Pakistan's newly-elected Prime Minister Imran Khan has completed his first week in office. He has named his cabinet and key advisors to run his government. What key challenges does he face going forward?

Pakistan graduated from low-income (level 1) to lower-middle-income (level 2) status at the end…

US President Donald Trump says he is being investigated by the "US Deep State" because he is trying to improve his nation's bilateral relations with Russia.  Pakistan's ex Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has also made similar allegations of being targeted by "Khalai Makhlooq" (Pakistani Deep State) because of his efforts to make peace with India. …

Asia 2025, a US Defense Department Study produced in summer of 1999, forecast that Pakistan would "disappear" as an independent state by 2015. It further forecast that Pakistan would become part of a "South Asian Superstate" controlled by India as a "regional hegemon".  Two Indian-American "South Asia experts" contributed to this study.  Much of the forecast in its "New South Asian Order" section appears to be wishful thinking of its Indian contributors.…

What are Asad Durrani and AS Dulat, ex spooks of India and Pakistan, trying to accomplish with their joint appearances and book collaboration? What is “Spy Chronicles: RAW, ISI and the Illusion of Peace" all about? What have the two revealed about the work of ISI and RAW spy…

Why is the violence in Afghanistan intensifying? Why has US-NATO coalition dropped more bombs in Afghanistan in Jan-March 2018 quarter than in any other 3 month period in the last 15 years? Is it in response to the Taliban annual spring offensive? Or the Daish (ISIS) contributing to more killings? Is the Trump administration too busy with the military option and paying too little…

Diplomacy underlies all ties between nations. Diplomatic relations form the basis of travel, trade and investment between countries. The probability of armed conflict increases in the absence of diplomacy. In light of the recent failure to keep Pakistan off the terror financing watch list, the following question is being asked by political commentators and pundits: Is Pakistan's diplomacy…

Financial Action Task Force (FATF), the financial watchdog group for terror financing, has delayed any decision to put Pakistan on its watch list, according to its spokesperson Alexandra Wijmenga-Daniel.  This move was sponsored by the United States and its European allies.

The FATF statement released after the…

In a New York Times Op Ed titled "How Not to Engage With Pakistan",  ex US Ambassador to Pakistan Richard G. Olson says "Its (CPEC's) magnitude and its transformation of parts of Pakistan dwarf anything the United States has ever undertaken".  Olson goes on to warn the Trump…

Has Asia-Pacific become Indo-Pacific? Is George W. Bush's Quad back again? Is this Trump's version of Obama's Pivot to Asia? Let's examine what happened during President Donald Trump's recent Asia Trip.

Obama's Pivot to Asia:

President Barack Obama's Pivot to Asia initiative and his…

"We believe Gwadar is following in the footsteps of Shenzhen which represented a historic population rise, from a population of 30,000 in 1980 to 11 million people in 2017. Gwadar is poised to see massive population growth due to incoming industries, and we expect this to be one of the most strategic cities in South Asia." Hao-Yeh Chang,  China Pak Investments Corporation

Gwadar: The Next Shenzhen?

Gwadar is booming. It's being called the …

Pakistan is looking to buy more F-16s from the United States. There's mounting opposition to such sales as witnessed recently when President Barack Obama approved the sale of just 8 F-16s to the country.

India Lobby:

This decision by the Obama administration's decision triggered the Indian spin machine to go into high gear. The campaign orchestrated by the Indian…

All the speculations about the United States walking away from Pakistan this year have been proved wrong by the joint statement issued by the White House after this week's summit meeting between Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and US President Barack Obama in Washington D.C.

US-Pakistan Joint…

"The Pakistani establishment, as we saw in 1998 with the nuclear test, does not view assistance -- even sizable assistance to their own entities -- as a trade-off for national security vis-a-vis India". US Ambassador Anne Patterson, September 23, 2009…

President Barack H. Obama finally asked the questions that many American Muslim victims of Islamophobia have been asking for a long time: How many Americans have been killed through terrorist attacks over the last decade?  And how many Americans have died in gun violence.

Here's the exact quote from…