President Obama's trip to India underscored India's importance in global security and global finances – a democratic counter to an aggressive China. But India's poor foreign policy and botched regional relations have been holding it back.
The elephant in the room of my reporting on security issues within India and Pakistan is the messy, insecure relationship between them. The components of that relationship will be familiar to students of territorial conflict elsewhere: perennial border skirmishes punctuated alternately by all-out war and half-hearted peace talks; sporadic public outbursts calling for deadly final solutions mixed with heart-rending anecdotes about cross-border love.
Even with near-daily terrorist attacks claiming 2,000 civilian lives last year and the frontier war against radicals taking an additional 1,000, most Pakistanis are not focused on the jihadis.
Washington has lately become concerned that Pakistan is dragging its feet in the fight against the Taliban because it sees the Islamists as a check on its archrival, India, whose influence in Afgha
Maha Atal has been writing on business, economic policy and South Asia since 2005. Her work has appeared in BusinessWeek, Forbes, Fortune, the New Statesman, the ...