At long last, the Iraq War appears to be over.

The US has been winding down its troop presence in Iraq for many months now, and will have reduced this to 50,000 by the end of August from a peak of 170,000 at the height of the ‘surge’ against the insurgency there in 2007. Under a [Read more...]

The Christmas Day Detroit airliner plot has put Yemen under the terror spotlight after it emerged that the suspect, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, lived in Yemen between August and December 2009, and after the Yemen-based Islamist group al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) claimed responsibility for the attempted attack.
Given the intense media attention on the country [Read more...]

Following the hullabaloo of US President Barack Obama’s whistle stop tour of Asia in November – the focus of which was primarily on China, Japan, the Koreas and South East Asia – it might be logical to assume that Washington-New Delhi relations have fallen down the pecking order of America’s list of foreign policy priorities. [Read more...]

Pakistan is one of the most geopolitically important countries in the world today, and how it evolves will affect a whole range of strategic issues. These include:

The future of political Islam

The fate of Afghanistan

The spread of nuclear weapons

The economic development of South Asia

The development of energy [Read more...]

Eight years after the ‘9/11’ terror attacks, the outcome of the subsequent ‘War on Terror’ is still inconclusive.
Overall, I have not really changed my view from the blog post I wrote on the seventh anniversary.
Neither ‘the West’ and its allied governments nor al-Qaeda and its offshoots have scored a decisive blow. In any case, as [Read more...]