Pakistan

Framing Politics and the NDN

by Joshua Foust

The AP report: Pakistan’s defense minister said Tuesday that the country should reopen its Afghan border crossings to NATO troop supplies after negotiating a better deal with the coalition. Pakistan closed the crossings over two months ago in response to American airstrikes that accidentally killed 24 Pakistani soldiers at two Afghan border posts. The closure [...]

4 comments Read the full article →

Boycotting Bonn: Why It Will Fail

by Joshua Foust

I wrote a piece for The Atlantic about why Pakistan’s boycott has turned an already iffy conference at Bonn into a complete farce: But the Bonn II conference has met with significant hurdles. Besides Pakistan, Afghanistan’s largest neighbor, no one seems to know if Afghanistan’s other major neighbor, Iran, will participate (I spoke with officials [...]

12 comments Read the full article →

Pakistani Nuclear Policy in Context

by Joshua Foust

This is a guest post by Eric Auner, a Policy Analyst at the American Security Project. He tweets at @eauner. *** Jeffrey Goldberg and Marc Ambinder’s latest article properly focuses on nuclear dangers emanating from Pakistan. Their critiques of Pakistani behavior are powerful and convincing. The article does not, however, acknowledge the ways in which [...]

2 comments Read the full article →

The Unicorn Principle and Regional Strategy

by Joshua Foust

There remains a lot of pushback against the idea that the U.S.’s decision to re-engage with the Karimov regime in Uzbekistan represents a least-bad option for the region. Writing a guestpost at my friend Steve LeVine’s blog, Russell Zanca argues: Like-minded thinkers see Uzbek military forces as competent and trustworthy military partners. Furthermore, Foust himself [...]

22 comments Read the full article →

The Schmidle Muddle of the Osama Bin Laden Take Down

by Joshua Foust

A special guest post by C. Christine Fair On Monday, August 1, the New Yorker ran a piece by Nicholas Schmidle, a young freelance journalist, which proffered a breathtakingly detailed account of the Bin Laden Take-down in May of 2011.  I have known Schmidle since the summer of 2006, when we met at my office [...]

153 comments Read the full article →

Where the hell does Bruce Riedel get his information from?

by UmairJ

  Bruceee is at it again, but this time he is discussing the Bahrain-Pakistan link that was quite obvious from the get go. It is not this obvious point, about the recruitment of Pakistani soldiers by the Bahrain government that is revealing, but it is his information concerning Baluchistan and their hungry anti-shia identity, ready [...]

1 comment Read the full article →

The Importance of Politics

by Joshua Foust

In 2008, I came across the story of some potato farmers in Khost province. They had approached their local U.S. military commander to complain about an issue they were having. It was in January or February, and all the border crossings between Afghanistan and Pakistan were still closed off because of the murder of Benazir [...]

6 comments Read the full article →

Malakand, Pakistan

by UmairJ
Thumbnail image for Malakand, Pakistan
Read the full article →

Travels Through Swat

by Joshua Foust
Thumbnail image for Travels Through Swat

Registan.net blogger UmairJ is traveling through Swat. His pictures from the trip promise to be stunning, as one would expect from Northwestern Pakistan. Swat, as we all know here, is normally considered a tourist haven (especially for skiing in the winter). Swat is also where Tantric Buddhism, which forms the foundation of Tibetan Buddhism, first [...]

Read the full article →

Picture of the day

by UmairJ

  A nice view of the Attock on the way to KPK province (formerly known as NWFP). One of the most historical areas as most invasions into India travelled through these roads to Delhi. The Attock Fort was built primarily overlooking the Indus and Kabul river as a first line of defence against oncoming armies [...]

Read the full article →

Something to watch out for

by UmairJ

  After returning from Swat, I plan on focusing more on a topic that I have discussed in length on registan.net previously. The Baloch insurgency is a topic that analysts and military thinkers will focus more on in the coming years because of the continously deteriorating situation in Pakistan.   Here are two op-ed’s in [...]

2 comments Read the full article →

← Previous Entries