South Asia Archive

The results of Pakistan’s parliamentary elections provide a genuine opportunity for Pakistan and the United States to rebalance their relationship. For Pakistan, they are a chance to re-establish representative government. For the United States, they are a chance to demonstrate support for Pakistan’s democratic institutions. And for both countries, they are an opportunity to initiate a much healthier long-term relationship. Despite his recent appeals to European and American audiences for support, the Musharraf era is over. President Pervez Musharraf once could claim to rule Pakistan with the support of the public, the Army and the Americans, but not anymore. His […]

Yesterday I mentioned that India had successfully test-launched an undersea missile. Today the head of Pakistan’s navy declared that the test would trigger a regional arms-race. (There are some doubts as to whether China has already mastered the technology.): “We are aware of these developments, and these developments are taking place with a view to put nuclear weapons at sea and it is a very, very serious issue,” the state news agency quoted him as saying. Of course, having tested three nuclear capable missiles in the past year, Pakistan is hardly in the position of pointing the finger.

Via Secret Défense comes the news that India’s defense ministry today announced the successful test-firing of an undersea missile, adding India to a very exclusive list of countries that have mastered the challenging technology. That the news coincides with Parag Khanna’s WPR article on the challenges facing India’s emergence as a modern economy strikes me as a poignant reminder of where so much of the wealth of the “second world” that could go into raising living standards and developing infrastructure will eventually be diverted. The launch is the latest in a tit for tat sequence of test firings between India […]

On the Uttar Pradesh-Bihar frontier, the chungi system is alive and well. One of the most unnecessary legacies of British colonialism, no less than five kilometers of trucks — those colorfully decorated and melodically horned belching beasts, overloaded with everything from steel beams to sacks of flour — sit idle, waiting to show their permits, sales tax chits, and other sheaves of documents to corrupt officers. My mother and I are on a nostalgic road trip from Delhi to Calcutta, driving on both emperor Akbar’s famed Grand Trunk road and its newest incarnation, the much touted “Quadrangle” project of major […]

There are still a lot of question marks in the aftermath of the Pakistani parliamentary elections. It’s still not clear, for instance, which parties will make up the governing coalition or who the Prime Minister will be. But the faultlines are beginning to come into focus, and one thing is already certain: the hot seat that President Pervez Musharraf has been occupying these past few months just got a bit hotter. Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) Co-chairman Asif Zardari and Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) chief Nawaz Sharif on Tuesday separately called for President Pervez Musharraf to quit after his allies were […]

When asked by reporters about the threat to his own safety following the assassination of his mother and Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto, 19-year-old Bilawal Bhutto Zardari cited a Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) saying: “How many Bhuttos can you kill? From every house a Bhutto will come.” But despite such defiant rhetoric, videos of the Oxford student at the Dec. 30 London press conference during which he was thrust suddenly into the spotlight of the Bhutto legacy — and into the shadow of the Bhutto curse — reveal a nervous boy trying his best to muster the courage to fill […]

DRUG TRAFFIC — On Feb. 5, Director of National Intelligence J. Michael McConnell told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that “Venezuela has been a major departure point” for Colombian cocaine since 2005, and Venezuela’s “importance as a transshipment center continues to grow.” On March 1, the State Department is expected to address the same issue in its annual International Narcotics Control Strategy Report, one of those report cards about other people’s faults that State grinds out every year — this one, of course, about the anti-drug war worldwide. Three years ago, the Venezuelan government halted regular cooperation with the […]

KATMANDU, Nepal — This week, ponies and porters are making their way to Nepal’s most remote regions with boxes of election materials taken from trucks and helicopters in district headquarters. The thousands of boxes contain voter education posters, election rules and the indelible ink that will hopefully mark the fingers of 17.6 million voters on April 10. It’s a huge logistical challenge but, after two false starts, Election Commission spokesman Laxman Bhattarai is confident. “It is easier than previously because many things we have prepared for the last election but it didn’t happen.” said Laxman with a chuckle. While the […]

With Pakistan’s much-anticipated Feb. 18 elections fast approaching against the backdrop of mounting jihadist activity in the country’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), questions about the stability of the region and the strategic implications of the activity there for U.S. interests seem to be growing more urgent by the day. While Pakistan has been considered a “key ally” in the war on terror for many years now, receiving at least $10 billion since 9/11 for its support in hunting down top al-Qaida operatives, this partnership has become dramatically more complex of late, and American decision makers are now facing difficult […]

For months, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has had only limited success in generating greater contributions for NATO’s military operations in Afghanistan by appealing directly to European governments. As a result, Gates has now decided to pursue the risky strategy of appealing directly to their skeptical publics for support. The Afghan war dominated the two-day meeting of NATO defense ministers in Vilnius, Lithuania. The government of Canada had provoked a mini crisis by warning beforehand that that it would withdraw its forces from the insurgent-prone province of Kandahar next January unless other NATO countries agreed to send at least […]

What looked like another bad day Feb. 7 for NATO’s efforts in Afghanistan ended with a hopeful development. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates addressed his fellow defense ministers in Vilnius, Lithuania, with a request he had made many times over the past six months. He again asked allies to increase the number of troops in the country’s south in preparation for the expected spring Taliban offensive and to shore up beleaguered forces from Canada, Britain, Denmark, and the Netherlands. Once again, it appeared NATO allies would demur. Some even had the […]

WASHINGTON – Despite little evidence that a massive program of aerial coca crop fumigation has worked in Colombia, and despite serious reservations by the Pentagon and by Afghan president Hamid Karzai, the U.S. State Department, backed by the White House, is quietly pushing the expansion of aerial poppy eradication into Afghanistan as a way to fight the Taliban. Soon Afghanistan, which produces 92 percent of the world’s opium and 80 percent of the world’s heroin, may be the target of a program of Plan Colombia-style aerial crop eradication. With the Afghan war entering a tenuous new phase, the stakes are […]