Tariq Khosa, a former Director General of the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) in Pakistan, grabbed the attention of the Indian media for a brief moment for an article he wrote in the Dawn newspaper on 3 August 2015 on the Mumbai attacks trial. In that article he pointed out how the investigations in Pakistan had been able to find strong evidence that the Mumbai attacks were planned and launched from Pakistani soil…
Over the years, the different aspects of the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan and its fallout on Pakistan and the wider world have been discussed threadbare. Yet, books are being written on it and the book under review is one among such books published in 2017. As the title of the book indicates, the author of this book Imrana Begum discusses the various dimensions of the intervention of the erstwhile Soviet Union in Afghanistan and its multiple impacts on Pakistan.
Under the assault of social media, attention spans have contracted somewhat. But that is not any reason to worry. There are short introductions available to catch up on weighty matters, such as in the case of national security. These help in gaining a working understanding of issues outside a reader’s usual beat and on the quick, being small handbooks intended unambitiously as ‘introduction’.
The book under review, Another South Asia! orbits around a simple but ambiguous premise of what South Asia is. While the answer to this question varies academically, politically and discursively, Dev Nath Pathak, through this book, has tried to provide an alternative conceptualization or imagination of this region.
In his memoir Neighbours in Arms, the former U.S. senator, Larry Pressler, advances a simple theme: ‘India’s democratic government [and] location … make it a natural … geopolitical ally. We should decisively choose India … We must downgrade Pakistan and treat it as it is: an irresponsible, dishonest, rogue state’ (pp. 53–54). His book focuses on his legislative efforts in the eighties and Pressler claims that if a law bearing his name
In 2006, AC Grayling, a well known and respected British philosopher stirred up a lot of discussion with his book Among the Dead Cities: Was the Allied Bombing of Civilians in World War Two a Necessity or a Crime? The book delved into the aerial bombing of German cities by the British and the Americans. Grayling termed the bombing as a crime against humanity as he saw it as causing disproportionate harm to civilians, being militarily ineffective in defeating the Axis Powers.