Pakistan

On February 6, 2009, the Pakistani judiciary acquitted Abdul Qadeer (AQ) Khan, the symbol of Pakistani involvement in clandestine nuclear commerce. Since 2004, he had been under house arrest after the proliferation network, linking several countries, including Pakistan, was uncovered. Though he has been put under ‘unspecified security measures’, yet the release of AQ Khan – dubbed by the United States State Department spokesman Gordon Duguid as a ‘serious proliferation risk’ – is considered to be a disturbing development for the non-proliferation regime.

• Rajiv Nayan
• July 2009
• Strategic Analysis

In recent months the international media has focused on the issue of Pakistan becoming a failed state soon. A top US counter terrorism expert David Kilcullen who advised David Petreaus in Iraq on counter terrorism strategy has opined that Pakistan may fail within six months. Concerns about stability in Pakistan became more acute when Taliban began their advance out of Swat towards Punjab earlier this year. The media highlighted the fragility of Pakistan by pointing out that the Taliban had come within 100 miles of Islamabad.

• Arvind Gupta
• June 16, 2009
• IDSA Comments

The European Union (EU) is going to have its first-ever summit with Pakistan on June 17 in Brussels. In Asia the EU has only three strategic partners, namely China, India and Japan, with whom it holds standard annual and occasionally half-yearly summits. Britain is the only country in Europe that holds annual summits with Pakistan. However, even these purportedly annual summits are irregular and have often been mired in controversy whenever a terrorist attack takes place in the UK or terrorist plots are unraveled and foiled by British agencies.

• Alok Rashmi Mukhopadhyay
• June 12, 2009
• IDSA Comments

The threat from the Taliban could be in the form of heightened infiltration attempts across the Line of Control or see a new breed of Talibanised Pakistani militants targeting the Indian hinterland or a combination of both.

• Harinder Singh
• June 02, 2009
• Issue Brief

Terrorism, maritime security and border management are the key challenges in India's neighbourhood