Dr Mohammad Taqi

Wherever and whenever nation-states make the transition towards a democratic form of government, the question about civilian supremacy over the military is bound to come up. In stable western democracies, such as the US and Japan, both convention and the constitution provide well-established safeguards against the military’s encroachment on the civilian power to oversee and […]

In an attempt to answer the question why the terrorists attacked the Pakistan Naval Station (PNS) Mehran, we had noted last week: “The Pakistani security establishment has no intention to correct its course and perhaps the politicians cannot sway it either. But they could at least be on record to have warned the Pakistani people […]

“I keep six honest serving-men, (They taught me all I knew); Their names are What and Why and When, And How and Where and Who” — Rudyard Kipling. Another week, another tragedy: the series of unfortunate events has no end. But each catastrophe, no matter how enormous, is matched with a conspiracy theory of even […]

“Foreign policy is everywhere and always a continuation of domestic policy, for it is conducted by the same ruling class and pursues the same historic goals”. — The Revolution Betrayed, Leon Trotsky In his 1983 masterpiece, Can Pakistan survive? The death of a state, Tariq Ali opens the section on Pakistan’s foreign policy during the […]

As President Barack Obama announced his re-election bid for 2012 earlier this week, one was reminded of a 2008 Democratic primaries election campaign advertisement run by his then opponent, Hillary Clinton. It went something like this: “It is 3 am and your children are safe and asleep. But there is a phone in the White […]

Doveryai, no proveryai! This Russian proverb, meaning ‘trust, but verify’, popularised by Vladimir Lenin and later by Ronald Reagan, has not rung truer than in the events surrounding the assassination of Osama bin Laden (OBL) earlier this week. And we may see it applied much more intensely in the months to come. Phone calls from […]

It had taken the Talib terrorist Nek Muhammad Wazir one day to renege on his April 2004 Shakai Treaty with the Pakistan Army. The September 2006 Miranshah Agreement between the Pakistani state and the warlords in North Waziristan lasted 10 months before the militants repudiated the deal in July 2007. The March 2007 deal between […]

Geostrategic planning and global leadership has been likened by the old grandmasters of US foreign policy to a grand chessboard, where the strategy is contemplated several moves in advance, with an eye on the endgame. But the knee-jerk responses of Barack Obama’s administration to the rapidly unravelling situation in the Middle East and North Africa […]

As this column goes to press, many observers are anticipating that the ‘Day of Rage’ protests in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) or the ‘Hunayn revolution’ as some of the organisers have opted to call them, would actually go through on Friday, March 11, 2011. For the first time since the Shiite uprising of […]

When Samuel Huntington and Warren Manshel co-founded the Foreign Policy magazine (FP) in 1970, they felt that “in the light of Vietnam, the basic purposes of American foreign policy demand re-examination and redefinition”. They pledged to do so through “an effort to stimulate rational discussion of the new directions required in American foreign policy”. They […]