The terrorist attacks in Pakistan are striking closer and closer to home, this time the highly secure police headquarters in Islamabad. There’s lots of speculation about what impact the domestic attacks will have on the Pakistani leadership’s approach to the extremist elements they’ve been otherwise cultivating for many years. My hunch is that it will be a lot like the American approach in Iraq, and what’s increasingly being proposed for Afghanistan and the FATA: buy out the ones who have a price, and fight the ones who don’t. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to figure out who’s who and what that [...]
As expected, the big winner of the U.S.-India nuclear deal, which just passed the House and might be approved by the Senate as early as today, is France. Actually, that’s just a catchy lede, because the agreement signed by French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Indian PM Manmohan Singh yesterday in Paris is simply the French equivalent of the American “1-2-3 Agreement.” The actual contracts between Areva and India have yet to be signed (although I’d be surprised if there aren’t any rough drafts already circulating). They would eventually need EU approval as per the Euratom Treaty [Update: Looks like Sarkozy [...]
AFOE’s Edward Hugh offers a solid analysis of the current financial turmoil roiling Russian markets, that among other things debunks the idea that the invasion of Georgia was an essential cause — as opposed to a catalyzing event — of the capital flight in the invasion’s aftermath. In other words, absent other fundamental weaknesses and contributing factors, there’s no way of knowing whether globalized markets would have “punished” Russia’s muscle-flexing in the Caucasus. While most of the loud arguments about the Russian invasion have framed it in terms of NATO enlargement and some sort of moral obligation to defend Georgia’s [...]
