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Frontier Tension: Is China Provoking India at Disputed Border?

May 5, 2013  •  Defense News

Amid all the media focus on China's maritime territorial disputes with Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines, the world nearly forgot that China still hosts the world's largest outstanding land border dispute with the world's largest democracy, India.

This author just returned from a week of meetings in Beijing, where China's territorial disputes were at the top of our delegation's agenda; the border dispute with India was conspicuously absent from our discussions.

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China and Pakistan's Nuclear Collusion

April 2, 2013  •  Wall Street Journal Asia

Last week the Chinese Foreign Ministry all but confirmed that it plans to sell its longtime ally Pakistan a new 1,000-megawatt nuclear reactor. The deal, reportedly signed in February, is a cause for concern in Washington. Though nominally a U.S. ally, Pakistan already has the world's fastest-growing nuclear-weapons arsenal and one of the world's worst nuclear-proliferation records. It is a country perpetually under threat from religious fanaticism, political instability and economic mismanagement.

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Wanted: A Post-Military Pakistan

October 23, 2012  •  US News and World Report

The outrage seen on Pakistan's streets over the recent shooting of 14 year-old Malala Yousefzai is a welcome contrast to the silence that greets so many acts of violence there. The liberal lawmaker Salman Taseer, assassinated by his bodyguard in 2010 for daring to speak out against Pakistan's arcane blasphemy laws, received no such outpouring of sympathy. There was no public outcry earlier this year when a Pakistani cabinet minister personally offered a $100,000 reward to any man who killed the filmmaker behind an incendiary anti-Islam video.

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A Forgotten War in the Himalayas

September 14, 2012  •  Yale Global

WASHINGTON: Next month marks the 50th anniversary of the 1962 Sino-Indian war. The event will be met with little fanfare in India, where China's surprise invasion still evokes feelings of outrage and betrayal. But the episode may be worth remembering for another reason, as the first occasion when India shed its nonaligned scruples and formed a tactical military alliance with the United States.

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India Key to U.S. Afghan Success

June 2, 2012  •  The Diplomat

With two important diplomatic victories last month, the Obama administration has laid the groundwork for the final chapters of the Afghan war. With a secret overnight flight to Kabul on May 1, U.S. President Barack Obama sealed an Enduring Strategic Partnership Agreement (ESPA) with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, setting the terms for the United States to retain a robust counterterrorism force to combat the remnants of al-Qaeda and provide a modest security blanket for the Afghan government beyond 2014. Weeks later, at the NATO summit in Chicago, Obama rallied war-fatigued European allies to endorse his framework for an orderly transfer of power to the Afghan government and secure long term pledges of aid.

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