Indo-Afghan Relations: Challenges and Options for Pakistan in Post 9/11 Era

The Indian soft power image in Afghanistan and strategic partnership between the two countries has become a great challenge for Pakistan political and security forces. India wants to prevent Pakistan from regaining “preponderant” influence in present day Afghanistan, and in this context, the paper discusses the history of troubled Pakistan-Afghanistan and Pakistan-India relations. The paper will present a comprehensive analysis on why Afghanistan is strategically important for Pakistan, how it affects Pak-Afghan relations, and how it provided India an opportunity to limit Pakistan’s role in Afghanistan? India’s idea of encircling Pakistan from east and west is a factor the importance of which India understood and used to her gain in 1971 East Pakistani crisis. Pakistan’s idea of ‘strategic depth’ can be understood as a lesson learnt from India’s two-frontier strategy against Pakistan. The paper suggests that Pakistan does not need strategic depth any more. On the contrary, it needs stable, mature and good neighbors so that both countries can come out of standoff. In this way Pakistan could become a partner in a wide range of areas from security to economic and social sectors.

Introducing Time Delays in Process Hitting Framework of Biological Regulatory Networks

Modelling and simulation of molecular systems helps in understanding the behavioural mechanism of biological regulation. Time delays in production and degradation of expressions are important parameters in biological regulation. Constraints on time delays provide insight into the dynamical behaviour of a Biological Regulatory Network (BRN). A recently introduced Process Hitting (PH) Framework has been found efficient in static analysis of large BRNs, however, it lacks the inference of time delays and thus determination of the constraints associated with the evolution of expression levels of biological entities of BRN is not possible. In this thesis, we propose a Hybrid Process Hitting scheme for introducing time delays in Process Hitting Framework for dynamical modelling and analysis of Large Biological Regulatory Networks. It will provide valuable insights into the time delays corresponding to the changes in the expression levels of biological entities thus possibly helping in identification of therapeutic targets. The proposed framework is applied to a well-known BRNs of Bacteriophage λ and ERBB Receptor-regulated G1/S transition involved in the breast cancer to demonstrate the viability of our approach. Using the proposed approach, it was possible to perform goal-oriented reduction of the BRN and also determine the constraints on time delays characterizing the evolution (dynamics) of the reduced BRN. The proposed Hybrid Process Hitting methodology is applied to a considerably large BRN of Apoptosis Pathway comprising of 90 entities for obtaining the dynamical properties of this pathway. The determination of constraints on time delays corresponding to the evolution of entities for the reduced BRN (entities involving feedbacks) was successfully computed using the new methodology. The chemical reactions as well as the biological interactions are all stochastic in nature and could, therefore, assume any rate of change within the range of delays determined through Hybrid Modeling. The same has thus been extended to Stochastic Modeling using Stochastic Petri Nets (SPNs) in which the random delay in firing of the transitions aptly captures the stochastic behaviour of changes in expression levels of genes. The proposed scheme was found to be more efficient than existing methodology and less computationally intensive. It was applied to the mucus production in Pseudomonas Aeruginosa BRN and results obtained from Stochastic Petri Nets are in agreement with the Hybrid Modeling results which establishes the accuracy of this approach as well as provide more insight in the dynamical behaviour of BRNs through simulation.