South Asia Archive

Velupillai Prabhakaran, the deceased leader of the Tamil Tigers, once likened himself to a spider in the center of a web, comfortably in control of a sprawling network. But over the past two years, the Sri Lankan military methodically, unflinchingly pulled his web apart, ultimately dismantling one of the most sophisticated insurgencies in the world. On May 19, the government claimed victory in a 30-year-old campaign, one that had cost tens of thousands of lives and seen the unraveling of much of Sri Lankan society. Though the guns have fallen silent, a state of emergency continues. Checkpoints are manned by […]

The Kashmir conflict is a legacy of the post-colonial partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 into the Hindu-majority country of India and the Muslim state of Pakistan. From its genesis, the conflict has been defined by competition between India and Pakistan over the national identity of Kashmir’s population. But the elites of both countries have also made the territory central to their respective principles of nation-statehood. In Pakistan’s official ideology, Pakistan as a nation-state has been considered incomplete without Kashmir, a Muslim-majority territory contiguous to the Pakistani provinces of Punjab and the North-West Frontier Province. In the Indian counter-claim, […]

Commemorations of the 20th anniversary of China’s crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square today produced images ranging from the momentous to the surreal. In Beijing, plain clothes security officials sparred with reporters in a darkly comical umbrella dance at Tiananmen Square, where police outnumbered tourists. In Hong Kong, organizers estimated that 150,000 people turned out for a candlelit vigil in Victoria Park. International discourse on the anniversary reached a fever pitch over the last week, with hardly a pundit on the planet — outside China, that is — silent on the subject. That China’s democratic credentials or lack thereof […]

Something of a blog spat has broken out between Andrew Exum and Michael Cohen, and before weighing in, I’ll endorse the suggestion made by one of Exum’s commenters that the two ought to hash this all out over some drinks. Both take an intellectually honest approach to questions of national security, and I’m sure that together they’d generate more light than heat. So take a chill, guys, COIN-bayah. As for the case on the merits, I’d say they’re both right and wrong. Cohen’s right when he says that we’re not really engaged in a counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. Exum finds this […]

U.S. coverage of Pakistan’s spotty effort to battle extremists is understandably U.S.-centric. So we hear a lot about what Islamabad should do to contain the FATA-based Taliban who are also feeding the Afghan insurgency. Since last November’s Mumbai attacks and the subsequent unveiling of the Obama administration’s regional strategy, there’s been a bit more attention paid to India’s concerns. But what doesn’t get as much attention as it deserves is China’s concerns about Uighur separatist terrorist groups, and Iran’s concerns about Baloch separatist terrorist groups, both also using Pakistani territory as a safe haven (both via John McCreary). In other […]

India’s disappointment with a Pakistani court decision freeing one of the Pakistan-based suspects behind the Mumbai attacks is understandable. But it’s also a case where the external demands on the Pakistani judiciary (i.e., to serve as a hanging judge) are flying in the face of Pakistan’s internal needs. The independence of Pakistan’s judiciary played a central role in the crisis thatbrought democratic rule back to the country, and the stand off betweenthe executive and the judiciary has continued under the civilian ruleof President Asif Ali Zardari. In a WPR op-ed last March, Arif Rafiq argued that strengthening the judiciary and […]

ISLAMABAD — The showdown in Waziristan hinted at by Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari 10 days ago may have already begun with the killing of Taliban militants by security forces in South Waziristan, and the deployment of hundreds of additional troops to the troubled region in the last few days. In response, Pakistan-based Taliban have launched multiple suicide and bomb attacks in two major cities and threatened to further target others. A local official in South Waziristan — who spoke on condition of anonymity, as he was not authorized to comment — told World Politics Review that security forces killed […]

As an addendum to last week’s post on the difficulties in gauging the intentions of other states, I found myself thinking over the weekend that President Barack Obama’s public diplomacy campaign towards the Muslim world is an illustration of how it is sometimes just as difficult to project one’s own intentions to other states. That difficulty obviously grows out of — and subsequently feeds off of — any divergence between strategic communcation on the one hand, and the reality of national policy as experienced by policy actors and citizens abroad on the other. Not only that, though, some of the […]