By Anand K SahayThere is now a formidable fresh basis for Pakistan’s renewal of belligerence towards India over a sustained period. China’s recent avowal of the deepest friendship for Islamabad goes well beyond the bland ‘all-weather friends’ rubric we were familiar with. They are bolstered by China’s Belt and Road initiative, whose centrepiece is the $60-billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), which links China to Pakistan’s Gwadar port in coastal Baluchistan near the mouth of the Persian Gulf. All this makes the Narendra Modi administration face a very different Pakistan today than the one faced by the governments of Prime Ministers Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh. The US has always feared a possible nuclear confrontation between India and Pakistan if certain conventional military thresholds were crossed.

Source: Economic Times January 21, 2018 18:10 UTC