In the extremely fragile India-Pakistan relationship, flying visits of leaders can prove to be counter-productive. They create completely unrealistic expectations which are invariably dashed on the altar of ground realities and critical national interests, says Sushant Sareen.
The Indian people need to know what the Manmohan Singh government expects to achieve from the dialogue from Pakistan. This obsession of normalising of relations with Pakistan, even if this is at the cost of India's territorial unity and integrity, is acquiring dangerous dimensions, says Sushant Sareen.
Apart from religious hatred that makes it kosher for the Sunnis to massacre the Shias, the targeting of Shias serves a political objective of the Islamists in destabilising the Pakistani state. As a result, the Sunni extremists are killing two birds with one stone, says Sushant Sareen.
The trouble is that trying anything more than the routine CBMs to affect a paradigm change in the bilateral relationship is a bit of a catch-22 situation: without trust, bold initiatives are not possible; but how do you build trust without bold initiatives, writes Sushant Sareen.
The bottom line is that carrying out Kasab's death sentence is not going to bring closure to the 26/11 case. For that matter, the conviction of the terrorists being tried in Pakistan will not end the menace of terrorism in India. The real closure will come only with the closure of the Jihad factory in Pakistan, which in turn will happen only if Pakistan takes concerted and sincere efforts to de-radicalise its society and its polity, neither of which are on the anvil.
By all accounts the diabolical policy that Pakistan has followed on Afghanistan has been motivated in large measure by its unrelenting enmity towards India. It is a different matter that in its quest for attaining 'strategic depth', Pakistan has ended up creating a 'strategic black hole' that could one day devour it, says Sushant Sareen
In his book Shadow War -- The Untold Story of Jihad in Kashmir, Pakistani journalist Arif Jamal, unveils the involvement of Pakistan in the insurgency and provides some new and quite startling details of the jihad that Pakistan waged against India in Kashmir.
There should be no doubt that if the Americans leave without finishing the job in Afghanistan they will be doing this at their own peril. In the globalised and borderless world of today, the US doesn't have the luxury that the British enjoyed of leaving Afghanistan to its own devices
After the euphoria of 'revenge of democracy', the Pakistani political establishment is coming to grips with the fact that the verdict of the February 18 general elections in Pakistan is more than anything else, a test of democracy.
'Any outbreak of civic disturbances and that too at a time when the Pakistani State is tackling the onslaught of the Islamists will almost certainly make a regime change inevitable.'
The storm will wreak havoc not just in Pakistan but around the world, which still has its eyes tightly shut to the silent revolution sweeping through Pakistan.
The Congress policy of minority appeasement and burdening the middle-class has cost it dear in Punjab