Tankel, Stephen

Summary
The article discusses Pakistan’s support to various militant groups that spread terrorism and it’s straining relationship with the U.S. as a result of the same. It discusses a drone strike by the U.S. in Pakistan’s Baluchistan province that killed Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour, the Afghan leader of fundamentalist political movement Taliban, and Pakistan allowing drone strikes in Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) but not in Baluchistan. Other topics discussed include U.S. President Barack Obama led administration’s frustration with the country for its production of tactical nuclear weapons.
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Dadwal, Shebonti Ray and Chithra Purushothaman

Abstract
In May 2017, some 1,200 delegates from 110 countries, including 29 visiting heads of state and government leaders, gathered in Beijing for China’s biggest diplomatic event, which was held to showcase the Belt and Road Initiative’s (BRI) achievements to date, as well as draft some new ideas. The forum also formalised the US$50 billion China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a flagship project of the BRI, projecting it as a game-changer for Pakistan’s economy. Pakistani officials have stated that once the projects are launched, it could see Pakistan’s flagging economy, burdened with a debt that constituted 66.5 per cent of its GDP in 2016, grow at 6–7 per cent per annum from the current 5.3 per cent. But more importantly, that energy plays a central role in the CPEC project is evident from the fact that out of a total fund allocation of around US$50 billion, US$35 billion has been allocated for energy projects. This is hardly surprising, given that Pakistan faced more than 40 per cent gap in electricity demand and generation. While demand during the peak summer months is around 24,000 MW, power generation is less than 1,600 MW, with some regions suffering from 20–22 hours of power cuts every day.
The energy projects, along with other infrastructure, Gwadar and industry development projects, have been categorised under four phases: ‘Early Harvest’ (priority) energy projects are to be completed by 2018; the short-term projects, or the actively promoted projects, are to be completed by 2020–2023; the medium-term ones by 2025; and the long-term projects are to be completed by 2030. However, there appears to be considerable opacity regarding which projects are viable and which need to be shelved or revised. Moreover, the timelines of some of the projects have also been changed.
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Paliwal, Avinash

Abstract:
India’s Afghanistan policy in the 1990s is termed a zero-sum game of influence with Pakistan. New Delhi’s aversion to the pro-Pakistan Taliban regime is considered a marker of this rivalry. This paper revisits India’s approach towards Afghanistan and examines if New Delhi was necessarily averse to engaging with pro-Pakistan political factions during 1990s. Based on fresh primary interviews with former Indian policymakers, media archives, and official reports, the paper shows that India engaged with and accommodated pro-Pakistan factions after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989 until 1996. The Taliban’s rise to power in Kabul in September 1996 challenged India’s engage-with-all approach. Nonetheless, the decision to sever ties with the Taliban and to bolster anti-Taliban factions was highly debated in New Delhi. Many in India saw the Taliban as a militant Islamist force sponsored by Pakistan. For others, however, it was an ethno-nationalist movement representing Pashtun interests, and not necessarily under Islamabad’s control.
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Grare, Frederic

Abstract
As the new Indian government has settled in, what will happen to its relations with Pakistan? While some take comfort in the idea that the strong nationalist credentials of the new Prime Minister could facilitate a peace agreement with Pakistan, others argue that the risk of communal violence created by the Hindutva ideology of the new government could be a potential impediment to better India–Pakistan relations. But the evolution of the bilateral relationship is unlikely to depend on either of these considerations; it is also unlikely to depend primarily on New Delhi.
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Joshi, Shashank

Introduction
New Delhi’s gamble is that calibrated punishment places the onus for escalation – and so the risk of further isolation – onto Pakistan.
There have been small, revisionist powers with a penchant for asymmetric warfare. And there have been small, nuclear-armed powers. But until Pakistan became nuclear-armed in the late 1980s, inching its way, one cold test at a time, to an air-delivered device a few steps ahead of its larger neighbour, there was no small, revisionist, nuclear-armed state in the world. Perhaps North Korea has since travelled a similar path, but its external provocations have had considerably less impact outside its borders than those of Pakistan. It has supported violent separatist movements, militant Islamist guerrillas and urban terrorist attacks in both Afghanistan and India, ramping up involvement as its nuclear shield matured through the 1990s. These proxies have failed to wrest Kashmir from India or guarantee a pliant Kabul, and have resulted in drastic blowback within Pakistan itself, in the form of more than 20,000 civilian deaths in the past decade alone But they have kept India off balance, forcing it to divert defensive resources away from China and highlighting the shortcomings of the state.
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Ayson, Robert, and Manjeet S. Pardesi

Introduction
Military coercion has already changed the Asia-Pacific region.
With so much attention being devoted to maritime security competition in Asia, including in the South China and East China seas, it is easy to forget how peaceful the region has been for several decades. In East Asia, no major power has been involved in so much as a limited inter-state war since China’s brief armed conflict with Vietnam in 1979. Peace among South Asian states has been broken more often, but mainly by circumscribed armed conflicts between India and Pakistan, including their most recent and very limited Kargil War in 1999.
This is an impressive record for a region that was riven by major wars in the middle of the twentieth century. But it does not mean that the making of military preparations has been abandoned in Asia. The region’s growing powers are devoting significant resources to their armed forces. Asian countries now spend $100 billion a year more on defence than all of the European members of NATO combined. Of particular note, China has emerged as the second-largest defence spender in the world after the United States. Beijing’s 2015 military budget was more than three times that of India’s, Asia’s second-largest defence spender, and almost four times as large as the combined defence spending of the 11 Southeast Asian states.
It is only right for scholars to wonder about the impact of China’s rapidly modernising military forces on US–China crisis stability, and to ask whether the economic interdependence between the United States and China really rules out an armed conflict between them. It is also important to consider what an Asian war might look like if it were to occur, and how it might be avoided in the first place. Uncertainty over quite how the Trump administration’s approach to Asia’s security will evolve increases the importance of this consideration. But there is another, more urgent strategic consideration for Asian countries as the locus of global power shifts in their direction. Strategic interactions that fall between complete non-violence and largescale combat are now ubiquitous in Asia. These events constitute a pattern of coercion involving the exploitation of potential violence to signal intent, influence behaviour, and change or uphold the status quo.
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Webb, Matthew J., and Albert Wijeweera, eds

Publication Year: 2015

The Political Economy of Conflict in South Asia

Summary
Destructive conflicts have thwarted growth and development in South Asia for more than half a century. This collection of multi-disciplinary essays examines the economic causes and consequences of military conflict in South Asia from a variety of perspectives embracing fiscal, social, strategic, environmental and several other dimensions.

Kazi, Reshmi

Abstract
In the 21st century, nuclear security (NS) risks are more tangible with the probability of nuclear weapons and materials falling into the hands of terrorists becoming more real. The NS threat scenario presents a complex matrix of violent terrorism, Islamist militancy, a proliferation network originating from Pakistan (A. Q. Khan Network)and its spread to Iran, Libya and North Korea. To mitigate nuclear risks and inspire global nuclear confidence, an institutionalized structure is critical for strengthening NS. India has developed its centre of excellence (CoE) called the Global Centre for Nuclear Energy partnership (GCNEP). It is supported by the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) as an institutionalized framework dedicated to ‘enhance nuclear safeguards to effectively and efficiently monitor nuclear materials and facilities’.
This commentary explores the critical role played by the GCNEP through sharing of best practices with several countries by imparting education, training and enhancing awareness. India’s approach is to achieve sustainable excellence as an integral aspect of its NS policy and embed a strong NS culture within its nuclear architecture capable of enthusing NS confidence at the national, regional and global levels.
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Pant, Harsh V., and Yogesh Joshi

Abstract
This article examines the transformation in Indo-US relations in the first two years of the Modi government. It first discusses the state of Indo-US relations before Modi’s ascent to the premiership in May 2014. The challenges confronting the relationship were not strictly bilateral; Modi’s image and its historical baggage had also made them personal. Subsequently, the article elaborates on the significant progress made in the bilateral relationship during the first two years of the Modi government. The concluding section explains the rationale behind Modi’s outreach to the United States. Three factors appear to have had a significant influence: a conviction that India’s developmental priorities cannot be met without substantive cooperation with the US; the strong political authority Modi enjoys within his own party and in the Indian parliament; and the structural changes in India’s security environment brought about by an aggressive China and its growing strategic convergence with Pakistan, leading to a re-think on ‘non-alignment’ as a guiding principle of foreign policy.
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Bajpai, Kanti

Abstract
Does Narendra Modi bring anything substantively new to Indian foreign policy? This article assesses Modi’s record towards Pakistan and China, arguing that he has significantly changed the course of India’s diplomacy, at two levels—bilateral diplomacy and coalition diplomacy. India has traditionally followed a policy of slow-to-anger, prudential bilateral diplomacy and, in the name of non-alignment, reluctant coalition-building against both powers. Under Modi, New Delhi has adopted a more assertive stance bilaterally and has actively sought to recruit third parties into a diplomatic coalition against Pakistan and China. Modi’s assertive bilateralism has translated into an insistence that anti-terrorism is the only subject of discussion and that the Kashmir dispute with Pakistan is off the table. In the case of Beijing, assertive bilateralism has meant reversing India’s traditional stance of normalization of relations leading to a border settlement by arguing that quicker progress on a settlement must be the condition for any further diplomatic normalization. Modi’s coalition diplomacy has entailed an active engagement with the US, the Gulf countries and even China against Pakistan, and with the US, Australia, Japan, Vietnam and the Indian Ocean states against China. The objective is not alliance-building but rather the application of diplomatic pressures against India’s two rivals. Modi’s diplomacy has been marked by a cooperation–defection cycle with both powers, signalling a willingness to cooperate on India’s terms and defect when it does not get its way. Not surprisingly, relations with both Pakistan and China have come under considerable strain.
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Leong, Adam Kok Wey

Abstract
The Royal Malaysian Navy (RMN) has just recently acquired a two-submarine force and is one of the new submarine operators in the South East Asia region. While criticism had been levelled on the usefulness of two submarines and far from the ideal minimum quantity, lessons from strategic history highlighted that even a single submarine can still yield immense strategic effects in this age of modern warfare. This article highlights the only two submarine operations after the end of World War II that had managed to sink an enemy warship, and uses these two cases to distil strategic lessons. These two lessons are the sinking of INS Khukri by PNS Hangor during the 1971 India–Pakistan War, and the sinking of ARA General Belgrano by HMS Conqueror during the 1982 Falklands War. This article argues that while the RMN has a limited number of submarines, lessons from recent wars however had demonstrated that even a sole submarine can still yield tremendous strategic effect.
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Staniland, Paul

Introduction
President Obama has placed Pakistan at the center of his administration’s foreign policy agenda. Islamabad is a pivotal player in Afghanistan and its decisions will have much to do with whether and how U.S. forces can leave that country. Al Qaeda and linked militant groups have used Pakistan as a sanctuary and recruiting ground, with the Afghanistan— Pakistan border areas becoming, in President Obama’s words, ‘‘the most dangerous place in the world.’’ Recurrent tensions between India and Pakistan frustrate and complicate U.S. initiatives in the region, where nuclear proliferation, insurgency, terrorism, and grand strategic goals in Asia intersect.
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Rezaei, Farhad

Abstract
This article explores the paradox in the reaction of the United States to the two different proliferation cases: Pakistan’s proliferation and Iran’s weaponization effort. The article tries to find answer to the following key question; why the United States, as one of the guardians of the Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) which would prefer to see a region that is entirely free of weapons of mass destruction, ultimately has accepted Pakistan’s proliferation, while imposed considerable amount of pressure to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
The paper posits that number of factors explain such differences; first, and at the theoretical level, Pakistan was never considered an “irrational” and “messianic” state like Iran, but regarded as a country with a certain degree of cold-war type nuclear rationality. Second and at the applied level, while Pakistan was a US ally with not having a history of challenging the United States, Iran has been considered enemy and a threat toward the US interest.
Third, while Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal was viewed as a defensive mean against overwhelming strength of India, Iran’s possible nuclear arsenal considered to be for offensive uses against the United States and Israel. The fourth factor pertains to the consequences of proliferation, which is what happens when Iran’s neighboring countries may feel threatened by Iranian nuclear weapon and proceed to develop their own arsenal. Fifth factor deals with the possible Iran’s temptation to give some nuclear material to a terror group in which made the United States serious in preventing Iran’s weaponization. Last but not least, Israel was not involved to pressure and agitate against Pakistan, while it was applied a tremendous pressure against Iran to prevent it from achieving nuclear weapons.
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Jacques, Kathryn

Publication Year: 2000

Bangladesh, India and Pakistan: International Relations and Regional Tensions in South Asia

Summary
This book provides a broad, analytical study of Bangladesh’s relationship with India and Pakistan between 1975 and 1990. Bangladesh’s role in South Asian international relations has tended to be overlooked and underestimated. The book reveals the complexity of the relationship between Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan and challenges the biased and stereotypical views often encountered regarding Bangladesh’s foreign policy. Considerable contemporary evidence is interpreted from a variety of perspectives: domestic, regional, and extra-regional. The evidence is then used to assess the relative significance of these perspectives.

Mack, Andrew

Introduction
Northeast Asia is the only region in the world in which the technological potential to make nuclear weapons is combined with deep-seated (though currently attenuated) historical animosities. In Western Europe and North America the nuclear capabilities exist but not the enmity: in other regions, enmity is not matched by capability. In South Asia the technical potential to go nuclear has already been realized and curbing vertical proliferation India and Pakistan has become the name of the game. It is a commonplace of strategic analysis that when political relationships deteriorate, perceived threats become a function the capabilities of adversaries. Thus the technical capabilities of regional states to make nuclear weapons must be a concern regional security planners in an uncertain strategic environment. This concern will exist notwithstanding the fact that all regional states are now members of the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT). There are two reasons for this.
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