Last week’s blackouts illuminate three fiascoes holding India back The massive, cascading power outages that left the northern half of India in the dark for two days last week bring to mind a telling juxtaposition of events in mid-1998. India had just concluded a momentous series of nuclear weapon tests, code-named “Operation Shakti” in reference […]
I step through the doors of the packed out Pyongyang restaurant on Monivong Boulevard in Phnom Penh and catch the eye of a very beautiful young Korean waitress. She traverses the crowded dining room and comes over to me with a bright smile on her face. “Table for two?” she asks, seeing my friend behind […]
Whatever Singh’s own faults as a government leader, India’s economic malaise is due to more basic problems. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is on the receiving end of a barrage of slings and arrows these days. The most recent salvo comes from Time magazine, whose Asian edition this week has a cover story labeling him “The […]
The agreement reopening NATO supply routes lays bare Pakistan’s strategic isolation. But is anyone in Islamabad paying attention? Some are spinning last week’s deal ending Pakistan’s seven-month closure of key NATO supply routes into Afghanistan as a triumph of Islamabad’s resolve. The reverse is much closer to the mark, however. Pakistan overplayed its hand in […]
During the Vietnam War, the United States dropped as many as 2 million tons of cluster bombs on Laos. It was called a secret air war but was, of course, no secret to the Laotians. Thousands of people have been killed and wounded by the bombs, which continue to litter the countryside. What director […]
We’ll soon find out whether Prime Minister Singh can salvage something positive from his final two years in office A previous post focused on the recent political crisis in Pakistan that resulted in Prime Minister Gilani’s removal and in the process further destabilizing the civilian government as well as complicating efforts to repair spiraling U.S.-Pakistan relations. […]
Southeast Asia’s youngest and poorest country, Timor-Leste, went to the polls on Saturday in the second round of parliamentary elections that will determine their next government as well as whether UN peacekeepers might be able to leave the country by year’s end. According to the World Bank, nearly half of the country’s 1.1 million people […]
Winning over Pakistani hearts and minds is proving difficult Two new reports provide further insight into the breakdown of U.S.-Pakistan relations. The first, put out by the Pew Global Attitudes Project, charts the growing hostility of Pakistani public opinion toward the United States. The second, issued by the International Crisis Group (ICG), a respected non-governmental […]
I can recall being in graduate school in New York having a conversation about Third World development with a fellow student, an American originally from Connecticut. At the time, the end of 2010, I had just returned from a stint with the South African Human Rights Commission and was pretty sour on the potential for […]
A long summer of political turmoil has begun that makes harder the search for a new equilibrium with Washington A tale of two capital cities in the grip of political uncertainty unfolded in South Asia last week. Islamabad was the scene of a fast-paced soap opera that throws into further doubt the future of the […]
Even though the big news in Pakistan right now is about the newly elected Prime Minster, deteriorating diplomatic relations with the United States, and match fixing charges on star cricketers, there is a less publicized–but important story–that CNN published last week, “Family’s 20 Kids Highlight Pakistan’s Population Explosion.” The article warns that Pakistan is currently among the […]
However justified, the public berating of Islamabad has become counterproductive. The comments made by Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta during his swing through South Asia last week once again raise the question of how coordinated the Obama administration’s regional policy is. An earlier post flagged this issue two months ago by noting the curious timing […]
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