2024 Monthly Forecast report stated: “While Council members are generally united in their desire to see a prosperous, peaceful Afghanistan free from terrorism and ruled by an inclusive government, […]

Why U.S. Allies in the Region Are Turning Toward China The United States has recently been touting its “convergence” with Asian partners. At the annual Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore in June, U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin titled his remarks the “New Convergence in the Indo-Pacific.”At the Brookings Institution the following month, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken maintained that […]

Balochistan: Spiralling retaliation In the early morning of August 26, 2024, at least 23 Punjabi travellers were killed in the Rarasham area of Musakhail District in Balochistan when cadres of Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) offloaded passengers from trucks and buses and shot at them after checking their identities. According to Musakhail Assistant Commissioner Najeeb Kakar, armed men blocked the inter-provincial […]

Bangladesh’s democratic process has been disrupted by military coups since 1975 and instability has marked its political landscape. After the restoration of democracy in 1991, parliamentary form was reinstated with Khaleda Zia and Sheikh Hasina alternatively holding power. However, since 2009 it was Sheikh Hasina who controlled power and registered mammoth progress in economic growth. But there has been a […]

The Pakistani Air Force (PAF) is said to be collaborating with its Chinese partners to enhance its JF-17 fighter jet, creating an advanced version, named the JF-17 PFX. Recent information indicates this upgraded model may be notably bigger than the existing JF-17, possibly weighing as much as India’s Tejas MkII, estimated at approximately 17.5 tons. The abbreviation, ‘PFX’, appears to […]

Pakistan hopes designation will shrink space for proscribed group ISLAMABAD:The United States on Tuesday declared the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) as a global terrorist organisation in a significant development, which Pakistan hopes will ensure the “BLA’s space to operate is minimised”. The US State Department, confirming the decision, said it was classifying the BLA as a global terrorist group, making […]

It’s surprising how much time Bloomberg’s writers invested in correcting their audience’s perceptions about the North-South Transport Corridor, which they should sincerely be commended for doing. The only constructive critiques that can be leveled against their report is that it should have been published much earlier and that it predictably ends on the politically self-interested note of implying that the […]

The challenge ahead is a formidable one that will require the military-intelligence services to fully focus on this newly metastasized terrorist threat in order to emerge victorious, which in turn necessitates their top brass giving them the order to abandon the all-out nationwide crackdown against the opposition. Pakistan’s prior large-scale anti-terrorist operations succeeded precisely because those carrying them out weren’t […]

While the Pakistani-Taliban security dilemma owes its origins to “innocent” misperceptions of the other that were previously manageable since neither suspected that any adversarial third party was meddling in these mutually sensitive issues, this dynamic has now evolved to the point where both suspect their counterparts of colluding with their hated enemy (if not outright being under their influence) in […]