China plots to encircle India
“Yay!” I exclaimed within myself. China was going to upgrade the Sylhet airport, said a blurb on the Internet. Sylhet is my hometown in northeastern Bangladesh. Sylhet’s Osmani airport is rather small and every time I fly in to the city, I have to hustle through a crowded arrival lounge into the hurly-burly of a […]
Can Israel digest 30% of West Bank?
WASN’T BENJAMIN NETANYAHU going to extend “Israeli sovereignty” to 30 percent of the West Bank, beginning July 1? Well, July 1 came and slipped quietly away, but the Israeli prime minister didn’t annex an inch of the Palestinian territory. What has happened to his plan? Rabbi Sharon Brous tells us what has. An influential leader […]
India’s empty threat to Pakistan
Pakistan was protesting, vociferously, India’s decision to wipe out the “special status” of the part of the Jammu and Kashmir state under its occupation. Rajnath Singh, the Indian defense minister, told Islamabad to hush up. He said New Delhi may be changing its “no-first-use” policy on firing nukes. India adopted the policy of not using […]
Bangladesh, Pakistan trade luck
I FEEL GOOD about living to see this day. Bangladesh, whose creation I once opposed, is belying my forebodings about its future. It has surpassed Pakistan and, in some cases, the economic behemoth of India in economic development and well-being. Bangladeshi economic performance glows brighter when you compare that with the near-meltdown of the Pakistani economy. Here’s […]
No ‘cakewalk’ to Pyongyang, please
ON WEDNESDAY I was about to head out to a seminar on cyber security at Wilson Center in Washington when I peeked into the Internet to check the latest news. “U.S. quietly plans to occupy North Korea after war,” a banner headline in London’s The Sun newspaper screamed at me. I remembered that President Trump […]
‘Islamic bomb’ scare, again!
“Persuading Pakistan to rein in its nuclear weapons program should be an international priority. “The major world powers spent two years negotiating an agreement to restrain the nuclear ambitions of Iran, which doesn’t have a single nuclear weapon. Yet there has been no comparable investment of effort in Pakistan.” – The New York Times Editorial Board […]
Declare Middle East nuke-free
Persian Gulf monarchies are petrified by the anticipated Iran nuclear deal, being negotiated in Geneva. Last week Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates threatened to try to acquire nuclear weapons technology if they didn’t get one of two things from the Iran deal. One, they wanted the Islamic Republic’s uranium enrichment program shut down […]
Terror bred by grievances, not Islam
PRESIDENT OBAMA’S speech at this week’s terrorism conference in the White House sounded to me like a broken record from the George W. Bush administration. Bush and his advisers attributed Muslim terrorism to Islam. “Islam is a religion in which God requires you to send your son to die for him,” said John Ashcroft, Bush’s […]
Cow, crescent and star
Published in Middle East Policy, Washington, D.C.; December 5, 2014 Mustafa Malik, an international affairs commentator in Washington, is investigating the impact of Hindu nationalism on liberal values and democratic institutions in his native India. Earlier, he conducted fieldwork on religious movements and nationalist experiments in the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent as a […]
Gaza, Pakistan and ignoble US legacy
The anti-government protests now raging in Pakistan and the travails of Hamas in Palestine remind me of Nurul Amin, my mentor. He served, at different times, as prime minister of Pakistan and Bangladesh, which was then East Pakistan. In February 1972, in Rawalpindi, Amin was telling me about the political intrigues that had led to […]
