Three classes of people trample all over Pakistan, the military dictators and terrorists it spawns with such remarkable fecundity, and the foreign commentators who write books of a terrifying banality that purport to explain why it does so. These are usually sniggering sermons that hold it up to the rest of the world as a cautionary tale, schadenfreude masquerading as scholarship. T.V. Paul’s The Warrior State is the latest hatchling of this sorry clutch.
Thanks to the excesses following 9/11 (racial profiling, waterboarding, rendition to other countries, etc.), counterterrorism has been a subject of much public scrutiny in the US. The recent disclosure of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s reports on the CIA torture programme is a case in point.
The conflict curve of Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Kashmir insurgencies is at a fragile and vulnerable state of stability. Sri Lanka has given a massive mandate for a ‘new democracy’; stability and accountability, yet it does not take away the shadow of instability that might follow.
India has one of the world’s largest military forces and it is also among the largest military spenders in the world, both in terms of military expenditure and arms imports. Nevertheless, the Indian military faces huge challenges.
The Indo-US nuclear agreement was a watershed in many ways. First, it led to the de-hyphenation of India and Pakistan and their relations vis-a-vis the United States.
Six years after India conducted a series of nuclear tests in 1998, strategy the Indian Army issued its conventional war fighting doctrine called the Indian Army Doctrine 2004. The doctrine, which later came to be known as ‘Cold Start’, drew a lot of attention in the strategic circles.