* McCain tells Ghani Gen Bajwa agreed to US ‘monitoring’ of action against terrorists * If Islamabad doesn’t change, US may change its behaviour towards Pakistan A high-powered delegation of US senators led by led by Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain on Tuesday told Afghan President Ashraf Ghani that Pakistan has agreed to ‘joint operations’ against terrorist groups in the border region, a statement from Presidential Palace in Kabul said. “The Senators said that head of Pakistan’s armed forces General Qamar Javed Bajwa has agreed to joint operations against terrorist groups in the border region. They said that the US would provide monitoring and verification of these operations,” the statement said. The delegation has reached Kabul after a two-day trip to Pakistan where the US senators met Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and Chief of Army Staff General Qamar Javed Bajwa and also travelled to South Waziristan to attend a briefing about Pak-Afghan border security situation, including recent measures to improve security through fencing and enhanced surveillance. President Ashraf Ghani said Afghanistan ‘agrees with the proposal’ of joint border operations with Pakistan, monitored by the US. The statement issued by Pakistan Army after meeting with the visiting dignitaries did not mention any proposal of joint operations with Kabul. “Pakistan has done its best despite constraints and shall continue its efforts for peace and stability,” ISPR quoted General Bajwa as having told US senators. Kabul had long been insisting on a third-party monitoring of operation against terrorists and Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and President Ghani had agreed last month to use the Quadrilateral Coordination Group mechanism as well as bilateral channels to undertake specific actions against terror groups and to evolve, through mutual consultations, a mechanism to monitor and verify such actions. McCain warned Pakistan that Washington was counting on its support to eliminate militancy...

This June, a group of 65 retired senior civil servants published an open letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi criticising “a rising authoritarianism and majoritarianism, which do not allow for reasoned debate, discussion and dissent”. The group includes Ishrat Aziz and Deb Mukharji of the Indian Foreign Service, Julio Ribeiro and M. Balachandran of the Indian Police Service, and activist Harsh Mander, who has valiantly sought justice for victims of anti-Muslim pogroms. The letter is noteworthy for setting a precedent as well as for its contents — it pins the blame squarely on Modi. “In Uttar Pradesh, in the run-up to the elections, an odious and frankly communal comparison was made between the relative number of burial grounds and cremation grounds. The question was also asked as to whether electricity was being supplied equally to different communities during their religious festivals.” This is a clear reference to remarks made by Modi while addressing a rally in Lucknow in February. The integrity of public servants has been undermined in UP. The letter also cites official acts that have created a “growing climate of religious intolerance that is aimed primarily at Muslims” — to wit, tighter curbs on cow slaughter and violence by ‘cow vigilantes’; a crackdown on NGOs; and charges of sedition levelled recklessly, even on 15-year-olds. It concludes, “[W]e appeal to all public authorities, public institutions and constitutional bodies to take heed of these disturbing trends and take corrective action.” One wishes that such public-spirited persons would also devote attention to the state of the civil service today. Communal and corrupt politicians in power rule through pliant civil servants. Vallabhbhai Patel warned against the suborning of the civil service in the Constituent Assembly in October 1949: “The Union will go — you will not have a united India, if you have not a good all-India service which has the independence to speak out its mind, which has a sense...

I almost couldn’t believe my eyes when I finally received my visa to visit Pakistan. As an Indian-American, it was not an easy process.  That I was born in Hyderabad – Deccan, not Sindh – made India home, but rendered Pakistan almost impenetrable. My first application was scoffed at by the embassy in Cambodia where I initially applied. But still I persisted, finally succeeding through the help of a college roommate, another Hyderabadi-American, who connected me with an official at a Pakistani Consulate in the US. It always surprised me that nearly everyone I know has visited either India orPakistan, never both. That these two nations are born out of the same cloth; out of a shared cultural and linguistic tapestry that stretches back millennia, has been unfortunately obscured by the politics of a few decades. During Partition, my entire family, as far as I knew, decided to stay in the relative security of Muslim-majority Hyderabad in southern India. Amidst a slightly different situation, I could just as easily have been born in Pakistan. I was, of course, as proud an Indian as any, but that never hampered my curiosity for my fraternal nation. We’re all scurrying to work in the United States, or vacation in Europe, when there is so much we can learn from our next-door neighbours. couldn’t remember the last time I was so excited to go somewhere new. I had already visited some 40-odd countries, attempting with each to broaden my understanding of the world. But there was something especially evocative about Pakistan. As a South Asian Muslim, it was the indignation of a birth right interminably delayed due to political complications. After all, Pakistan was created in the spirit of inviting and protecting the rights of Muslims. As a proud speaker of the language, I was also excited at revelling in Urdu in all its glory in Pakistan. The Devanagari script used to render Hindi is, of course, just as beautiful to my eyes. But I yearned to immerse myself in the elegant...

An uptick in attacks by Afghan National army soldiers against foreign troops would seem a worrisome trend ahead of the deployment of another 4,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan in the latest attempt by Washington to turn around the protracted war against insurgents. Two so-called insider attacks, in which a soldier in an Afghan National Army uniform turns his weapon on foreign troops, in as many weeks have killed three U.S. soldiers and wounded another seven. Insider attacks have been occurring with deadly regularity since 2011. According to an April report by the Modern War Institute at America’s West Point it was in 2011 that “insider attacks became the preferred war-fighting tactic of the Taliban, an organization that understood well how to apply limited resources for maximum effect.” The report says since 2007, insider attacks have killed 157 NATO personnel and 557 members of the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces. But it also blames many attacks against foreign troops on what it calls cultural friction, where Afghans become infuriated by a perceived insult. In June alone there were two separate attacks on U.S. soldiers by Afghans wearing an Afghan army uniform. In March another insider attack killed three U.S. soldiers. In April, Taliban fighters dressed in Afghan army uniforms passed through several security rings to enter a base in northern Afghanistan’s Balkh province and kill as many as 140 Afghan soldiers. The attacks come as U.S. President Donald Trump prepares to bolster Washington’s presence in Afghanistan to stem the violence and the Taliban’s military advances, particularly in rural areas of the country, and largely in the south and the east. But the emergence of an affiliate of the Islamic State group has created a sense of urgency to turn the war around. WHAT HAVE THE LATEST INSIDER ATTACKS LOOKED LIKE AND WHAT DO THEY SAY ABOUT INSURGENTS’ ABILITY TO INFILTRATE? The diverse locations of the two most recent insider attacks shows the depth of...