ISDEI Instituto de Seguridad, Defensa y Estudios Internacionales

The Pakistan Air Force is considering other options after Washington decided to withdraw financing for a US arms purchase. “If funding is arranged, Pakistan will get the F16,” said Sartaj Aziz, foreign affairs adviser to Nawaz Sharif, the Pakistani prime minister. “Otherwise, we will opt for jets from some other place.” As reported by The Financial Times, Pakistan’s other options include the Russian SU35, the Chinese J10 and the Chinese J20 stealth fighter. The US and Pakistan have long had close ties. They jointly supported the Taliban rebels, who drove Soviet invaders out of Afghanistan in 1989. But the 9/11 terror attacks, masterminded by al-Qaeda from Afghan soil, ushered in a more complex period in which US forces helped overthrow the Taliban regime. The US continues to fight the group’s militants while Pakistan gives them haven. Washington is also upset by Pakistan’s support for other Islamist terror organisations, while President Barack Obama has said Islamabad is moving “in the

By Arvind Subramanian NEW DELHI – As the world’s financial leaders gather in Washington, DC, for the annual spring meeting of the International Monetary Fund, their hopes – and fears – center on China. After all, China is the one country that might be able to jump-start the sputtering global economy’s recovery; and yet its own economic growth is based on a foundation that is increasingly showing signs of strain. The dilemma is that both Chinese failure and success carry risks for the world economy. A failure scenario would be unique in post-World War II history. Because China’s economy is so large, the consequences would reverberate worldwide. But, unlike in 2008, when the US dollar appreciated, allowing emerging markets to revive quickly, the renminbi would likely depreciate should China’s economy experience a serious downturn, spreading deflation far and wide. Other currencies might depreciate as well, some as a result of deliberate policy. Consequently, a China failure scenario coul

WhoWhatWhy WhoWhatWhy exists in good part to serve as a kind of reality check. Its goal is to step outside the echo chamber, in which, no matter how improbable the “official” story, the media and the public reflexively accept it. WhoWhatWhy exists to remind us that the powerful — whether corporations or presidents or national security agencies — often exaggerate, cherry-pick facts, and even construct total falsehoods in service of their agenda. We see that again and again, with Vietnam, with Watergate, with Iraq, with the claimed reasons for invading Afghanistan , Libya and, through surrogates, Syria . The examples are legion. Each time the propaganda machine comes up with a new story, our society’s default response is to accept it. And the bigger the story, the harder it is for people to imagine they are being lied to. And the more discomfort it causes, the more cognitive dissonance kicks in. Then we rally around the flag — and lash out at the skeptics. Most recently, we encounte

A journalist who infiltrated a cell of Isis supporters as they planned a terror attack in France said he found “lost, frustrated, suicidal, easily manipulated youths”. The man, who is using the pseudonym Said Ramzi to protect his identity, said he “easily” contacted the group who called themselves the Soldiers of Allah on Facebook. Embedded with the extremists for six months between summer 2015 and January, he filmed their meetings with a hidden camera as they plotted an attack on a nightclub. The footage was broadcast by French network Canal + in a documentary called Allah’s Soldiers on Monday. A Canal + reporter secretly filmed Isis supporters planning a terror attack (Canal +) The network consisted of 10 members led by a 20-year-old man called Ossama, who had been refused by the French army and been a Satanist and alcoholic before discovering radical Islam online, the broadcaster said. Having being caught attempting to join Isis, he was jailed for five months in France but set up

Syrian army, backed by the Syrian army air force, on Sunday have carried out wide-scale military operations against the Takfiri terrorist organizations across in different areas including Homs, Hama, Aleppo, Daraa. Units of the army and the armed forces, backed by the Syrian army air force, on Sunday carried out wide-scale military operations against the Takfiri terrorist organizations across the country, destroying their dens and positions and inflicting heavy losses upon them in the personnel and the equipment. Homs Syrian Army Air Force destroyed ISIS terrorists’ gatherings and vehicles north and east of Palmyra city and Jabal al-Khanzeir in Homs Countryside. According to a military source, the air strikes targeted ISIS gatherings and cars fitted with various machineguns in Khneifis and and Jabal-al Khanzeir . The army, in cooperation with popular defense groups established control over southern plains of Jabal a-Mkeita’a and the western plateaus of Jabal Antar after inflicting

Numerous orphans who lost their parents due to foreign anti-terror intervention in Syria are becoming thirsty for revenge, a new ISIS propaganda video claims, showing a squad of well-equipped child soldiers preparing for battle. The footage created by the terrorist group’s media arm, Alhayat Center, starts off with a child walking across the ruins of a city destroyed during the Syrian conflict. Amid the scenes of destruction, the faces of Western leaders and politicians blend in with carefully drafted propaganda messages, accompanied by the Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) nasheed tune sung in French. The terror group vowed payback for the “massacre” perpetrated by the West against the self-proclaimed caliphate in the name of “so-called precious freedoms,” the inserts read, reassuring followers that the extremist organization has enough means by which to defend their cause. US President Barack Obama, Russian and French leaders Vladimir Putin and François Hollande, alongside Syr

By Gilbert Doctorow A new French documentary depicts a long-denied truth that Ukraine is in the grip of extreme right-wing nationalists who seek to impose what the British scholar Richard Sakwa has called a monist view of nationhood, one which does not accept minorities or heterogeneity. Rainbow politics is not what the Maidan uprising was all about. Like the Communism which held power in Ukraine before 1992, this new extreme nationalism can impose its will only by violence or the threat of violence. It is by definition the antithesis of European values of tolerance and multiculturalism. Sen. John McCain appearing with Ukrainian rightists of the Svoboda party at a pre-coup rally in Kiev. This intimidation is what Paul Moreira’s Canal+ documentary, “Ukraine: The Masks of Revolution,” shows us graphically, frame by frame. That this repression happens to take place under an ideology that incorporates elements of fascism if not Nazism is incidental but not decisive to the power of the docu

Egypt’s military regime is suppressing political opposition even more ferociously than the longtime Mubarak dictatorship while also collaborating in the strangulation of Gaza, writes ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar. By Paul R. Pillar With U.S. attention toward the Middle East being recently focused on such matters as warfare in Syria and Iraq and on the relationship with Saudi Arabia, little attention span is left over for the relationship with the most populous Arab nation. But developments in Egypt have, in multiple respects, significant capacity for creating attention-grabbing problems for Washington in addition to problems to which Egypt already is contributing in significant though less salient ways. Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi The regime of Abdel Fatah al-Sisi has become increasingly harsh, illiberal, and downright brutal—much more so than the last previous Egyptian general-turned-president, Hosni Mubarak. The State Department’s official human rights report on Egypt say