IDR Blog
Should the PM avoid cosying upto Iran?
The Prime Minister, Dr.Manmohan Singh, has gone to Teheran to attend the summit of the Non-Aligned Movement. His participation in the summit will provide him with an opportunity to meet leaders from important countries of the NAM and to have another round of bilateral talks with President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan. Even if nothing...
Need for finesse in cyber counter-intelligence?
Intelligence is the collection of information from the real world that could be important for our national security. Counter-intelligence is the technique of preventing our ill-wishers from collecting intelligence about us that could weaken our national security. Cyber-intelligence is the collection of intelligence having a bearing on our...
Can committee of secretaries do justice to the armed forces?
Often the political executive appears to find solutions to difficult problems with the help of a group of secretaries. In some cases, this group of secretaries may not have complete knowledge and grasp of the issues under examination. In the late eighties the Army evaluated a number of indigenously developed diesel engines for the Vijayanta...
Has the military been given a raw deal on the pay front?
6Th Central Pay Commission (CPC) had, besides a few bureaucrats as part of the commission, approximately 125 officers drawn from various central services, (but none from the defence services) such as, postal service, Indian forest Service, police etc, on its staff to work out the nitty-gritty of the report. Predictably, these...
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...