Eight days ago, on December 16th, the Awami League government of Bangladesh arrested, detained and allegedly began to torture BNP leader Salauddin Qader Chowdhury. This is abhorrent news, no matter the turns of fortune in a man’s life, no matter the moral worth of a cause, no matter the government’s writ on the matter. That […]
It hasn’t passed notice in the news cycle, but Pakistan and China are working together on a cooperative agreement worth at least $20 billion. The deal, which also establishes plans for at least $15 billion in private investment, was worked out during Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao’s visit to Pakistan, part of his tour of South […]
Rather than cast India’s super wealthy as this era’s robber barons or malefactors of great wealth, a more salutary response to renewed concerns about concentrated wealth and influence would be to enact deeper reforms of the Indian state.
This might have passed you by; certainly it did me. There’s no surprise here, nothing really worth accounting for; but I’ll go ahead and account for it anyway. Jamaat has come out to say that during the troubles in 1971, the people who constituted both the party, Jamaat-e-Islami and the paramilitary killer brigade, were all […]
It was like just another formality in the Sino-Indian relationship being fulfilled, as the Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao concluded his “significant” “trust-building” India visit on Friday. The Chinese Premier brought along a huge entourage of 400 business leaders to India, signaling the only purpose of his visit – more business. India and China signed […]
Today’s PBS Newshour coverage of President Obama’s Af/Pak review canvassed everything you need to know about how Pakistan and politics there feeds into the administration’s strategy to pull together a feasible exit from Afghanistan beginning July 2011. Here’s the video of the Newshour’s segment on the policy review released earlier today, December 16, 2010: Please […]
Pomp and ceremony will come and go and there’s yet plenty of time to crow about vainglorious victory; but before the day passes irretrievably I’d like to wish my fellow native Bangladeshis a happy Victory Day. May all our days, yours and mine, be driven toward a better future, with more than a passing glance […]
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has come to help Bangladesh’s economy grow in the short to medium term, even as donor countries have begun to the belt on their fiscal and monetary policy. In consultation with the Finance Minster, the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisor, Bangladesh Bank and other major institutional stake-holders, the IMF has proposed […]
The news of Richard Holbrooke’s sudden death engulfed diplomatic circles in Washington with an ineffable sorrow. His condition was reported critical but stabilizing a day earlier, as his doctors hoped for a slow recovery after a lengthy surgery to repair a tear in his aorta. But 69 year old Richard Holbrooke could not survive. Holbrooke, whose forceful style […]
I can’t help but think that this is fairly obvious news: The U.S. intervention in Afghanistan won’t work unless the Pakistani government and military rounds up its Taliban allies and, in a manner of speaking, breaks the back of the various groups that constitute the Taliban–both the Afghanistan and Pakistan contingents. Elisabeth Bumiller, writing for […]
It has to be, without a doubt, that the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent collapse of communism constituted the single most transformative event of the past 40 years. Since man walked the surface of the Moon, the collapse of communism signified the predominance of ‘one’ over the ‘other.’ A New World Order […]
India has launched an ambitious military expansion, but some question whether the sum of its parts adds up to a strategic whole.
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