Working President Omar Abdullah on Sunday said India should initiate talks with stakeholders in Jammu and Kashmir as well as Pakistan because the continued hostility between the two neighbours on the LoC and the International Border has a direct bearing on peace and stability in J-K. Omar, who was addressing NC activists in Srinagar, asked the central government to acknowledge […]

President Ashraf Ghani and Pakistan’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif this weekend held a bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Astana in Kazakhstan and agreed to intensify their joint efforts to fight terrorism. Ghani’s office said in a statement that Sharif joined the president in condemning the recent terror attacks, especially the wave of violence […]

Indian and Pakistani troops traded heavy fire on Sunday along the Line of Control (LoC) in Jammu and Kashmir, a defence official said. “Pakistan army initiated indiscriminate firing and shelling on our positions on the LoC in Rajouri district’s Bhimber Gali sector at 9.45 am,” Defence Ministry spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Manish Mehta said.

China on Friday announced it will contribute an additional 10 million yuan ($1.47 million) to the Secretariat of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) to facilitate its work. Still, the Voice of America claimed that China is squeezing Russia’s influence in Central Asia by economic means. According to the report, Russia is mired in the Syrian crisis and has bumpy relations […]

This volume investigates the nature of threats facing, or perceived as facing, some of the key players involved in Asian maritime politics. The articles in this collection present case studies on Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Thailand, Japan, China, and Southeast Asia as a whole and

The China-Pakistan axis plays a central role in Asia’s geopolitics, from India’s rise to the prospects for a post-American Afghanistan, from the threat of nuclear terrorism to the continent’s new map of mines, ports and pipelines. China is Pakistan’s great economic hope and its most trusted military partner. Pakistan lies at the heart of China’s geostrategic ambitions, from its take-off […]

For nearly a decade the international community has supported Afghanistan’s political, social, and economic reconstruction—and opposed the return to power of the Taliban. While Afghans have seen many improvements over that decade, there has been a Taliban resurgence across much of the country. Despite the recent increase in fighting, neither side has been able to vanquish the other militarily. Moreover, […]

Pakistan was born as the creation of elite Urdu-speaking Muslims who sought to govern a state that would maintain their dominance. After rallying non-Urdu speaking leaders around him, Jinnah imposed a unitary definition of the new nation state that obliterated linguistic diversity. This centralisation – ‘justified’ by the Indian threat – fostered centrifugal forces that resulted in Bengali

One of our foremost authorities on modern Afghanistan, Barnett R. Rubin has dedicated much of his career to the study of this remote mountain country. He served as a special advisor to the late Ambassador Richard Holbrooke during his final mission to the region and still serves the Obama administration under Holbrooke’s successor, Ambassador Marc Grossman.

A former senior mujahidin figure and an ex-counter-terrorism analyst cooperating to write a book on the history and legacy of Arab-Afghan fighters in Afghanistan is a remarkable and improbable undertaking. Yet this is what Mustafa Hamid, aka Abu Walid al-Masri, and Leah Farrall have achieved with the publication of their ground-breaking work.