Shahzad Chaudhry

These days a popular answer would be: “a long time back”. Such are the lows that one has hit in the last few weeks. Why have we lost direction as a nation? Why do we not have a direction? Pulled in different ways, each follows his instinct. We are told not to worry. “This is […]

Hillary Clinton was effective; maybe stern, serious, sombre, dead serious, but she was effective. The message was clear: we know what we want out of this relationship, do you? Yes, she did talk of corruption, the economy, need to recover from the floods, energy, and then extremism and militancy, but was the menu especially ordered […]

The May 13 joint resolution by parliament and the joint communiqué issued after Senator John Kerry’s May 15/16 visit underlines the distortions in Pakistan’s misjudgement of its weight. The May 13 resolution partly conceded failure but remained, for a significant part, bluster; May 16 was realpolitik hitting home in full force reminding us all of […]

Retooling militaries is costly if undertaken en masse; it must be a gradual process beginning with reorienting planned force development strategies. An improving political environment, like the re-initiation of the India-Pakistan talks, will greatly help, but where security and polity easily drive each other, as has been the case in both countries, reshaping priorities can […]

Cricket trumps ‘conflict studies’ at least for this week; the final of my four articles on conflict must wait. No loss is ever easy, nor was the one at Mohali. I watched the match at a large screen event in Dubai the in presence of a large number of well-heeled Indian expatriates. Being well heeled […]

In this penultimate article seeking to define conflict in the here and now world — which I term as the post-modern world — and establish whether states, especially Pakistan and India where post-modern conflict is pervasive, are equipped and even more importantly conscious of the need to retool mental dispositions to the new war. As […]

My piece, ‘States and conflict’ (Daily Times, March 14, 2011), left some questions unanswered. These deal primarily with how I had intended to divide the modern era into its significantly important sub-divisions to understand better the nature of the threat that states are faced with and hence the ultimate intent to determine if those states […]

States and conflict will coexist with time. Along with inter-state conflict, the 21st century has an accompaniment, which is intra-state conflict, enabled by the dawn of that shadowy, grey character, the non-state actor. As weapons and militancy become the elements of the new franchise, states will have to confront challenges from within in defining the […]

President Obama gave a landmark speech in Cairo in July 2009, appeasing Muslim sentiment across the globe, and allaying apprehensions of American mistrust of Islam as a religion. He also, however, had a message to give: Muslim nations must change the way they operate and bring in more inclusiveness. He had this to say: “I […]

Raymond Davis may be a contract employee of the Pentagon. Or, maybe not. He may well be a hired gun of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) which has just been put on the Pentagon roll for convenience. You see the CIA will have a fairly self-contained, compartmentalised operation, with part-timers not in the least possible, […]