South Asia Investor Review

Both the American and the Iranian delegations are expected to begin peace talks in Islamabad tomorrow after the announcement of the Pakistan-brokered ceasefire. The US team is led by Vice President J.D. Vance and includes President Trump's envoy Steve Witkoff and the president's son-in-law Jared Kushner. The Iranian team includes Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf and Foreign Minister Abbas Aragchi. Mohammad Ghalibaf is a former IRGC (Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps) commander with close ties to the hardliners.   The Islamabad meeting has come as a result of the tireless efforts of the Pakistani leaders to stop the war since it started on February 28 with the US-Israeli attack on Iran. But these efforts took on special urgency on the morning of April 7,  when President Donald Trump posted an ominous warning on Truth Social: "A Whole Civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again". "We will find out tonight, one of the most important mome...

Pakistani civilian and military leaders have recently met with top leaders from China and the US. While Pakistani Deputy Prime Minister Ishaq Dar has met with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Chinese President Xi Jinping, Pakistan's military chief Field Marshal Asim Munir has had lunch with President Donald Trump and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi during July, 2025.   “Our foreign policy is not a zero-sum game,” Dar said at a presentation to the Atlantic Council think tank in Washington DC. “We hope to see friendly relations between the US and China and do not wish to embroil in bloc politics.”  Pakistan's close ties to both the US and China go back to the 1960s at the height of the Cold War. It was Pakistan which helped arrange the first China-US dialogue in July 1971 when the US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger flew from Pakistan to China to hold the first face-to-face meeting with Chinese leaders.  With increasing US-China rivalry on the world stage today...

The Indian military leadership is finally beginning to slowly accept its losses in its unprovoked attack on Pakistan that it called "Operation Sindoor". It began with the May 31 Bloomberg interview of the Indian Chief of Defense Staff General Anil Chauhan in Singapore where he admitted losing Indian fighter aircraft to Pakistan in an aerial battle on May 7, 2025.  General Chauhan further revealed that the Indian Air Force was grounded for two days after this loss.  General Chauhan was followed by Navy Captain Shiv Kumar, the Indian Defense Attache in Jakarta, Indonesia, who explained last month that the Indian Air Force losses occurred due to "constraint by (the Indian) political leadership" imposed on the Indian Air Force. He said the Indian forces had been directed not to target Pakistan’s military infrastructure or air defenses. “Only because of the constraint given by the political leadership to not attack the military establishment or their air defenses,” he s...

Professor John Mearsheimer, a renowned international relations expert known for his theory of "offensive realism", has recently spoken to India's CNN-News18 about the impact of US-China competition on geopolitics in South Asia. Sharing his thoughts in interviews on India-Pakistan conflict after the Pahalgam attack, he  said : "There is really no military solution to this (Kashmir) problem. The only way this can be solved once and for all is through a political solution that both sides find acceptable". Professor John Mearsheimer on India-Pakistan Conflict Professor John Mearsheimer is a highly respected professor of political science at the University of Chicago. Here's how he introduces himself on his  personal website :  "I am the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Chicago, where I have taught since 1982. Above all else, I am an international relations theorist. More specificall...