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.

Digital Right Protection of Relational Databases

Design and development of knowledge-preserving and robust water- marking techniques for digital ownership rights protection of relational databases is an active area of research. In this dissertation, various dis- ciplines have been used to design and develop watermarking techniques which ensure knowledge-preserving and robustness characteristics of wa- termarking techniques by bringing tolerable distortions in the original data. Different parameters are used to define data distortions in terms of information loss as a result of watermarking. The intelligent min- ing techniques and statistical measures have been utilized to define and measure information loss after watermark embedding in the relational databases. The data owner usually defines the usability constraints to control this information loss. These usability constraints in turn iden- tify the available bandwidth for watermark embedding. The watermark decoding accuracy of a watermarking algorithm generally depends on this bandwidth; larger the bandwidth the better the decoding accuracy (watermark robustness) and vice versa. However, this dissertation pro- poses a model to make the watermark decoding accuracy independent of this bandwidth and hence the usability constraints; as a result, max- imum decoding accuracy can be achieved even with very tight usability constraints and minimum data distortions. Such mechanism also helps to preserve the knowledge in the databases to a maximum level; as a consequence, the classification results for such databases are also pre- served after watermark embedding. In the pilot study, empirical study and formal modeling have been used to prove the knowledge-preserving and robustness characteristics of the proposed watermarking techniques for digital right protection.