Rajan Menon

Pakistan: U.S. Reactions to Pakistani Election Results Are Mixed (Inter Press Service News)

..."[The Islamist parties] have been replaced by secular Pashtun nationalist parties who are hostile to the Taliban and who, at a minimum, will not allow the institutions of these provincial governments to be used by collaborators of the Taliban," Steve Coll, a South Asia expert and president of the New America Foundation, told an interviewer on public television Tuesday.

..."There is this notion that if… more

The view that sometime during this century a “changing of the guard” will occur, when China will displace the United States in much the same way as America did Britain, is widely held. It unites liberals and conservatives, optimists and pessimists, most of whom accept the proposition that “the East is back”, with China leading the pack. The debate is over when the shift will happen and what a world that currently bears an American stamp will look like after… more

Last week Former Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto addressed her power-sharing deal with General Pervez Musharraf at her press confrerence. “Many have criticized the deal but it is being done to avoid bloodshed and ensure an orderly transfer of power to the people,” she said.

In an interview with ABC Radio Australia, New America Foundation Fellow Rajan Menon discussed Bhutto’s political situation upon her return to Pakistan after eight years in exile.

Has Bhutto been damaged politically by… more

As Pakistan’s president, Pervez Musharraf, struggles to retain power, the United States finds itself in a familiar predicament, one that illustrates a recurring pathology in its foreign policy. Having yet again cast its lot with a strongman, Washington is confounded now that his political position has become precarious. It’s the Anastasio Somoza, shah of Iran, Ferdinand Marcos dynamic in a different guise. Though Musharraf won’t be forced into exile like those friends of Washington, the best he can hope for… more

Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s president and strongman, met his nemesis, the opposition leader Benazir Bhutto, in Abu Dhabi on July 27. Only extraordinary political circumstances could have thrown these two together. Musharraf sees Bhutto -- a former prime minister who’s lived in exile since the general brought corruption charges against her -- as emblematic of all that’s wrong with Pakistan’s inept and graft-ridden political parties. Bhutto, for her part, sees him as yet another military usurper, like the one who had… more

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The National Intelligence Estimate released this week revealed the continuing role of Pakistan in the survival of Al Qaeda. Former CIA analyst Paul Pillar and Lehigh University professor of international relations Rajan Menon talk about how US foreign policy could best address the problem.

To listen to this interview, please visit The Brian Lehrer Show website.

After the shootout at Islamabad’s Red Mosque, the pro-democracy demonstrations against Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf in the months preceding it, and Islamists’ rallies and suicide bombings following it, the United States finds itself in a familiar situation, aligned with a general who grabbed power in a coup but has become politically isolated, perhaps beyond repair. The difference is that Pakistan is now a more dangerous place than it was under the three prior military strongmen, Ayub Khan, Yahya Khan, and… more

Iraq’s Kurdish north has offered a heartening contrast to an otherwise blood-soaked country. Its polity works; its economy thrives. But the reports last week of a Turkish military incursion, in pursuit of Kurdish rebels, is an eruption of only one of three steadily deepening problems that could combine to worsen the Bush administration’s predicament in Iraq.

The first is the dispute over Kirkuk, capital of At-Tamim province. The city and its environs contain some 10 billion of Iraq’s 112 billion barrels… more

News report these days opine with tiresome regularity that Russia and the United States are headed for a new Cold War. But don’t believe the hype.

It’s true enough that Moscow and Washington have been exchanging cross words. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates told the House Armed Services Committee on Feb. 7 that Russia’s military modernization constitutes a threat; the assessment went largely unnoticed here, but not in Moscow.

Things got really nasty three days later. At an international conference in Munich,… more