India has to not only fight over-consumption of resources in metropolitan cities but also make sure that the resources saved percolate down to its rural areas.
Afghanistan was a test case for our foreign policy resolve, an arena where while leveraging other tools of foreign policy, use of instruments of force and military diplomacy/intelligence should have been predominant.
India needs to engage Singapore more robustly so as to enable the forging of deeper and more broad-based friendships in the Southeast Asian region through Singapore’s good offices.
The Indian armed forces appear to be driving defence budgets rather than a cold calculation of the country’s desire for ‘adequate’ military capability.
Though the Indus Water Treaty apportions 80 per cent of the waters of the Indus River Basin to Pakistan and only 20 per cent to India, Pakistan is engaged in baseless allegations to inflame public opinion and project India as its number one threat.
While limitation in aims set is acknowledged as the primary way of conflict limitation, the point lost sight of usually on the politico-military facet is war termination.
While China has shown eagerness for the Dalai Lama’s return to China, it has categorically refused to take back the exiled Tibetan population based in India.
Adequacy or inadequacy of defence allocation largely lies in the manner it is spent keeping in view the defence requirements for meeting operational and strategic goals and to have the needed defence preparedness to deal with threats.
Karzai’s use of the word ‘proxy war’ in relation to India’s reconstruction and rehabilitation efforts can only be understood in view of the West’s fatigue in Afghanistan and the growing importance of Pakistan
Notwithstanding revelations about the secret nuclear pact, the Japan-US alliance is likely to remain strong and the East Asian security order will continue to be determined by the American presence
The disclosure of this agreement is aimed at scoring political points as well as addressing the discontent among the nuclear allergic Japanese who want adherence to the non-nuclear principles in letter and sprit.
China has to accept that the long term solution to Tibetan discontent lies in granting greater autonomy to Tibetans instead of pursuing assimilation oriented policies.
While the asymmetrical threat will have an effect on warfare at strategic, operational and tactical levels, the threat will be most dramatic at the operational level.
The Naxal challenge is a wake up call to rejig our internal security instruments and restore their organizational ethos, autonomy and operational credibility.
If Pakistan succumbs to American pressure, it will continue to be engaged in a long war of attrition on its western borders. If Pakistan resists American pressure, it will be isolated in the world and the international community will have to fall back upon India to put a firewall around the AfPak region.
In a fundamental shift in its position on the global nuclear non-proliferation regime, Pakistan has made it known that it will join the NPT only as a recognised nuclear weapons state.
The latest arrests underline the lack of cooperation among security agencies in South Asia and the support base that exists in Bangladesh for terrorist groups.
