Trusting Musharraf was a strategic failure: Former CIA analyst
Indo-Asian News Service
Washington, September 08, 2011
The biggest US mistake in the war against terrorism was to ignore al Qaeda in Pakistan to invade Iraq after the September 2001 terror attacks and trusting then president Pervez Musharraf to "fight on our side", according to a former CIA analyst. "This was the war that should have ended years ago," Bruce Riedel, now a foreign policy expert at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, wrote in an article on how the US enabled al Qaeda, the terror group behind the attack
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Pakistan experiment close to defeat?
Ali Ashraf Khan
Sixty-four years after the creation of Pakistan the experiment which was done to provide a homeland for those Indian Muslims who were afraid that their fate in India ruled by Hindus would be detrimental to their community seems to have reached a point of no return. The Quaid’s vision of a Muslims majority state where the Muslims would rule a nation consisting of mainly Muslims did not take off well due to strong feudal influence in the Muslim League. After the untimely early death of the Quaid the subsequent rulers of Pakistan infatuated with power missed the opportunity to build a new nation by securing a place of dignity and comfort for all ethnic groups inhabiting Pakistan.
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Chinese warning fails to deter India and Vietnam
Jayanth Jacob & Reshma Patil, Hindustan Times
New Delhi/Beijing, September 17, 2011
Ignoring Chinese warnings on Friday, India and Vietnam decided to focus on oil and gas exploration in the potentially oil-rich South China Sea while deepening their bilateral relations.
After Beijing's objections to the ongoing exploration in two Vietnamese blocks in the South. Beijing says keep off S China Sea, Delhi unmoved
China Sea by India's ONGC Videsh Ltd (OVL), state-run Chinese news agency Xinhua said the activities could "poison" China-India relations. However, external affairs minister SM Krishna and his Vietnamese counterpart Pham Binh Minh decided in Hanoi that they would extend their cooperation to defence and various economic sectors for the next three years.
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The Journalist and the Spies: The murder of a reporter who exposed Pakistan’s secrets.
Dexter Filkins, New Yorker
September 13th, 2011
In May 30th, as the sun beat down on the plains of eastern Pakistan, a laborer named Muhammad Shafiq walked along the top of a dam on the Upper Jhelum Canal to begin his morning routine of clearing grass and trash that had drifted into the intake grates overnight. The water flow seemed normal, but when he started removing the debris with a crane the machinery seized up. He looked down and saw, trapped in the grates, a human form.
Shafiq called some colleagues, and together they pulled out the body. Occasionally, farmers and water buffalo drown in the canal, float downstream, and get stuck in the grates, but never a man in a suit. “Even his tie and shoes were still on,” Shafiq told me. He called the police, and by the next day they had determined the man’s identity: Syed Saleem Shahzad, a journalist known for his exposés of the Pakistani military. Shahzad had not shown up the previous afternoon for a television interview that was to be taped in Islamabad, a hundred miles to the northwest. His disappearance was being reported on the morning news, his image flashed on television screens across the country. Meanwhile, the zamindar—feudal lord—of a village twenty miles upstream from the dam called the police about a white Toyota Corolla that had been abandoned by the canal, in the shade of a banyan tree. The police discovered that the car belonged to Shahzad. Its doors were locked, and there was no trace of blood.
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India picks a quarrel with China
By M K Bhadrakumar
India, which has been wetting its toes sporadically in the South China Sea in the recent years, is apparently taking the plunge to wade waist-deep into the troubled waters. It is a historic move - be it there is no clarity whether merely tactical or strategic. But it is historic; India's "Look East" policy acquires swagger. The Sino-Indian geostrategic rivalry is not going to be the same again.
Two months ago, an unidentified caller on an open radio channel hailed an Indian naval ship INS Airavatas as it was leaving Vietnam after a "goodwill visit", and advised it to lay off the South China Sea. The Chinese denied Beijing's involvement in the incident. India kept an ambiguous silence over the incident, which the Western media played up.
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South China Sea Disputes: Harbinger of Regional Strategic Shift?
Yoichi Kato 14 September 2011
The territorial disputes in the South China Sea between China and the other littoral states, including Vietnam and the Philippines, are gaining more strategic significance for the entire Asia-Pacific region and beyond. Japan cannot discount this issue as an isolated phenomenon in the remote region because it reflects China's regional strategy, which is based on its growing economy and national confidence.
The more fundamental challenge is how the regional countries, including Japan, should deal with the emerging strategic ambivalence, which is caused by both the growing economic interdependence with China and the continuing dependence on the regional security order guaranteed by the United States.
The territorial disputes in the South China Sea seem to have reached a certain equilibrium at the ASEAN-China Ministerial Meeting and the following ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) in July in Bali, Indonesia. The 10 member states of ASEAN and China agreed upon new guidelines, which stipulate a path to the implementation of the long-standing Declaration of Conduct (DOC) for peaceful resolution of the disputes in the South China Sea.
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