President Obama's call for a nuclear-weapons-free world in Prague last April unleashed a great outpouring of support from international allies and grassroots activists demanding a process to actually eliminate nuclear weapons. One recent and unexpected initiative has come from America's NATO allies. Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Norway have called on NATO to review its nuclear policy and remove all U.S. nuclear weapons currently on European soil under NATO's  "nuclear sharing" policy. Despite U.S. insistence on strict adherence to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty [ … ]

Killed, aborted or neglected, at least 100 million girls have disappeared – and the number is rising! 

Posted By Shivani K

Imagine you are one half of a young couple expecting your first child in a fast-growing, poor country. You are part of the new middle class; your income is rising; you want a small family. But traditional mores hold sway around you, most important in the preference for sons over daughters. Perhaps hard physical labour is still needed for the family to make its living. Perhaps only sons may inherit land. Perhaps a daughter is deemed to jo [ … ]

“China's maritime strategy relies heavily on submarines to patrol the littorals, blockade the Taiwan Strait, and stalk aircraft carriers. The U.S. Navy should not underestimate China's ability to build a capable submarine force to challenge a superior maritime foe.” Dr. Lyle Goldstein and Lieutenant Commander Bill Murray, U.S. Navy

China's National Defense In 2004, a White Paper promulgated in December 2004 provides valuable pointers elucidating Beijing’s national security concerns that drive its evolving strategic thought and policies – present and future – for the management of strategic [ … ]

China’s immediate short and long term interests would extend to its registered territorial claims and disputes, to areas of immediate economic interest and to those parts of the world where it plans on increasing its political interaction as a short and mid term objective. This means that the PRC over a period of time would project itself along the Pacific littoral states, ASEAN, the Indian Ocean, Africa, West Asia and the Central Asian Republics, where its national interests lie. Such initiatives in an incoherent geo-political and geo-str [ … ]

Originally compiled in June 2006

As recently as the 1980s the Peoples Liberation Army [PLA] operated on military doctrines that evolved during World War II and military means that preceded that war. It had become apparent to the Chinese leadership that the country’s political and economic evolution had far outstripped its military capacities engendering a credibility gap in the over all national power quotient that Beijing required to give it the means to play the role it expected to in the international fora. “A major strategic task of the Communist Party of China [CPC] in exercising state p [ … ]

As Hong Kong will be assimilated into the People’s Republic of China [PRC] in July 1997, with certain stipulations, its security would become a part of the parent State’s security milieu and, therefore, cannot thereafter be considered in the prevailing autonomous fashion. However, its assimilation into the PRC would be a principal change in evolving dynamics with a fundamental affect on the security environment of Asia Pacific region. It is one of the first, and crucial stages in the Chinese game pla [ … ]

By the time this article is published, the first formal India-Pakistan talks to improve their perpetually hostile bilateral relationship since the 26/11 Mumbai attacks will have already taken place.  No doubt Islamabad will have cited the Kashmir issue as the raison d’être for its difficulties with New Delhi, though such routine whimpers will yield little.  The words spoken at the recent meeting may be the same as at previous meetings, but the geopolitical geometry of Indo-Pakistani relations has changed rather radically once again, with the result that any s [ … ]

The much-vaunted success in Iraq, by the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, has now become a violent failure, engulfing the Shi’as and Sunnis into lethal conflict. In Pakistan, the “Taliban movement,” funded from Saudi Arabia and aided by Britain, is fast turning into the slaughter-house of minority Shi’as by the “Islamic Sunni jihadis.” Unless

Baghdad and Islamabad recognize, and deal with, the enemy that unleashed this endless war to destroy Islam, and bring untold misery to hundreds of millions of Mu [ … ]

Eliot‟s To the Indians who Died in Africa is not his best known work and yet it has an interesting history. Its implications and perspectives are vast and two Indian academics, A.N. Dwivedi of Allahabad University and K. Narayana Chandran of Hyderabad University, have expressed quite contrary views of it.

The poem had escaped my attention until Sir Christopher Ricks, former Professor of Poetry at Oxford and now at Boston University‟s Editorial Institute, had read my T.S. Eliot and India in the September 2008 issue of this publication. He said that it made [ … ]

http://nafeez.blogspot.com/2009/09/exclusive-our-terrorists-in-new.html 

The Sept-Oct edition of the popular progressive magazine, The New Internationalist, is a special issue on Political Islam, carrying an exclusive feature article by me called "Our Terrorists", which summarises some of my work on Western military intelligence cooptation of al-Qaeda affiliated terrorist networks after the Cold War.

You can't read the piece online, so I'd encourage getting hold of the hard copy, and perhaps encouraging friends/colleagues to read it too as a way of raising awareness. The NI coverage is [ … ]