Anecdotal understanding of the Afghan attitude is misleading.
Tom Ricks, in an interview with Fareed Zakaria:
Even when I lived there, it seemed to me that guerrilla warfare was the Afghan national sport.
One of my favorite books on this region is by John Masters. It’s called “Bugles and a Tiger.” It’s a memoir of being a British [...]
British have made the mistake of paying the enemy earlier and still not learned their lessons.
From the At War blog of the New York Times:
There is talk of paying Afghan tribes to give up violence and stop fighting the American-led NATO forces in Afghanistan.
This brings to mind a poem by Rudyard Kipling about [...]
There is little research on the contribution of the Indian armed forces to the Indian independence movement.
People always seemed to know half of history, and to get it confused with the other half. ~Jane Haddam
Even though the Royal Indian Navy Mutiny of 1946 has earned a footnote in the history of India’s independence movement, [...]
An asset and a liability.
Indian army has been Indian barely for 62 years now. It was the British Indian Army for at least twice that period. It should come as no surprise then that the Indian army still continues to draw most of its values and traditions from the British army.
One such quality is what [...]
Many reasons. None substantial.
Lieutenant General (retired) S. K. Sinha lays bare the reasons “that have been militating against the introduction of this appointment” of the Chief of Defence Staff [Journal of Defence Studies, Volume 1, No 1, Pages 135-136]:
First, is the political leadership’s fear, of the man on the horse back. It is apprehended that [...]
The Brits are reviewing theirs. Can we at least frame ours now?
Global Dashboard informs us that egged on by incessant calls from various think-tanks to do so, the British Ministry of Defence has announced that it will be kicking off a root and branch review of Britain’s defence policy. This will result in an interim [...]
From Narayanmurthy’s book.
In his forthcoming book, NR Narayanmurthy tries to solve the Indian development puzzle through three seminal pieces of work: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber; My Experiments with Truth by Mahatma Gandhi; and Peau Noire, Masques Blancs (Black Skin, White Masks) by Franz Fanon. It is the third [...]
General Petraeus coins a new phrase for Afghanistan.
If General David Petraeus would not have been an intellectual-soldier, he would certainly have been a great pitchman. The latest catchphrase from his repertoire encapsulates the new US strategy in Afghanistan.
Petraeus is determined to apply his method to Afghanistan: living among the people, bringing them security, establishing a [...]
Milband and others of his ilk are pinning their hopes on a non-existent civil society in Pakistan.
David Milband has been causing quite a ruckus with his inchoate thoughts about terrorism, Pakistan and Kashmir. The government of India has rightly taken offence and rebuked him for his views on Kashmir.
No, I’m asking Indians to do the [...]
Two pieces on Pakistan in the Western media. The Guardian, as usual, has it all wrong while David Sanger in NYT raises the right questions.
Adrian Levy of Guardian received a gift-wrapped rose addressed to him thrown over the wall of his heavily guarded and secret compound in Islamabad. Tied to the stem was a message [...]
Neither India-Pakistan military conflict nor merely justice for Mumbai terror attacks, the real problem that needs to be solved is Pakistan.
Pakistan has tried its best [and partially succeeded] to portray the Mumbai terror attacks in the framework of a conventional military conflict between two nuclear-weapons armed nations — India and Pakistan. Beijing, as the historical [...]
No one wants to learn by mistakes, but we cannot learn enough from success to go beyond the state of the art. [...]
…there is no Remembrance day for soldiers in India?
The British celebrated the Remembrance Sunday with the usual fervour and solemn éclat, remembering their war dead, described as “The Glorious Dead” on the side of the Cenotaph.
After the wreath-laying – the Queen first, followed by other members of the Royal Family, the Prime Minister and other [...]
From the Christian Science Monitor [August 24, 1944]–
When World War I ended there were only 12 commissioned Indian officers in the Indian Army. The process of Indianization had progressed so rapidly in the years before World War II, that when it broke out the number had grown to 307.
From the Time magazine [July 14, 1947]–
In [...]
Go no further. First take a look at the website of the Indian military’s Directorate General Resettlement. Then scour the home page of the British military’s resettlement service and their civilian partner agency.
One talks about starting the process of career transition two years before leaving and continuing for two years after leaving the military. [...]
Earlier post on the subject :A potboiler… off the Somalian coast
Somalia is a failed state with no central government and over 3,000 miles of coastline. NATO reports that there have been seven new piracy-related incidents including two hijacks during the past week itself and nine vessels are now being held by Somali pirates for ransom. [...]
[Administrative Note: Due to heavy professional and personal commitments, this blogger was on a short hiatus. My apologies as I shall not be able to respond to the plethora of comments and emails in the intervening period immediately. I hope to respond to them progressively in the near future. And a special thanks to all [...]
The French President Nicolas Sarkozy in his talk with the reporters at New York:
We cannot wait any longer to turn the G8 into the G13 or G14, and to bring in China, India, South Africa, Mexico and Brazil.
And George Bush, in his final address to the UN General Assembly also spoke about reforming the UN. [...]
In a series of articles and columns last week, The Telegraph (UK) has covered the delicate relationship existing between India and China. It also pushes the much echoed theory that the US is courting India to counter China’s rising influence in the region.
Meanwhile, future administrations will seek to advance Washington’s burgeoning partnership [...]
From the BBC:
The US is sending a senior counterinsurgency expert, Gen John Nicholson, to the south [Afghanistan] to invigorate operations there.
It is interesting to note that one of his forebears was a British brigadier who raised the siege of Delhi in 1857 – with a deserved reputation for great brutality that the current Nicholson will [...]
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