To illustrate how differently India and Pakistan carve and peddle their narratives, former ambassador to the United Nations, Munir Akram recently quoted an excerpt from a review by Pankaj Mishra, a noted Indian author and writer of literary and political essays. “An unblinkered vision of South Asia would feature a country whose fanatically ideological government in 1998 conducted nuclear tests, threatened its neighbour with all-out war and, four years later, presided over the massacre of 2,000 members of a religious minority. Long embattled against secessionist insurgencies… the ‘flailing’ state… now struggles to contain a militant movement in its heartland. It is also where thousands of women are killed every year for failing to bring sufficient dowry and nearly 200,000 farmers have committed suicide in the past decade.” Mishra added: “This country is not Pakistan; it is India.” The review noted that India has revamped its image in the West through a most successful rebranding effort and one of “the cleverest PR campaigns”. On the other hand, Pakistan seems to have “lost the narrative”, argued Akram. He suggests that Pakistanis in general and officials in particular are often defensive and non-assertive even when they are on the right side of the argument. Pakistan, indeed, suffers from poor branding and its own people have failed in carving a narrative built on the positives. Ironically, this article reminded me of a few conversations with foreigners who have been to both India and Pakistan. At the cost of being taken on by nationalist Indians, I am reproducing some of the comments here which were made in the context of the brinkmanship and arrogance that has accompanied Narendara Modi’s government. After taking a study tour to Pakistan, Sri Lanka and India, members of an international officers’ delegation made some poignant observations about their stint in the three countries. Some of these observations may be cursory but still reflect certain realities of...

It is hard to believe that Germany, now a peaceful and tranquil country, had been subject to such significant acts of terrorism only in the last century; first, during the Weimar Republic following the First World War and again in the 1970s and 1980s in the Cold War period. The German experience of countering terrorism has been no less bitter than any countries’ currently battling the menace of terrorism today such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria, Syria and India, the top six according to Global Terrorism Index 2014. During the 1970’s and 80’s, terrorism in Federal Republic of Germany, known as West Germany until its unification in 1990, was mainly rooted in the Cold War politics between the two rival super powers, the Soviet Union and the United States, where the East and West Germanys had become staging grounds for insurgencies carried out by far-left and far-right German groups as well as foreign terrorist organizations. West German Marxist-Leninist groups were occasionally supported by the East German state (aka German Democratic Republic) and its security service Stasi while certain Palestinian groups had also found safe havens in West Germany because of its lenient asylum policies. The Germans’ first taste of the scourge of terrorism came during the 1972 Summer Olympics Games held in Munich. On the night of September 4, 1972, eight heavily armed terrorists belonging to the Palestine Liberation Organization’s front group, called the Black September Organization, managed to enter the quarters of 11 Israeli athletes participating in the Olympics and took the Israeli Olympic team hostage. The German response was a fiasco which led to the killing of all except one Israeli athlete. The Munich massacre set the German policy makers to re-evaluate and frame new counter-terrorism policies. Besides Palestinian terrorist groups such as Black September and Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Germany was confronted with several other terrorist...

Below is a report published by The News, the largest English-language Pakistani newspaper, on the CRSS quarterly security report released early this month. The report, based on open-source information from national newspapers, underlined the marked decline in incidence of violence across the country in the last quarter, including that in Karachi, Pakistan's largest city on the Arabian Sea.  Security think tank’s report shows marked decrease in Karachi violence Karachi: The quarterly report of an Islamabad-based security think tank released on Tuesday showed a marked improvement in the law and order situation in Karachi and the law enforcement agencies’ operation against criminals in the city has been given the credit for it. Besides, the report prepared by the Centre for Research and Security Studies (CRSS) also stated that there has been a significant improvement in the security situation in the entire country. The ongoing operation in Karachi, spearheaded by the Rangers, has had a positive impact in terms of curbing organised crime – a combination of criminal gangs, political patronage and bureaucratic protection. “This combination has had its own impact on the city’s security landscape because the criminals hooked up with militants – both relying on one another for protection and support,” Muhammad Nafees, a senior research fellow at the CRSS who compiled the report, told The News. Launched in September 2013, the Karachi operation represents yet another dimension of the security crisis that Pakistan faces.“For the first time in history, the law enforcement agencies focused on the connection between crime, politics and militancy in a sustained way,” Nafees maintained. The report also highlighted the controversies and fierce reaction from various political groups, especially the Muttahida Qaumi Movement and the Pakistan People’s Party, because of the operation “Yet there is hardly any denial of the fact that political patronage of crime, facilitation and...

Major Western democracies — despite many socio-political shortcomings, not alien to human society at large — stand out for continued democratic exercise and incessant accountability. Legal and institutional oversight of the government and parliament ensures preservation of and the respect for citizens’ fundamental rights — the yardstick for judging the performance of the various arms of government. It basically boils down to the rule of law and the respect for it — a basic prerequisite for instilling fear in the minds of violators and giving confidence to those who knock at the doors of courts for justice. Enquiry into controversies, largely fearless adjudication, a usually unconditional acceptance (by contestants) of such verdicts and near certainty of punishment (where applicable) are some of the hallmarks of present-day democratic societies and systems that stand on and draw strength from a legal regime i.e., the rule of law. This check and balance works as continued introspection to provide for course correction. These systems, evolved over decades, allow criticism and are open to correction as well. One such example in the US, for instance, is the National Security Archive (NSA), which is a non-governmental, pro-transparency organisation and the leading non-profit user of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). It is located at The George Washington University in Washington. Through the FOIA, the NSA has been releasing documents that relate even to the mighty US security establishment, including the CIA. Although most cases date back decades, yet the access to information does underscore the importance of institutions born out of the American Constitution. On July 20, the NSA managed to acquire and release files that document the often rough-and-tumble, behind-the-scenes dynamics between Congress and the executive branch during the “Year of Intelligence (1975-76)”, when a congressional committee was trying to investigate allegations and revelations of abuses...