A de-miner near Srinagar, Kashmir. Photo: Flickr user Haumont

Ambassador S. Azmat Hassan is a former Ambassador of Pakistan to Malaysia, Syria and Morocco and Deputy Permanent Representative of Pakistan to the United Nations. He is currently an adjunct professor at Seton Hall University and is a contributing Worldfocus blogger.

Nonaligned India was perceived by most analysts to be largely in the Soviet camp during the Cold War. But the demise of the Soviet Union prompted India to recalibrate its relationship with the world’s only remaining superpower: the United States.

Another major factor assisting in this realignment was India’s embrace since the early 1990’s of free market reforms, trade liberalization and privatization measures. These changes opened up the vast Indian market to U.S. exporters and foreign investors. While millions of Indians are still desperately poor, around 300 million Indians have joined the middle class. Thus a new and expanding Indian market is opening up for a wide variety of U.S. exports, and U.S. investment in Indian industry and infrastructure has risen appreciably in the last few decades.

As a rising regional power, India is anxious to be recognized as a major player not only in South Asia but on the international stage. The importance of India to the U.S. was highlighted by the choice of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh as the first foreign dignitary to be accorded the honor of a state visit.

A major impediment retarding India’s quest towards great power status is its perennial dispute with neighboring Pakistan over Kashmir. The two oldest conflicts on the agenda of the UN Security Council from the late 1940’s are the Arab-Israeli and Kashmir conflicts.

Despite a number of diplomatic meetings spread over five decades, India and Pakistan have yet to overcome the hurdle of Kashmir, over which they have fought three wars. For Pakistan, Kashmir remains the unfinished agenda of the 1947 Partition. For secular multicultural India, Kashmir is a symbol of its heterogeneity.

President Obama has publicly stated that the U.S. would help India and Pakistan to normalize their relations,  including the dispute over Kashmir. The U.S. can help both countries. If the U.S. can persuade India to withdraw some of its forces on its border with Pakistan, this gesture would enable the latter to commit more of its troops now facing India to its lawless tribal areas bordering Afghanistan.

While the Pakistan army has achieved encouraging gains against the Pakistani Taliban in Swat and South Waziristan, its counterinsurgency efforts need to achieve more success. Once the tribal areas are pacified, they will no longer afford a sanctuary to the Afghan Taliban and al-Qaeda elements that cross the mountainous and porous Pakistan-Afghanistan border at will, to attack U.S. and NATO troops fighting the Taliban insurgents.

So it is patently in the U.S. interest to invest more diplomatic capital in New Delhi and Islamabad. India and Pakistan have both suffered from violent extremism. They continue to be plagued by domestic insurgencies. Whether they admit it or not, they have a shared interest in combating the ravages of terrorism in their territories.

As the U.S. footprint in both Pakistan and India assumes greater depth, hopefully the U.S. will nudge both countries to consistently focus on a resolution of the Kashmir imbroglio. A mutually acceptable settlement of this issue should be placed on the same pedestal as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in U.S. calculations.

- S. Azmat Hassan

As a reporter, Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff hitchhiked overnight to Berlin to cover the story. He is now the senior director at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

So, Berlin has also played host to some of America’s greatest presidential speeches. In June 1963, President John F. Kennedy delivered his famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” address:

In 1987, President Ronald Reagan delivered his “Tear Down This Wall” speech at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, imploring the Soviet leader to end the Cold War:

And most recently, in July 2008, Barack Obama spoke to 200,000 Europeans about re-establishing transatlantic bonds in one of his most memorable campaign addresses:

Credit: flickr user pdxjmorris

My first image of the “iron curtain” came from a Nancy Drew novel The Captive Witness, in which our heroine Nancy, touring a communist country as a student, gets involved in a plot to help children escape to freedom. What was this iron curtain that separated east from west, I wondered—and what was so perilous and forbidding about the land behind it that made young people like me risk their lives to flee?

As I looked at a map of Europe, I pictured a sheet of metal, upright and extending for miles along the ground and high into the sky, a metal barricade topped with barbed wire, guarded by attack dogs, and surrounded by towers with roving lights. On one side—the world that I knew. On the other—a cold, dark menacing place where the sun never shone.

Fast forward a few years. I am sitting in my high school social studies class when our teacher tells us with tears in his eyes that the Berlin Wall is falling down. I run home and sit transfixed in front of the television, watching the thousands of people clambering up and over the wall, taking away pieces of brick, drinking champagne, celebrating. Exiled cellist Mstislav Rostropovich serenades united easterners and westerners with Bach. I can’t quite fathom what it means—the structure that surrounded the city of Berlin is no more—but understand that with the fall of the wall, the iron curtain is melting away.

In 1993, I venture for the first time behind the line that divided east and west. I’m in Moscow to study Russian for a semester. In part, it was the desire to discover for myself this previously “forbidden” part of the globe that drew me there. I arrive on a grey evening in February. As we drive from the airport to the city outskirts, I peer through the steamy window at the foreign scene outside. The grey sky seems an extension of the snowy landscape. Mammoth apartment buildings extend endlessly, and tiny figures scurry about in fur hats and coats. We pass row upon row of bare birch trees.

Soviet poster: building socialism. Photo: flickr user x-ray delta one

It was four years since the wall came down, and two years since the Soviet Union officially dissolved. Part of me always wished I’d arrived three years earlier, to have experienced life in the USSR. But even though I was too late, I caught glimpses of what life behind the iron curtain must have been like: watching my good friend Anastasia try her very first banana, listening to recordings of singers whose music had been circulated through samizdat, sharing a meal on an overnight train ride with fellow passengers who had never spoken to an American before, handing a mother a letter from her son who had fled to the west, and feeling the oppressive uniformity and lack of diversity in a city where everyone looked and dressed alike.

In the ten plus years that I spent studying Russia and the former Soviet Union, I’ve never ceased to be amazed by the monumentality of the events that transpired during the fall and winter of 1989, and by just how much the world has changed since then. In a sense I’m glad to have known a world in which there was an iron curtain, in order to appreciate a world without it. And so, on the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, I propose a toast to the destruction of walls everywhere, walls that keep people apart and walls that keep people in.

- Christine Kiernan

In December 1971, President Richard Nixon and Brazilian President Emilio Garrastazú Médici met to discuss Brazil’s role in efforts to overthrow the elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile. Photo courtesy of the National Security Archive.

Back in the days of the cold warriors – those righteous Americans who knew might was right and Communism was the devil’s work – U.S. officials set out to overthrow governments that seemed a shade too pink for their liking. The results were invariably bloody.

Echoes of the past came back to us this weekend thanks to the National Security Archive, which published documents showing that President Richard M. Nixon had sought help from Brazil in 1971 to overthrow Chilean President Salvador Allende. Whether or how much Brazil actually helped or not is still not known, but Allende, Chile’s democratically elected president, was in fact deposed on Sept. 11, 1973.

Nixon, his then-National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, and their intelligence apparatus pushed and promoted the coup. By day’s end, it was a bloody overthrow. Allende was dead; labor leaders, intellectuals, artists and others were corralled in the Santiago soccer stadium. Thousands were killed. The right-wing Chilean military imprisoned tens of thousands more, and drove hundreds of thousands into exile. A dictator, Gen. Augusto Pinochet, was thus born, reviled by many around the world for his suppression of human rights. He ruled for 16 years, supported as a friend by successive U.S. governments.

Much was previously known, but the independent National Security Archive, based in Washington, has been tracking additional details of the U.S. role over the years. Here is a transcript of a tape five days after the Chilean coup, declassified and obtained by the archive in 2006.

Nixon: Nothing new of any importance or is there?
Kissinger: Nothing of very great consequence. The Chilean thing is getting consolidated and of course the newspapers are bleeding because a pro-Communist government has been overthrown.
Nixon: Isn’t that something. Isn’t that something.
Kissinger: I mean instead of celebrating – in the Eisenhower period we would be heroes.
Nixon: Well we didn’t – as you know – our hand doesn’t show on this one though.
Kissinger: We didn’t do it. I mean we helped them. [garbled] created the conditions as great as possible.
Nixon: That is right. And that is the way it is going to be played.

In the Brazilian case revealed this week, Nixon met with Brazilian Gen. Emilio Medici in 1971. Both agreed that Allende was a threat. [By the way, the CIA also worked with the right-wing Brazilian military in 1964, supporting the overthrow of that country's democratic president, Joao Goulart]. The Archive information is accompanied by copies of the documents on line. It’s worth reading:

The Top Secret “memcon” of the December 9, 1971, Oval Office meeting indicates that Nixon offered his approval and support for Brazil’s intervention in Chile.

The President said that it was very important that Brazil and the United States work closely in this field. We could not take direction but if the Brazilians felt that there was something we could do to be helpful in this area, he would like President Médici to let him know. If money were required or other discreet aid, we might be able to make it available. This should be held in the greatest confidence.

“The U.S. and Brazil,” Nixon told Médici, “must try and prevent new Allendes and Castros and try where possible to reverse these trends.”

Nixon was not interested in stopping with Brazil. He discussed overthrowing Fidel Castro himself, and connived to dump the then president of Peru, with the picaresque idea of planting news in the media that the Peruvian had fathered a child with his mistress, Miss Peru.

More than three decades later, what have Americans learned from history? How many people died, how much suffering took place, and for what, exactly?

The cold warriors are still with us. The architects of the Iraq War, former vice president Richard M. Cheney and former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, are veterans of the Nixon administration. History is now.

- Peter Eisner

The visit, along with a Russian warship’s visit to Venezuela and Nicaragua and passage through the Panama Canal earlier this month, comes in response to the announced American missile defense shield in Europe as well as the presence of American ships in the Black Sea during the recent conflict with Georgia.

Russia also announced that it plans to give 10 fighter jets to Lebanon as part of a defense cooperation deal, and is preparing to sell anti-aircraft missiles to Iran.

Christopher Sabatini, an expert on Latin America and senior director of policy for the Council of the Americas, speaks with Martin Savidge about the significance of the timing of the visit, Raul Castro’s proposed prisoner swap with the U.S. and potential changes to Cuba-U.S. relations under Barack Obama.

Nikolas Kozloff, the author of “Revolution, South America and the Rise of the New Left,” speaks with Martin Savidge about the importance of Medvedev’s visit and how it affects the U.S. and other countries in the western hemisphere.