Current Projects
Russia and Pakistan's Reluctant Romance
State-to-state relationships are not grounded in emotions. These are based on shared interests. No one is a friend or a foe forever; the convergence or divergences of mutual interests decide the nature of the relationship between two countries. Though, the relations between Russia and Pakistan have remained turbulent over the years, they have been warming up over the last decade with top political and diplomatic rendezvous. Moscow is reaffirming its assertion in its immediate domain and beyond, whereas Islamabad is seeking new avenues of opportunities lessening its reliance on the United States in particular, and the West in general. Between 1947-50 and 1965-69, the two countries were engaged in the spheres of trade, education, and cultural exchanges. The 1996 Tashkent Summit between Pakistan and India also materialized due to the labors of Soviet Prime Minister Alexi Kosygin. Pakistan Steel mills remain a towering reminder of well-intentioned Pak-Russo bilateral relations. Nonetheless, the Soviet efforts were diluted by Soviet Union itself when Soviet condemnation of Pakistan's position in the 1971 war with India deteriorated bilateral relations, and many people of Pakistan assumed that the August 1971 Indo-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Peace and Cooperation encouraged India’s invasion of East Pakistan. Ensuing Soviet arms sales to India, amounting to billions of dollars on concessional terms, strengthened this argument. The USSR also kept vetoing each resolution regarding the East Pakistan situation that Pakistan brought to the United Nations. During the cold war, Moscow-Islamabad relations had seen many ups and downs. Incidents such as Soviet Union support for Afghanistan on Pashtunistan issue and the U-2 episode shuddered the mutual trust. The two sided relations experienced a nose dive and touched the lowest ebb during 1980s Soviet’s occupation of Afghanistan, in which Pakistan sided with United States - the Soviet’s Cold War arch rival to obstruct the...
Monopolizing the Legitimate Use of Force in Afghanistan: The Way Forward
Afghanistan’s security apparatus, even after 15 years of NATO presence, is still fragile. Nothing is hindering Taliban to launch on and off destructive offenses in Afghanistan. Furthermore, the year 2017 is instigating multiple terror attacks in Afghanistan; Major Afghan cities were traumatized by consecutive deadly assaults thereby tens of people were killed and wounded. The first happening this January 2017 shook Kabul with twin blasts near the Afghan Parliament in a congested area which killed at least 50 people and more than 100 wounded including Rahima Jami, a member of parliament from Herat province. The second attack in southern Afghanistan, at a guesthouse belonging to the governor of Kandahar province killed 11 with five United Arab Emirates’ diplomats and wounded 18 others. SIGAR’s latest report released on January 30, 2017 revealed deadly figures of up to 19,000 terrorist attacks occurring in the last 10 months at the hands of the Taliban and ISIS insurgents compared to only 700 counter-insurgency operations by Afghan Security Forces in Afghanistan. This exhibits the magnitude of the security challenge that the Afghan Government is faced with. Encountering such relentless terrorist offensives by insurgents, impairing the authority of the Afghan Government, Kabul has once again turned to old school rules by engaging pro-government militias to counter Taliban and ISIS. The effort is anticipated to ultimately mobilize thousands of Afghans especially from the northern region of the country to confront Taliban in areas where the Afghan military and police forces are losing ground or have had little presence. This kind of strategy to turn to irregular forces is stirring up apprehensions of discordant conflicts and civil dissension in a country still haunted by the civil strife of the 1990s in which fighting militia leaders ripped the country apart. In Afghanistan, regimes have, since long before the existing chapter of the conflict, depended on the parallel...
CHINA WATCH [FBERUAR 21-27] CHINA-PAKISTAN ECONOMIC CORRIDOR (CPEC) SECURITY
Senator Mushahid Hussain Syed said that in order to provide security to CPEC projects, the government has deployed 15,000 military personnel. India’s Foreign Secretary S. Jaishankar visited Beijing and held strategic dialogue with China. Prime Minister (PM) Nawaz Sharif dismissed the notions of conspiracy by the United States or the West against CPEC. China has expressed its support for Pakistan’s newly-launched Operation Radd-ul-Fasaad. Pakistan’s Foreign Secretary Aizaz Ahmad Chaudray stated that CPEC would help achieve the core objectives of the Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO). President of the Balochistan National Party (BNP-M) Sardar Akhtar Jan Mengal has said that he sees no benefit for his province from the implementation of the CPEC projects. CPEC’s Security: Chairman of the Parliamentary Committee on CPEC, Senator Mushahid Hussain Syed, revealed that in order to provide security to the projects under CPEC, the government has deployed 15,000 military personnel under the Special Security Division (SSD) and Maritime Security Force (MSF).[1] He said that “[T]he SSD is a force that will provide security to 34 CPEC related projects, while MSF will safeguard the Gwadar port and other coastal areas of the country.” These forces will work under the interior ministry and in coordination with the provinces. The SSD was formulated with the primary goal of ensuring the security of foreigners working on the CPEC projects. As Pakistan has been waging an internal war against the militancy for more than a decade, protecting the foreigners – especially thousands of Chinese involved in different projects across the country- becomes a priority and a challenging task. The recent resurgence in terrorist attacks in Pakistan that have killed more than hundred people has made such security measures all the more important. China-India Talks: India’s Foreign Secretary S. Jaishankar visited Beijing and held strategic dialogue with China. Mr. Jaishankar said that he told...
IS in Afghanistan: How successful has the group been?
Amid a rise in attacks in Afghanistan attributed to the so-called Islamic State (IS), the BBC's Dawood Azami examines what kind of threat the militant group poses in the conflict-hit nation and the wider region. How much territory has IS captured? IS announced the establishment of its Khorasan branch - an old name for Afghanistan and surrounding areas - in January 2015. It was the first time that IS had officially spread outside the Arab world. Within a few weeks, the group appeared in at least five Afghan provinces, including Helmand, Zabul, Farah, Logar and Nangarhar, trying to establish pockets of territory from which to expand. It was the first major militant group to directly challenge the Afghan Taliban's dominance over the local insurgency. Its first aim was to drive Afghan Taliban fighters out of the area and it also hoped to evict Taliban ally al-Qaeda from the Afghanistan-Pakistan region, or absorb its fighters. Yet despite efforts to energise battle-weary militants, IS struggled to build a wide political base and the indigenous support it expected in Afghanistan. Instead, it made enemies of almost everyone, including the Afghan Taliban. In the first half of 2015, IS managed to capture large chunks of territory in eastern Nangarhar province. This became the de facto "capital" principally for two reasons - its proximity to the tribal areas of Pakistan, home of IS Khorasan's top leaders, and the presence of some people who follow a similar Salafi/Wahhabi interpretation of Islam to IS. IS is also trying to get a foothold in northern Afghanistan, where it aims to link up with Central Asian, Chechen and Chinese Uighur militants. But it has largely been eliminated from southern and western Afghanistan by the Afghan Taliban and military operations conducted by Afghan and US/Nato forces. It has also lost territory in eastern Afghanistan in recent months. But it still has control over some parts of Nangarhar and Kunar provinces, where it plans attacks and...
Drone Warfare: Afghanistan, Birthplace of The Armed Drone
Using drones to carry out targeted killings has become an integral part of the United States’ ‘war on terror’. Afghanistan in the late 1990s was the laboratory where the US developed armed drones as it searched for a way to deal with Osama bin Laden who was then ordering attacks on American targets from his safe haven in Kandahar. At that time, Washington was uneasy about ordering an assassination, especially one likely to result in civilian casualties. After 9/11, such doubts disappeared and it embraced drones, using them to carry out targeted killings of Islamist militants in many countries. In this first of two dispatches, AAN’s Kate Clark looks at armed drones in Afghanistan. A second dispatch will look at the expansion of America’s targeted killing by drone programme in the war on terror and asks whether Afghanistan might in the future see a US ‘drone-only’ or ‘drone-mainly’ mission of the sort seen in Pakistan’s tribal areas. Bin Laden and the birth of drone warfare The project to create armed drones grew out of the need felt by Washington to eliminate the threat posed by bin Laden. In the late 1990s, he was orchestrating attacks on American targets while living under Taleban protection. US options were limited by a presidential standing order banning assassinations (1) which meant the CIA was legally bound to plan an operation with detention as its sole aim. Additionally, CIA officials were worried about the women and children living in bin Laden’s compound – visible on satellite footage – who would be harmed if the capture operation turned into a firefight. “[CIA officers,” reported Steve Coll, “found themselves pulled into emotional debates about legal authorities and the potential for civilian casualties…” (2) (p 393) In 1998, bin Laden ordered attacks on two American embassies in east Africa and Washington responded with Cruise missile strikes on training camps in Khost (which it said was an act of self-defence, not an assassination attempt). Even after...
As China enjoys Pak seafood, India feels Beijing’s presence
The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is changing life in China’s Northwest Xinjiang Uyghur region, bringing something special to the region: seafood from Pakistan. This little bonus is being shipped by container trucks through the corridor, which currently accounts for two percent of the total trade between the two countries; and more goods are expected to come through CPEC from the Middle East and Africa. That’s certainly a good return for China’s enormous investment in the project, which some experts call the Marshall Plan for Pakistan. “The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) has been described as a Marshall Plan for Pakistan,” says Marko Dimitrijevic, author of Frontier Investor. “It is a $51 billion, 15 year project that will ultimately create a 2,000 kilometre highway/railway/pipeline route from Western China to Pakistan’s Gwadar Port, knocking over 10,000 kilometres off the current sea route for Middle Eastern oil to China; a high-speed railway from Karachi to Lahore to Peshawar; and over 26,000 MW of electric generating capacity.” CPEC is part of China’s ambition to write the rules of the next stage of globalisation and help Beijing sustain growth—a good prospect for investors in Chinese equities, which have been lagging behind those of neighbouring India over the last five-year period. This piece originally appeared in The News, February 27, 2017. Original link. Disclaimer: Views expressed in the article are not necessarily supported by CRSS.
Why Does India Want Pakistan And China’s CPEC To Fail? [ANALYSIS]
CPEC may be a game-changer project for the entire Asia, but India is doing everything it can to disrupt the multi-billion joint China and Pakistan project. While China-Pakistan Economic Corridor is an ambitious project for improving connectivity and economic integrity in the region, there is one Asian nation that opposes the project and views it as a threat to its security, defense and strategy interests. That country is – India – Pakistan and China’s traditional rival that has nuclear weapons. 7 Reasons Why India Is Worried About CPEC India has several major issues with CPEC, which is a 3,000-kilometer sophisticated network of roads, railways and pipelines that connect Xinjiang in China to Gwadar in Pakistan. CPEC passes through Pakistani regions disputed by India. The two nuclear-armed neighbors claim Kashmir as their own. Islamabad and New Delhi have fought three wars over the disputed territory, including the Indo-Pakistani Wars of 1947 and 1965, as well as the Kargil War in 1999. India fears that CPEC may result in internationalization of the Kashmir dispute, and China – with its tremendous influence both in Asia and in the international community – would eventually win the Kashmir dispute in favor of Pakistan, safeguarding and guaranteeing the integrity of CPEC, in which Beijing has invested $46 billion. India is concerned over China’s military presence in the Indian Ocean. The CPEC project will enable China to get direct access to the Arabian Sea, which could embolden the Chinese to substantially step up their military presence there, something that India views as an existential threat. India is worried that China is planning to use the Gwadar port –deep-sea port located in Pakistan’s Balochistan province – to monitor India’s naval activity and allegedly even exploit it to expand and improve its own navy. However, China’s naval power is already almost 4x times stronger than India’s (714 vs 295 of fleet strength, according to Global Fire Power). India is...
Who is the real winner in Af-Pak tensions?
Recently, when Pakistan decided to move heavy artillery towards the Afghan border, many wondered if a full-scale war was about to be initiated between the two countries. Surprisingly, Kabul refrained from retaliating when Pakistani forces shelled terror camps on the other side of the border. It was hard to fathom such an action as Afghanistan has always been considered “a brotherly neighbour”. Where India has always remained our nemesis, Afghanistan now might well be pilfering the former’s title of being our “arch rival”. So how did we end up in this mess where brothers have turned into fierce rivals? Firstly, since 2001, both the countries have fuelled a never-ending cycle of blame game. This back and forth blame game was activated soon after major attacks took place in both countries. Even though Pakistan’s blame is divided between Afghanistan and India, Afghanistan’s current and only scapegoat is Pakistan. Secondly, the shift in regional alliances has also somewhat contributed in souring these ties. While Hamid Karzai was less explicit in his support for India, President Ashraf Ghani, on the other hand, has embraced the country with open arms. He holds India and Prime Minister Narendra Modi as a “brother replacement” for Pakistan. The shifting of these alliances was witnessed recently in a couple of high-profile meetings in India and Russia. When the Heart of Asia conference was organised in Amritsar last year, Afghanistan not only joined hands with India in shaming Pakistan and calling it a ‘facilitator of terror’, it also refused a generous amount of financial aid from Islamabad. It seemed as if President Ghani was more than okay to play Modi’s sidekick in supposedly isolating Pakistan on the global stage – an Indian policy still far from fruition. Nonetheless, Afghanistan’s stand surely angered Pakistan. Kabul was irked by Russia organising a trilateral moot on Afghanistan in Moscow, inviting only China and Pakistan to discuss the imminent rise of Islamic...
Role of Community Vital for Crime-Control
The role of public is crucial for crime control in the society in its partnership with police. The radio programs as part of Ulasi Police project have helped us incorporating several policing needs of the communities into our services on-offer. The advocacy and awareness campaign of this project has been critical in ameliorating the public-police trust deficit. The Charsadda Police, showing an exceptional courage and valor, foiled a major terror attack; stopping three suicide bombers from causing havoc at a local court. The efforts for the capacity building of KP police have made them much more capable of fighting terrorism. The Dispute Resolution Council in Charsadda is an extremely important forum for addressing the civil matters of local population. These were the remarks made by the Deputy Superintendent of Police, Mr. Nazir Khan during a consultative meeting on police reforms at Model Police Station, Sardheri, Charsadda. The meeting was a part of the project “Ulasi Police”, which is an awareness and advocacy campaign undertaken by the Center for Research and Security Studies (CRSS) – as part of USAID Small Grants and Ambassadors’ Fund Program – to strengthen the rule of law in KP province by promoting and disseminating the significant police reforms aimed at incorporating local communities’ policing needs and international human rights standards. The endeavor aims to tackle the trust deficit between the public and police, help KP police become an accountable and community-focused police force. Mr. Nazir Khan said that the gaps between the public and police could give rise to crimes in the society. The Charsadda police is performing quite well and successfully preempting terrorist attacks. Had the tragedy in local courts not been averted, it would have been a catastrophe. The Charsadda police has also arrested most of the terrorists involved in the target killing of several police officials. At the core of initiatives for the capacity building of KP...
Future Implications of Afghan Moot in Moscow
Russia announced this week that it is going to convene a six-party conference on Afghanistan with high level representation from regional powers in mid-February. It reiterated its stance to include the Taliban in the constructive dialogue. This time the leading regional stakeholders include the Afghan Government, India and Iran, in addition to China and Pakistan, which had been part of the first round of trilateral talks held in Moscow on December 27, 2016. The announcement was made by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov during a press conference on February 7 in the presence of his Afghan counterpart Salahuddin Rabbani who was on a trip to Moscow at the time. Back in December 2016, the Afghan Government had been upset for not being invited to the trilateral meeting which ostensibly discussed “the deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan” but also expressed support for the ‘reintegration of armed opposition into peaceful life’ as a way to facilitate an Afghan-led and Afghan-owned peace and conciliation process. In the joint statement released after the first trilateral talks, China and Russia, as permanent members of the UN Security Council, even confirmed their “flexible approach to delisting Afghan individuals from the UN sanctions lists”, a condition put forth by the Taliban for engaging in reconciliation talks. This came at a time when the militant Islamic State group had expanded its presence in Afghanistan, battling against not only the Afghan Government but also some of the Afghan Taliban factions. Following reports about a growing Russia-Taliban thaw, the Afghan Government raised concerns over such moves. However, Russia has claimed to be concerned about the expansion of Daesh operatives in Afghanistan and has argued that the meeting with the Taliban is to combat Daesh in Afghanistan. Russia has made it clear that it fully backs the present government in Kabul but condemns the growing terrorism in Afghanistan. In Russia’s view, including the Taliban on...
TOP STORIES
TESTIMONIALS
“
I am also a member of National Assembly’s Standing Committee on Information and Broadcasting. Recently, we held a meeting with the Director General of Radio Pakistan and we told them to initiate such local programs (like Constituency Hour) in regional languages to educate and inform people. Even Indian Radio can be heard in FATA which is being used for propaganda purposes and must be closed. Therefore, we should launch some standard and quality programs like CRSS that will change the taste of the listeners.