IDR Blog
Is Pakistan Taliban on the come-back trail?
On June 24, 2012, about 100 followers of Maulana Fazlullah, a Pakistani Taliban leader who used to operate from the Swat Valley of the Khyber-Pakhtunkwa Province of Pakistan and who have since taken sanctuary in the Nuristan area of Afghanistan after they were driven out of Swat by the Pakistani Army in 2009, infiltrated into the Dir Area of...
Is corruption wide spread in the military?
A TV channel recently showed a sting operation where a junior commissioned officer is caught on camera handling wads of currency notes obtained from prospective candidates for various jobs in the military’ with a colonel rank officer allegedly operating in the background. A maj-gen is caught red handed taking money from a contractor. These...
Are the anti-Maoist operations fake?
It is difficult to totally avoid collateral deaths of innocent civilians in counter-insurgency operations, but it is important to take every precaution possible to reduce such deaths. …counter-insurgency operations themselves, instead of putting down the insurgency, become a root cause of more insurgency. When the security forces do not...
The nation has a right to know
1962: India suffered a humiliating set-back in the Sino-Indian war. Many believed that the set-back was attributable to the then political, military and intelligence leadership. An enquiry was held into some of the aspects of the set-back. This enquiry report has not so far been released to the Indian public. 1965-66: India suffered two...
Why India needs a survival strategy
Imperial China first gobbled up pacifist Tibet and now demands major territorial concessions from pacifist India to protect the flanks of the conquered land. With the imminent withdrawal of the exhausted Western forces from Afghanistan, the emergence of an Islamic Emirate running from Kabul to Islamabad is inevitable. The Pakistan Army will be...