Current Projects
If US withdraws, China wonders if it is ready to lead the world
That was the question posed by the nationalist Global Times tabloid in Beijing on Monday. If the United States under Donald Trump gives up its global leadership and withdraws into isolationism, will the rising superpower of China replace it? Ironically, in the past week, China has come forward to defend the system of global governance which the United States has done much to build. Senior officials have urged Trump not to walk away from a global deal to address climate change, while President Xi Jinping told the Asia-Pacific region not to surrender to protectionist pressures, but recommit itself to globalisation and free trade. “Openness is the lifeline of the regional economy,” Xi told the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit in the Peruvian capital Lima on Saturday. State news agency Xinhua gushed that Xi’s speech put China and the region in the “vanguard” of a joint effort to revive the global economy. Of course, both the United States and China have sometimes used their power to ignore global rules, whether in sidestepping the United Nations to invade Iraq or in advancing territorial claims in the South China Sea. Nevertheless, China is defending the collaborative, rules-based order because it has benefited hugely from that system: its accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001 gave an immense boost to Chinese exports but also provided a real incentive for its own domestic economic reforms. Its 1.4 billion people also stand to lose heavily if the planet continues to warm sharply. But is it prepared to accept the burden of leadership? In 2014, President Barack Obama accused China of being a “free rider” on the world stage, but there is no doubt that under Xi Jinping the country has been taking a more forceful global role — launching the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank in 2014 and a ‘Belt and Road’ regional development plan. China’s influence will also expand if Trump fulfills his campaign promise to walk away from the Trans-Pacific Partnership...
Gwadar Augurs New History
The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot) Exactly this is the misery of life and it is endless. Isn’t it another misery of life that at one time, one person weeps while other laughs? It goes on every part of the world. Same were the feelings watching the inauguration ceremony of the first shipment of trade goods from China to Gwadar that will further be shipped to its export destinations. Pakistani and Chinese singers were singing Urdu Chinese duet songs to mark the celebration of the long-awaited moment of history of Pakistan when the first CPEC cargo ship was launched. On the other hand, we could see the people screaming and crying over the misery inflicted upon them just a day ago at the shrine of Shah Noorani in Khuzdar district. The person who blew himself killing and injuring many did not have a heart. He crossed all the limits of humanity and risked his own life to take the lives of others. First known as Taliban, then Daesh and now the IS — they are the different names of one mindset, one philosophy and one agenda. The attack at the shrine of Shah Noorani one day before the inauguration of CPEC first trade shipment does have some meaning that the enemies of humanity are also opponents of development of Pakistan. They did not want to see this multi-billion project in this completion mode. It was due to the tireless efforts of civil military partnership that the dream of regional development turned into reality. The whole world witnessed that nothing can bar the process of progress when government is committed to bringing the underdeveloped areas of Pakistan into mainstream of prosperity. The important thing about CPEC is that it is not the project of development and economic benefit for Pakistan and China, it will also usher an era of regional integration, cooperation and development. The regions of Asia, South East Asia,...
Pak-US Relations in The Trump Era
The most important single event in the Pakistan-US relationship in the last decade was the November 26, 2011 slaughter of over two dozen Pakistani soldiers on the border with Afghanistan by US forces. The Salala incident, as it came to be known, was characterised as a mistake by the US. The current corps commander Multan, Lt-Gen Ishfaq Nadeem, was the DGMO at the time, and in briefings with civilians, he made clear that Salala could not have entirely been a mistake. The Defence Committee of the cabinet met the morning after the attack under the chairmanship of then-PM Yusuf Raza Gilani. Pakistan suspended Nato’s supply lines and closed an airbase that Nato/Isaf and the US had been using. The relationship did not recover for seven months, until a July 3, 2012 phone call between then-secretary of state Hillary Clinton and then-foreign minister Hina Khar. (Full disclosure: I joined the government of Pakistan as an adviser to the foreign ministry days after the Salala attack, and remained in government until January 2013). Clinton’s apology took seven months, and some of the most robust diplomacy Pakistan has had to engage in, in Washington DC, thanks to the leadership of Khar and our then ambassador to the US, Sherry Rehman. But the US apology was not the end of that story. I believe Gen Ishfaq was right. Salala was not a random act of violence, it was a product of a slow burn in which the bitterness of US officials, usually unattributed, and published in the New York Times, came to define official US tactics and operations in the region. The public imagination about 2011 as a disastrous year for Pakistan-US relations is animated by Raymond Davis (January 2011), the Bin Laden raid (May 2011), and Memogate (October 2011). However, among the most telling informants of the poisonous contamination of the Pakistan-US relationship back then was a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing in September 2011, just two months before Salala in which Admiral Mike Mullen famously...
CPEC’s Territorial Impact
ON Nov 13, the military and civilian leaderships of Pakistan appeared on the same page during the operationalisation ceremony of Gwadar port and testing of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor’s western route. An impressive array of development components related to road transportation, railways, port airport development (in Gwadar), energy and warehousing constitute the revealed dimensions of the corridor initiative. No doubt many more will follow. Barring some dissenting voices, political forces and provincial administrations have generally welcomed CPEC and are working to connect with it to reap greater benefits for themselves and, perhaps, their people. However, there seems to be little effort vis-à-vis the general preparedness of the planning and implementation apparatus at the national, provincial and local levels to connect Pakistani people — especially the proletariat, entrepreneurs, manufacturers, traders and the like — with the project. While the corridors of movement and connectivity are discussed with much rigour and energy, the territorial and spatial impacts of CPEC are not being considered. Whether urban, sub-urban and logistic-based settlements shall be able to reconcile and adjust to these physical developments remains an unaddressed concern. An immediate outcome of corridor-based developments is a rapid rise in land values along the arteries of movement in suburban and rural settings. Land and real-estate enterprises tend to cartelise to acquire land along strategic locations. Development of high-end neighbourhoods along the Super Highway between Karachi and Hyderabad is one example. All along the western and eastern routes, ruthless investment sharks are likely to expropriate land from existing owners. As a consequence, the working classes here will be pushed out and marginalised. Capitalists may also elbow out indigenous livelihoods in many parts of the alignments and corridors. Subsistence fishermen in Gwadar were concerned about the closure...
Post-Presidential Karzai: Still A Challenge To The NUG?
Hamid Karzai may have handed over the reigns of power in September 2014, but his influence on Afghanistan’s politics did not end. His calls for a Loya Jirga, as the National Unity Government approached its two-year anniversary, represented a danger to that government. However, political groups and influential individuals, even those who had previously been his closest allies, did not take up his call. Rather, some of his recent comments have met clamorous pushback and the expressions of support he did receive, mainly from people in government, only increased the controversy that surrounds him. AAN’s Ali Yawar Adili (with parliamentary reporting from AAN’s Salima Ahmadi and input by Thomas Ruttig) looks at a number of recent incidents, their fallout and what they tell us about Karzai’s political clout. Ever since he left office in 2014, former president Hamid Karzai has maintained a shadowy presence on Afghanistan’s political scene. In his compound not far from the presidential palace, he frequently meets those who feel belittled by the National Unity Government (NUG), or who have an axe to grind with it, often hosting elaborate luncheons. (The new president, Ashraf Ghani, has abolished such practices in the presidential palace.) There are rumours that the former president has been tacitly conspiring against the NUG (see this July 2016 Los Angeles Times article or this June 2015 Radio Free Europe article, both by Afghan authors), an accusation he has denied. More overtly, he has frequently granted interviews to the international media, opining on a wide range of topics. He told the German news agency dpa there were ‘no tensions’ between himself and his successor Ashraf Ghani, but that he would make his voice heard “when he had the feeling that the country was moving in a wrong direction on essential issues.” “Death to Karzai” Over the last few months, Karzai has been involved in a fair share of controversy. The most notable incident took place on 30 September 2016...
Isis in Afghanistan: ‘Their Peak Is Over, But They Are Not Finished’
Fifteen months ago, militants arrived in the village of Manan Bagh, eyeing its strategic location in the mountains close to Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan. They started picking out community leaders, elders and people they accused of conspiring against them. Among them was Zahir Shah, who was marched into the mountains and whose fate his family only learned from a video uploaded to Facebook. “They forced him to sit on explosives,” Ziarat Gul, Shah’s father-in-law, told the Guardian. “We haven’t been able to find even one part of his body.” Islamic State fighters have been pummelled by US airstrikes and receive little local support, but they maintain a small – and seemingly resilient – stronghold in eastern Afghanistan. The fighters are few but unusually brutal, in keeping with the group’s behaviour elsewhere. They may not be an existential threat to the Afghan state but they are to civilians. Local authorities said using explosives was a common method of killing for Isis, who also impose strict rules at odds with local customs: forcing men to grow beards and women to wear burqas. They declare government-officiated weddings invalid, smash shrines and ban smoking, snuff and poppy cultivation. These rules erode an already limited public support for Isis, argues the US Institute of Peace in a new report. However, since it emerged publicly in 2014, Isis has continued to claim attacks outside Nangarhar – the only province where it has managed to gain ground – most notably when it targeted a crowd of protesters in Kabul in July, and a group of Shia mourners last month. This week, Isis attacked a unit of elite Afghan bodyguards in central Kabul, which killed at least six, including civilians. Although on the ropes in Afghanistan, the group can still strike in the heart of the capital. Since April, about 200 US airstrikes in Nangarhar alone have helped push Isis into retreat, killed its leader in Afghanistan – Hafiz Saeed Khan – and limited its reach to four districts....
Isis in Afghanistan: 'Their Peak Is Over, But They Are Not Finished'
Fifteen months ago, militants arrived in the village of Manan Bagh, eyeing its strategic location in the mountains close to Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan. They started picking out community leaders, elders and people they accused of conspiring against them. Among them was Zahir Shah, who was marched into the mountains and whose fate his family only learned from a video uploaded to Facebook. “They forced him to sit on explosives,” Ziarat Gul, Shah’s father-in-law, told the Guardian. “We haven’t been able to find even one part of his body.” Islamic State fighters have been pummelled by US airstrikes and receive little local support, but they maintain a small – and seemingly resilient – stronghold in eastern Afghanistan. The fighters are few but unusually brutal, in keeping with the group’s behaviour elsewhere. They may not be an existential threat to the Afghan state but they are to civilians. Local authorities said using explosives was a common method of killing for Isis, who also impose strict rules at odds with local customs: forcing men to grow beards and women to wear burqas. They declare government-officiated weddings invalid, smash shrines and ban smoking, snuff and poppy cultivation. These rules erode an already limited public support for Isis, argues the US Institute of Peace in a new report. However, since it emerged publicly in 2014, Isis has continued to claim attacks outside Nangarhar – the only province where it has managed to gain ground – most notably when it targeted a crowd of protesters in Kabul in July, and a group of Shia mourners last month. This week, Isis attacked a unit of elite Afghan bodyguards in central Kabul, which killed at least six, including civilians. Although on the ropes in Afghanistan, the group can still strike in the heart of the capital. Since April, about 200 US airstrikes in Nangarhar alone have helped push Isis into retreat, killed its leader in Afghanistan – Hafiz Saeed Khan – and limited its reach to four districts....
India, Pakistan Battle for Influence Over Afghanistan
While India focusses on building dams, highways and new Parliament in Afghanistan; Pakistan has pledged a fresh round of $500 million in October for infrastructure Giant trucks thunder along the main stretch of highway that peels away from the Pakistani border, carrying cement, fruit and chemicals to the Afghan city of Jalalabad. Vulnerable to attacks from Taliban and Islamic State militants, the crucial 74-kilometre expanse of road that runs near the famed Khyber Pass is undergoing a major facelift after security concerns forced a seven-year delay in the project. As well as paving the way for an expansion in bilateral trade between the two countries, the road is at the center of the struggle between Pakistan and India to maintain influence over Afghanistan. Strategic interests “It’s strategic interest that is prompting investment in Afghanistan,” Imtiaz Gul, executive director at the Centre for Research and Security Studies in Islamabad. “Goodwill is secondary.” In the last decade India’s investment in Afghanistan has created discomfort for Pakistan, he noted. In October, Pakistan pledged a further $500 million to help reconstruct Afghanistan, in addition to an existing $500 million package on health, education and infrastructure that includes a 400-bed hospital in Kabul and more than 2000 scholarships for Afghan students. “India, too, has focused on building infrastructure such as dams, highways, and power infrastructure as well as the new parliament in Kabul. It has largely refrained from supporting Kabul militarily because of Pakistani sensitivities,” said Dhruva Jaishankar, fellow at the Brookings India think tank. “For India, the priority is a stable and plural Afghanistan and the defeat of the Taliban. This would ensure that the region is not a hotbed for terrorism and is instead a conduit to Central Asia,” Jaishankar said. Militant insurgency Meanwhile, Afghanistan remains in the grip of a resurgent Taliban and repeated attacks from Islamic State...
Mediatised Understanding of the Indo-Pak Conflict
“Ma’am, why is it only India who always initiates Peace”, asked a class XII student I asked him to share some examples. He quoted bilateral meetings initiated by India, PM Narendra Modi’s swearing in ceremony and his visit to Pakistan. He further said that India keeps initiating without any positive response. Initially, I shared some examples to burst the “peace is one-sided” narrative that exists in both countries. I then asked him to share the source of his information. To which he replied that he reads the newspaper regularly. Thereafter, I provided some clues to facilitate a discussion in the whole class about yellow journalism, the way media works as a means for the ends of a nation-state, the politics of media and moreover, knowledge between India and Pakistan. This conversation was part of a peace building workshop of Aaghaz-e-Dosti, an Indo-Pak Friendship Initiative, in a school in Delhi. These workshops that are about peace building and conflict resolution in general and Indo-Pak in specific are designed to familiarize students about life and people across the border, educate them about issues of conflict between India and Pakistan, and to facilitate critical thinking. Based on the responses of students and the interaction, this workshop highlighted the role that media plays in Indo-Pak relations. In view of the restrictions in mobility, the media forms the main source of knowledge between India and Pakistan. The media is the platform to know the ‘other’. It is also the platform to understand the Conflict. As we see in the above cited incident, the student had a particular image of Pakistan and Indo-Pak peace based on his readings of the newspapers. This was not limited to this one student, school or just to India. During my trip to Pakistan last year, I had interacted with students in a Lahore school. The students raised the case of a Pakistani musical band that faced opposition by an extremist, anti-peace political group in India. The students believed...
Pak-India Tensions
Is it brinkmanship or something more? With the decade-old ceasefire along the LoC already in tatters, India appears determined to find new avenues of provocation against Pakistan. Over the weekend, first an Indian submarine attempted to intrude into Pakistani waters, according to official accounts, and then a small Indian surveillance drone was knocked down after it strayed across the LoC, again according to official statements. While each incident may individually seem small and both sides will likely dispute what really occurred, it is alarming that incidents, especially one involving a submarine, are taking place at the moment. Pakistan-India ties are not merely in a deep freeze, but appear to be further unravelling. Seemingly that is the intention of the Indian leadership. Do both sides truly understand the risks they appear so willing to stoke? While it is difficult to definitively ascribe motives to the actions of an external rival, it does seem that the Indian government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi has rejected the idea of engaging Pakistan in dialogue and is determined to go down a path of increasing military tensions. Perhaps this is because the Indian state wants to deflect attention from its troubles in India-held Kashmir or because a strong, militaristic nationalism is the campaign platform of choice for the BJP, which faces crucial state elections once again in the year ahead. With the election of a hawkish Donald Trump in the US, Mr Modi may even now be gambling that the year ahead will see closer cooperation between India and the US and more pressure on Pakistan from the new American administration to address US and Indian concerns about specific militant groups allegedly operating on Pakistani soil. So the combination of pre-existing preferences and the introduction of a new, unpredictable factor in the election of Mr Trump may be the cause of a fresh spike in Pakistan-India tensions. Perhaps all sides, including the incoming US...
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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.