India's Changing Afghanistan Policy: Regional and Global Implications
Abstract : Since 2001, Afghanistan has allowed New Delhi an opportunity to underscore its role as a regional power. India has growing stakes in peace and stability in Afghanistan, and the 2011 India-Afghan strategic partnership agreement underlines India's commitment to ensure that a positive momentum in Delhi-Kabul ties is maintained. This monograph examines the changing trajectory of Indian policy toward Afghanistan since 2001 and argues that New Delhi has been responding to a strategic environment shaped by other actors in the region. As the U.S.-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces prepare to leave Afghanistan in 2014, India stands at a crossroads as it remains keen to preserve its interests in Afghanistan. This monograph underlines the ever-evolving Indian policy in Afghanistan by examining it in three phases, before drawing out the implications of this change for the region and the United States. There has been a broader maturing of U.S.-India defense ties, and Afghanistan is likely to be a beneficiary of this trend. Managing Pakistan and unravelling Islamabad's encirclement complex should be the biggest priority for both Washington and New Delhi in the coming years if there is to be any hope of keeping Afghanistan a stable entity post-2014.
India: A Reluctant Partner for Afghanistan
The year 2014 will prove crucial for Afghanistan. The presidential elections will shape the country’s political future, both who will govern and how much the process of democratic consolidation will have advanced. On the military front, by the end of the year, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) mission is expected to withdraw all combat troops from the country. While the United States and other Western countries are planning to stay engaged in Afghanistan after 2014 through the presence of training and counterterrorism forces, in late 2013 and early 2014 the difficulties in finalizing a Bilateral Security Agreement (BSA) between the United States and Afghan governments led to calls for a “zero option”—a complete departure of all foreign troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2014, leaving the country alone to manage its security, train its armed forces, and fight extremist groups. Against the backdrop of troop withdrawal, Western countries have encouraged Afghanistan’s regional neighbors to find regional solutions to stabilize the country. However, the progress of regional initiatives like the Istanbul Process—a series of meetings of regional countries interested in Afghanistan initiated by Turkey in 2011—has been slow due to tensions and mistrust among regional states and numerous conflicts among key actors in South Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East.
The National PKI of Peru: a new certification hierarchy
In order to guarantee secure transactions through the Internet and to generate strong evidence that could be used in case of future legal disputes, several countries around the world have promoted and regulated the use of digital signatures based on Public Key Infrastructure (PKI). However, despite the high expectations, its implementation has achieved neither the desired results nor its globalization. Many of the reasons were discovered years ago, but they are still open problems for the scientific community nowadays. In order to consider the case of the national PKI of the Peruvian state as empirical evidence for studies that address the open problems, this article describes the details about a new certification hierarchy which is expected to overcome some of its predecessors’ limitations. It is also expected that the information disclosed in this article could be useful to other countries for making a preliminary assessment for possible cross-border recognition of Peruvian digital signatures.