Saleem's Post

The Civil Dimension According to investigative journalist Steve Coll’s article in the New Yorker, India, and Pakistan, after intensive track II diplomacy, had very nearly reached an agreement that would have demilitarized Jammu & Kashmir. The proposed agreement called for the creation of an autonomous region in which residents could move freely and conduct trade on both sides of the territorial boundary. Over time, the border would become irrelevant, and declining violence would allow a gradual withdrawal of tens of thousands of troops that now face one another across the region's mountain passes. The stillborn plan was the only feasible solution to the complex Kashmir problem. Pending a just solution to the J&K dispute, Pakistan needs to build up international pressure against India and utilize UN resolutions wherever possible.   Pakistan should continue to work with the US, Russia, and China, the three major strategic players, for pulling Afghanistan out of its pre...

  Pakistani Rulers  - How do they behave with their ministers, party workers, and commoners! As usual, Pakistani media is abuzz with the news of a hot exchange of words between the PM and the Defence Minister. According to the grapevine, during a meeting, Pervez Khattak embroiled with Hammad Azhar, the Energy Minister, over  non-compliance with Khattak’s long-standing demand for new gas connections to his constituency in KPK.  During the heated argument, Khattak also sniped at the PM, taunting the latter that he owed his premiership to Khattak’s vote bank. Reportedly, Khattak left the meeting in a huff after Imran Khan snapped back that he was prepared to step down if people like Khattak were not satisfied with his policies. For the last many years, Pakistan is facing extreme natural gas shortage due to the depletion of the local gas reserves and ill-planned energy policies of the previous governments where, despite the gas shortage, new connections were sanctioned t...

Readers frequently come across news items about India’s indigenously developed and failed, fighter aircraft –Tejas. Starting the Tejas programme in 1985, and after spending almost USD18.4 billion (including the money spent on the naval variant) the aircraft does not meet IAF and IN requirements. Both the services consider the aircraft underpowered and have rejected it. Interestingly, India’s quest for developing an indigenous fighter aircraft started much before Tejas. During the Cold War, Jamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian President, had commissioned Nazi scientists who helped UAR (as Egypt was then officially designated) in producing supersonic fighter aircraft, biological weapons, and a delivery system (providing the backdrop for Frederick Forsyth’s thriller “The Odessa File”. More about The Odessa File later). While Messerschmitt was busy designing UAR’s Helwan fighter aircraft, Kurt Tank, another Nazi aeronautical engineer, was constructing the HF-24 Marut for India. Both these airc...

  The recent tragedy at  Murree, resulting in the deaths of around forty citizens, has gripped the hordes (I will abstain from using the word "nation") into a state of frenzy. Such incidents follow a familiar pattern now  –There is a terrible event that makes everyone blame the others for the carelessness and indifference, followed by a ritual of introspection. There is a period of mourning and then we forget if anything happened. It is a vicious cycle that keeps repeating itself. For such behavior,  I have coined the term  “ The law of diminishing effects". According to this law, the more a pattern of events repeats itself, the less it surprises the people. At Murree, the people died when, due to a snow blizzard, they could not find shelter in any of the hotels because the hotel owners demanded exorbitant rents for the accommodation. The tourists, largely,   had arrived without any proper clothing, sleeping bags, and the necessary gear required for an excu...

The Indians appreciate that a future war in this area will be a two-front war in which Pakistan and China will launch a three-direction combined offensive against the Indian positions in Ladakh and Baltistan along the western (Pakistan), and northern and eastern (China) approaches. This offensive may result in India losing all the areas northeast, east, and southeast of Leh, making the Indus River the new line of control with Pakistan and China (Rikhye, 2012). Historical background If not for the Sikh forays during the 19 th Century, and the engineered accession of Jammu & Kashmir in 1947, post-independence India would not have shared borders with Pakistan in the Vale of Kashmir, and with Pakistan and China in the Karakorams and the Ladakh region.  However, independent India considered itself     the successor to the British Empire in India and maintained that since the northern frontiers were defined by what was then the government of India,...

  The  Threat Assessment It has two dimensions 1) The enemy within, and 2) The external  threats. The Enemy Within Presently the internal threat is more potent than the external one.  The constituents of internal threat are  identified as 1) centrifugal forces; 2) terrorism, and 3) civil-military  divide. Pakistan, since the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, has been f ighting an undeclared war forced on it by India, Afghanistan, the United States , and Iran. The United Arab Emirates is also playing a role in destabilizing  Pakistan.  Unlike conventional wars, this type of war can neither be fought solely  with conventional forces nor are these forces amply trained to fight such a war.  After suffering considerable losses, the army, and the air force have learned their  lessons as a result of which the terrorists in the northwest and the separatists in  Balochistan are on the run.  However, the internal war cannot be dec...