SCA MORNING PRESS CLIPS

epubdos : Afghanistan

Prepared for the U.S. Department of State

Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs

By TechMIS
www.TechMIS.com

Mobile User Copy

TO:	SCA & Staff
DATE:	Tuesday, January 2, 2024 6:30 AM ET

Afghanistan

UN Security Council Calls For Afghan Special Envoy (Agence France-Presse)

Agence France-Presse [12/29/2023 6:32 AM, Staff, 223K, Positive]
The United Nations Security Council adopted a resolution on Friday calling for the appointment of a special envoy for Afghanistan to increase engagement with the country and its Taliban leaders.

It followed an independent assessment report issued in November which called for greater engagement with Afghanistan following the return to power of the Taliban in August 2021.

The resolution calls on the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to name a special envoy to promote the independent report’s recommendations, particularly regarding gender and human rights.

The resolution was adopted after 13 members of the Security Council voted in favor, while Russia and China abstained.

"The UAE and Japan firmly believe the independent assessment serves as the best basis for discussions going forward," said Japan’s UN ambassador Yamazaki Kazuyuki ahead of the vote.

"The resolution highlights the need to increase international engagement in a more coherent, coordinated and structured manner, as the independent assessment states."

The United Arab Emirates and Japan have responsibility for raising the situation in Afghanistan at the Security Council as so-called "pen-holders" for the issue.

The Taliban government is not officially recognized by any country or world body and the United Nations refers to the administration as the "Taliban de facto authorities".

Officials initially promised a softer version of the strict Islamic rule that characterized their first stint in power from 1996 to 2001, but restrictions have gradually been reintroduced – particularly affecting women.

Teenage girls have been banned from attending most secondary schools and women from universities, prompting global outrage and protests in some Afghan cities.

In November 2022 women were prohibited from entering parks, funfairs, gyms and public baths.

"The United States strongly supports this resolution’s call for a UN Special Envoy for Afghanistan. A Special Envoy will be well positioned to coordinate international engagement on Afghanistan, including with relevant Afghan political actors and stakeholders," said the United States’ representative following the adoption of the resolution.

Taliban Balk At UN Security Council Plan For Special Afghan Envoy (Agence France-Presse)

Agence France-Presse [12/30/2023 4:14 PM, Staff, 223K, Positive]
Afghanistan’s Taliban authorities on Saturday criticised the UN Security Council’s plan for a special envoy to promote gender and human rights in the country as "unnecessary".

The Taliban government is not officially recognised by any country or world body, and the United Nations refers to the administration as the "Taliban de facto authorities".

Many are torn over engaging with Kabul’s rulers in a bid to roll back their controls on women and girls, or freezing them out until they make concessions such as reopening educational opportunities for females.

On Friday, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) adopted a resolution calling for the appointment of a special envoy for Afghanistan to increase engagement with the country and its Taliban leaders.

But foreign ministry spokesman Abdul Qahar Balkhi said a new envoy "is unnecessary as Afghanistan is not a conflict zone and is ruled by a central government that is able to secure its national interests".

In a post on social media site X, he said the Taliban government welcomes "more robust and enhanced engagement" with the UN, but special envoys "have complicated situations further via imposition of external solutions".

"The approach of the government of Afghanistan will ultimately be guided by the unaltered religious beliefs, cultural values and national interests of the people of Afghanistan," he said on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Since the Taliban surged back to power in August 2021, Kabul’s new rulers have insisted on their right to impose harsh social controls in accordance with their austere interpretation of Islam.

They have rejected appeals to obey international law as undue meddling in their domestic affairs.

Teenage girls have been banned from attending most secondary schools and women from universities, prompting global outrage and protests in some Afghan cities.

Late in 2022, women were prohibited from entering parks, funfairs, gyms and public baths.

The UN resolution followed an independent assessment report issued in November calling for greater engagement with Afghanistan.

It was adopted after 13 members of the Security Council voted in favour, while Russia and China abstained.

The Afghan women’s rights activist who says the world should talk to the Taliban (NBC News)

NBC News [1/1/2024 5:44 AM, Jennifer Jett, 3304K, Neutral]
In August 2021, when U.S.-led forces were withdrawing from Afghanistan and evacuation flights were being overwhelmed by people desperate to leave with them, Mahbouba Seraj decided to stay.

Seraj, 75, an Afghan-American women’s rights activist and founder of the nonprofit Afghan Women’s Network, had been in Afghanistan since 2003, when she moved back with a mission to help the country’s women and girls. More than 25 years earlier, Seraj — the niece of the country’s former king — had been forced into exile by Afghanistan’s Communist government, settling in the United States.

Afghanistan had been transformed in the years since Seraj’s return, particularly for women and girls. While poverty, violence and enduring conservative social norms still forced many Afghan women to restrict their lives, under the U.S.-backed government, some had grown accustomed to rights they were denied under Taliban rule from 1996 to 2001, re-entering public life, attending university and participating in government.

But in 2021, that government was being toppled, leaving the Taliban poised to take over once again and Afghan women facing an uncertain future.

“I knew that they are going to be needing some kind of support, at least something from the past that remained, so that will give them the feeling that, okay, things have not gone to hell completely,” Seraj told NBC News in an interview in Hong Kong in November.

Since the Taliban returned to power in August 2021, the fighters and clerics espousing an extremely conservative version of Islam have arrested women’s rights activists, ended education for women after sixth grade, barred women from gyms and parks, ordered the closure of beauty salons, and prohibited women from working at nongovernmental organizations.

They have also shut down most shelters for victims of domestic abuse, with Seraj’s among the few remaining.

The Taliban government has been largely ostracized internationally, but with its control firmly established, the United Nations Security Council is considering how to engage with it politically and perhaps reintegrate it into the global system. Some, including Seraj, see this as an opportunity to pressure the Taliban into restoring some rights to women in exchange for diplomatic recognition.

Others, such as Nobel Peace laureate Malala Yousafzai, say the Taliban cannot be trusted or given any kind of legitimacy and governments should continue to shun them.

An independent assessment of potential engagement that was submitted to the Security Council in November said the basic rights of women and girls “are not only fundamental obligations of a state, but also critical to build state capacity for long-term development and economic growth and peace and security,” according to Reuters.

In its response to the assessment, Reuters reported, the Taliban said it was obligated to consider Afghanistan’s “religious values and national interests” and that no one would be allowed to interfere in the country’s internal affairs.

The Taliban also defended their record on women, saying they respected women’s rights in line with their interpretation of Islamic law.

Seraj argues that the best way forward with the Taliban “is to talk, and come up with some kind of an agreement.”

“Every single day that it goes on with the Taliban not being recognized, it’s not that the Taliban are being pushed in a corner, it’s the people of Afghanistan that are being denied their rights everywhere — in the United Nations, in the world, in the conferences and the meetings,” she said.

Though the Taliban are struggling to transition from waging war to running a country, Seraj said, trying to install a new, more palatable government would only bring more chaos.

“If we keep on changing government, after government, after government, we cannot afford that,” she said.

That doesn’t mean consigning Afghanistan’s 20 million women to second-class citizenship, Seraj said, arguing that the world cannot move to accept the Taliban unless they engage in parallel, step-by-step reforms.

“They have to recognize [women’s rights] first for the world to recognize them, but it has to happen,” she said. “So in order for that to happen, they have to have a talk.”

There is no time to waste, she added.

“The boys [who] are growing up in this era, you will not be able to tell them that they have to respect a woman later,” Seraj said. “They won’t. Even right now they are not.”

Boys, too, are facing an education crisis under Taliban rule, Human Rights Watch said in a report on Dec. 6. With women barred from teaching boys, the group found, they are often replaced by unqualified male teachers or not replaced at all.

Afghanistan’s problems have been compounded this fall by the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Afghans from neighboring Pakistan, which said in October it would arrest and deport any foreign nationals living in the country without documentation. Though the Pakistani government says it is not targeting any particular nationality, most of those affected are from Afghanistan.

The crackdown has created a humanitarian crisis as Afghans who fled Soviet occupation in the 1980s or Taliban rule after that stream into a country that some have never lived in and that is struggling to take them in.

“They’re not kicking out people who have been there [in Pakistan] for five years and six years, they’re kicking out people that were there for 40 years,” Seraj said.

The International Organization for Migration, a U.N. agency, said in late November that about 375,000 Afghans had left Pakistan in the last two months, many of them forced to leave behind their savings and possessions.

Many of those returning, including women and children, “could lose their lives in a harsh winter if left without adequate shelter,” the U.N. refugee agency said in December.

An additional 345,000 Afghan refugees have been deported from neighboring Iran since late September, the Afghan news channel TOLOnews reported in December, citing the Iranian Ministry of Refugees and Repatriation.

Afghanistan is also still dealing with the aftermath of a series of 6.3-magnitude earthquakes that hit the northwestern province of Herat in early October. U.N. officials said the vast majority of the people killed were women and children, most of whom were at home while their male relatives were working outside.

Though the Taliban regime has not been formally recognized by any foreign government, in September neighboring China became the first country to name a new ambassador to Afghanistan, and in December the Taliban said they had appointed an ambassador to China, their first to any country.

The Taliban are also joining Chinese President Xi Jinping’s signature Belt and Road infrastructure initiative.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry said Dec. 5 that while Afghanistan “should not be excluded from the international community,” the Taliban government must engage in political reform before it can receive diplomatic recognition.

“We believe that diplomatic recognition of the Afghan government will come naturally as the concerns of various parties are effectively addressed,” ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said at a regular news briefing in Beijing.

China’s role in Afghanistan “could be very beneficial,” Seraj said, as long as any deals between the two countries are made in the interest of the Afghan people.

“If the interest of the people of Afghanistan is taken into consideration, then China is a fantastic resource. Why not?” she said. “They are interested in what we have, they are our neighbor, we can work with them. I don’t see any problem.”

Though she worries about her safety and sometimes gets discouraged, Seraj said she has no plans to leave Afghanistan.

“My responsibility towards the women in my shelter is huge,” she said. “I love those girls. I cannot just leave them and go somewhere and do something else.”

Seraj said she wants Afghanistan to stay in the global spotlight, but not as a “disaster.”

Rather, she said, she hopes it will one day be seen “as a country with possibilities, as a country that can go on and can be alive, and maybe one day can thrive.”

Taliban say security forces killed dozens of Tajiks, Pakistanis involved in attacks in Afghanistan (AP)

AP [12/31/2023 6:29 AM, Staff, 2565K, Negative]
Security forces in Afghanistan killed a number of Tajik and Pakistani nationals and arrested scores others involved in attacks against religious clerics, the public, and mosques, a senior Taliban official said Sunday.

Mohammad Yaqoob Mujahid, Taliban’s appointed defense minister, during a press conference in the capital, Kabul, said dozens of Tajiks and more than 20 Pakistanis were killed in the past 12 months “in operations by security forces.”

He said scores of Tajiks and hundreds of Pakistanis involved in various incidents were also arrested during that period.

Mujahid called on neighboring and regional countries to strictly monitor their borders.

Tensions between Kabul and Islamabad spiked as hundreds of thousands of Afghans left Pakistan after authorities started pursuing foreigners they said were in the country illegally, going door-to-door to check migrants’ documentation, following an Oct.31 deadline.

Mujahid also said there has been a 90% decrease in attacks by an Islamic State group affiliate in the past year.

The militant group has carried out major assaults on schools, hospitals, and mosques, and has also attacked Shiite areas across the country.

The IS affiliate has been a major rival of the Taliban since the latter seized control of Afghanistan in August 2021. IS militants have struck in Kabul, in northern provinces and especially wherever there are Shiites, whom IS considers to be apostates.

Since taking power, the Taliban have barred women from most areas of public life and work and stopped girls from going to school beyond the sixth grade as part of harsh measures they imposed, as U.S. and NATO forces were pulling out of Afghanistan following two decades of war.

I teach in secret, defying the Taliban ban and fighting despair (Al Jazeera – opinion)

Al Jazeera [1/1/2024 8:32 AM, Maryam Ahmadi, 2060K, Neutral]
I have sent the link and I am waiting for my students to join the Zoom session. I am teaching them English. I receive a notification that my students are in the waiting room. I put a big smile, I let them in, and greet them in English.

I know that they can’t see my smile because I don’t turn on my camera for security reasons, but I know they hear it in my voice. I know that I have to do everything and anything to keep up the spirits of my students. And I have to do it for myself as well.

Since 2021, we have had to struggle against two enemies: the Taliban ban on secondary and higher education for girls and women and the desperation and hopelessness that are slowly overcoming us.

According to the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), some 2.5 million girls and young women are out of school due to the ban. Before the universities were closed for us, one in three young women were enrolled; some 100,000 were denied their dreams of pursuing the degrees they wanted. Not only that, even when students have found opportunities to study abroad, the Taliban has denied them the right to do so.

Islamic scholars have repeatedly said and emphasised that there is no basis in our religion for this ban. Even economically, it does not make sense. The UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) estimates that preventing girls from attaining secondary education costs the Afghan economy some $500m per year.

The Taliban government has refused to change its decision despite the repeated appeals of international organisations and agencies. Afghan women and girls, for their part, have refused to give up.

The need and desire for education has been so great that soon after the bans were imposed, a few teachers got together and organised classes online. At first, it was a small group with just a few students. I joined them about a year and a half ago.

We teach English as well as all high school subjects and a few additional courses, like computer skills. News of our courses spread by word of mouth and more and more students joined. By 2023, we had grown to 400 students from across Afghanistan.

I consider myself lucky to have this opportunity – to be able to help a little my family financially and help other young women and girls who want to study and learn.

I had received training at a teacher training centre before 2021. I did the course without having the intention to be a teacher one day; my dear father had suggested that I do it and I followed his advice.

At the centre, they taught us how to approach education through different methods and how to interact with students to help them learn better. But a lot of what we learned could only be applied in a normal situation where the teacher and students are in a classroom together, not online struggling with a frustratingly bad internet connection.

So when I began teaching online, it was a challenge. I struggled and often thought about quitting, but the desire of my students to learn kept me going and I found a way to make it work.

“Whenever I thought I couldn’t do it, you showed me somehow that I could. You are the best role model in my life,” one student wrote to me recently. Such messages really warm up my heart and motivate me to keep going.

But there are other times when I also get difficult questions that I struggle to answer.

“Teacher, if I had been allowed to go to school, now after two years, I would have graduated from school. But it would have been useless because I am not allowed to go to university. Or if I were to graduate from university, again it would be useless because I would not be allowed to work. So why should I study now?” another student asked me recently.

It was a heartbreaking question. I wonder how many girls and young women across the country are asking themselves this question.

Due to the prison-like conditions that Afghan women and girls live in, many suffer from mental health problems. According to statistics from medical facilities, there has been a sharp increase in Afghan women taking or trying to take their own lives.

Many don’t have hope for the future and I can see it in my students. I am often compelled to assume the role of a counselor and sit and listen to stories of suffering and depression. Some of my students have shared that they are mocked or blamed for what has happened to them – working hard and dreaming big, only for everything to come crashing down.

Hearing and knowing what my students are going through makes it all the more challenging to teach. But I know I cannot give up and must keep going for their sake. I constantly try to keep them motivated, keep their spirits high, and encourage them to love learning and exploring.

I share inspirational stories and biographies of great people from across the world. I ask them to write lists of their dreams and goals, to share their plans for their future and everything that keeps them hopeful and motivated. I try to help younger students discover their talents; I ask them to write stories and poems or to paint. We try to break out of prison through learning and creativity.

The other teachers and I are doing our best to keep the hope of Afghan girls and young women alive. But we need support. It would make a huge difference for our students if the United Nations and international organisations could help us set up a mechanism to formalise the education we provide and grant valid documents certifying degrees attained. This would help motivate young women and girls and lessen the troubling feeling that they are wasting their lives.

Things in life often don’t go according to plan. I never planned to be a teacher, especially not one in hiding. But here I am teaching online, defying an unjust ban, trying to help my fellow Afghan girls and women, and fighting despair. It is a job I never wanted, but I love doing it.

Pakistan

Pakistan human rights body says an upcoming election is unlikely to be free and fair (AP)

AP [1/1/2024 11:08 AM, Munir Ahmed, 2565K, Negative]
Pakistan’s independent human rights commission said Monday there is little chance of free and fair parliamentary elections in the country next month because of “pre-poll rigging.” It also expressed concern about authorities rejecting the candidacies of former Prime Minister Imran Khan and most other members of his party.

At a news conference in Islamabad, the co-chairperson of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, Munizae Jahangir, said other political parties have been subjected to similar tactics to varying degrees.

“At this point, there is little evidence to show that the upcoming elections will be free, fair or credible,” Jahangir said.

She said Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party, or PTI, was “being dismembered in a systematic manner” and that the rejection of nomination papers for most of its candidates raised questions about the country’s Election Commission.

People should be allowed to vote for their candidate of choice on February 8, she added, and there are “apprehensions that the electoral process is being engineered.”

Jahangir condemned the state’s “clampdown” on dissent, saying it has further constricted civic discourse at a time when Pakistanis should be allowed to express their views freely given the upcoming election.

Farhatullah Babar, a veteran human rights leader, said the Election Commission’s decisions keeping Khan and other PTI members off the ballot amounted to “apparent pre-poll rigging.”

He said Pakistan’s caretaker government has a duty to ensure free and fair elections and the Election Commission’s is responsible for providing all political parties equal opportunities.

Some of the country’s main parties would not accept the outcome of a rigged election, and a disputed vote would create further political instability, Babar warned.

Khan is in currently in prison and serving a three-year sentence for corruption. He also faces a stack of other charges, making it difficult for him to run for office. Despite knowing his nomination papers could be rejected, Khan through his legal team sought to run for a seat in the National Assembly.

According to election officials, Khan was barred from running because of his conviction.

His disqualification was a fresh blow for the 71-year-old former cricketer, who is the country’s most popular opposition figure. He was ousted from office in April 2022 following a no-confidence vote in Parliament by his political opponents.

Pakistan Rights Group Slams Government ‘Manipulation’ Of Electoral Process (Radio Free Europe)

Radio Free Europe [1/1/2024 12:42 PM, Staff, 223K, Negative]
A Pakistan-based rights group slammed the government’s “blatant manipulation” of the electoral process ahead of next month’s scheduled parliamentary elections, which it said are unlikely to be “free, fair, or credible.”

The independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) on January 1 said it “is deeply concerned by the overall deterioration in human rights, which needs urgent attention as the new year unfolds.”

“Foremost is the blatant manipulation of the electoral landscape in which one political party among others has been singled out for systematic dismemberment,” it added.

The group said the process has “assumed a familiar pattern,” including arrests of party workers and supporters, lack of transparency of any charges filed, and a crackdown on party workers’ right to peaceful assembly.

HRCP also alleged “enforced disappearances, obvious signs of pressure on party leaders to resign or exit politics altogether and, most recently, the large-scale rejection of candidates’ nomination papers.”

“At this point, there is little evidence to show that the upcoming elections will be free, fair, or credible,” it added.

HCRP officials raised concern about the rejection by authorities of the candidacies of former Prime Minister Imran Khan and other members of his Tehrik-e Insaf party (PTI).

Pakistan’s Election Commission has rejected Khan’s nomination to participate in the national elections in two constituencies. The 71-year-old former cricket star has been involved in a series of political and legal battles since he was ousted as prime minister in April 2022 and has been in prison since August.

Pakistani politicians often compete for a seat from more than one constituency to increase their chances of winning.

The commission said Khan’s nomination was rejected because he was not a registered voter of the constituency where he was seeking to run and because he is "convicted by the court of law and has been disqualified."

Speaking at an Islamabad news conference, HRCP co-chairperson Munizae Jahangir said Khan’s party was “being dismembered in a systematic manner” and that rejection of nomination papers for most of its proposed candidates raised concerns about the Election Commission’s actions.

Jahangir blasted the government’s clampdown on dissent, saying it has severely limited civic discourse “at a time when people must be allowed to express their will freely ahead of [the February 7] national election.”

In a statement, Chairperson Asad Iqbal Butt assailed the government for its “mass expulsion of vulnerable Afghan refugees and asylum seekers — in violation of international customary law and without consideration for their prospects of safety in their country of origin — has put many women, children, elderly and disabled Afghan nationals at risk.”

Islamabad in early October announced that all 1.7 million “undocumented foreigners,” most reportedly from Afghanistan, should leave the country by November 1.

Most Afghans returning from Pakistan have complained of harassment, abuse, and mistreatment during the expulsion process, allegations Islamabad has denied.

According to its website, the HRCP was established in 1986 and is a nonpolitical, not-for-profit organization committed to defending human rights in the South Asian nation.

Pakistan election body rejects ex-PM Imran Khan’s nomination for 2024 elections (Reuters)

Reuters [12/30/2023 8:37 AM, Mubasher Bukhari and Ariba Shahid, 5239K, Negative]
Pakistan’s election body has rejected former Prime Minister Imran Khan’s nomination to contest the 2024 national elections in two constituencies, officials and his party’s media team said on Saturday.

The 71-year-old former cricket star has been embroiled in a tangle of political and legal battles since he was ousted as prime minister in April 2022. He has not been seen in public since he was jailed for three years in August for unlawfully selling state gifts while in office from 2018 to 2022.

Khan has been disqualified from contesting the national elections scheduled for Feb. 8 because of the corruption conviction, but he nevertheless filed nomination papers for the elections on Friday, his media team said.

In a list of rejected candidates from Lahore, the Election Commission of Pakistan said Khan’s nomination was rejected because he was not a registered voter of the constituency and because he is "convicted by the court of law and has been disqualified".

His media team said the commission had also rejected his nomination to contest the elections from his hometown, Mianwali.

Khan, who is widely seen as the country’s most popular leader, says he is being targeted by the powerful military, which wants to keep him out of the polls. The military denies this.

Last week, a high court refused to suspend Khan’s disqualification from contesting the elections.

In addition to Khan, the election commission has also rejected nomination papers submitted by other senior party members, including Shah Mehmood Qureshi, vice chairman of Khan’s party, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI).

Meanwhile, the election commission accepted former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s nomination from two constituencies for the 2024 elections, weeks after a court overturned two graft convictions.

But Sharif still needs a life ban on holding any public office to be removed to qualify to stand, so it was not immediately clear how his nomination was accepted. A hearing on that ban will be held in January.

Sharif was banned from running in elections in 2017 by the Supreme Court, which declared him dishonest for not disclosing income from a company owned by his son.

Sharif, who arrived back home in October from four years of self-imposed exile in Britain, is bidding for a fourth premiership in the February elections. His biggest challenge will be to wrest back his support base from Khan.

Pakistan arrests 21 members of outlawed Pakistani Taliban militant group linked to deadly attacks (AP)

AP [1/1/2024 6:27 AM, Staff, 22K, Negative]
Pakistan’s counterterrorism police said Monday they arrested 21 members of outlawed militant group the Pakistani Taliban, which has been behind several deadly attacks across the country.

Acting on intelligence information, the arrests were made in the eastern Punjab province over the past two weeks, the provincial Counterterrorism Department said in a statement.

The Pakistani Taliban, known as Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP, is a separate group but allied with the Afghan Taliban, who seized power in Afghanistan in 2021 as U.S. and NATO troops were in the final stages of their pullout from the country after 20 years of war.

The Counterterrorism Department provided a list of the suspects, the cases against them and their alleged affiliation. But the list did not give details about the attacks the militants were allegedly involved in, including the number of casualties.

The statement said that Mohammad Arshad, an alleged chief commander of the banned Baluch Nationalist Army which mostly operates in Pakistan’s southwestern Baluchistan province, was also arrested.

Baluchistan has been the scene of low-level insurgency by nationalists for more than two decades. They initially wanted a bigger share of provincial resources, but later initiated an insurgency for independence. The TTP and other domestic militant groups also operate in the province.

Gunmen kill 6 barbers in a former stronghold of the Pakistani Taliban near the Afghan border (Reuters)

AP [1/2/2024 2:15 AM, Staff, 456K, Neutral]
Unidentified gunmen shot and killed six barbers before dawn on Tuesday in a former stronghold of the Pakistani Taliban in the country’s northwest near the Afghanistan border, police said.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for the killings in Mir Ali, a town in the restive Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, said Jamal Khan, a local police chief.

The incident shocked residents, who said the slain men all worked at various barbershops. Javed Ali, a local resident, said he met one of the slain men last month when he went to a barbershop for a haircut.

Mir Ali served as a base for the Pakistani Taliban — who are known as Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP — for years until the military cleared the area of insurgents. TTP is a separate group but a close ally of the Afghan Taliban, who seized power in neighboring Afghanistan in August 2021 as U.S. and NATO troops were in the final stages of their pullout from the country after 20 years of war.

Pakistani militants years ago had banned the trimming of beards and haircuts in Western styles.

Pakistan has seen many militant attacks in recent years in the region, where authorities often target TTP hideouts to foil the group’s efforts to stage a comeback.

Pakistan Military Reports Killing 5 ‘Terrorists’ Near Afghan Border (VOA)

VOA [12/30/2023 7:29 AM, Ayaz Gul, 761K, Negative]
Pakistan’s military said Saturday its forces had raided a “terrorist” hideout in a volatile region bordering Afghanistan and killed five militants in the ensuing shootout.

The “intelligence-based” overnight raid in the militancy-hit North Waziristan district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province also killed a key militant commander involved in attacks on security forces, the army’s media wing said in a statement.

The army did not name the group, but the anti-state Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP, said its hideout was raided and confirmed the killing of four of its members. The group’s statement, sent to journalists, also claimed inflicting heavy casualties on the raiding military forces.

Parts of the northwestern Pakistani province have experienced almost deadly militant attacks, mainly targeting soldiers and police, with the TTP claiming credit or being blamed for most of the violence.

The provincial counterterrorism department said in its annual report Friday that militant attacks in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa had killed 185 police officers and wounded 400 other people this year.

The report claimed security forces had also killed 300 militants and captured more than 900 others during the same period.

Pakistan’s southwestern Baluchistan province, bordering Afghanistan, has also seen an uptick in attacks carried out by the TTP and ethnic Baluch insurgents this year, killing hundreds of civilians and security forces.

The Pakistani military has reported the death of nearly 300 officers and soldiers in nationwide militant attacks and counterinsurgency operations in 2023 alone. Earlier this month, militants raided an army base and killed at least 23 soldiers in the deadliest attack in Pakistan’s recent history.

Authorities say TTP, listed as a global terrorist group by the United States, and allied groups are plotting the violence from Afghan sanctuaries.

Islamabad maintains that cross-border terrorism in Pakistan has sharply increased since the Islamist Taliban regained power in Afghanistan two years ago.

“While the interim authorities have reported some success in the fight against Daesh [the Islamic State group], the fact is that a number of terrorist groups are living in Afghanistan, evidently under the protection of the Afghan interim government,” Munir Akram, the Pakistani envoy to the United Nations, told a U.N. Security Council meeting on Afghanistan earlier this month.

Akram reiterated Pakistan’s claims that the TTP was launching more deadly and sophisticated attacks against security forces due to the militant group’s acquisition of modern military weapons from "the considerable stocks left behind in Afghanistan” by U.S. and NATO troops.

Washington has repeatedly denied leaving any weapons in Afghanistan during the American military’s withdrawal from the country in August 2021, dismissing such allegations as “farce.”

Taliban authorities reject charges they are sheltering or allowing militants to stage attacks against Pakistan or any other country from Afghan soil.

Report: Terrorist Attacks Kill Nearly 1,000 Pakistanis in 2023 (VOA)

VOA [12/31/2023 1:18 PM, Ayaz Gul, 761K, Negative]
Militant attacks across Pakistan killed around 500 civilians and a similar number of security forces in 2023, the highest number of fatalities the country has experienced in six years, according to a new report released Sunday.

Northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and southwestern Baluchistan provinces bordering Afghanistan accounted for most of the terror attacks and the resulting casualties, the report by the Islamabad-based independent Center for Research and Security Studies, or CRSS, said.

It noted that 2023 was the deadliest year for Pakistani police and military forces in a decade, collectively losing more than 500 personnel in terrorist bombings and ambushes.

Anti-state groups, such as Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP, Tehreek-e-Jihad Pakistan, or TJP, separate Baloch insurgents, and a regional affiliate of Islamic State, known as the Islamic State Khorasan, often claim or are blamed for the violence.

The Pakistani military has reported the deaths of at least 265 officers and soldiers in nationwide militant attacks and counterinsurgency operations in 2023. In December, militants raided an army base in a northwestern district and killed at least 23 soldiers in the deadliest attack in the country’s recent history.

Khyber Pakhtunkhwa police said in its annual report this week that militant attacks claimed the lives of its 185 personnel. Police in Baluchistan also suffered fatalities, but provincial authorities have formally not released any details.

Pakistan says TTP and other fugitive militants have increasingly and freely carried cross-border terrorist attacks from sanctuaries in Afghanistan since the Islamist Taliban seized power in the neighboring country in August 2021.

Officials in Islamabad allege that Afghan fighters linked to the ruling Taliban in Kabul have also facilitated and participated in TTP-led assaults on Pakistani security forces and civilians.

The military said in a statement Sunday that one of its soldiers was killed when “terrorists from inside Afghanistan opened fire on a Pakistani border post.” The pre-dawn shooting occurred in the volatile North Waziristan border district.

Pakistan renewed its demand for the Taliban government to “ensure effective border management” on their side of the shared 2,600-kilometer frontier between the two countries. The statement said that Kabul “is expected to fulfill its obligations and deny the use of Afghan soil by terrorists for perpetuating acts of terrorism against Pakistan.”

The United Nations has also documented in its recent reports the presence of thousands of TTP fighters on Afghan soil.

Afghan Taliban officials reject charges they are sheltering or allowing the use of their territory for staging attacks against Pakistan or any other country.

Commonly known as the Pakistani Taliban, the TTP, a globally designated terrorist group, is a close ally of the ruling Taliban in Kabul, and the two jointly waged insurgent attacks against the United States-led Western forces until they withdrew from Afghanistan in August 2021.

India

India Is Chasing China’s Economy. But Something Is Holding It Back. (New York Times)

New York Times [1/2/2024 4:14 PM, Alex Travelli, 810K, Neutral]
India’s economy is booming. Stock prices are through the roof, among the best performing in the world. The government’s investment in airports, bridges and roads, and clean-energy infrastructure is visible almost everywhere. India’s total output, or gross domestic product, is expected to increase 6 percent this year — faster than the United States or China.

But there’s a hitch: Investment by Indian companies is not keeping pace. The money that companies put into the future of their businesses, for things like new machines and factories, is stagnant. As a fraction of India’s economy, it is shrinking. And while money is flying into India’s stock markets, long-term investment from overseas has been declining.

Green and red lights are flashing at the same time. At some point soon, the government will need to reduce its extraordinary spending, which could weigh on the economy if private sector money doesn’t pick up.

No one expects India to stop growing, but a rise of 6 percent is not enough to meet India’s ambitions. Its population, now the world’s biggest, is growing. Its government has set a national goal of catching up to China and becoming a developed nation by 2047. That kind of leap will require sustained growth closer to 8 or 9 percent a year, most economists say.

The missing investment could also present a challenge for Narendra Modi, the prime minister since 2014, who has concentrated on making India an easier place for foreign and Indian companies to do business.

Mr. Modi is in campaign mode, facing elections in the spring and rallying the nation to cheer his successes. The sluggish investment is not something executives, bankers or foreign diplomats like to discuss, for fear of looking like naysayers. But investors are playing it safe while the economy is signaling both strengths and weaknesses.

One point of widespread agreement is that India should benefit from China’s slowdown, which has been fueled by an unfolding property crisis. China’s geopolitical tensions with the West present another opening for India, by motivating foreign companies to move production in China to other countries.

Sriram Viswanathan, an Indian-born managing partner at Celesta, a Silicon Valley venture capital fund, describes investors “wanting to fill the vacuum that has been created in the supply chain.”

“That, I think, is the opportunity for India,” he said.

The World Bank has applauded India’s commitment to infrastructure spending, which ramped up during the pandemic when the private sector needed rescuing. Since then, the government has doubled down, paying for bricks-and-mortar improvement to the rickety roads, ports and power supply that once discouraged business investment.

But the World Bank, whose mission is to nudge developing economies higher, says it is critical that those billions’ worth of government spending ignite a burst of corporate spending. Its economists speak of a “crowd-in effect,” which happens when, for instance, a new port next to a shiny new industrial park lures companies into building plants and hiring workers. Last year, the bank said it anticipated an imminent crowding-in, as it has forecast for almost three years running.

“To accelerate the growth of confidence, public investment is not enough,” Auguste Tano Kouamé, the World Bank’s country director for India, said at a news conference in April. “You need deeper reforms to make the private sector invest.”

A lack of confidence helps explain why the stock markets are setting records, even while foreign investors are backing away from buying into the Indian economy through start-ups and acquisitions.

The stock markets in Mumbai, India’s business capital, are worth nearly $4 trillion, up from $3 trillion a year ago, making them more valuable than Hong Kong’s. India’s small investors have been a big part of that, but trading stocks is quick and easy, compared with buying and selling companies. A recent annual average of $40 billion in foreign direct investment has shrunk to $13 billion in the past year.

One reason that businesses are watching and waiting to make investments is Mr. Modi’s powerful national government.

On the one hand, business craves stability in political leadership, and India has rarely, if ever, had such a well-entrenched leader. He demolished the main opposition party in three big elections across the Hindi-speaking heartland in December and looks like a shoo-in for re-election this year. And Mr. Modi is vocally pro-business.

His government plays a markedly interventionist role in managing the economy, in a way that can make it dangerous for firms to place their stakes.

In August, the government announced sudden restrictions on the import of laptop computers, to spur production at home. That sent businesses that depend on them into a tailspin, and the measure was almost as suddenly withdrawn. Likewise in July, the government slapped online betting companies with a retroactive 28 percent tax, gutting a $1.5 billion industry overnight.

Businesses close to Mr. Modi and his political circle have done especially well. The most prominent examples are Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries and the Adani Group, conglomerates that reach into numerous areas of Indian life. Their combined market power has grown gigantic in recent years: The flagship stocks of each company are worth about six times more than they were when Mr. Modi became prime minister.

Some smaller companies have been the target of high-profile raids by tax-enforcement agencies.

“If you’re not the two A’s” — Adani or Ambani — it can be treacherous to navigate India’s regulatory byways, said Arvind Subramanian, an economist at Brown University who served under Mr. Modi’s government as chief economic adviser from 2014 to 2018. “Domestic investors feel a little bit vulnerable,” he added.

The past nine years of Modi government have improved many things in the business environment for all. Crucial systems work better, many types of corruption have been reined in and digitization of commerce has opened up new arenas for growth.

“What is really complex and interesting about this Modi phenomenon is that there’s a lot of hype and bluster and manipulation,” Mr. Subramanian said. “But it’s built on a core of achievement.”

Still, foreign officials charged with bringing billions of investment capital to India complain that much of the traditional pain of doing business in India lingers. The one most frequently cited is red tape. Too many officials get involved at every level of approval, and it remains painfully slow to obtain legal judgments, let alone to enforce them.

Another factor holding back longer-term investment is an underlying weakness in “the India growth story.” The most powerful source of demand, the kind that foreign investors and domestic businesses covet, is among the wealthiest consumers. In a population of 1.4 billion, about 20 million Indians are doing well enough to buy European consumer products, build luxury homes and beef up the top tier of the automotive sector.

Most of the rest of the population is struggling with inflation in food and fuel prices. Banks are extending credit to consumers of both kinds, but less so to businesses, which fear that the great majority of their customers will be tightening their belts for years to come.

“For the moment, there is no evidence that investors are feeling reassured about India,” Mr. Subramanian said.

But he remains hopeful. The annual growth, even if less than 6 percent, is nothing to sniff at. The new and improved infrastructure should attract more private investment eventually. And the benefits of consumer wealth, unevenly distributed as they are, could over time raise up more incomes.

The biggest wild card is whether India can grab a significant share of global business from China. The highest-profile example is Apple, the $3 trillion megacompany, which is slowly moving some of its supply chain away from China. Its pricey iPhone has barely 5 percent of the Indian market. But currently about 7 percent of the world’s iPhones are made in India — and JPMorgan Chase has estimated that Apple intends to get that to 25 percent by 2025. At that point, all kinds of things become possible for India.

“We should keep our minds open,” Mr. Subramanian said.

‘Turbulence’ hits India-US ties after Sikh separatist murder plot (Al Jazeera)

Al Jazeera [1/1/2024 1:11 AM, Sanjay Kapoor, 2060K, Neutral]
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is not known to give interviews to the media.

In late December he made an exception and spoke to the London-based Financial Times, which had first reported on how the United States government had thwarted an alleged plot hatched by an Indian agent to kill a Sikh separatist on American soil. New York-based Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, a US-Canada dual citizen, has been branded a “terrorist” by India for issuing threats of violence against New Delhi and for his call for a separate Sikh homeland carved out of India, called Khalistan.

In the interview, Modi made light of suggestions that the US allegations of Indian involvement in an attempted extraterritorial and extrajudicial killing had hurt bilateral ties between the world’s two largest democracies. “I don’t think it is appropriate to link a few incidents with diplomatic relations between the two countries,” he said while committing — as his country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs had done earlier as well — to an internal Indian investigation into the allegations.

Yet a series of visits — and one key decision to avoid a visit — point to a strain in ties at a time when both nations are headed towards elections, shrinking the political space available to their leaders to make moves that could attract domestic criticism.

On December 11, FBI chief Christopher Wray visited New Delhi for talks that are believed to have included a conversation on the Pannun case — it was the first visit by an FBI director to India in 12 years. The US Congress-appointed watchdog on religious freedom also released its annual report early, demanding that the Biden administration declare India a “country of particular concern”. The US Commission on International Religious Freedom linked the allegations of a hit ordered against Pannun to the broader concerns about attacks on religious minorities in India. It said it was “alarmed” by India’s increased transnational “targeting of religious minorities and those advocating on their behalf”.

Then, US President Joe Biden turned down Modi’s invitation to attend India’s January 26 Republic Day celebrations as chief guest. No formal reason has been made public, but Biden’s refusal to come to New Delhi has also forced India to postpone a meeting of the Quad grouping — which also includes Australia and Japan — it was hoping to hold during the US leader’s visit.

These are among a series of “signs” of the tensions in ties, said Sushant Singh, a senior fellow at the New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research.

“June was the high peak of India-US ties and they have cooled down since,” he told Al Jazeera, referring to Modi’s visit that month to Washington, during which he became a rare leader to address the US Congress for a second time. “The Pannun murder plot has had a definite role to play in this.”

That doesn’t mean that India-US relations are in any serious trouble, said Christopher Clary, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Albany and a non-resident fellow at the Washington-based Stimson enter. Besides the Pannun episode, he told Al Jazeera, relations between the two countries were fine.

“This is like a commercial airliner that encounters turbulence,” he said. “It can be unpleasant for those aboard but does not endanger the aircraft. We will keep flying even if we encounter bumpy air sometimes.”

Clary said that “shared US and Indian concerns about a rising China can paper over many potential US-India differences.”

Still, in India, a refrain — from influential voices in the strategic community to people on the street — has gained ground that New Delhi did no wrong if it indeed tried to assassinate Pannun. “If the US can kill Osama bin Laden on foreign soil, then what stops us,” asked an analyst who requested anonymity because of concerns that his candid comments might affect his ability to work on bilateral relations. “Why different yardsticks?

Yet India too has deployed different responses to the US allegations, and similarly dramatic assertions by Canada that New Delhi might have been behind the assassination of another Sikh separatist, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, in the town of Surrey near Vancouver.

After Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau levelled accusations against India in his parliament in October, New Delhi retaliated hard. It accused Canada of sheltering and supporting individuals and entities it describes as “terrorists” and put a halt to trade talks.

New Delhi asked the High Commission of Canada to reduce its staff and temporarily froze visas for those trying to visit India.

India was a lot more circumspect in its response to the US allegations — there were no public protestations, and New Delhi instead promised its own investigation into the accusations. The Modi government has explained that difference in its response to the nature of Washington’s approach.

While Canada, according to India, is yet to offer concrete proof linking New Delhi to the Nijjar assassination, the US has revealed much more of what its investigation has shown. The indictment against an Indian businessman, Nikhil Gupta, who is now incarcerated in Prague jail at Washington’s request, says that he was in contact with an Indian intelligence operative identified in the legal paperwork as “C1”.

C1, the indictment claims, paid Gupta $15,000 and promised a total of $100,000 for the assassination of Pannun. But the hitman Gupta tried to hire turned out to be an informant of the US government who blew the lid on the plot.

While the Indian government has tried to suggest that it knew nothing of the alleged plan to kill Pannun, AS Dulat, the former head of India’s external intelligence agency — the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) — has said that any such plot would have been known to National Security Advisor Ajit Doval.

Whatever the truth may be, other reports have suggested that India has withdrawn many RAW operatives from North America in recent months. Meanwhile, progress on defence deals over the purchase of Predator drones by India, and for the transfer of technology for jet engines between the two countries, appear to have slowed down, said Singh.

Within the corridors of power in New Delhi, there is disquiet over what the Pannun case suggests — that communication devices of Indian officials might be under scrutiny.

“If the US officials were monitoring secure Indian government communications in Delhi, they definitely know much more than they have revealed so far,” said Singh.

“How and when that information is used by them is yet to be seen.”

India Asks Pakistan to Extradite Suspected Terror Mastermind (VOA)

VOA [12/29/2023 5:32 PM, Ayaz Gul, 761K, Negative]
Pakistan confirmed Friday that India officially demanded the extradition of Hafiz Saeed, a hardline Pakistani cleric suspected of involvement in terrorist attacks on Indian soil.

Pakistani Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mumtaz Zahra Baloch effectively rejected India’s demand, stating that the two countries have no bilateral treaty to address such matters.

Baloch made the statement just hours after the Indian Foreign Ministry spokesperson told a routine news conference that India has asked Islamabad to extradite Saeed for trial in India.

Baloch said New Delhi sought Saeed’s extradition in a "money laundering case."

Arindam Bagchi, spokesperson for India’s Foreign Ministry, would not discuss details of the request on Friday, saying only that the request was submitted "some weeks ago."

"The person in question is wanted in numerous cases in India. He is also a U.N.-proscribed terrorist," Bagchi said. "In this regard, we have conveyed a request along with relevant supporting documents to the government of Pakistan to extradite him to India to face trial in a particular case."

Bagchi was responding to Indian media reports claiming that Saeed’s custody was sought in connection with the 2008 attacks on Mumbai that killed 166 people, including six Americans.

"Pakistan has received a request from the Indian authorities, seeking extradition of Hafiz Saeed in a so-called money laundering case," Baloch said in a written statement she sent to VOA. "It is pertinent to note that no bilateral extradition treaty exists between Pakistan and India."

Saeed is serving a prison term in Pakistan on terrorism-financing charges. Last year, an anti-terrorism court found him guilty on multiple counts and sentenced him to 31 years.

Indian officials accuse the Pakistani cleric of masterminding the four-day Mumbai bloodshed and supporting militants battling security forces in the India-administered part of the disputed Kashmir region. Saeed denies the allegations.

The United States has also offered a reward of up to $10 million for information on Saeed in connection with the Mumbai violence.

Saeed is known as the founder and leader of Lashkar-e-Tayyiba, or LeT, a U.S.-designated global terror group that India blames for plotting the Mumbai attacks and other violence from its alleged bases in Pakistan, charges Islamabad rejects.

A group of 10 LeT gunmen reportedly carried out the carnage in Mumbai after slipping into the city by boat from Pakistan. India hanged the lone gunman who survived the attack, identified as Pakistani national Mohammad Ajmal Kasab, in 2012.

New Delhi has long accused Islamabad of financing and training separatist groups in majority-Muslim Kashmir. Pakistan denies the charges, saying it provides only political and diplomatic support to Kashmiri "freedom fighters."

Pakistan accuses India of human rights violations in Kashmir and of suppressing the democratic rights of Kashmiris.

India controls two-thirds of the Himalayan region and Pakistan the rest, with both claiming Kashmir in full. The dispute has sparked two of the three wars between the nuclear-armed South Asian rival nations and remains the primary source of bilateral tensions.

Modi Unveils $1.3 Billion Projects In Disputed Temple City (Bloomberg)

Bloomberg [12/30/2023 5:27 AM, Swati Gupta and Rakesh Sharma, 13914K, Positive]
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated projects totaling 111 billion rupees ($1.3 billion) in the northern riverside town of Ayodhya, ahead of the opening of a long-anticipated and controversial temple in January.

Hundreds braved a winter morning to line up along roads in the city as Modi began a tour in a Toyota sports utility vehicle, waving at crowds that showered him with rose petals and chanted slogans. The projects he unveiled included a new airport and a revamped railway station.

Ayodhya is widely believed by Hindu devotees to be the birthplace of the deity Ram. The temple was built after a decades-old movement that involved the destruction of a mosque that had stood in its place, and a bitter court battle. In 2019, India’s Supreme Court ruled construction could go ahead.

The city has undergone a facelift in recent years as authorities widened roads and built bridges and highways ahead of an anticipated influx of Hindu pilgrims. The airport, whose facade mirrors temple architecture, was also developed with the expectation of increased tourism, according to a government statement.

The temple is scheduled to host a grand opening on Jan. 22, with a high-profile guest list that includes the prime minister. It will come just months before the country holds a general election, and is expected to boost Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party’s chances as they fulfill one of their main poll promises.

“After the construction of Ram temple, there will be a massive surge in people coming to Ayodhya,” Modi said at an event after inaugurating various projects. “Keeping that in mind, our government is spending billions in infrastructure projects.”

Phase one of the airport development costs 14.5 billion rupees and it can serve about 1 million passengers annually. When fully upgraded, the aim is to handle 6 million passengers a year.

Former Modi adviser Panagariya appointed as India’s new finance panel head (Reuters)

Reuters [12/31/2023 4:05 AM, Aftab Ahmed, 5239K, Positive]
The Indian government on Sunday appointed Arvind Panagariya the chairman of new Finance Commission that will recommend how federal taxes will be shared with states.

In 2017, Panagariya, an Indian-born, U.S.-educated economist, resigned from the government’s main policy think-tank, after he was hand picked by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to lead the newly created body that replaced the former planning commission that drew Soviet-style five year economic plans.

Every five years, India sets up a Finance Commission to suggest the formula for sharing of taxes between the federal and state governments, and make recommendations on public finances.

Presently, India shares 42% of federal taxes with states.

"The Commission shall make its report available by October 31, 2025 covering a period of five years commencing on the 1st day of April, 2026," the government order said.

A rebel group in the Indian state of Assam signs a peace accord with the government (AP)

AP [12/29/2023 10:11 AM, Ashok Sharma and Wasbir Hussain, 456K, Neutral]
A rebel group that fought for decades to free India’s northeastern state of Assam from New Delhi’s rule on Friday signed a peace accord with the government pledging to end the insurgency in the region.

The United Liberation Front of Asom or ULFA, led by Arabinda Rajkhowa, concluded 12 years of negotiations with the Indian government. The signing ceremony in New Delhi was attended by India’s Home Minister Amit Shah and the top elected official of Assam state Himanta Biswa Sarma.

However, the group’s hard-line faction, led by Paresh Baruah, is not part of the agreement. Baruah is believed to be hiding somewhere along the China-Myanmar border, the Press Trust of India news agency said.

ULFA, formed in 1979 demanding a “sovereign Assam,” carried out a reign of terror in Assam state in the late 1980s, including extortion, kidnappings and killings, especially targeting the state’s flourishing tea companies. It killed several tea planters.

India banned ULFA in 1990. It then set up bases in neighboring Bangladesh and coordinated with several other insurgent groups in India’s northeast.

Indian military operations against ULFA began in 1990 and have continued until the present.

In 2011, ULFA split after Bangladesh handed over several top ULFA leaders, including Rajkhowa, to Indian authorities. The Rajkhowa faction joined peace talks with the Indian government that year.

ULFA shifted its base to Bhutan, but in 2003 it was attacked by the Indian and Bhutanese armies. Rebels were dislodged from 30 camps in the Bhutanese jungles.

Indian forces are battling dozens of ethnic insurgent groups in India’s remote northeast who are pushing demands ranging from independent homelands to maximum autonomy within India.

In 2020, more than 600 insurgents belonging to different rebel groups surrendered to Indian authorities in the northeast in response to a government peace initiative that will allow them to rejoin mainstream society, police said.

They laid down assault rifles, grenades, bombs and other weapons and were kept in government-run camps and taught technical skills to equip them to take up jobs.

Gunmen open fire on villagers in India’s Manipur, 3 killed (Reuters)

Reuters [1/2/2024 12:14 AM, Zarir Hussain, 5.2M, Neutral]
At least three people were killed and five seriously injured when gunmen in camouflage fatigues opened fire on villagers in India’s restive northeastern state of Manipur, officials said on Tuesday, as sporadic violence continued in the region.

At least 180 people have died since fierce fighting broke out between members of the majority Meitei and minority Kuki communities in the state in May, following a court order suggesting privileges granted to Kukis also be extended to Meiteis.

The latest violence was reported from the Lilong area of Thoubal district on Monday when the group in camouflage fatigues opened indiscriminate fire on locals.

"Three people died of bullet wounds while five others are in hospital with multiple injuries," a senior police official told Reuters by phone.

There was no immediate word on the identities of the victims or the suspected identities of the assailants.

Authorities have re-imposed an indefinite curfew in Thoubal district and four other adjoining districts of Imphal East, Imphal West, Kakching and Bishnupur since Monday night.

Manipur, bordering Myanmar, is among the smallest states in India with a population of 3.2 million people.

Of its residents, 16% are Kukis, who live in the hills and receive economic benefits and quotas for government jobs and education, while 53% are Meiteis, who control the more prosperous lowlands.

Sikh militancy casts a shadow over U.S.-India relations (The Hill – opinion)

The Hill [1/1/2024 2:00 PM, Brahma Chellaney, 1592K, Negative]
Sikh militancy may be practically dead in India, but it’s gaining traction among sections of the Sikh diaspora in America and in Canada. With California and British Columbia serving as their operational base, Sikh radicals glorify political violence, including honoring convicted or slain terrorists as “martyrs,” as they campaign for an independent Sikh homeland of “Khalistan.”

Sikh extremists have in recent months erected billboards advocating the killing of Indian diplomats (identified with photos), threatened attacks on the Indian Parliament and New Delhi Airport, staged a parade float on which the 1984 assassination of then–Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was reenacted, and mounted attacks on Indian diplomatic missions in Canada and California.

Cash rewards have been offered for providing home addresses of Canada- and U.S.-based Indian diplomats, who have been labeled “killers.” The militants have also held referenda in Canada on the secession of India’s Sikh-majority Punjab state.

Bands of Sikh radicals staged two separate attacks on the Indian consulate in San Francisco last March and July. The FBI says it is still probing the attacks, which included arson, but it has made no arrests so far. India’s National Investigation Agency, meanwhile, has released pictures of 10 militants it has linked to the first attack on the consulate.

Largely because the anti-India Sikh militants pose no direct threat to American or Canadian security, local law enforcement authorities have treated them leniently. But this approach is only emboldening the extremists, as underscored by the December 22 vandalism in Newark, California, of a Hindu temple, whose walls were defaced with pro-Khalistan graffiti.

Against this background, recent U.S. allegations about an Indian murder-for-hire plot that have buffeted Washington and Ottawa’s relations with India obscure the deep roots of a problem that burst into shocking view in 1985 when Canadian Sikh bombers targeted two separate Air India flights, killing 331 people.

While one bombing misfired, taking the lives of two baggage handlers at Tokyo’s Narita Airport, the other killed all 329 people, mostly of Indian origin, on a flight from Toronto. It was the deadliest act of aviation terrorism until 9/11. Two separate Canadian inquiries found that the bombings were carried out by Canada-based Sikh extremists led by Talwinder Parmar, whose extradition to India on terrorism-related charges Prime Minister Gandhi had earlier sought unsuccessfully.

Eight months before the twin Air India bombings, Gandhi was assassinated by two Sikh sentries at her New Delhi residence, almost five months after Indian forces stormed the Sikhs’ Golden Temple to flush out armed militants. But before her assassination, she accused the CIA of seeking to destabilize India by aiding Sikh militancy. In that Cold War era, the U.S. was allied with Pakistan’s military regime, while nonaligned India was viewed in Washington as tilted toward the Soviet bloc.

The dramatic improvement in U.S.-India ties in the 21st century was underlined by President Joe Biden in June when he called the partnership with New Delhi “among the most consequential in the world, that is stronger, closer and more dynamic than any time in history.”

Yet the issue of Sikh militancy is again bedeviling U.S.-India relations today.

Unlike in the 1980s, when they waged a bloody insurgency in Punjab that was eventually crushed, Sikh militants now draw little support in India and are largely based in the Anglosphere, principally the U.S., Canada and Britain. According to data from the Pew Research Center, Sikhs in India are nearly universally opposed to secessionism, with 95 percent saying they are “very proud to be Indian.”

Simply put, Khalistan is almost entirely a demand in the Sikh diaspora. The separatists constitute a small minority of the Sikh diaspora, but wage a strident campaign that seeks to sanctify violence.

In September, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada — home to the world’s largest Sikh diaspora, numbering 770,000 — said in Parliament that were “credible allegations” about the Indian government’s “potential link” to the June killing on Canadian soil of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a prominent Sikh separatist who had been designated a terrorist by India. Trudeau’s bombshell accusation has strained Canada’s traditionally friendly ties with India, which categorically denied any involvement and forced out 41 Canadian diplomats on grounds that there must be parity in the two countries’ diplomatic staff strength. New Delhi also called Canada “a safe haven for terrorists.”

Then, in November, a potential rift opened in the U.S.-India relationship following an indictment that alleged an unnamed Indian official’s involvement in a failed plot to murder a New York–based Sikh separatist wanted in India on terrorism charges. The larger plot, according to the indictment in Manhattan, was linked to the June killing in Canada. The indictment alleged a murder-for-hire scheme that was remarkably amateurish: an Indian operative, at the Indian official’s direction, tried to arrange the killing on U.S. soil, but the hitman he hired long distance from India turned out to be an undercover law enforcement officer.

Despite the indictment, the White House declared that “we’re going to continue to work to improve and strengthen that strategic partnership with India.” India has set up a high-level committee to probe the alleged plot. But in an interview, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi criticized the lack of action against Anglosphere-based Khalistan militants who, “under the guise of freedom of expression, have engaged in intimidation and incited violence.”

The episode may just be a wrinkle in the U.S.-India relationship, yet the fact remains that the growing anti-India militant activities of Sikh separatists in America and Canada are starting to cast a shadow over Washington and Ottawa’s ties with New Delhi. They are also reopening old Indian wounds, not least those created by the Air India bombings.

The New York target of the alleged Indian murder plot, Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, warned Air India passengers in November that their lives were at risk while threatening not to let the flag carrier operate anywhere in the world. Pannun had previously threatened to also disrupt Indian railways and thermal power plants, according to India’s National Investigation Agency.

How would the U.S. react if an India-based militant designated by Washington as a terrorist were to make such terrorist threats without India seeking to prosecute him? Ominously, mass-murderers, including the mastermind of the Air India bombings, have become the poster boys for Khalistan radicals operating out of North America.

If the U.S. wishes to deepen strategic ties with India — a country central to a stable balance of power in Asia — it must not ignore New Delhi’s growing concerns over the activities of American Sikh militants. By locking horns with China through a border military standoff for over 43 months, India is openly challenging Chinese capability and power in a way no other power has done in this century. India is indispensable to America’s Asia strategy.

NSB

Bangladesh court sentences Nobel laureate Yunus to 6 months in jail. He denies violating labor laws (AP)

AP [1/1/2024 3:46 PM, Julhas Alam, 22K, Negative]
A labor court in Bangladesh’s capital Monday sentenced Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus to six months in jail for violating the country’s labor laws.

Yunus, who pioneered the use of microcredit to help impoverished people, was present in court and was granted bail. The court gave Yunus 30 days to appeal the verdict and sentence.

Grameen Telecom, which Yunus founded as a non-profit organization, is at the center of the case.

Sheikh Merina Sultana, head of the Third Labor Court of Dhaka, said in her verdict that Yunus’ company violated Bangladeshi labor laws. She said at least 67 Grameen Telecom workers were supposed to be made permanent employees but were not, and a “welfare fund” to support the staff in cases of emergency or special needs was never formed. She also said that, following company policy, 5% of Grameen’s dividends were supposed to be distributed to staff but was not.

Sultana found Yunus, as chairman of the company, and three other company directors guilty, sentencing each to six months in jail. Yunus was also fined 30,000 takas, or $260.

Yunus said he would appeal.

“We are being punished for a crime we did not commit. It was my fate, the nation’s fate. We have accepted this verdict, but will appeal this verdict and continue fighting against this sentence,” the 83-year-old economist told reporters after the verdict was announced.

A defense lawyer criticized the ruling, saying it was unfair and against the law. “We have been deprived of justice,” said attorney Abdullah Al Mamun.

But the prosecution was happy with what they said was an expected verdict.

“We think business owners will now be more cautious about violating labor laws. No one is above the law,” prosecutor Khurshid Alam Khan told The Associated Press.

Grameen Telecom owns 34.2% of the country’s largest mobile phone company, Grameenphone, a subsidiary of Norway’s telecom giant Telenor.

As Yunus is known to have close connections with political elites in the West, especially in the United States, many think the verdict could negatively impact Bangladesh’s relationship with the U.S.

But Foreign Secretary Masud Bin Momen on Monday said relations between Bangladesh and the U.S. would likely not be affected by an issue involving a single individual.

“It is normal not to have an impact on the state-to-state relations for an individual,” the United News of Bangladesh agency quoted Momen as saying.

The Nobel laureate faces an array of other charges involving alleged corruption and embezzlement.

Yunus’ supporters believe he’s being harassed because of frosty relations with Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. Bangladesh’s government has denied the allegation.

Monday’s verdict came as Bangladesh prepares for its general election on Jan. 7, amid a boycott by the country’s main opposition party, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, led by former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, Hasina’s arch-enemy. The party said it didn’t have any confidence the premier’s administration would hold a free and fair election.

In August, more than 170 global leaders and Nobel laureates in an open letter urged Hasina to suspend all legal proceedings against Yunus.

The leaders, including former U.S. President Barack Obama, former U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and more than 100 Nobel laureates, said in the letter that they were deeply concerned by recent threats to democracy and human rights in Bangladesh.

Hasina responded sharply and said she would welcome international experts and lawyers to come to Bangladesh to assess the legal proceedings and examine documents involving the charges against Yunus.

In 1983, Yunus founded Grameen Bank, which gives small loans to entrepreneurs who would not normally qualify for bank loans. The bank’s success in lifting people out of poverty led to similar microfinancing efforts in other countries.

Hasina’s administration began a series of investigations of Yunus after coming to power in 2008. She became enraged when Yunus announced he would form a political party in 2007 when a military-backed government ran the country and she was in prison, although he did not follow through on the plan.

Yunus had earlier criticized politicians in the country, saying they are only interested in money. Hasina called him a “bloodsucker” and accused him of using force and other means to recover loans from poor rural women as head of Grameen Bank.

In 2011, Hasina’s administration began a review of the bank’s activities. Yunus was fired as managing director for allegedly violating government retirement regulations. He was put on trial in 2013 on charges of receiving money without government permission, including his Nobel Prize award and royalties from a book.

Bangladesh opposition on the run despite not contesting vote (Reuters)

Reuters [1/1/2024 8:09 PM, Sudipto Ganguly and Ruma Paul, 5239K, Negative]
As general elections approach this week in Bangladesh, opposition leader Abdul Moyeen Khan says he had to hide out in the homes of a string of acquaintances until nominations closed, trying to escape a government crackdown.

The former minister and his Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) are not running in the Jan. 7 vote, in which Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina is chasing a fourth straight term, despite a bleak economy that needed an IMF bailout last year.

"We’re not even in the election, but they are still not sparing us," the grey-haired Khan, 77, said in Dhaka, the capital, on his return home in December after nominations closed and removed any risk that he could pose an electoral threat.

His party boycotted the vote after Hasina refused to cede power to a caretaker government to run the poll. Now it says 10 million party workers are on the run after the arrests of nearly 25,000 following deadly anti-government protests on Oct. 28.

"Police and other government agents were hunting for our leaders, particularly in their homes," said Khan. "The situation instilled fear in our minds."

Conditions were worse than at the time of the last election in 2018, when attacks on party workers kept him from holding even a single rally, he added.

Bangladesh’s interior minister, Asaduzzaman Khan, did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

Hasina and her Awami League have repeatedly condemned the BNP as troublemakers out to sabotage the elections, rebuffing warnings by rights groups Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (HRW) that the crackdown aimed to subdue the opposition.

The BNP contested the last election but kept out of the fray in 2014. And New York-based HRW has said Bangladeshis will again be denied the right to freely choose their leaders.

In a November report, the rights group put the number of arrests of BNP activists at 10,000, with two police officers among at least 16 dead and about 5,500 injured in the violence.

"The jails are overcrowded, with statistics showing the number of inmates is double capacity," said Khan, who wore a mask, cap and sunglasses to obscure his identity as the pace of arrests picked up.

Police ransacked the homes of BNP leaders and workers in frequent nighttime raids, he said, even detaining family members of those who evaded them. Some hid out in forests, paddy fields and cemeteries to escape, two other party leaders said.

However, police say they arrested only those involved in the violence, with one senior officer rejecting the opposition estimates as incorrect.

"Police are arresting only those involved in killings and attacks, vandalism and arson," said the officer, who sought anonymity as he was not authorised to speak to the media.

The crackdown comes at a time when the opposition leadership finds itself in disarray, as ailing party president Khaleda Zia, herself a former prime minister famed for a bitter, decades-long rivalry with Hasina, keeps out of active politics.

Although her son has temporarily taken the mantle, he is in exile, and the party’s next most senior leader, Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir, has been in jail since Oct. 29.

SEPARATION PANGS

About 100 women members have been arrested over the past 1-1/2 months, said Afroza Abbas, head of the women’s wing of the BNP.

"They are separated from their family, from their babies," she added. "Those families are going through such a trauma."

Her husband, Mirza Abbas, 74, who is among the BNP’s top decision makers, has been in jail since Nov. 1, when police arrested him from a relative’s home, even though he is suffering from ailments such as diabetes and kidney problems.

Although she decided to stay on at her Dhaka home, along with her two sons and their families, it has not been easy.

On Nov. 20, Awami League activists threw two crude bombs at the house, though there were no casualties, said Afroza, who recognised the attackers from images caught on closed-circuit television, but added that police did not arrest them.

Police said Afroza notified them after informing the media, but they arrested the person accused of paying for the attack.

"He was trying to seek a position in the BNP," said regional police chief Sudip Kumar Saha, as investigations continue.

Hasina has said it was the opposition that was ready to kill for political gain, however.

"Any party can boycott the poll but why do they burn people to death?" she asked recently at a rally in the northeastern district of Sylhet.

"If anyone interferes with voting or elections, people will reject them."

The United States, the biggest buyer of Bangladesh’s garments, has condemned the violence, and curbed visas for citizens of the South Asian nation believed to have a role in undermining elections.

"We want what the Bangladeshi people themselves want: free and fair elections conducted in a peaceful manner," a U.S. State Department spokesperson said.

In her past 15 years in power, Hasina, 76, has been credited with turning around the economy and the massive garments industry, winning international praise for sheltering Rohingya Muslims fleeing persecution in neighbouring Myanmar.

But the economy has slowed sharply since the Russia-Ukraine war boosted prices of fuel and food imports for the country of 170 million, which turned to the International Monetary Fund for a bailout. The IMF approved funds of $4.7 billion last year.

Although violent crackdown on dissent was common in Bangladesh, the recent government steps were unprecedented, said Zillur Rahman of bipartisan think-tank the Centre for Governance Studies.

"The mass arrests of all major opposition players right before the election is a kind of authoritarian unmasking that is almost comical in its nakedness."

U.N. to boost food ration for Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh (Reuters)

Reuters [1/2/2024 3:55 AM, Sudipto Ganguly, 5.2M, Neutral]
The United Nations will increase the food ration for each Rohingya refugee in Bangladesh by $2 a month, to $10 from Jan. 1, the World Food Programme (WFP) said on Tuesday, as it thanked donors for coming to the rescue of a cash-strapped effort.

The United Nations had cut food aid last year to the refugees by a third, to $8 each every month, as it had raised less than half of the $876 million required to support them.

Nearly a million members of the Muslim minority from Myanmar live in bamboo-and-plastic camps in Bangladesh’s border district of Cox’s Bazar, most of them having fled a military crackdown in 2017.

The WFP cut the refugees’ food entitlement to $10 from $12 in March, and further in June, to stand at $8 each a month, in the wake of a severe funding crunch.

"The rapid deterioration of the food and nutrition situation in the camps is extremely worrying," Dom Scalpelli, the agency’s director in Bangladesh, said in a statement.

"Through all this, the donor community stood with the Rohingya - it’s all thanks to its generous contributions we can now have this increase and also add locally fortified rice to WFP’s food assistance package."

Sri Lanka’s China ‘debt trap’ fears grow as Beijing keeps investing (Nikkei Asia)

Nikkei Asia [1/1/2024 4:00 PM, Cissy Zhou, 293K, Negative]
Surging investment from China, including a multibillion dollar oil project late last year, is leaving a giant question mark over Sri Lanka even as it tries to restructure towering debt and recover from its worst economic crisis as an independent nation: Just how much leverage does Beijing have over the island country?

China is the largest bilateral creditor to Sri Lanka, which in May 2022 became the first Asian lower-middle income country to default on its sovereign debt in two decades. Chinese loans had financed a string of large infrastructure projects, including highways, an airport and a port in the country.

Sri Lanka’s debt has been soaring since 2009, as the government embarked on a borrowing-financed endeavor to enhance the country’s infrastructure as it emerged from civil war. A supporter of China’s giant infrastructure Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) from as early as 2013, Sri Lanka has frequently been depicted by China critics as falling into an alleged Chinese ‘debt trap,’ enticed into accepting unsustainable loans for infrastructure projects and allowing Beijing to gain strategic or military influence by seizing assets in times of financial distress.

China has repeatedly denounced claims that it is operating a debt trap. "We have never forced any party to borrow money or pressed any country to accept debt. We do not attach any political conditions to the loan agreements and do not seek any political self-interest," a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson said last year.

While China has indicated its readiness to restructure Sri Lanka’s $36.4 billion in outstanding foreign loans, it is also extending direct investment in the country.

In late November, Sri Lanka approved Chinese state-owned oil giant Sinopec’s proposal to build a $4.5 billon refinery in the southern port of Hambantota, the single largest investment in Sri Lanka since the economic crisis of 2022. The approval came after commodities trader Vitol, the only other shortlisted bidder, dropped out.

"If successfully done, this investment can help Sri Lanka in the long run," said Toshiro Nishizawa, a professor at the Graduate School of Public Policy of University of Tokyo, referring to the country’s problems with fuel shortages. In addition, "It could be crucial leverage for Beijing in China’s access to Sri Lanka’s economy."

That is because Sri Lanka’s sole oil refinery, built in 1969 by the state-owned Ceylon Petroleum Corporation (CPC), has been struggling to meet domestic demand as economic growth in the island of 22 million people surged before the crisis hit.

Over the years, there have been plans to expand Sri Lanka’s refining capacity to reduce its reliance on imported fuel. These efforts have attracted potential investors from China, the U.S. and India. Colombo is trying to take balancing measures by seeking other partners, particularly India, to "hedge the risk of China’s over-dominance and [to] seek to maintain its bargaining power with major partners," said Nishizawa.

India and the U.S. are already moving in to counter Chinese influence. Early in November, the U.S. announced it would lend $553 million for the development of a container terminal in Colombo operated by Indian tycoon Gautam Adani.

Ganeshan Wignaraja, visiting senior fellow at the Overseas Institute in London and former director of research at the Asian Development Bank Institute, said the debt crisis of 2022 has cruelly exposed Sri Lanka’s energy security problem and lack of foreign exchange. And an inefficient CPC has "led to fuel shortages and hardships for the Sri Lankan people."

"Foreign investment by China’s Sinopec in petroleum refining and distribution may be a means to improving energy security in Sri Lanka, provided the energy market is open to all investors and a strong competition policy is adopted," he said.

"If not, Sri Lanka could be vulnerable to problems of a private monopoly under Sinopec, with higher fuel prices and variable fuel supply," Wignaraja said.

According to Nishizawa, it remains questionable whether Chinese investments by operators like Sinopec will help or hinder the Chinese government’s goals in Sri Lanka. "Chinese actors in the field have their own motivations and risk perceptions to achieve commercial goals that are not always fully aligned with the national agenda," he said.

"The central government’s inability to micromanage commercially motivated actors and projects, and a compartmentalized governance structure, do not allow Beijing’s strategic ambitions to be automatically attainable," Nishizawa said.

Meanwhile, the process of restructuring Sri Lanka’s debt continues. While an agreement in principle was reached with a group of 14 creditor nations -- China didn’t join -- in late November, a deal with external private creditors is still pending.

In October, Sri Lanka reached a preliminary debt restructuring agreement with the Export-Import Bank of China to cover about $4.2 billion of the country’s outstanding debt, a crucial step for Sri Lanka to get the second tranche of a $2.9 billion bailout package approved in early December by the International Monetary Fund.

Deborah Brautigam, a professor of international development at Johns Hopkins University in the U.S., said once Sri Lanka’s economy is stable and growing again, Chinese foreign investment is likely to pick up. But Chinese lending is unlikely to expand, as most banks tend to avoid countries that have defaulted.

"It’s not just Chinese banks, the market has dried up more generally. Very few low- and middle-income countries have been able to issue bonds recently. Countries are going to have to postpone the infrastructure they had hoped to build with Chinese finance," she added.

For all China’s touting of the Belt and Road Initiative as a huge success at a 10-year anniversary conference last year, lending through BRI has fallen since 2017 and the value of new BRI projects has remained stagnant.

The average size of deals in recent years has also been smaller compared with the pre-pandemic period. Meanwhile, Beijing is relying less on policy banks such as the China Development Bank and China Eximbank, and more on state-owned commercial banks.

From 2000 to 2021, Chinese official-sector institutions lent $1.34 trillion to 165 low- and middle-income countries, according to AidData, a research group based at William and Mary’s Global Research Institute. With global interest rates rising in the past few years, developing countries are having to make higher debt repayments to Beijing.

A November report by AidData found that Beijing has increased short-term, emergency rescue lending. The share of rescue loans provided by China to low- and middle-income countries has rocketed from 5% in 2013 to 58% in 2021. That ensures that major BRI participants have enough cash on hand to service outstanding infrastructure project debts.

Meanwhile, in cases where borrowers face difficulties repaying their loans, Beijing has begun "paying itself" by withdrawing dollars and euros from cash collateral accounts, and requiring financially distressed borrowers to replenish these accounts in exchange for easing of repayment terms, according to AidData.

China’s appetite for outward direct investment has grown in the past few years, even as it has it become more cautious in BRI lending, according to the University of Tokyo’s Nishizawa.

"Such a trend is considered desirable to reduce the risk of a double-edged debt trap that both China and BRI debtors can equally suffer. There are no winners in a debt trap situation, as the debtor, trapped with unsustainable debt, leaves its creditor with lost claims," he said.

Central Asia

U.S. has golden opportunity to engage Central Asia’s Turkic states: analysts (Nikkei Asia)

Nikkei Asia [12/31/2023 9:43 AM, Ken Moriyasu, 293K, Positive]
Conditions are aligning for the U.S. to strengthen engagement with the mostly Turkic states of Central Asia, which collectively cover an area approximately 40% that of the continental U.S., lawmakers and analysts have noted in recent weeks.

The biggest catalyst is that Russia has been forced to redeploy much of its troops and defense equipment from Central Asia to Ukraine. This has left a security vacuum, with Central Asian governments -- Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan -- looking for alternative security guarantors.

"Russia has consumed a lot of defense equipment in Ukraine, has gobbled up a lot of its munitions, and is going to find it very difficult to resupply its own stockpiles, but certainly to export to other countries will be very difficult for a long time," said Donald Lu, assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asian affairs, in a congressional hearing earlier this year.

"Imagine if you’re one of the front-line states with Afghanistan, and suddenly you’re worried about getting spare parts for your airplanes or bullets for your rifles," Lu said. "This has got them very concerned."

"Relations with Russia have seen a fundamental shift among all five of the Central Asian states," wrote President Nancy Lubin of JNA Associates, a research and consulting firm specializing in the Caucasus and Central Asia, in an essay titled "Central Asia and the War in Ukraine," published by the Hoover Institution this month.

"In 2022 alone, Putin made five trips to Central Asia, reportedly to solidify his dominant role in the region; but at least politically, his travels seemed to illustrate just how fragile that role may have become," she wrote.

China would be the natural alternative to Russia, having established strong economic relations with many of the Central Asian states. Turkmenistan, for instance, ships most of its exported natural gas to China via pipeline.

Yet Central Asian communities "have increasingly unfavorable perceptions of China," according to the U.S. Congressional Research Service, owing to factors ranging from anger at China’s repression of Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim minorities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region to "numerous corruption scandals" concerning China-based companies involved in Belt and Road infrastructure projects.

"China is moving very cautiously and with a mindset of not upsetting Moscow by increasing its profile too rapidly," said Lyle Goldstein, director of the Asia Engagement program at Defense Priorities.

This leaves the likes of the U.S., the European Union, South Korea, Iran and Israel as potential suppliers of arms.

"Windows of opportunity such as this ... are few and far between, and the United States should take advantage," wrote RAND Corp. defense analyst Hunter Stoll in a September commentary titled "A Case for Greater U.S. Engagement in Central Asia."

Stoll called for greater U.S. assistance in counterterrorism, utilizing the "numerous relationships already available." National Guard units of various American states have partnership programs with Central Asian countries, such as the Virginia National Guard and Tajikistan, the Arizona National Guard and Kazakhstan, and the Mississippi National Guard and Uzbekistan, he noted.

"Building off that established rapport, the United States could rotate units through the region to support counterterrorism efforts," Stoll wrote.

Yet there may be limitations to the U.S.’s ability to single-handedly take over Russia’s role in Central Asia, owing to distance and a history of indifference.

Rich Outzen, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council in Turkey and a former U.S. State Department policy-planning staffer, proposed leveraging NATO partner Turkey’s ties with the region in an article titled "Security and Military Cooperation Among the Turkic States in the 2020s," published this month by the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute in Washington.

"There has been a rapid intensification of Turkish relations with Turkic states in Central Asia and the Caucasus in the past decade," the retired U.S. Army colonel wrote.

"This development could be a net strategic gain for the West in an era of Great Power Competition," Outzen argued.

Turkey’s engagement is through the Organization of Turkic States, which consists of Turkey, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and the South Caucasus nation of Azerbaijan. Neutrality-conscious Turkmenistan remains an observer, while non-Turkic Tajikistan is not a member.

Turkey’s integration with the Azerbaijan military has been so multilayered that the two partners have been described as having "one nation, two states, one army." Turkish-provided attack drones played a crucial part in Azerbaijan’s decisive victories over Armenia in the Nagorno-Karabakh clashes in recent years.

Outzen foresees similar alliances between Turkey and Kyrgyzstan in the future as the latter struggles in border clashes with Russia-backed Tajikistan.

"If I’m Kyrgyzstan, I’m keeping in mind that the Turks are a friend. ... They don’t stop arms shipments or freeze contacts if a conflict breaks out," he told Nikkei Asia in an interview. "They rush to the side of their partner."

Outzen said the integration of the Turkic states would probably be like a stair-stepping process, starting with cultural convergence and moving to trade convergence and ultimately toward strategic convergence. "They would like to be like the Arab League," speaking with one voice on diplomatic issues, he said. While it would likely not grow into a security alliance, it could stop just short of a collective security arrangement, according to Outzen.

On the U.S.’s position, Outzen said that "we need to make sure we don’t get into a competition with Turkey, because frankly there’s greater trust, mutual trust, among the Turkic states, including Turkey, than there is between any of them and us."

RAND’s Stoll agreed. "If the United States wants to boost its investment and engagement with Central Asia, I think doing so in tandem with Turkey could be a good course of action," he told Nikkei Asia. "It would demonstrate long-term investment with a regional partner, which would be a stronger assurance to the Central Asian republics that this investment could last."

This would be especially important, considering that for most of the past two decades, Central Asia served largely as a launchpad for American. involvement in Afghanistan and little more, he said.

But Defense Priorities’ Goldstein, who studied at the Pushkin Institute in Moscow, said Russia’s decline in the region should not be overly exaggerated. "Russian soft power still goes a long way in Central Asia," he said, adding, "U.S. prestige after Afghanistan coupled with the faltering war in Ukraine is also not so stellar.

"The negative legacy of the Afghanistan War for the region is likely to leave all players quite skeptical of great power games for at least a generation," Goldstein said.

Central Asia’s strategic geography -- bordering Russia, China, Afghanistan and Iran -- and its wealth of critical resources have driven U.S. interest in the region. Members of Congress have expressed interest in expanding American engagement with Central Asia.

In September, U.S. Sens. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., and Todd Young, R-Ind., introduced legislation to end Cold War-era trade restrictions on Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan and grant the countries permanent normal trade relations status.

"As Russia and China’s influence on Central Asia begins to wane, a Cold War-era relic could cost the United States an important opportunity to redefine our relationship with the region," Murphy said in a press release.

"Once a useful tool to coerce the Soviet Union into improving its treatment of Soviet Jews and minority groups, today the Jackson-Vanik amendment is an outdated trade policy that is holding back our partnerships with Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan," he said. "This bipartisan legislation would advance our economic interests while sending a clear message that the United States is committed to bringing our relationship with Central Asia into the 21st century."

Kazakhstan removes Taliban from list of banned organizations (EurasiaNet)

EurasiaNet [12/30/2023 4:14 PM, Almaz Kumenov, 57.6K, Neutral]
Kazakhstan has removed the Taliban, the militant Islamic movement that seized power in Afghanistan in 2021, from its register of prohibited organizations in a move that the Foreign Ministry on December 29 described as being in compliance with UN guidance.

"The decision to remove the Taliban from our list of prohibited organizations is in strict accordance with the resolutions laid down by the UN Security Council," Aybek Smadiyarov, a ministry spokesperson, was quoted as saying by the Kazinform state news agency.

Smadiyarov clarified that this was an allusion to the fact that the Taliban has not been classified as a terrorist organization by UN Security Council.

Kazakhstan’s Supreme Court, however, labeled the Taliban a terrorist organization in 2005, along with several other groups such as Al-Qaeda, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, and the Kurdish People’s Congress.

In spite of that designation, Astana has been quietly cultivating ties with the self-styled Islamic Emirate in Afghanistan ever since the Taliban took over following the withdrawal of U.S. forces in August 2021. Bilateral engagements saw a significant upsurge in the shape a Kazakhstan-Afghanistan business forum held in April. That format later produced commercial agreements amounting to around $200 million.

Annual trade between Kazakhstan and Afghanistan has risen close to $1 billion since the Taliban’s ascension. Kazakh agriculture producers have found this a particularly promising avenue, given the pressure they have faced amid intense competition from their Russian peers.

The decision to go back on the Taliban proscription is somewhat unexpected, though.

In July, Deputy Foreign Minister Kanat Tumysh went on the record to state that the option of removing the organization from its banned registry was not on the agenda. He noted at the same time that the Taliban is not formally deemed a proscribed organization by the United States and other major Western nations. This stance was put forward as a defense for Kazakhstan’s official engagement with the group.

As Dosym Satpayev, head of the Risk Assessment Group, a think tank, has argued that this ambiguity was designed to enable the United States to sustain some form of diplomatic dialogue with the Taliban, which has been ongoing since 2018 in Qatar.

For Kazakhstan to continue engaging with Afghanistan, excluding Taliban from a list of undesirable organizations was imperative, he wrote in an article for the Forbes.kz website.

‘Private’ Meeting With Putin, Public Appearances Stir Talk Of Nazarbaev Comeback (Radio Free Europe)

Radio Free Europe [12/30/2023 10:17 AM, Chris Rickleton, 235K, Neutral]
Friends who are old faces and friends in high places: Kazakhstan’s former leader Nursultan Nazarbaev has proven in recent months that he still has both.

Does that mean the 83-year-old is mulling a political comeback?

Kazakh officials loyal to his successor, Qasym-Zhomart Toqaev, are keen to dispel the notion. But the very fact that they are feeling the need to comment on the idea is indicative of the interest -- and, in some quarters, alarm -- sparked by the ex-president’s recent return to the national news cycle.

The first week of January will mark the second anniversary of the Bloody January unrest that exposed fractures in the elite and, for many, definitively marked the end of the long Nazarbaev era in Kazakhstan.

Since ceding all his remaining positions and titles in the aftermath of the violence that left at least 238 people dead, Kazakhstan’s first president has mostly shunned the limelight.

But in the final months of 2023, Nazarbaev’s name is once more on everybody’s lips.

One public appearance in November was perhaps unavoidable, after his controversial younger brother, Bolat Nazarbaev, passed away. But even then, the grand, elite-packed memorial for a former plumber who grew fabulously rich during the reign of his older sibling turned out to be more like an homage to that same older sibling.

After that appearance came the release of Nazarbaev’s autobiography: My Life: From Dependence To Freedom. The book was not his first, but proved sensational in that the author acknowledged for the first time that he fathered children -- sons, no less -- by a woman other than his official wife, Sara Nazarbaeva.

Later this month, Nazarbaev addressed the seventh meeting of the Astana Club, his own geopolitical talking-shop initiative that included former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and ex-Afghan President Hamid Karzai among the speakers.

But it was his meeting with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, likely in Moscow on December 19 -- which Putin’s press spokesman Dmitry Peskov described as "absolutely private" -- that really set tongues wagging and provided the context for comments by Yerlan Koshanov, chairman of the lower house of parliament, on December 27.

"Dual power does not exist today and cannot exist. Today, all decisions are made by the head of state, Toqaev, elected by the overwhelming majority of the people," said Koshanov, who told journalists that people had "no reason for concern" over Nazarbaev’s activities as a "private citizen."

Fulfilling Allah’s Task

Toqaev made similar comments about "dual power" in 2019, just months after he stepped into the presidential hot seat as Nazarbaev’s hand-picked, loyalist successor.

Nobody believed him then, and with good reason.

At that time, Nazarbaev was serving as the "lifelong" chairman of the Security Council -- a role that raised questions about which of the two was commander in chief. And the former president also chaired the ruling party and enjoyed extensive perks and protections thanks to his constitutionally enshrined status as "elbasy," or leader of the nation.

Subsequent "de-Nazarbaevification" was seemingly driven by two factors.

Firstly, protesters had signaled right before the January 2022 unrest turned deadly that they had had enough of the authoritarian who dominated Kazakh politics for more than three decades, beginning in Soviet times.

And Toqaev, having been constrained by his predecessor for the best part of three years, probably felt the same, not least because of the way the "dual power" situation had paralyzed the security apparatus, dividing loyalties in the process.

After the deadly January events, the power struggle was laid bare.

In addition to transferring his remaining power to Toqaev, Nazarbaev’s relatives and allies lost powerful and lucrative positions. At least three members of the president’s extended family were jailed on corruption charges. The capital, Astana, also got its old name back after spending three years as Nur-Sultan in Nazarbaev’s honor.

In public, the former president has said only positive things about Toqaev and his policies. But it can be assumed that in private he is less than happy -- and probably worried for his family’s future. Notable then was the guest list at the closed-doors memorial for Nazarbaev’s brother, Bolat.

The younger Nazarbaev had been buried four days earlier in the family’s home village of Shamalgan in the Almaty region, more than 1,000 kilometers away.

And if Toqaev’s government was represented at the funeral by Prime Minister Alikhan Smailov -- presumably as a courtesy to Nazarbaev -- then the faces captured in footage from the Astana memorial luncheon were former officials: ex-police chiefs, prosecutors, defense and education ministers, as well as his ex-lawmaker daughter, Darigha Nazarbaeva.

"It was not easy for us to establish independence," the former president told his appreciative audience after thanking Toqaev, "a number of heads of state," officials, and ordinary citizens for their condolences.

"When the Soviet government fell in 1992, 1,500 manufacturing plants were shut down, leaving 2 million people unemployed," Nazarbaev said. "The store shelves were empty, salaries and pensions were not paid. At a time when there was the question, ‘Will we be a country or not?’ [We] colleagues and comrades came together to lift up the country. In this way, I believe that I fulfilled the task assigned to me by Allah."

Meet My Other Family

Even some of Nazarbaev’s critics give him credit for dealing with the manifold challenges of early independence.

Opinion is more divided over the subsequent repression that included the killing of opposition figures, the elbasy cult, and the excesses of relatives like Bolat, who allegedly acquired huge tracts of valuable land around the country’s largest city, Almaty, at little or no cost and had millions of dollars in luxury properties around the world.

After Bloody January, some of Bolat Nazarbaev’s businesses and land were returned to the state, while he was also named and shamed by the authorities as a participant in an illegal cryptomining venture. Yet despite strong public demands, he was not brought to justice before his death.

As November became December, Kazakhs were already discussing another family of the former president, which had been an open secret but was only officially revealed in Nazarbaev’s autobiography. His description of falling in love with Asel Qurmanbaeva (then Asel Isabaeva) -- a woman some 40 years younger than him -- certainly made for awkward reading.

His only legal wife, Sara Nazarbaeva, responded to her husband’s decision to tie the knot with Qurmanbaeva in an Islamic ceremony, "with nobility," Nazarbaev wrote, adding that the pair’s three daughters -- Darigha, Dinara, and Alia -- had also understood.

Qurmanbaeva bore him two sons, his only confirmed male heirs. In an interview with RFE/RL, former diplomat Talgat Kaliev said that Nazarbaev’s book reveal was a bid to publicly legitimize the two boys "[so] it is officially possible to leave something to them…. Otherwise, their destiny would be very challenging."

Qurmanbaeva -- Miss Kazakhstan in 1999 -- and Nazarbaev began their relationship when the former was just 19, and she is most often referred to as Nazarbaev’s third wife, with former air stewardess Gulnara Rakisheva reportedly bearing the president two more daughters.

And the elder of Nazarbaev’s two sons, 18-year-old Tauman Nursultan, has already been romantically linked to the daughter of Energy Minister Almasadam Satkaliev.

Responding to rumors that the young pair had married, the Energy Ministry published a statement in April calling the information "inaccurate," stressing that the minister "does not have and did not previously have any family ties with the first president."

The ministry’s press department was pressed into action once more last month to deny reports that Satkaliev was among the guests at Bolat Nazarbaev’s memorial.

Putin Meeting

One person who might be sympathetic to Nazarbaev’s complicated situation is divorced Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Putin, after all, is rumored to have fathered at least two children with Alina Kabayeva, a retired Olympic gymnast who was placed under sanctions by the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union after Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year.

But there was no shortage of suspicion that the two men were talking about things other than family when they met in Moscow earlier this month.

This was not the first time the two have met since Nazarbaev formally retired from politics, famously declaring himself "just a pensioner." They had previously met in June 2022, almost immediately after a constitutional referendum promoted by Toqaev that, among other things, removed all the basic law’s references to Nazarbaev as elbasy, a move that, in theory, made him more vulnerable to prosecution.

At the time, Russia’s Nezavisimaya gazeta speculated that Nazarbaev was seeking "assurances for himself and his capital," and referred to "various estimations" of the octogenarian’s net worth at around $200 billion.

Before that, in late December 2021 -- weeks before the unrest in Kazakhstan and two months before Russia launched its full-scale aggression against Ukraine -- Nazarbaev and Toqaev held talks with Putin in St. Petersburg with Belarusian leader Alyaksandr Lukashenka along for the ride.

It was undoubtedly Toqaev, not Nazarbaev, who benefited from the CSTO peacekeeping intervention. But public figures and politicians close to the Kremlin were soon complaining that Toqaev had failed to show gratitude for the mission, after Astana chose to remain neutral in the Ukraine war.

In this light, Nazarbaev’s sudden return to prominence looks like something of a "cliffhanger" for Kazakhstan.

Perspectives: Central Asian states walking fine line on Russian sanctions (EurasiaNet – opinion)

EurasiaNet [12/31/2023 4:14 PM, Nurbek Bekmurzaev, 57.6K, Neutral]
Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan are walking a geopolitical tightrope when it comes to international sanctions against Russia, striving to please both the Kremlin and the West. Kazakhstan seems to be managing the balancing act better than Kyrgyzstan.

In recent months, Kazakh and Kyrgyz leaders have engaged in rhetorical calisthenics aimed at remaining in the good graces of all parties involved in the war in Ukraine. During a late autumn visit to Germany, for example, Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev repeated earlier denials that Kazakhstan has facilitated Russian parallel-import and sanctions-evasion schemes, insisting that Astana “has clearly stated that it will follow the sanctions regime.” At the same time, Tokayev said Kazakhstan was not “anti-Russia” and valued “comprehensive cooperation with Russia, with which [Kazakhstan] shares the longest border in the world.”

Similarly, Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov has denied USaccusations of sanctions-busting by his nation. “There is no ground to believe so,” he said in comments published by the Kabar state news agency. “Russia and China do not depend on small Kyrgyzstan.”

Such official denials are undermined by mounting evidence of questionable trade practices. A potential indicator of sanctions-busting behavior is seen in the rapid growth of trade volume in 2022. Last year, Kazakhstan’s exports to Russia saw a 25 percent increase, whereas Kyrgyzstan’s exports increased by 150 percent over previous year totals.

Numerous cases of suspicious trade have been documented. In one prominent example, The Washington Post outlined a scheme that was broken up, in which a Kyrgyz entity tried to act as a conduit for shipping Chinese-made drones to Russia.

In another case, an investigation by Radio Azattyk illustrated how Kyrgyz and Kazakh companies are exporting microchips, telecommunications equipment and other electronic components to Russia. Such components are similar to those found in Russian weaponry used in Ukraine. Meanwhile, an OCCRP investigation also showed how drones and microchips allegedly used by the Russian military are making their way to Russia via Kazakh companies.

Even Kazakhstani officials have acknowledged that some dual-use items have made their way to Russia via Kazakhstan.

On a basic level, the challenge of keeping both the West and Russia happy for much longer seems difficult, if not impossible. Referring to Tokayev’s pledges that Kazakhstan is upholding the sanctions regime while remaining Russia’s faithful economic ally, Rakhimbek Abdrakhmanov, the director of the Kazakhstan School of Applied Policy, said the concepts are mutually exclusive. “These two promises cancel each other out; Kazakhstan cannot simultaneously enforce the sanctions regime and be on good terms with Russia,” Abdrakhmanov said.

Despite an abundance of evidence that both Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan are violating the Russia sanctions regime, only Kyrgyzstan has faced Western punishment. Five Kyrgyz companies have been sanctioned for aiding Russia’s war effort.

One explanation for the discrepancy is connected to image-crafting. Kazakhstan has adopted measures that look good, even if they do not function optimally. To better control the flow of sanctioned goods, for instance, Astana launched an automated online tracking system that ostensibly enables the monitoring of imported goods into Kazakhstan and their further movements. This has been presented as a solution to stopping the flow of sanctioned items.

Kazakh investigative journalists, however, have raised doubts about the system’s effectiveness. According to Dimash Alzhanov, a political analyst from Kazakhstan, the items used in Russia’s military industry are exported by companies able to bypass the tracking system.

Effective or not, Kazakh officials have still done noticeably more than their Kyrgyz counterparts to address Western complaints. Underscoring Bishkek’s sluggish response, the Kyrgyz security services chief, Kamchybek Tashiev, announced an investigation when Kyrgyz companies were sanctioned in July. Almost six months after that announcement, the investigation has yet to produce any findings.

Meanwhile, in a move that some Western observers deem an attempt to obscure monitoring efforts, Kyrgyzstan’s National Statistics Committee changed the format in June for open data reporting on foreign trade. Instead of breaking down exported items into specific categories using a 10-digit code, the agency started using first four-digit codes, each covering a much wider variety of goods. A representative of the agency, Gulsara Sulaimanova, explained the move, saying “the need [for 10-digit codes] was not that important to users.”

Iskander Sharsheev, a Kyrgyz economist, affirmed that the coding change has made monitoring trade more difficult: “Now that the data on imports and exports is not disclosed, we cannot tell if sanctioned products are transported to Russia via Kyrgyzstan.”

Kazakhstan has additionally been much more adept than Kyrgyzstan in demonstrating a willingness to push back against Russian pressure, scoring diplomatic points with the West in the process, regional experts say. Such an advantage is understandable, some add, given that Tokayev made his way to the top of Kazakh politics via the country’s diplomatic service.

Some examples of Kazakhstan’s diplomatic dexterity include Tokayev’s statement in June that his country would not recognize the independence of the breakaway Ukrainian regions of Luhansk and Donetsk. In November, following a Kazakh-Russian meeting, Tokayev tweaked the Russian delegation led by Vladimir Putin by delivering opening remarks at a joint news conference in Kazakh.

“Kazakhstan has painted a beautiful image,” said Abdrakhmanov, explaining how Kazakhstan entities and individuals have managed to dodge sanctions so far. Alzhanov also noted that Astana maintains open channels of communication with western think-tanks, media and other inside-the-beltway types.

Global economic factors also help Kazakhstan diminish Western ire concerning sanctions-busting. Kazakhstan’s oil and gas resources attract large investments; six out of the 10 largest investors in the sector are entities headquartered in the EU, UK, and US. Kyrgyzstan, meanwhile, lacks natural resources and is not a hub for intercontinental trade.

“We [Kyrgyzstan] are being made an example [of], because western businesses are not represented here. We are small,” said Sharsheev, the Kyrgyz economist. “The safest thing to do [for the West] is to push around our country because it cannot do anything in response.”

Twitter

Afghanistan

Abdul Qahar Balkhi
@QaharBalkhi
[12/30/2023 10:55 AM, 226.2K followers, 49 retweets, 170 likes]
IEA-MoFA Statement on UNSC Resolution 2721 IEA-MoFA expresses disappointment at adoption of Resolution 2721 requesting UN Secretary General to appoint a Special Envoy (SE) to Afghanistan despite existence of division among permanent members of the UNSC.

Abdul Qahar Balkhi
@QaharBalkhi
[12/30/2023 10:55 AM, 226.2K followers, 4 retweets, 22 likes]
It is noteworthy that the Council adopted this resolution even though two permanent members of the UNSC requested more time for deliberations & clarifications regarding assessment of the Special Coordinator, & without any prior consultations with the Afghan government.

Abdul Qahar Balkhi
@QaharBalkhi
[12/30/2023 10:55 AM, 226.2K followers, 1 retweet, 15 likes]
The government of Afghanistan reiterates that the appointment of an additional SE for Afghanistan in the presence of @UNAMAnews is unnecessary as Afghanistan is not a conflict zone & is ruled by a central government that is able to secure its national interests, fulfill its

Abdul Qahar Balkhi
@QaharBalkhi
[12/30/2023 10:55 AM, 226.2K followers, 1 retweet, 15 likes]
obligations & manage all affairs through bilateral & multilateral mechanisms. Moreover, SE’s throughout contemporary history of Afghanistan & the world have not only failed to resolve any conflicts, but have complicated situations further via imposition of external solutions.

Abdul Qahar Balkhi
@QaharBalkhi
[12/30/2023 10:55 AM, 226.2K followers, 4 retweets, 23 likes]
While welcoming all attempts of a more robust & enhanced engagement with Afghanistan by the UN, the approach of the government of Afghanistan will ultimately be guided by the unaltered religious beliefs, cultural values & national interests of the people of Afghanistan.

Abdul Qahar Balkhi
@QaharBalkhi
[12/30/2023 10:55 AM, 226.2K followers, 4 retweets, 23 likes]
Accordingly, we call on the United Nations to consider ground realities when making decisions about Afghanistan and not be influenced by any party.

Neha Sakhra
@NehaNadiry
[1/1/2024 3:08 AM, 889 followers, 23 retweets, 45 likes]
Taliban officials gang-raped a 25-year-old woman in Takhar province, whose husband lives in Iran. Sources from Takhar Province say that Maulvi Abdul Rab, the military leader of the Taliban, his nephew Qari Sohaib, the head of the jihadi school, and his niece @heatherbarr1

Pakistan

Spokesperson Pakistan MoFA
@ForeignOfficePk
[1/1/2024 10:50 AM, 466.2K followers, 51 retweets, 126 likes]
The Government of Pakistan dispatched the third consignment of relief goods for the people of Gaza, today. Foreign Minister Jalil Abbas Jilani sent off the cargo with a special Pakistan Airforce aircraft at Noor Khan Airbase. After arrival at Al Arish Airport in Egypt, the consignment – which includes medicine, surgical/medical items, hygiene kits and dry ration - will be handed over to the Red Crescent for onward distribution. In his remarks at the sendoff ceremony, Foreign Minister Jilani termed the consignment as a token of solidarity with the Palestinian brothers and sisters on the first morning of the new calendar year. Reiterating Pakistan’s unstinted support to the Palestinian people in their legitimate and valiant struggle for their right to self-determination, the Foreign Minister underlined the urgency of a ceasefire and unimpeded flow of humanitarian assistance to the people of occupied Gaza facing brutal Israeli aggression. The Palestinian Ambassador present at the ceremony, thanked the Government and people of Pakistan for continuous support especially the significant gesture of marking the new year by expressing solidarity with the Palestinian people.

Michael Kugelman
@MichaelKugelman
[12/31/2023 10:52 AM, 203.4K followers, 5 retweets, 16 likes]
In this new op ed for @TOIOpinion, I assess the differences between upcoming elections in Bangladesh, where the likely outcome appears quite clear, and in Pakistan, where it is more uncertain, and what the implications may be for India in both cases. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/toi-editorials/bangladesh-pakistan-tale-of-two-elections-and-implications-for-india/

Michael Kugelman
@MichaelKugelman
[12/30/2023 1:39 PM, 203.4K followers, 66 retweets, 317 likes]
The BNP boycott is a principled position-a rejection of an election it thinks will be rigged/unwinnable. But the BNP decision only helps the AL and hurts itself. It won’t be able to claim the AL stole the election if AL has no opponent to steal it from. BNP boycott=an own goal.

Michael Kugelman
@MichaelKugelman
[12/30/2023 1:30 PM, 203.4K followers, 1.2K retweets, 3.6K likes]
What a contrast between how Bangladesh’s BNP & Pakistan’s PTI are approaching their respective elections. In both countries, the state has put up massive electoral roadblocks. The BNP has decided to sit the elections out. The PTI is determined to contest them, come what may.

Michael Kugelman
@MichaelKugelman
[12/30/2023 1:30 PM, 203.4K followers, 42 retweets, 209 likes]
Of course these are two different contexts, with two very different parties & experiences (eg the BNP’s previous boycott in 2014 and then its participation in a 2018 election that was rigged). BNP is more jaded than PTI. But hard to overlook how their paths will diverge in 2024.

India

Narendra Modi
@narendramodi
[1/2/2024 2:16 AM, 94.2M followers, 1.8K retweets, 5.6K likes]
The new airport terminal building and other connectivity projects being launched in Tiruchirappalli will positively impact the economic landscape of the region.

Narendra Modi
@narendramodi
[1/1/2024 7:36 AM, 94.2M followers, 4.8K retweets, 22K likes]
Over the next two days, I will be attending various programmes in Tamil Nadu, Lakshadweep and Kerala. The programmes will begin from Tiruchirappalli in Tamil Nadu, where I will address the Convocation Ceremony of the Bharathidasan University. The new terminal building of the airport will also be inaugurated. At the same time, other development works will also be launched. These works will benefit several people. https://pib.gov.in/PressReleseDetail.aspx?PRID=1991902 I look forward to being among the people of Lakshadweep. Development works worth Rs. 1150 crore would either be inaugurated or their foundation stones would be laid. These works include projects relating to better internet connectivity, ensuring clean drinking water supply, solar energy, healthcare and more.

Narendra Modi
@narendramodi
[12/31/2023 2:07 AM, 94.2M followers, 8.3K retweets, 42K likes]
Gujarat welcomed 2024 with a remarkable feat - setting a Guinness World Record for the most people performing Surya Namaskar simultaneously at 108 venues! As we all know, the number 108 holds a special significance in our culture. The venues also include the iconic Modhera Sun Temple, where several people joined. This is indeed a true testament to our commitment to Yoga and our cultural heritage. I also urge you all to make Surya Namaskar a part of your daily routine. The benefits are immense.

Narendra Modi
@narendramodi
[12/29/2023 12:07 PM, 94.2M followers, 3.9K retweets, 15K likes]
Over the last two days, attended the Conference of Chief Secretaries. We had fruitful deliberations on a wide range of policy related issues and also discussed on means of ensuring better service delivery as well as ensuring good governance for all citizens.

Dr. S. Jaishankar
@DrSJaishankar
[1/1/2024 5:32 AM, 3M followers, 960 retweets, 6.1K likes]
2023 has indeed been a memorable year for Indian Diplomacy. Amongst significant successes is also its commitment to serving our citizens. Happy to share that last year, we rendered a record 16.4 million passport related services globally. Confident that #TeamMEA will respond fully to a globalizing India.

Dr. S. Jaishankar
@DrSJaishankar
[12/31/2023 5:35 AM, 3M followers, 1.6K retweets, 8.6K likes]
“From a country that used to seek a voice in various platforms, we are now a country that creates new global ones. Today, the world consensus is clear: this is India’s moment” A must read interview of PM @narendramodi where he takes stock of how we have performed and how we aim to work in the Amrit Kaal for our people.: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1av9V5xnU0wYgMecg8Z3fikwqTzgdWS3T/view

Dr. S. Jaishankar
@DrSJaishankar
[12/29/2023 2:44 PM, 3M followers, 3.2K retweets, 23K likes]
Concluded my Russia visit today. Has contributed to strengthening trust and deepening cooperation.

Brahma Chellaney
@Chellaney
[1/1/2024 4:09 PM, 261K followers, 585 retweets, 1.9K likes]
My op-ed: If the U.S. wishes to deepen strategic ties with India — a country central to a stable balance of power in Asia — it must not ignore New Delhi’s growing concerns over the activities of American Sikh militants. https://thehill.com/opinion/international/4384020-sikh-militancy-casts-a-shadow-over-u-s-india-relations/

Brahma Chellaney
@Chellaney
[12/31/2023 7:26 AM, 261K followers, 65 retweets, 266 likes]
The memorandum of settlement between Indian authorities and the ULFA insurgent group cannot obscure the guerrilla role of the rival ULFA faction led by Paresh Baruah. But the deal helps weaken the hand of the China-sheltered Baruah.

Brahma Chellaney
@Chellaney
[12/29/2023 7:34 AM, 261K followers, 346 retweets, 1.3K likes]
A court in Qatar may have commuted the death sentences of 8 ex-Indian naval officers but make no mistake: the decision to lower their penalty was political, just as their conviction on charges of spying for Israel was politically driven. There’s no independent judiciary in Qatar.

NSB

Awami League
@albd1971
[1/2/2024 2:39 AM, 634.1K followers, 4 retweets, 9 likes]
Encouraging citizens and administrative officials to withdraw their support for the government not only challenges the democratic process but also poses a significant threat to the stability and progress of the nation. Writes @pranab1974 https://albd.org/articles/news/41242/#BNP #Jamat #NonCooperation #Bangladesh #Election2024

Awami League
@albd1971
[1/1/2024 9:39 AM, 634.1K followers, 89 retweets, 162 likes]
On the first day of 2024, hundreds of thousands of people approved #SheikhHasina’s vision for a #SmartBangladesh and took a firm resolve to boycott #BNP and #Jamaat policy of violence to thwart polls in the upcoming polls. #Bangaldesh #BangladeshPolls #Elections2024

Awami League
@albd1971
[12/31/2023 8:11 AM, 634.1K followers, 46 retweets, 115 likes]
HPM #SheikhHasina has inaugurated the ‘Book Festival’ for the academic year of 2024. More than 38 million students will receive free textbooks this year. #AwamiLeague govt has been distributing free textbooks since 2010. #Education #FreeTextbook #Bangladesh

Bangladesh Nationalist Party-BNP
@bdbnp78
[1/2/2024 12:09 AM, 45.6K followers, 25 retweets, 90 likes]
Every part of society, from garment workers to the Nobel laureate, is being denied fundamental rights and democratic ideals under Sheikh Hasina. The erosion of justice and the rule of law spares nobody, as Professor Muhammad Yunus, despite being a global inspiration, is deprived of a fair trial, just like Mother of Democracy Begum Khaleda Zia, a three-time elected Prime Minister. The destiny of Bangladesh is intertwined with the fate of five million pro-democracy activists, whose lives are also shattered by politically motivated cases.

Michael Kugelman
@MichaelKugelman
[1/1/2024 11:20 PM, 203.4K followers, 93 retweets, 273 likes]
Today Bangladesh’s most famous resident, and perhaps one of the most well-known names in the world, Nobel Laureate Mohammad Yunus, was sentenced to 6 months in jail for alleged labor law violations. PM Hasina has harbored a grudge against him for years.

Michael Kugelman
@MichaelKugelman
[1/1/2024 11:20 PM, 203.4K followers, 1 retweet, 13 likes]
One must look at this case against the backdrop of the government’s ongoing crackdown on the opposition, on dissent more broadly, and on those like Yunus that the gov’t and especially Hasina simply don’t like (and that dislike has likely grown, given his global fame and stature).

Michael Kugelman
@MichaelKugelman
[1/1/2024 11:24 PM, 203.4K followers, 2 retweets, 10 likes]
Yunus was facing legal troubles for months; it was a big story when I was in Dhaka in September. The allegations against him were serious, but some of the world’s most famous people were rushing to his defense-which made the government even more unhappy. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/9/11/why-world-figures-urged-bangladesh-to-stop-harassment-of-a-nobel-laureate

Michael Kugelman
@MichaelKugelman
[1/1/2024 10:38 AM, 203.4K followers, 286 retweets, 925 likes]
Happy first day of 2024. A reminder that South Asia has five national elections this year:
Bangladesh: January 7*
Bhutan: January 9
Pakistan: February 8*
India: April-May
Sri Lanka: Before September
*Serious concerns about credibility/integrity/fairness of elections.

Amnesty International South Asia, Regional Office
@amnestysasia
[1/1/2024 11:11 AM, 74.5K followers, 199 retweets, 395 likes]
BANGLADESH: Today, a Dhaka Labour Court convicted 83 year old Nobel Laureate Mohammad Yunus and three of his colleagues under the Bangladesh Labour Act 2006 and sentenced them to six months’ imprisonment. The conviction of Yunus is emblematic of the beleaguered state of human rights in Bangladesh, where the authorities have eroded freedoms and bulldozed critics into submission. The unusual speed in which the trial against Mohammad Yunus was completed stands in stark contrast to the snail-paced progress in other labour rights-related court cases in Bangladesh. The abuse of labours laws and misuse of the justice system to settle political vendettas is a violation of international human rights law. Amnesty International believes that initiating criminal proceedings against Mohammad Yunus and his colleagues for issues that belong to the civil and administrative arena is a blatant abuse of labour laws and the justice system and a form of political retaliation for his work and dissent.

The President’s Office, Maldives
@presidencymv
[1/2/2024 1:46 AM, 105.1K followers, 68 retweets, 80 likes]
President Dr @MMuizzu inaugurates Maldives Zakat House. President constituted the ‘Maldives Zakat House’ on December 18, 2023.

The President’s Office, Maldives
@presidencymv
[12/29/2023 11:49 PM, 105.1K followers, 136 retweets, 173 likes]
Vice President @HucenSembe joined the kick-off for the National Mosquito Control Campaign across the country. This initiative aims to curb the spread of recently identified filariasis—a disease eradicated from the Maldives in 2016.#MadhirinRakkaa

Dr Mohamed Muizzu
@MMuizzu
[12/31/2023 10:32 AM, 73.6K followers, 412 retweets, 579 likes]
Today, in the cabinet, we have decided to change municipal services of Hulhumale to Male City Council, as clearly mentioned in the Law, the process starting from 1st Jan 2024. The transfer process of office, machineries, equipments, municipal land, staff etc are to be completed within 1 month. All staff will continue to receive the same remuneration as they are currently receiving for 1 year. Details will be announced soon. This is a pledge I made during the election.

Mohamed Nasheed
@MohamedNasheed
[1/2/2024 1:55 AM, 268.8K followers, 27 retweets, 41 likes]
Heavy rains have flooded Male’ and other islands. Existing concrete storm drains have failed and will likely keep failing in future. We need new designs, making use of nature: we should explore, for example, bringing back the Male’ mangroves (Kulhi) and bathing tanks (Vevu).

M U M Ali Sabry
@alisabrypc
[12/31/2023 5:21 AM, 4.7K followers, 6 retweets, 14 likes]
As we commenced our work for the New Year at @MFA_SriLanka, we began with our traditional ceremony, symbolizing the continuity of our collective efforts. It is through the collective dedication of each team member that our nation embarks on the journey towards recovery. Let us remember that working together, with a common purpose, is our key to emerging stronger than ever before. Here’s to a year of teamwork, resilience, and shared success.

Central Asia

Navbahor Imamova
@Navbahor
[12/29/2023 1:58 PM, 22.1K followers, 2 retweets, 2 likes]
EBRD provides US$10 million to Kazakhstan’s Atameken-Agro to support the modernization, energy efficiency and environmental improvements of its agricultural machinery, including tractors, harvester-threshers and sprayers. https://ebrd.com/news/2023/ebrd-provides-us10-million-to-kazakhstans-atamekenagro.html

Navbahor Imamova
@Navbahor
[12/29/2023 1:00 PM, 22.1K followers, 1 retweet, 3 likes]
Uzbekistan presidential appointments @uzbekmfa today:
– Deputy FM Bakhromjon Aloyev is now first deputy FM
– Muzaffarbek Madrakhimov and Rakhmatulla Nurimbetov are now deputy FMs
Madrakhimov had been heading the department for the Americas, Europe and the EU, while Nurimbetov had been serving as the point person on CIS affairs.

{End of Report}

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