Washington will not allow Afghanistan to be a safe haven for terrorism, say Secretaries of State and Defence in Australia. The U.S. will keep its military engagement in Afghanistan open-ended, Secretary of Defence James Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson have indicated. Speaking in Sydney on Tuesday, where the senior officials of the Trump administration attended the Australia-U.S. Ministerial […]

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 […]

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 […]

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

Established as a homeland for India’s Muslims in 1947, Pakistan has had a tumultuous history that has unfolded in the vortex of dire regional and international conflicts. Beset by assassinations, coups, ethnic strife, and the breakaway of Bangladesh in 1971, the country has found itself too often contending with religious extremism and military authoritarianism. Now, in a probing biography of […]

Since Pakistan gained independence in 1947, only once has an elected government completed its tenure and peacefully transferred power to another elected government. In sharp contrast to neighboring India, the Muslim nation has been ruled by its military for over three decades. Even when they were not directly in control of the government, the armed forces maintained a firm grip […]

India on Thursday successfully test fired a new surface-to-air missile, developed jointly with Israel, from a defence base off Odisha coast. The medium range missile (MR-SAM), a product of joint venture between India and Israel, was successfully test launched from a mobile launcher in the Integrated Test Range (ITR) at Chandipur at around 08.15 hours, a DRDO official said. “The […]