... become more active. Competition for “on the ground” presence and for new negotiation formats now determines the region’s balance of power. The emergence of India as a new actor is an important component that could impact regional dynamics.
Before India became visible in the South Caucasus, Pakistan was notably quite active. In 2017, Baku, Ankara and Islamabad
signed
a trilateral statement on regional cooperation. Later, in 2020, Pakistan
supported
Azerbaijan during the war in Nagorno-Karabakh. Islamabad regularly participated in military ...
...
Indian Air Force (IAF), being a numerically superior force with better combat stamina, is postured for a prolonged multi-front and attrition-oriented warfare. This posture, however, now has limited feasibility, particularly after overt nuclearization of India and Pakistan. Unlike PAF, which is entirely structured against India-centric threats, IAF has two major fronts to deal with simultaneously. The likelihood of a two-front war, particularly after the recent Indo-China military crisis, has overstretched IAF ...
... Russia and Ukraine formed the organic core of the Russian Empire, and later that of the Soviet Union. While the collapse of the Soviet Union did not result in an immediate direct military conflict between Moscow and Kyiv like it was in the case of the India-Pakistan War of 1947–1948, it was nevertheless extremely painful for Russia and Ukraine, also triggering significant migration flows that continue up to this day.
It is precisely the closeness of the “cultural and historical codes” of the two pairs ...
... feeling of shock in West Pakistan in 1971. And today, 50 years later, Feroz Hassan Khan still expresses a sense of “deception” by the USA. Pakistan had felt “protected” by the US in the SEATO alliance, but at the loss of Bangladesh and defeat to India, Pakistan
felt
that “Nobody is going to come to your rescue”.
After 1971, Pakistan said "never again". Pakistan invested ever more in military self-dependence in an indigenous nuclear capability. Pakistan’s then Prime Minister Zulfikar ...
... asymmetric. India is far larger, richer and stronger than Pakistan, while the same is true for Russia vis-a-vis Ukraine. That said, neither Pakistan nor Ukraine is so weak that India or Russia could ignore or manipulate their neighbour with impunity. For India, Pakistan is much more important than, say, the neighboring Sri Lanka, where New Delhi also faces numerous challenges in sustaining bilateral ties. Similarly, Ukraine is far more important for Russia than all the three Baltic states combined. While neither ...
... their withdrawal.
The NATO withdrawal creates significant hurdles for regional stability and a power vacuum in Central Asia. There are several players, both internal and external, who are seeking to fill the void left by the Americans and their allies. Pakistan, India, Iran, Turkey, China and Russia seem poised to play the next “
great game
” in the so-called “
graveyard of empires
”. Some of these states have a vested interest in the stability of Afghanistan to ensure regional security and foster economic ...
... India’s vital interests. Looking North is now more imperative than ever before.
Reference:
1
. Discussion of the authors on this theme with Amb Jayant Prasad, former Director-General, IDSA.
2
. The two energy projects – the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas pipeline, and the Central Asia South Asia Electricity Transmission and Trade Project (CASA-1000) which is expected to bring Tajik and Kyrgyz hydropower to Afghanistan and Pakistan, and evolve into the Central Asia-South Asia Regional ...
... another state. The Indian authorities are paying more and more attention to conducting defensive and offensive operations in cyberspace while striving to reduce the country’s dependence on tools developed aboard and giving preference to forward-looking India-made products.
At present, Pakistan, China, and the U.S. are India’s key adversaries in cyberspace. Pakistan’s capabilities for waging cyberwar are fairly limited: as a rule, Pakistani secret services either hack the websites of Indian agencies and companies connected with ...
... trenchantly prosecuting the virtues of continuity versus the pyrrhic costs of change and the medley of opposition parties desperately litigating the need for the electorate to embrace their case for change. The election has been conducted in the shadow of India’s punitive cross-border air-strikes into Pakistan, presenting itself as arguably swift comeuppance for the terror assault in Jammu Kashmir state and evidence of emphatic decisive leadership of the Prime Minister to glower at and not be cowered, by the scourge of terrorism emanating from across ...
... terrorism. Essentially, the issue of terrorist groups being active in South Asia was taken off RATS’ table. On the one hand, this allowed both the Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure and the SCO as a whole to avoid paralysis during another flareup of the India–Pakistan crisis. On the other hand, it called into question its value as a body coordinating the anti-terrorist activities of all the SCO member states. The national security services of India and Pakistan proved unable to latch onto the “Shanghai spirit” ...
