Asia-Pacific Archive

The widower of Benazir Bhutto, Asif Ali Zardari, will be Pakistan’s next president after winning a majority in today’s elections. Zardari wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post on Thursday in which he promised, if elected, to amend the consitution to reduce the powers of the presidency, enhance the power of the legislature, and restore an independent judiciary. He also pledged to “work to defeat the domestic Taliban insurgency and to ensure that Pakistani territory is not used to launch terrorist attacks on our neighbors or on NATO forces in Afghanistan.” Will he follow through on these promises? We’ll see. […]

In the Sergio Leone-inspired, and admittedly simplistic, formulation of the above headline, Iraq is the good, Somalia is the bad, and Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) are the ugly. The must-read from today’s media roundup of commentary concerns Iraq and comes from CNAS’s Nagl, Kahl and Brimley. The three analysts recently returned from Iraq advise policymakers on “How to Exit Iraq,” saying the answer has little to do with “‘all in’ or ‘all out’ way that Iraq is debated in Washington” at the moment. The most worrying piece of analysis I saw in today’s papers assesses U.S. and Ethiopian […]

Following years of promising gains since 2001, Afghanistan is in a tailspin. Not long ago, a sophisticated Taliban assault on a Kandahar prison freed 1,200 inmates, including 350 Taliban members. The attack came only weeks after Afghan President Hamid Karzai survived a fourth assassination attempt. The main forces behind the country’s downward spiral are al-Qaida and the Taliban, which have found sanctuary in the vast unpoliced region of western Pakistan known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). Stabilizing the Afghan-Pakistani front of the war on terrorism will require U.S. policymakers to re-examine the fatal misconception that they face only […]

HUMAN RIGHTS GROUPS PRESS IOC ON FUTURE GAMES — Human rights groups are calling on the International Olympic Committee to promise that human rights guarantees will be part of the process for awarding future Olympic Games. Reporters Without Borders, Freedom House, Students for a Free Tibet, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are among the more than a dozen groups calling for more IOC attention to human rights as a criteria for selecting host nations. The success of the Beijing Games was tempered by Chinese authorities’ ongoing human rights abuses, and many worry that the games sent the wrong message […]

For a man known as a safe but unexciting pair of hands, Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda managed to make a splash this week with his unexpected announcement that he will step down as prime minister, less than a year into the job. On the face of it probably shouldn’t come as a surprise. With Fukuda’s approval ratings having plunged to the high 20s, a deadlocked Diet, 50 million lost pension records and controversial health insurance reforms, the prospects for the ruling Liberal Democratic Party were not exactly rosy ahead of a lower house election that has to be called […]

Seen from space Saudi Arabia looks like a chunk of reddish clay chiseled from a vast slab linking the Arabian Gulf in the east to the Atlantic coast of Mauritania in the west. This desert-like landscape, stretching almost 5,000 miles across the Middle East, stands in stark relief to the green, fertile lands of Turkey and Europe to the north and the central African jungles of Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo to the south. However, looking closer, from the perspective of an airplane flying over the kingdom, one would notice that the great sand sea of Saudi Arabia […]

As I’ve suspected for a while, after doing the heavy lifting for clearing India’s return to the nuclear fold, America will watch France and Russia walk away with the lion’s share of the initial nuclear contracts handed out, expected to represent $100 billion over the next twenty years. In addition to an expected delay in Congressional ratification, American companies will have to wait for a liability convention to be drawn up before actively entering the Indian market. French and Russian nuclear producers, on the other hand, are nationalized, allowing them to use national sovereignty to shield themselves from liability in […]