With Libya’s rebel forces having entered Tripoli on August 21, 2011, the country’s leader, Colonel Muammar Qadhafi, has seemingly lost power after 42 years. Although the rebels appear to have exaggerated their control of the capital – as evidenced by the defiant reappearance of Qadhafi’s son Saif al-Islam on August 23, thereby contradicting rebel claims… [Read more]

Although the war in Libya has been dominating international media in recent weeks – with a brief interlude for the Japanese earthquake – events in Yemen – where President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s regime is on the brink of collapse – are arguably of greater geopolitical significance. Libya has dominated headlines because it is more visibly… [Read more]

The assassination of Punjab governor Salman Taseer on January 4 is yet another blow to Pakistan’s turbulent political scene, where Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani’s government has lost its majority in parliament following the departure of a key coalition partner recently. Taseer’s death came barely three years after opposition leader and ex-premier Benazir Bhutto was… [Read more]

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… [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… [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 resources in Central Asia… [Read more]