“I don’t see any immediate instability flowing from this situation, but Pakistan is destined to be politically uncertain until the next election,” said Moeed Yusuf, a Pakistan expert at the U.S. Institute for Peace who is visiting Pakistan. “In the short run, it will make the military stronger in dealing with the U.S. and foreign powers, since they will not be sure whom to talk to on the civilian side.”

“To strengthen institutions, you have to make sure you don’t open Pandora’s boxes in immature democracies,” said Moeed Yusuf of the United States Institute of Peace, a Washington think tank. “The political class can discredit itself so much now, by going after each other’s throats over the next year, that even the street would again start saying that this democratic system cannot deliver.”

Moeed Yusuf is the Director of South Asia programs at the US Institute of Peace. He joined TRT World from Islamabad.

The administration must “empower” a senior level official to “chart the way out of the abyss” in South Sudan, said Payton Knopf, the coordinator of the South Sudan senior working group at the United States Institute of Peace.

he American diplomat Brett McGurk is the central player in the seventy-two-nation coalition fighting the Islamic State, a disparate array of countries twice the size of NATO. He has now worked all of America’s major wars against extremism—in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria—under three very different Presidents: George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and now Donald Trump. McGurk served in Baghdad after the ouster of Saddam Hussein; he used his experience clerking for the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist on the Supreme Court to help draft Iraq’s new constitution. President Bush brought McGurk back to Washington to serve on the National Security Council and help run the campaign against Al Qaeda. President Obama tapped him to work Iraq and Iran at the State Department. McGurk was visiting Kurdistan, in northern Iraq, when ISISseized nearby Mosul. In 2015, he became Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIS. President Trump kept him on.

PAKISTANI politics is back to its uncertain best. While all eyes are fixated on the Supreme Court’s verdict, of even more concern is the larger political question: what will all this mean for Pakistan’s quest for democratic consolidation?

(Washington) – The U.S. Institute of Peace has named communications and foreign policy professional Diane Zeleny as its vice president for external relations. Zeleny will lead the institute’s outreach and public communications strategy, and will oversee its public affairs, public education, congressional relations and institutional development efforts.