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...

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...

In her soon-to-be released memoir, I Was Told to Come Alone, Souad Mekhennet, a young Washington Post security correspondent who grew up as a Muslim in Germany recounts her work exploring the roots of Islamic radicalism. Born in Germany to a Turkish mother and a Moroccan father, Souad Mekhennet’s unique cultural identity granted her access to some of the most wanted terrorist operatives in the world where she has attempted to discover “what is in the minds of these young jihadists, and how can we understand and defuse it?” Her travels take her from the German neighborhoods where the 9/11 plotters were radicalized and the Iraqi neighborhoods where Sunnis and Shia turned against one another, all the way to the Turkish-Syrian border, encountering with intelligence agents, and secretive meetings with members of the inner circles of Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and ISIS all along. In her travels across the Middle East and North Africa, she documents her terrifying run-ins with various intelligence services and reveals why the Arab Spring never lived up to its promise. Returning to Europe, she uncovers the identity of the notorious ISIS executioner “Jihadi John” a British Arab living in London who had been shown on gruesome videos of radicals beheading captives. In France, Belgium, and her native Germany, she reveals how terror has infiltrated the heart of the Western civilization. Based on copious interviews with members of jihadi groups, torture victims, families of men drawn into terrorism, refugees, and desperate citizens, Mekhennet exposes the sources of rage against the West. She is as frustrated with the West’s insistence that all Muslims are terrorists as she is with the horrific image of the West held by indoctrinated jihadi militants, who watch videos of atrocities carried out by Western-backed regimes as part of the recruitment process. Mekhennet is also frustrated by the Western media’s glossing over reality: she wonders, for example, why the uprisings known as...