Saleem's Post

  It is interesting to note that India, a Non -Aligned country taunted by Dulles for“sitting on the fence”, continued to milk Uncle Sam throughout the Cold War period. A fter the 1962 Sino- India border war, when Non -Aligned India was caught in the no man’s land, the United States and Britain provided India $ 120 million worth of military aid. The program included a variety of military equipment, but its central feature was the raising of six Indian mountain divisions (Bhutto, 1969). It has been stated earlier that the 1962 Sino- Indian War provided the United States an opportunity to increase American influence over India without coercing the latter into a formal and declared part.                                                  ...

  During a meeting held in late May 1965 on the directive of Vice Chief of the General Staff (Major General Abid Bilgrami), Major General Akhtar Hussain Malik (a close friend of Bhutto), GOC 12 Division revealed his plan to Colonel Syed Ghaffar Mehdi, Commander Special Services Group (SSG). The plan called for infiltrating groups of "Mujahideen" comprising regular army troops and irregulars into IHK for contriving a local uprising and unfreezing the issue without provoking a general war (Hali,2012).  It was almost going to be a replay of the first Kashmir war. The meeting between the two was arranged by the Vice Chief of the General Staff. However, when asked by Mehdi if the Army High Command were on board, Akhtar responded that it was his plan. When asked further when he expected to launch the Mujahideen, Akhtar replied "July, the same year". According to Mehdi, he told Akhtar that the plan was a non-starter, but upon the latter's insistence, Mehdi left behind ...

    The Subcontinent had never been a peaceful region, particularly after its partition into India and Pakistan. However, the Indian nuclear explosion in May 1973 changed the dynamics of power in the Sub-Continent for all times to come. A nuclear bomb is an instrument of deterrence, not meant to be used – henceforth, India would use the indirect approach to nibble at Pakistan, using nuclear blackmail to settle its scores with its smaller neighbor.   Interestingly, even before gate crashing into the nuclear club, India had always adopted an indirect approach for destabilizing Pakistan? What was the reason?   To find  the answer, we'll have to understand the psyche of the Indian civil and military leadership – generally, they are cautious and risk-averse people when it comes to settling scores on the battlefield.   During the first Kashmir war, the Indian Army fought essentially against a ragtag force of tribesmen, locals, and retired/serving ar...

    Mir Aimal Kasai was born in Quetta in1967. It is said that he was on the payroll of the CIA and had been performing various intelligence gathering and other covert tasks in Pakistan at the behest of the agency. Like Osama bin Laden, he fell afoul of his US taskmasters and decided to pay them back for abandoning him after he had outlived his utility for the CIA. To actualize his plan, Kasai entered the US in 1991, taking a substantial sum of cash he had inherited on the death of his father in 1989. He traveled on forged papers he had purchased in Karachi, Pakistan, altering his last name to "Kansi", and later bought a fake green card in Miami. He stayed with a Kashmiri friend, Zahid Mir, in his Reston, Virginia, apartment, and invested in a courier firm for which he also worked as a driver. On January 25, 1993, Kasai killed two CIA employees in their cars as they were waiting at a traffic signal and wounded three others outside the CIA headquarters campus in Langley, Virgi...

  During the last two years, Pakistani society has witnessed an unusual controversy over the screening of the Turkish drama series Diriliş: Ertuğrul on TV channels and YouTube. In a society where the Tik Tok generation and the TV and film artists feel proud in mimicking third rate Indian actors representing the fantasy world of Bollywood gutter movies, it seems rather strange when these very same people criticize the Turkish drama for 1) Not being based on historical facts; 2) Encouraging jingoism; 3) A threat to local TV dramas. There is a long list of similar objections, grievances, and heartburns.  Interestingly, these objections are raised less by the commoners and more by the local TV and cinema artists, media houses, intellectuals of sorts, and a few politicians in the opposition. The opposition to this Turkish drama serial was more pronounced during the last government when the Indian movies were screened in Pakistan and there was a strong film distributors’ lobby that ...

A cloudburst is an extreme amount of precipitation in a short period, sometimes accompanied by hail and thunder, which is capable of creating flood conditions. Cloudbursts can quickly dump large amounts of water, causing flash floods. What is the relevance of cloudburst to what happened in Pakistan in 1968?  It was October 1968. Heavy Monsoon rains which started lashing Pakistan, as usual, grafually became weaker in July gradually became weaker, soon to peter out and give way to the mild morning chill, the first sign of winter. At Bara Bazaar, a small group of students from Rawalpindi’s Gordon College was stopped at the customs check post.  Bara Bazaar is a seedy marketplace in the tribal belt of Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province (presently the KPK).  During the 1960s, as it is, even today, Bara Bazaar was a transit point for goods smuggled from Afghanistan to the bazaars in Rawalpindi, Lahore, and places as far away as Karachi.  The students from Gordon Coll...

Pegasus is spyware developed by the Israeli cyber arms firm NSO Group. The spyware can be cover tly installed on mobile phones (and other devices) running most versions of iOS and Android. iOS is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. As of 2016, Pegasus was capable of reading text messages, tracking calls, collecting passwords, location tracking, accessing the target device's microphone and camera, and harvesting information from apps.  According to an analysis by the German newspaper Die Zeit, the following incumbent and former heads of state and government have been targeted, implying possible full access to their mobile phones data:       • Noureddine Bedoui, former Prime Minister of Algeria       • Mostafa Madbouly, Prime Minister of Egypt         • Charles Michel, former Prime Minister of Belgium and current President of the European      ...

Kinetic war, also known as the conventional war, deals with military actions involving active warfare, including lethal force. The phrase is used to contrast conventional military force and "soft" force, including diplomacy, sanctions, and cyber warfare. The Order of battle of an armed force participating in a kinetic military operation or campaign shows the hierarchical organization, command structure, strength, disposition of personnel, and equipment of units and formations of the armed force.   Warfare, during the first quarter of the 21st Century, is transitioning fast from a kinetic to a non-kinetic dimension. Not that the non-kinetic dimension of warfare was missing earlier. However, it is presently becoming the dominant form of fighting between the nations. The hot war will gradually become a corollary to the cold war.  However, the hot war will remain an instrument to achieve the coup de grace- the final blow on the battlefield. In that sense, future wars will end ...

On the eve of independence Quaid e Azam, while replying to a foreign correspondent, talked about a local Monroe Doctrine, which would seal the Sub-Continent against foreign interference (Singh, 2010). However, Pakistan and India had different strategic objectives. While the main objective of Pakistan was to survive as a sovereign country, Indian leadership nurtured the ambition of re-absorbing Pakistan into a united India.  Sardar Patel, independent India’s first interior minister, termed partition as a temporary phase and was confident that Pakistan would soon be brought back into the pack (Wolpert, 2005). Congress’ mindset can be gleaned from a letter written by Nehru to Brigadier Cariappa, a member of the Reconstitution Committee formed to oversee the division of armies:    “Let things take shape for a while. But of one thing I am convinced, that ultimately there will be a united and strong India. We will have to go through the valley of shadows before we reach the sun...

The United States is pulling out its forces, and those of its allies, from Afghanistan. This is happening after a futile war that lasted for a little less than twenty years – America's longest overseas war!   The U.S.-led war in Afghanistan began in October 2001in response to the September 11, 2001, attack on New York’s Twin Towers. The US alleged that Al Qaeda, a terrorist organization, had masterminded the attack. Al Qaeda was supported by the Taliban, then ruling Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden, the Al Qaeda mastermind, was at that time hiding in Afghanistan and the Taliban had refused the US demand to hand him over.   Before invading Afghanistan the US, to the point of bullying, had grabbed Pakistan’s support in the “war against terrorism”. According to Musharraf, Pakistan’s military ruler in 2001, the US had threatened to “bomb Pakistan into the stone age” if it did not comply with the US demands. Pakistan was thus coerced into facilitating the US in its Afghan war. This had...