Pipeline diplomacy, and much more, is the need of the hour. The Investment Summit on Afghanistan, held in New Delhi, underscores two key aspects of India’s policy towards Afghanistan. First, there is an emphasis on economic engagement. Since the overthrow of the Taliban regime in 2001, India has sought to cultivate strong political ties with Kabul and to reach out to the people of Afghanistan. The principal ...

Impact on terrorism The arrest of Abu Jundal/Abu Hamza/Zabiuddin Ansari, a 26/11 participant of Indian origin; from Saudi Arabia on July 21 and arrest of another suspect (Fasih Mohammed) earlier is a major event in war against terrorism in India. The wide publicity this has received will have a salutary impact on would be terrorists in India. Bangladesh had cracked down on terrorists and other Gulf countrie ...

Uri Avnery For decades, my friends and I have warned that if we dither in making peace, the nature of the conflict will change. I myself have written dozens of times that if our conflict is transformed from a national to a religious struggle, everything will change for the worse. The Zionist-Arab struggle started as a clash between two great national movements, which were born more or less at the same time ...

The Air Force has launched a rocket from Cape Canaveral carrying a top-secret spy satellite, which analysts believe has the ability to see through clouds and bad weather. An unmanned Atlas V rocket carrying the classified device rose from its seaside Florida pad successfully following an aborted launch on Monday that was foiled by a problem with the environmental control system. It is believed to be the sec ...

Pakistan cricket captain Salman Butt has been released from prison early, his lawyers confirmed. The ex-Test captain was jailed for 30 months at Southwark Crown Court in November for match-fixing. But he was released on Wednesday night, his lawyers, 25 Bedford Row, said. The 27-year-old was the orchestrator of a plot to bowl deliberate no-balls in the Lord's Test against England last summer. His teammates M ...

Pakistan's batsmen deprived their team of a chance of winning the series, collapsing to lose seven wickets for 13 runs after reaching a position of advantage in the chase in the fourth ODI. An implosion of that nature can be dispiriting, the painstaking yet determined progress by their captain and an emerging top-order talent decimated by the ineptness of those followed. Not too long ago, in 2009 in Sri Lan ...

With the war there officially "ended" and most of our troops back home, Iraq isn't getting much ink these days. But the story is far from over. Indeed, according to Wadah Khanfar, former director general of Al Jazeera, Iraq is still the most important story in the Middle East -- with a far greater impact on the region's future than Syria. "Nobody's paying attention to Iraq anymore," he told me during dinner ...

President Obama is still vastly more popular internationally than his predecessor, George W. Bush, but after three and a half years of his presidency world opinion of US policy has fallen sharply, according to the 2012 Pew Global Attitudes survey released on Wednesday.  In particular, Obama's drone program in foreign nations -- including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia -- has fueled mistrust and a ...