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:	Wednesday, March 20, 2024 6:30 AM ET

Afghanistan

US to lift Afghan visa limit under Biden, Congress deal (Reuters)

Reuters [3/19/2024 6:30 PM, Phil Stewart and Jonathan Landay, 5239K, Neutral]
U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration has reached a compromise deal with Republicans in House of Representatives to lift the number of resettlement visas for Afghans who worked for the United States, U.S. lawmakers said on Tuesday.

The congressionally-authorized limit of 38,500 Special Immigration Visas (SIVs), which offer a path to U.S. citizenship, had been expected to be reached sometime around the August anniversary of the 2021 U.S. troop withdrawal.

The Republican who leads the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Representative Michael McCaul, said the agreement would allow for 12,000 more visas. The Biden administration and Senate Republican lawmakers had sought 20,000.

"The White House and Congressional leaders have agreed to grant 12,000 Special Immigrant Visas for Afghan nationals who assisted the United States," McCaul announced during a hearing, adding it would be in the State Department’s foreign operations funding bill.

Representative Jason Crow, a Democrat and Army veteran who served in Afghanistan and led the drive in the House to raise the SIV ceiling, confirmed the 12,000 figure to Reuters.

Still, the agreement falls far short of the demand for visas by Afghans, and the program is set to expire in 2026.

As of March 1, there were more than 80,000 Afghans who were in the visa process, about a quarter of whom had already been cleared for final interviews and vetting outside of Afghanistan, according to a State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The announcement came during a hearing by two former top U.S. generals who testified that Afghans who helped the United States were facing a systematic campaign of retribution by Taliban in the aftermath of the U.S. pullout.

The additional visas come despite an immigration backlash fueled by former President Donald Trump, the Republican presidential candidate, and United Nations reports that the Taliban have killed, arrested and tortured hundreds of former officials and soldiers since the Islamists seized Kabul.

"This is a victory," Crow said.

"It’s not what we originally asked for. That’s what the Senate had approved," he added. "But it gives us a lot more runway for a longer-term fix and allows us to save more lives."

Republicans continue to hammer Biden for Afghan exit (Washington Post)

Washington Post [3/19/2024 7:53 PM, Dan Lamothe, Abigail Hauslohner, and Leigh Ann Caldwell, 6902K, Negative]
The top two generals who oversaw the deadly evacuation of Afghanistan faced renewed scrutiny Tuesday as House Republicans escalated their campaign to hold President Biden accountable for the fiasco and Democrats accused Donald Trump of setting the conditions for the Kabul government’s collapse.

Retired Gens. Mark A. Milley and Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie, career military officers who served in senior roles under both presidents, testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee as part of its oversight investigation of the United States’ calamitous exit, in August 2021, from a 20-year war.

McKenzie said that although the Pentagon had developed a plan to withdraw all U.S. troops, diplomats, citizens and at-risk Afghan partners months before the Taliban’s return to power, Biden instead decided to leave open the U.S. Embassy and withdraw all but a few hundred military personnel — ultimately leaving tens of thousands in harm’s way.

“I think the fundamental mistake — the fundamental flaw — was the timing of the State Department call” for evacuation, Milley said. “I think that was too slow and too late, and that then caused the series of events that result in the very last couple of days.”

The recurring political spotlight on the conflict’s closing days, marked by scenes of gruesome violence and desperation, has forced Democrats to confront a dark moment during Biden’s tenure as president while he campaigns against his predecessor for a second term as commander in chief.

Many Democratic lawmakers have joined their Republican colleagues in criticizing the administration’s handling of the withdrawal. But with the anticipated election rematch between Trump and Biden months away, they face pressure to defend his position that it was Trump in 2020 who boxed in Biden by accepting a deal with the Taliban that put few conditions on a U.S. departure the following year.

Throughout the hearing, both sides took turns trying to demonstrate their respect for the generals while prodding them to acknowledge the other party’s president as the person ultimately responsible for the evacuation fiasco.

Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Tex.), the committee chairman, said the White House “refused” to listen to warnings about what was happening in Afghanistan as the Taliban made recaptured cities and districts on their march to Kabul. The State Department, he said, never called for a full evacuation until Aug. 14, 2021, one day before the Afghan government fled the country and thousands of civilians overran the city’s airport in a frantic bid to do so themselves.

“As the saying goes, ‘If you fail to plan, you plan to fail,’” McCaul said of the Biden administration. “And fail they did.”

He produced an interim report around the second anniversary of the evacuation last August and is expected to release a final version this summer.

A State Department investigation released last June found that the agency gave “insufficient senior-level consideration of worst-case scenarios” and how quickly those could occur after Biden decided to follow through with Trump’s decision to withdraw. The agency also did not have anyone clearly in the lead on preparation for a full evacuation, that investigation found.

A State Department official, asked about Tuesday’s hearing, said the agency is “immensely proud of the work done, under incredibly difficult circumstances, to ensure the relocation of U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents, and Afghans throughout the withdrawal and the period that followed.”

Both retired generals said their remarks were consistent with hours of testimony they provided while still on active duty — a point that Rep. Gregory W. Meeks (N.Y.), the committee’s top Democrat, sought to emphasize.

“There’s nothing groundbreaking here!” Meeks said, urging lawmakers to look instead at the war’s totality, not just how it ended. The bipartisan Afghanistan War Commission that was convened last year to scrutinize the entire 20-year war is expected to issue findings within four years.

Among those present at the hearing were the families of several U.S. troops killed in a bombing on the outskirts of the Kabul airport as the 17-day evacuation raced to a close. The explosion followed days of public warnings from the Biden administration that the Islamic State, which operates a branch in Afghanistan, was poised to attack. An estimated 170 Afghans died in the suicide strike alongside 13 American service members. Dozens more were wounded.

Reps. Cory Mills (R-Fla.) and Michael Lawler (R-N.Y.) assailed McKenzie and Milley for not seeking out the testimony of a Marine sniper, Sgt. Tyler Vargas-Andrews, who has said that shortly before the attack, he spotted a man in the crowd who met the description of the suicide bomber but was denied permission to shoot him. Vargas-Andrews, who was severely wounded in the explosion and was present at the hearing Tuesday, provided lawmakers last year with an emotional account of the bombing and its aftermath, compelling the Pentagon to review the findings of its investigation of the incident. The results of that review are expected to be made public soon.

McKenzie and Pentagon leaders told the public in 2022 that the airport bombing was “not preventable.”

Rep. Michael Waltz (R.-Fla.), a retired Special Forces officer, said he was infuriated recalling how Biden, in the weeks before the crisis, downplayed the prospect of Afghanistan falling to the Taliban. In one instance, Waltz noted, Biden said in July 2021 that it was “highly unlikely” the Taliban would overrun the country — even though the generals had privately warned that such an outcome could happen swiftly.

“My assessment at the time was if we went to zero on U.S. military forces, then there was a high likelihood of a collapse of the government of Afghanistan, and the [Afghan forces], with the Taliban taking over,” Milley told lawmakers Tuesday. “But I personally thought it was going to be in the fall, somewhere around Thanksgiving. Assessments varied widely.”

The White House, asked about Milley’s testimony, cited a document the White House released last spring saying that when Biden assumed office, he undertook a “deliberate, intensive, rigorous, and inclusive decision-making process” about how to handle the war. “Ultimately, President Biden refused to send another generation of Americans to fight a war that should have ended for the United States long ago,” it states.

Several Democrats on the panel sought to highlight what they said were Republican inconsistencies on Afghanistan policy. They noted that GOP outrage over the abandonment of U.S. allies stranded amid the military airlift that carried 124,000 people to safety should translate into meaningful help for Afghans left behind and those who were resettled in the United States.

Afghan advocates, included leading U.S. military veterans groups, have warned that thousands of Afghans who served the U.S. mission remain in Afghanistan and that the State Department will soon run out of Special Immigrant Visas for them unless Congress acts.

There are approximately 20,000 Afghans — not counting their family members — who have received preliminary approval and “will soon require visas,” a bipartisan group of senators led by Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) wrote last week in a letter to Senate leaders. As of March 1, “there were approximately 7,000 visas remaining,” they said.

Rep. Jason Crow (D-Col0.), an Army veteran who served in Afghanistan, urged his colleagues to sign on to the Afghan Allies Protection Act, a bipartisan bill consistently thwarted by Republicans. Congress can still “save lives by passing this bill and providing a pathway for our friends to get out,” Crow said.

Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.), wondered what it will take for Americans to be able to visit Afghanistan in a similar fashion to how he visited Vietnam to see where his father was killed.

“It will take years upon years upon years,” Milley responded. “ … I believe the Taliban are still a terrorist organization. I still believe that they conduct incredible, horrific retribution inside their own country, and I would not recommend to any family member at this time to return.”

Milley added that he will have a difficult time ever reconciling with the Taliban. “I’ll probably go to the grave with it,” he said.

Top former US generals say failures of Biden administration in planning drove chaotic fall of Kabul (AP)

AP [3/19/2024 9:32 PM, Tara Copp, 6902K, Negative]
The top two U.S. generals who oversaw the evacuation of Afghanistan as it fell to the Taliban in August 2021 blamed the Biden administration for the chaotic departure, telling lawmakers Tuesday that it inadequately planned for the evacuation and did not order it in time.

The rare testimony by the two retired generals publicly exposed for the first time the strain and differences the military leaders had with the Biden administration in the final days of the war. Two of those key differences included that the military had advised that the U.S. keep at least 2,500 service members in Afghanistan to maintain stability and a concern that the State Department was not moving fast enough to get an evacuation started.

The remarks also contrasted with an internal White House review of the administration’s decisions which found that President Joe Biden’s decisions had been “severely constrained” by previous withdrawal agreements negotiated by former President Donald Trump and blamed the military, saying top commanders said they had enough resources to handle the evacuation.

Thirteen U.S. service members were killed by a suicide bomber at the Kabul airport’s Abbey Gate in the final days of the war, as the Taliban took over Afghanistan.

Thousands of panicked Afghans and U.S. citizens desperately tried to get on U.S. military flights that were airlifting people out. In the end the military was able to rescue more than 130,000 civilians before the final U.S. military aircraft departed.

That chaos was the end result of the State Department failing to call for an evacuation of U.S. personnel until it was too late, both former Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley and U.S. Central Command retired Gen. Frank McKenzie told the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

“On 14 August the non-combatant evacuation operation decision was made by the Department of State and the U.S. military alerted, marshalled, mobilized and rapidly deployed faster than any military in the world could ever do,” Milley said.

But the State Department’s decision came too late, Milley said.

“The fundamental mistake, the fundamental flaw was the timing of the State Department,” Milley said. “That was too slow and too late.”

In a lengthy statement late Tuesday, the National Security Council took issue with the generals’ remarks, saying that Biden’s hard decision was the right thing to do and part of his commitment to get the U.S. out of America’s longest war.

The president “was not going to send another generation of troops to fight and die in a conflict that had no end in sight,” the NSC said. “We have also demonstrated that we do not need a permanent troop presence on the ground in harm’s way to remain vigilant against terrorism threats.”

The statement said the president and first lady still mourn for those lost at Abbey Gate and are “enormously proud of the men and women of our military, our diplomats and the intel community who conducted that withdrawal,” the NSC said.

In the hearing, which was prompted by a lengthy investigation by the House Foreign Affairs Committee into the decisions surrounding the evacuation of Kabul, McKenzie spoke at length about his discomfort in how little seemed to be ready for an evacuation, even raising those concerns with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.

Evacuation orders must come from the State Department, but in the weeks and months before Kabul fell to the Taliban, the Pentagon was still pressing the State Department for evacuation plans, McKenzie said.

“We had forces in the region as early as 9 July, but we could do nothing” without State ordering the evacuation, McKenzie said, calling State’s timing “the fatal flaw that created what happened in August.”

“I believe the events of mid and late August 2021 were the direct result of delaying the initiation of the (evacuation) for several months, in fact until we were in extremis and the Taliban had overrun the country,” McKenzie said.

Milley was the nation’s top-ranking military officer at the time, and had urged President Joe Biden to keep a residual force of 2,500 forces there to give Afghanistan’s special forces enough back-up to keep the Taliban at bay and allow the U.S. military to hold on to Bagram Air Base, which could have provided the military additional options to respond to Taliban attacks.

Biden did not approve the larger residual force, opting to keep a smaller force of 650 that would be limited to securing the U.S. embassy. That smaller force was not adequate to keeping Bagram, which was quickly taken over by the Taliban.

The Taliban have controlled Afghanistan since the U.S. departure, resulting in many dramatic changes for the population, including the near-total loss of rights for women and girls.

The White House found last year that the chaotic withdrawal occurred because President Joe Biden was “constrained” by previous agreements made by President Donald Trump to withdraw forces.

That 2023 internal review further appeared to shift any blame in the Aug. 26, 2021, suicide bombing at Hamid Karzai International Airport, saying it was the U.S. military that made one possibly key decision.

“To manage the potential threat of a terrorist attack, the President repeatedly asked whether the military required additional support to carry out their mission at HKIA,” the 2023 report said, adding, “Senior military officials confirmed that they had sufficient resources and authorities to mitigate threats.”

Top generals who oversaw US withdrawal from Afghanistan slam State Department for delaying emergency evacuation (CNN)

CNN [3/19/2024 5:17 PM, Oren Liebermann and Michael Conte, 6098K, Negative]
The two senior generals in charge of the US military during the withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 both blamed the State Department for not sooner ordering a “noncombatant evacuation operation” for remaining US citizens in Afghanistan in a congressional hearing on Tuesday.

“It is my assessment that that decision came too late,” retired Gen. Mark Milley, former Joint Chiefs chairman, said at the House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing.

Retired Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie, former commander of US Central Command, said that “the events of mid- and late August 2021 were the direct result of delaying the initiation of the NEO (evacuation) for several months, in fact, until we were in extremis, and the Taliban had overrun the country.” McKenzie said he began to doubt the State Department’s ability to carry out an evacuation one month earlier, as the Taliban swept across the country.

Milley and McKenzie have spoken about mistakes made during the withdrawal, including the failures of the intelligence community to predict the rapid collapse of the Afghan government and military, but Tuesday’s comments were their most candid statements about the end of the US’ longest war. They provided the clearest picture to date of the friction between the Defense Department and the State Department, as the former pushed for the order to evacuate and the latter delayed that decision.

Milley said the consensus military recommendation to the Biden administration was to evacuate US Embassy personnel from Kabul at the same time as the military forces were withdrawing.

“After the decisions were made to keep a diplomatic presence there, as the situation deteriorated through the summer and the fall in the provincial capitals, etc., we were clearly pressing for early calls to execute a NEO,” said Milley.

McKenzie also accused the US Embassy in Kabul of obstructing coordination on a possible evacuation plan with the military.

“Embassy Kabul had a plan, had what we would call an F-77 list, which is the list of US citizens and their families that are in the country, and we struggled to gain access to that plan and work with them over the months of July until we finally got a decision to execute the NEO, which, as I’ve already mentioned, occurred on the 14th of August,” said McKenzie.

Rep. Michael McCaul, the Republican chair of the committee, has repeatedly called for accountability from the Biden administration on how the withdrawal from Afghanistan played out. He has slammed the administration for the Abbey Gate bombing, which killed 13 US service members in the final chaotic days of the withdrawal. In his opening statement, McCaul read the names of those killed in the attack. The blast also killed scores of Afghan civilians who were desperate to get into the walled-off airport complex.

“I think somebody needs to be held accountable,” McCaul told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer Tuesday morning. “In what form that takes, we’ll see where the evidence goes in the matter.”

In January 2023, McCaul launched a separate investigation into the Afghanistan withdrawal, an effort he says is ongoing. McCaul said many of the families of the service members killed in the Abbey Gate bombing will be at the hearing.

“They are not happy with this president. They don’t think he’s ever publicly apologized to them or even stated the names of their deceased, the fallen, their children who were killed that fateful day,” he said.

At the hearing, Republican lawmakers repeatedly referenced the previous testimony of Marine Corps Sergeant Tyler Vargas-Andrews, who claims he had a potential suicide bomber in his sights on the day of the deadly attack at Abbey Gate. Vargas-Andrews testified he asked for permission to shoot but was told by his battalion commander, “I don’t know.” Milley and McKenzie, though unwilling to comment on the account of Vargas-Andrews, pointed out that US servicemembers have a right to engage a threat under the rules of engagement. On three other occasions in the closing days of the withdrawal, US troops took lethal shots under the rules of engagement.

Political hearing

Democrats ripped the hearing as a political show used to attack the Biden administration. Rep. Brad Sherman, a California Democrat, said the hearing began with the title “Biden strategic failure.”

“It’s my understanding that our witnesses refused to testify with that title,” said Sherman. “We’ve now retitled the hearing, but we haven’t repurposed it. It continues to be politicized.”

The hearing came after US Central Command recently completed an additional review of the Abbey Gate bombing. The review was announced by CENTCOM in September, just days after an emotional congressional roundtable where family members of the troops killed made clear their anger and what they saw as a lack of accountability over the chaotic withdrawal. It included additional interviews with service members and other personnel who were not included in the initial review of the withdrawal.

The new review included more than 50 interviews, including with 12 US troops who were not part of the original effort. The new interviews sought “any new information surrounding the [Abbey Gate] attack” and whether it would affect the findings of the first investigation, completed in November 2021, Central Command said in a statement last week.

This is not the first time Milley and McKenzie have testified together about the withdrawal from Afghanistan. On September 28, 2021, less than a month after the final withdrawal of US forces from Kabul’s international airport, Milley and McKenzie sat before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

The two men - at the time, the top US general and the top US commander in the Middle East - said they recommended keeping a small US military footprint in Afghanistan. Milley said he suggested keeping between 2,500 and 4,500 US troops in Afghanistan “until conditions were met for further reduction.” That recommendation, he noted, was consistent across the Trump and Biden administrations.

McKenzie said 2,500 US troops was an “appropriate number to remain.” He also issued a warning of what might happen if US troop levels dropped even lower. “If we went below that number, in fact, we would probably witness a collapse of the Afghan government and the Afghan military.”

Maintaining a troop level of 2,500 would have been a fraction of the US force posture in Afghanistan during two decades of war, numbers that peaked at about 100,000 US troops in 2011.

The US military presence in Afghanistan was initially scheduled to end on September 11, 2021, the 20-year anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks. On Tuesday, Milley said he felt it was an “inappropriate” date to conclude the withdrawal of US forces, but it was “very rapidly” changed to the end of August.

Swedish Aid Group Suspends Afghanistan Operations After Taliban Pulls Licenses (Radio Free Europe)

Radio Free Europe [3/19/2024 1:12 PM, Staff, 223K, Neutral]
The Swedish Committee for Afghanistan (SCA), one of the country’s oldest and largest international aid groups, has suspended activities in Afghanistan after the Taliban revoked its licenses.

"We are extremely saddened by the current situation and the effects our suspension will have on the millions of people who have benefitted from our services over the past four decades," the organization said in a statement on March 19.

The SCA said the suspension was in response to a decree from the Taliban, which called for the suspension of all of "Sweden’s activities" following the burning of copies of the Koran in Stockholm in June.

"We strongly condemn and distance ourselves from these acts," the statement said.

"Desecration of the Holy Koran is an insult to all Muslims around the world who hold this sacred text dear to their hearts, and it constitutes a flagrant attack on the Islamic faith."

Every year, nearly 3 million Afghans residing in 16 provinces benefit from the SCA’s projects in health care, education, and disability and livelihood support.

"We are also gravely concerned about the future of our nearly 7,000 Afghan employees across 16 provinces," the SCA said.

"Many of them are the sole breadwinners of their families and if they lose their jobs, thousands of families will suffer," the organization added.

The closure of the SCA has disappointed Afghans across the country because it was seen as a leading example of how best to work with Afghan communities.

"All these activities were effective in healing our nation’s pain," an Afghan aid worker who requested anonymity told RFE/RL’s Radio Azadi.

"While our people face starvation and don’t have enough food and water, they are closing such humanitarian organizations," he added.

An SCA employee in the southeastern Ghazni Province told Radio Azadi that the closure of the group’s operations was wreaking havoc on the daily lives of Aghanistan’s most vulnerable.

"Our hospital was helping more than 200 disabled people daily," he said.

"Now hundreds wait outside the hospital’s gates with no prospects of it reopening soon."

In the northern Balkh Province, another employee said that closing an education training institute was a further blow to the region.

"Our people are grappling with monumental problems," he told Radio Azadi. The SCA employees interviewed sought anonymity because they said they were not authorized to speak to the media.

The SCA was founded as a nongovernmental organization in 1980. It first supported millions of Afghan refugees in neighboring Pakistan who had fled the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

In the 1990s, it moved into Afghanistan and provided lifesaving health care and education to millions of Afghans. Various Western donors have supported its projects.

Afghanistan’s school year starts without more than 1 million girls barred from education by Taliban (AP)

AP [3/20/2024 4:39 AM, Rahim Faiez, 456K, Negative]
The school year in Afghanistan started Wednesday but without girls whom the Taliban barred from attending classes beyond the sixth grade, making it the only country with restrictions on female education.

The U.N. children’s agency says more than 1 million girls are affected by the ban. It also estimates 5 million were out of school before the Taliban takeover due to a lack of facilities and other reasons.

The Taliban’s education ministry marked the start of the new academic year with a ceremony that female journalists were not allowed to attend. The invitations sent out to reporters said: “Due to the lack of a suitable place for the sisters, we apologize to female reporters.”

During a ceremony, the Taliban’s education minister, Habibullah Agha, said that the ministry is trying “to increase the quality of education of religious and modern sciences as much as possible.” The Taliban have been prioritizing Islamic knowledge over basic literacy and numeracy with their shift toward madrassas, or religious schools.

The minister also called on students to avoid wearing clothes that contradict Islamic and Afghan principles.

Abdul Salam Hanafi, the Taliban’s deputy prime minister, said they were trying to expand education in “all remote areas in the country.”

The Taliban previously said girls continuing their education went against their strict interpretation of Islamic law, or Sharia, and that certain conditions were needed for their return to school. However, they made no progress in creating said conditions.

When they ruled Afghanistan in the 1990s, they also banned girls’ education.

Despite initially promising a more moderate rule, the group has also barred women from higher education, public spaces like parks, and most jobs as part of harsh measures imposed after they took over following the withdrawal of U.S. and NATO forces from the country in 2021.

The ban on girls’ education remains the Taliban’s biggest obstacle to gaining recognition as the legitimate rulers of Afghanistan.

Although Afghan boys have access to education, Human Rights Watch has criticized the Taliban, saying their “abusive” educational policies are harming boys as well as girls. The group, in a report published in December, said there has been less attention to the deep harm inflicted on boys’ education as qualified teachers — including women — left, and inclusion of regressive curriculum changes as well as an increase in corporal punishment have led to falling attendance.

Afghans Pushed Out, Fenced In By Once-Accommodating Neighbors (Radio Free Europe)

Radio Free Europe [3/19/2024 9:17 AM, Michael Scollon, 223K, Negative]
Afghans are being pushed back, fenced out, and left to fend for themselves in the face of Taliban persecution and widespread hunger.

Hundreds of thousands of undocumented Afghans have been kicked out of neighboring countries and forcibly returned to Afghanistan in recent months. Millions more are slated to join them, complicating the already daunting humanitarian effort to stave off a famine.

Underscoring that Afghans are not welcome, neighboring states are rolling out the barbed wire in an attempt to keep them out.

Returnee Overload

Over the course of a year, a total of 1.5 million Afghans have been forcibly returned to Afghanistan by various countries, the Taliban said earlier this month.

Most, according to migration officials, were sent back by Pakistan, Iran, and Turkey -- for decades destinations for Afghan migrant workers as well as refugees looking to escape war and poverty. Others have been sent back from Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

That number could more than double if Iran and Pakistan fully carry out their goals of deporting all undocumented Afghans, including asylum-seekers who face persecution under the Taliban and some who have not lived in their home country for decades or were born abroad.

Pakistan was initially accommodating to Afghans fleeing Taliban rule, serving as a temporary destination for many as they sought asylum in a third country.

But since October 2023, when Islamabad announced its plans to expel more than 1.7 million "undocumented foreigners," more than a half million Afghans have been forced to leave Pakistan, Abdulmatallab Haqqani, spokesman for the Taliban’s Refugees and Repatriations Ministry, said this week.

Some of the new arrivals are now trying to resettle in a homeland they have never stepped foot in, and most are being held in temporary tent camps set up along Afghanistan’s eastern border with Pakistan, where aid groups are struggling to provide them with emergency relief.

More than half of Afghanistan’s population of around 40 million faces a food security crisis that is approaching the level of a famine, according to aid and rights groups.

According to the UN’s World Food Program, the situation is contributing to "a humanitarian crisis of incredible proportions" that has "grown even more complex and severe since the Taliban took control" in August 2021. The UN body warns that Afghanistan is on the brink of economic collapse, with the currency struggling and food prices on the rise.

The vast majority of the returnees aim to return to their provinces of origin, according to the International Organization for Migration Afghanistan, but many have no homes or livelihoods to return to.

The new arrivals have been welcomed in Afghanistan, UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) senior public information officer Caroline Gluck told RFE/RL in written comments, but "there are limited capacities to offer them the support they need."

"The arrival of around a half million Afghans from Pakistan is putting a huge strain on already limited services -- from health to shelter, work opportunities, and schools," Gluck said.

"Many have arrived, having spent all their life in Pakistan and never having set foot in Afghanistan," Gluck added, noting that more than 23 million Afghans are in need of humanitarian aid.

Like many returnees, Abdul Basit, a migrant who recently left Pakistan and moved to Afghanistan’s eastern Nangarhar Province, has experienced difficulties settling back in.

Basit told RFE/RL’s Radio Azadi that there is no work and he and other deportees spend much of their time bouncing around from government office to government office.

The situation now promises to get even worse, with a second phase set to begin on April 15 to expel Afghan citizens from Pakistan, meaning more than 1 million Afghans could be potentially deported.

To the west, Iran is also engaged in a concerted effort to push out Afghans.

According to Iranian officials, more than 1 million undocumented Afghans have been deported in the past year. That number, too, could more than double, with Tehran saying it intends to expel half of the 5 million Afghans it estimates live in Iran.

In the meantime, Iran has taken steps to make Afghans’ lives difficult on its territory, with migrants and refugees barred from living in, traveling to, or seeking employment in more than half of Iran’s 31 provinces.

Amid rising resentment against Afghan migrant workers whom some Iranians accuse of stealing their jobs, parliamentary committees and officials have also discussed plans that would introduce strict punishments for renting homes or hiring undocumented foreigners.

Heydayatullah, an Afghan laborer who gave only his first name to Radio Azadi, said he was recently deported from Iran after spending only 20 days in the country.

He said that now that he is back in Afghanistan, he is unemployed and has no way of supporting his family of six.

Nasir Ahmad, a 30-year-old who was deported from Iran and has tried to settle in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e Sharif, said "there is no work in Afghanistan" and that he had depended on traveling to Iran to support his wife and children. Now, he says, he is ready to work for a pittance if only he could find employment.

Fenced Out

From all sides, Afghanistan’s neighbors are taking steps to prevent Afghans from entering their territory, a situation that has led to tensions and occasional clashes.

The efforts are far-reaching, including Tajikistan calling on fellow members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization to establish a "security belt" along the Afghan border to combat drug trafficking, and Turkey’s construction of a 170-kilometer wall along its border with Iran that is widely seen as intended to keep Afghan migrants out.

But most of the work is being done along Afghanistan’s borders with Pakistan and Iran.

In April 2023, Pakistan announced it was "98 percent" done installing fencing along its around 2,600-kilometer border with Afghanistan. Ahmed Sharif, the spokesman for the Pakistani military’s media department, said the barrier was intended to prevent "terrorists" from crossing into Pakistani territory.

But the fence also reinforces Islamabad’s anti-migrant position, observers suggest, and has posed difficulties for traders on both sides.

Running along the contentious Durand Line border that the Taliban does not recognize as legitimate, the fence has also left Taliban officials bristling. Having previously boasted about destroying the barbed wire fencing, the Taliban has said it will not allow the fence to be completed.

Tensions along the border have risen considerably in recent days, with Islamabad this week launching retaliatory air strikes on armed groups it says have carried out militant attacks in Pakistan and are hiding out in Afghanistan.

The Taliban, in turn, said its forces had fired at Pakistani positions in retaliation on March 17.

Iran, meanwhile, has launched its own initiative to block the paths of Afghans across its 920-kilometer border with Afghanistan.

Iranian Interior Minister Ahmad Vahidi said in January that the project was a "complete plan" that went beyond the erection of a wall along a porous 74-kilometer stretch of the border, stressing it is a top priority to seal gaps in the border that are being "misused."

Observers note the initiative comes after Iran accused extremist groups in Afghanistan of attacks on Iranian territory as well as following clashes between Iranian and Taliban border forces that reportedly led the Taliban to reinforce the border.

Aziz Maaraj, a former Afghan diplomat in Iran, told Radio Azadi that "Iran is installing cameras and barbed wire" to prevent smuggling and the entrance of illegal migrants, as well as to protect itself against future clashes and possible militant attacks.

Fereshta Abbasi, a researcher in the Asia division at Human Rights Watch, told RFE/RL that "definitely, Iran and Pakistan are trying to send the message to Afghans that they are not welcome."

Contributing to the problem is that the international community has been slow in living up to commitments to resettle Afghan asylum seekers and refugees who fled after the Taliban seized power. That has left thousands of Afghans who did find temporary refuge in neighboring countries as they awaited processing at the risk of having to return to the persecution and insecurity they fled.

"Some of these people who are now being forced to leave Pakistan and Iran are the ones whose lives are not safe inside Afghanistan," Abbasi said.

"The Taliban have arbitrarily detained journalists, human rights activists, former government employees, and former security officers. These people have been tortured. In some cases, they have been forced to disappear and killed," she added.

Outside countries have also been slow to deliver money, leaving the coffers of the UN’s 2024 humanitarian response plan at just 3 percent of expected levels, coming after the 2023 plan was only funded by half, according to Abbasi.

"These governments are not living up to their commitments," Abassi said, adding that Afghans who worked with the previous Western-backed government or alongside Western forces are at particular risk. "They need to be reminded of the fact that they are leaving those Afghans behind who have stood by them."

Pakistan

US Scrutinizes Pakistan’s February Polls, Donald Lu Advocates for Democratic Integrity (BNN)

BNN [3/20/2024 1:07 AM, Aqsa Younas Rana, Neutral]
Amidst recent developments that have stirred the political landscape of Pakistan, Assistant Secretary of State Donald Lu has become a focal point of international discourse. Highlighting irregularities in the February 8 elections, Lu’s insights are poised to shape the future of US-Pakistan relations, particularly concerning democracy’s fortitude in the South Asian nation. As Lu prepares to address a Congressional panel today, the global community watches closely, anticipating the implications of his testimony on bilateral ties and democratic governance in Pakistan.

Examining Electoral Integrity and Bilateral Ties

During his appearance before the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee, Lu is expected to delve into the complexities of the US-Pakistan relationship post-elections. His written testimony sheds light on the State Department’s concerns regarding the February polls, notably criticizing undue restrictions on essential freedoms and condemning electoral violence. These statements underscore a clear message from the US: a steadfast commitment to supporting democratic institutions in Pakistan while vehemently opposing any form of electoral manipulation or rights infringements. This hearing, titled ‘Pakistan After the Elections: Examining the Future of Democracy in Pakistan and the US-Pakistan Relationship,’ aims to dissect the intricate dynamics at play, offering a platform for Lu to advocate for transparency and fairness.

US Policy and Future Directions

Lu’s testimony not only highlights past grievances but also sets the stage for future US policy towards Pakistan. By calling for a thorough investigation into the alleged irregularities and emphasizing the importance of upholding democratic values, Lu signals a pivotal shift in how the US aims to engage with its South Asian partner. Amidst ongoing concerns about economic stability, debt challenges, and the need for substantial reforms, the US-Pakistan Green Alliance Framework emerges as a beacon of potential cooperation, alongside counterterrorism efforts and the promotion of human rights. Lu’s approach suggests a multifaceted strategy, balancing criticism with constructive engagement, aimed at nurturing a robust democratic ecosystem in Pakistan.

Implications for Democracy and International Relations

The repercussions of Lu’s congressional testimony are manifold, extending beyond immediate policy adjustments to influence the broader discourse on democracy and international cooperation. By publicly addressing the electoral issues and advocating for corrective measures, the US reinforces its role as a proponent of democratic integrity worldwide. This stance, while focusing on Pakistan, sends a reverberating message to other nations grappling with similar challenges, advocating for accountability, transparency, and inclusive governance. As Pakistan navigates through these turbulent waters, the support and scrutiny from international actors like the US will be crucial in steering the country towards democratic maturity and stability.

As the dialogue unfolds in Washington, the eyes of the world remain fixed on the evolving narrative. Donald Lu’s testimony is more than a diplomatic formality; it is a testament to the enduring significance of democracy, the rule of law, and the unyielding pursuit of justice. With the future of US-Pakistan relations hanging in the balance, today’s hearing could very well dictate the trajectory of democratic governance in Pakistan, influencing not just bilateral ties but the global democratic landscape.

Pakistan Gets Initial Approval for Final $1.1 Billion IMF Payout (Bloomberg)

Bloomberg [3/20/2024 1:59 AM, Ronojoy Mazumdar, 5.5M, Neutral]
Pakistan secured initial approval from the International Monetary Fund for the release of the final tranche from a $3 billion bailout program and has expressed interest in another loan program to keep the economy going.

The staff-level agreement for the second review of the program gives the nation access to a payout of about $1.1 billion — subject to approval from the IMF’s executive board, the Washington-based lender said in a statement on Wednesday. Pakistan also expressed interest in a successor medium-term program, Mission Chief to Pakistan Nathan Porter said in the statement.

“Pakistan’s economic and financial position has improved in the months since the first review,” IMF said in a statement. “However, growth is expected to be modest this year and inflation remains well above target, and ongoing policy and reform efforts are required to address Pakistan’s deep-seated economic vulnerabilities.

The South Asian country succeeded in averting a sovereign default last year, but it remains heavily reliant on IMF aid with $24 billion in external financing needs in the fiscal year starting July, about three times its foreign exchange reserves. Now investors’ attention will turn to negotiations for a fresh package as Pakistan had planned to seek a new loan of at least $6 billion from the IMF, Bloomberg News earlier reported.

Pakistan dollar bonds rose to their highest level since March 2022. IMF aid has helped boost sentiment for the nation’s dollar bonds, which handed investors a gain of more than 20% this year, the top performer in emerging markets after Ecuador.

New Goals
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, who was sworn in this month after a controversial election, has directed authorities to fasttrack negotiations with the IMF for a new facility.

The new loan program will aim to permanently resolve Pakistan’s fiscal and external sustainability weaknesses and lay the foundations for sustainable growth, Porter said after discussions in Islamabad. While these discussions are expected to start in the coming months, the IMF said the key objectives are expected to include broadening the tax base, improving debt sustainability and restoring the energy sector’s viability.

Pakistan’s authorities are determined to deliver a primary balance target of 0.4% of GDP and continue with the timely implementation of power and gas tariff adjustments, Porter said.

The State Bank of Pakistan has said it remains committed to maintaining a prudent monetary policy to lower inflation and ensure exchange rate flexibility and transparency in the operations of the FX market.

IMF says it reaches a staff level agreement with Pakistan to disburse $1.1 billion (Reuters)

Reuters [3/20/2024 3:18 AM, Ariba Shahid and Asif Shahzad, 5.2M, Neutral]
The International Monetary Fund on Wednesday said it had reached a staff level agreement with Pakistan, which if approved by its board, will disburse $1.1 billion for the indebted South Asian economy also saddled with a balance of payment crisis.

The funds are the final tranche of a $3 billion last-gasp rescue package Pakistan had secured last summer, which averted a sovereign debt default. Islamabad is also seeking another long-term bailout.

"The IMF team has reached a staff-level agreement with the Pakistani authorities on the second and final review of Pakistan’s stabilization program," the IMF said in a statement.

"This agreement is subject to approval by the IMF’s Executive Board," it added. The agreement expires on April 11 and while Pakistan has yet to be added to the IMF’s executive board’s calendar, officials say board approval is expected sometime in April.

The deal comes after the IMF mission held five days of talks with Pakistani officials to review the fiscal consolidation benchmarks set for the loan.

"Pakistan’s economic and financial position has improved in the months since the first review, with growth and confidence continuing to recover on the back of prudent policy management and the resumption of inflows from multilateral and bilateral partners," the IMF said.

However, growth is expected to be modest this year and inflation remains well above target, as Pakistan needs more policy reforms to address its "economic vulnerabilities", the lender added.

Most Pakistan dollar bonds traded higher on Wednesday.

The 2027-maturing bond was up 0.25 cents at 83.957 cents on the dollar while the 2025 bond which was up 0.21 cents at 92.023 cents on the dollar.

NEW AGREEMENT

Pakistan’s newly appointed Finance Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb had said that Islamabad will seek another long-term bailout, and the IMF said Pakistan had expressed interest in a deal during the review talks, with discussions on a medium-term programme expected to start in the next few months.

The government has not officially stated the size of the additional funding it is seeking. Bloomberg reported in February that Pakistan planned to ask for a loan of at least $6 billion.

Ahead of the stand-by arrangement, Pakistan had to meet IMF conditions including revising its budget, and raising interest rates as well as generating revenues through more taxes and hiking electricity and gas prices.

The IMF said the government of newly elected Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif was committed to these measures, and called for broadening the tax base as well as adjusting power and gas tariffs.

Economist Sakib Sheerani said the new long-term agreement would likely trigger more conditions from the IMF.

"While successful completion of the SBA improves the country’s chances of securing a follow up programme, the next arrangement is likely to be substantially different than the current one - focusing more on deeper structural conditionality such as the public sector wage and pension bill," he said.

‘Cousins at war’: Pakistan-Afghan ties strained after cross-border attacks (Al Jazeera)

Al Jazeera [3/19/2024 10:05 AM, Abid Hussain, 2060K, Negative]
Pakistan’s air raids inside Afghanistan on Monday amid rising tensions between the neighbours have injected new uncertainty into ties, say analysts.

The early morning attacks on Monday from Pakistan, according to a detailed statement by the Pakistani foreign ministry, were aimed at hideouts of armed groups including the outlawed Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (Pakistan Taliban, or TTP). Afghan officials said eight people in all — five women and three children — were killed.

The official government statement said that the “terrorists” pose a great threat to the country, and alleged that “they have consistently used Afghan territory to launch terror attacks inside Pakistani territory.”

“Terrorist groups like TTP are a collective threat to regional peace and security. We fully realise the challenge Afghan authorities face in combating the threat posed by TTP. Pakistan would therefore continue to work towards finding joint solutions in countering terrorism and to prevent any terrorist organisation from sabotaging bilateral relations with Afghanistan,” the statement said.

The air raids came two days after a group of suicide bombers targeted a Pakistani military checkpost in its North Waziristan district, a border area next to Afghanistan, killing at least seven Pakistani soldiers.

The Afghan Taliban, who have ruled the country since taking over in August 2021, reacted swiftly to the Pakistani attacks, calling them “reckless”. Hours after the air raids, the Afghan military fired mortar shells on Pakistani military positions near border districts, which left four civilians and three soldiers injured.

Zabiullah Mujahid, the Taliban government spokesperson, denied that foreign armed groups are allowed to operate from Afghan soil. But he conceded that parts of the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan were hard to control.

“In this regard, we have made our utmost effort and continue to do so; but one thing we must accept is that Afghanistan shares a very long border area with Pakistan, and there are places with rugged terrain including mountains and forests, and places that might be out of our control,” Mujahid said in response.

Sami Yousafzai, a journalist and a longtime observer of Pakistan-Afghanistan ties, described the spat as a fight between two cousins.

“These two neighbours act like they are cousins. They cannot leave each other, but they cannot find a way to fix their relationship either. And in all this fighting, it is impacting the public-to-public relations between them,” he told Al Jazeera.

For years, Pakistan was seen as a patron of the Afghan Taliban, which first rose to power in 1996. It was believed to hold considerable sway on the Taliban leadership, whom it sheltered, funded and shielded diplomatically.

Yet amid the United States’s so-called “war on terror”, the Pakistan Taliban emerged and started waging a war against the state of Pakistan, although the group was ideologically aligned with the Afghan Taliban.

The Pakistani army conducted multiple operations to eliminate the Pakistan Taliban, and managed to push some of its leaders into Afghanistan. After the Afghan Taliban returned to Kabul in late 2021, Pakistan hoped to use its historic influence over the new Afghan rulers to contain the Pakistan Taliban.

Instead, attacks grew, and 2023 was among the bloodiest years in recent Pakistani history, with more than 650 attacks across the country, killing nearly 1,000 people, mostly from law enforcement agencies and the military. Most of the attacks on security personnel were claimed by the Pakistan Taliban, along with other relatively lesser-known armed groups.

Over the years, Pakistan has blamed the Pakistan Taliban for several attacks inside its territory, killing thousands of people, including the deadly attack on Army Public School in Peshawar in 2014, which killed more than 130 students.

More than 90 percent of the attacks in 2023 were carried out in the northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the southwestern province of Balochistan, both of which border Afghanistan.

Syed Akhtar Ali Shah, a former police chief in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, said that such regular attacks against security personnel affects the motivation of the forces and Pakistan had little option but to retaliate.

Shah also noted that Pakistan had the added experience of a similar level of cross-border action earlier in the year against Iran, which perhaps emboldened the military.

In January this year, Iranian forces launched a cross-border attack inside Pakistan, targeting hideouts of an armed group that it claimed works against the interest of state of Iran.

Within 24 hours, the Pakistani government responded with attacks of its own inside Iran’s Sestan-Baluchestan province, targeting what it claimed was armed groups seeking protection in Iran.

After the tit-for-tat action, Pakistan and Iran managed to calm those tensions, with the Iranian foreign minister visiting Pakistan the same month.

Shah, the former police chief, believed that Pakistan perhaps learned a lesson from that incident and decided to show “muscle”. But he also added a word of caution.

“When you take an aggressive stance like that, it helps to have a dialogue from a position of strength. But it could backfire, as well, and lead to a dilemma for the country because the Afghan government can retaliate,” he added.

Yousafzai said one way that the Afghan government could show its ability to hit back was by allowing the Pakistan Taliban a freer reign in the border areas.

“There is a lot of resentment within Afghanistan for what Pakistan did, and they are unhappy with the situation so this could have consequences,” he said.

Shah said Pakistan does have some leverage on Afghanistan: Pakistan is landlocked Afghanistan’s biggest trading partner. Pakistan has also long hosted millions of Afghan refugees. Many Afghans also travel to Pakistan to access health facilities.

Last year, following the surge in violence, Pakistan launched a drive to push Afghan refugees living in the country back to Afghanistan, citing security concerns.

The move was denounced, both domestically and globally, but more than half a million Afghans had been deported as of December 2023.

But if Pakistan uses any of those levers of influence, it is likely to end up even more unpopular in Afghanistan.

“There are strong anti-Pakistan sentiments in Afghanistan, and vice versa, and all of this isn’t going to help in the long-term for either of the two,” Yousafzai said.

Pakistan Interior Minister Urges New Laws For Online Speech (Agence France-Presse)

Agence France-Presse [3/19/2024 8:00 AM, Shrouq Tariq, 163K, Negative]
Pakistan’s new interior minister said Tuesday the country needed better laws to regulate internet free speech, as disruption of social media platform X stretched into its fifth week.

Islamabad has declined to clearly say whether it is behind nationwide restrictions to the platform, formerly known as Twitter, which have left it rarely accessible since February 17.

Pakistan’s polls earlier that month were marred by allegations of rigging, and the outages began after a senior government official made a public admission of vote tampering.

"We need to make better laws," Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi said when asked whether his ministry was responsible for the X shutdown.

"Expression is fine, but making false allegations against people is wrong -- it’s happening and needs to be fixed."

"We must reassess our own laws and look into what is being misused," he told reporters in remarks broadcast on state TV.

X, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok were key planks in the election campaigning of jailed ex-prime minister and popular opposition leader Imran Khan.

The former cricket star was barred from running and his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party was subject to a sweeping crackdown of arrests and censorship ahead of February 8 polls.

Most of their campaigning moved online, where it was shut down by numerous social media blackouts which Islamabad blamed on technical glitches.

Rigging claims were also fuelled by a nationwide mobile internet shutdown on polling day, which the caretaker government said was required for security reasons after twin bombings killed 28 a day earlier.

X remained unavailable to AFP reporters in Islamabad, Peshawar and Lahore on Tuesday afternoon -- but the site has been momentarily accessible at times over the past five weeks.

"The problem is there is no transparency by the government," said Sadaf Khan, an analyst for Pakistani campaign group Media Matters for Democracy.

"Twitter is being banned specifically because it has emerged as a platform where political disclosure takes place," she told AFP.

Information minister Attaullah Tarar has given mixed signals over disruption, telling one local media outlet it "is working" and another that it was "already banned" when the new government came to power.

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif -- who secured the office through a shaky coalition after Khan’s candidates defied expectations to secure more seats than any other party -- has frequently published statements on X.

On Monday, he used the platform to congratulate Russian President Vladimir Putin for his re-election in a poll slammed by independent observers and the West as the most corrupt in post-Soviet history.

Explosion in Pakistan coal mine kills 12 miners (Reuters)

Reuters [3/20/2024 2:43 AM, Saleem Ahmed, 5.2M, Negative]
Twelve miners were killed and eight rescued after an explosion in a coal mine in south-western Pakistan, officials said on Wednesday.

"The rescue operation has been just completed," said Balochistan province’s chief inspector of mines, Abdul Ghani Baloch, on Wednesday morning. He said that 20 miners had been inside the mine when a methane gas explosion took place overnight.

He added that rescue teams recovered 12 bodies while the survivors had been taken to hospital.

Coal deposits are found in the western areas of Pakistan that sit near the Afghan border and mine accidents are common, mainly due to gas build-ups.

Mine workers have complained that a lack of safety gear and poor working conditions are the key causes of frequent accidents, labour union officials have said in the past.

India

Ukraine’s foreign minister to visit India next week, sources say (Reuters)

Reuters [3/20/2024 2:49 AM, Krishn Kaushik, 5.2M, Neutral]
Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, will visit India next week as Kyiv looks to build support for its peace plan, two Indian officials aware of the matter said, the first visit by a top Ukrainian leader since Russia’s invasion over two years ago.

New Delhi, which has traditionally had close economic and defence ties with Moscow, has so far refused to criticise Russia for the February 2022 invasion, instead stepping up purchases of Russian oil to record levels.

Kuleba’s visit comes at the invitation of his Indian counterpart, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, after a telephone call between the leaders of the two nations at the beginning of the year, said one of the officials.

Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity.

Ukraine’s peace plan, as presented by President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, calls for removing all Russian troops, restoring Ukraine’s 1991 post-Soviet borders and a process to make Russia accountable for its actions.

Apart from talks with Indian officials, Kuleba is also set to "review the India-Ukraine inter-governmental commission", one of the officials said, referring to a panel charged with keeping up the two nations’ economic, cultural and technological ties.

India’s foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

One of the officials said a formal announcement of the visit was expected next week. Indian media first reported it on Tuesday.

Ukraine has also pitched for New Delhi to help rebuild its war-ravaged economy, inviting investment from Indian companies at a January business summit in India.

Kuleba’s visit will come about two weeks after Andriy Yermak, the head of the Ukraine president’s office, spoke to India’s National Security Adviser Ajit Doval on March 15.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has spoken several times to the leaders of both combatants, having met Zelenskiy in May on the sidelines of a G7 summit in Hiroshima.

India has insisted on the need for both sides to talk, with Modi telling Russian President Vladimir Putin during a meeting in September 2022 that this is not an era of war.

The Indian Opposition Leaders Challenging Modi in Elections (Bloomberg)

Bloomberg [3/19/2024 10:30 PM, Swati Gupta, 5543K, Neutral]
India’s opposition alliance, launched with much fanfare last year, is heading into next month’s election on the backfoot, struggling to mount a successful challenge against Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Known by its acronym I.N.D.I.A. — or Indian National Development Inclusive Alliance — the coalition of more than 20 parties has been beset by defections to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party and disagreements over seat sharing. Losses by the Indian National Congress, the biggest party in the alliance, in state elections in December have also cast doubt over its ability to win voters.

Modi is predicting he’ll return to power for a third term in the elections due to kick off on April 19, saying his party and allies will sweep the vote with more than 400 of the 543 parliamentary seats being contested. His popularity has been fueled by a combination of economic progress and Hindu nationalist policies, which resonate in a country where about 80% of the population identify as Hindu.

To counter this, the alliance is focusing its message on India’s unemployment, especially among young people, crony capitalism and corruption.

Here’s a look at some of the key opposition leaders seeking to make a dent into Modi’s popularity.

Rahul Gandhi, 53

A descendant of three generations of prime ministers, Gandhi has been waiting for a decade now to take the top job. He has run against Modi twice in national elections, and lost. He resigned as party president after the Congress’s routing in the 2019 poll. Critics have questioned his leadership abilities, while he’s often portrayed by Modi and the BJP as being out of touch with voters.

Still, the Gandhi name has currency. Opposition parties rallied around him after he was sentenced to jail for making defamatory remarks about the prime minister’s name in 2019. The Supreme Court later suspended his conviction.

Gandhi has tried to change his image in the run up to the elections by making direct appeals to voters. In late 2022, he marched from the southern tip of India right up to Kashmir in the north in a journey spanning 137 days. The effort paid off with the Congress party scoring a victory in state elections in Karnataka in May 2023.

On Sunday, Gandhi ended a 65-day trek across 15 states from the east to the west of the country.

Mallikarjun Kharge, 81

The first non-Gandhi to become president of the Congress party in more than two decades, Kharge was selected in 2022 to the top post. He has been leading talks with regional parties to strengthen the opposition alliance and is now being viewed as a possible prime minister candidate.

Kharge is a member of India’s lowest caste, the Dalits. He started his political career as a student union leader in Karnataka before moving on to become a Congress party lawmaker and government minister. Given his age, though, it’s unclear whether he would play a major role in the party after the elections.

Mamata Banerjee, 69

Banerjee is the only woman governing a state in India and as a national opposition leader, she has rarely shied away from public rows with Modi. In the latest dispute after the enactment of a controversial citizenship law, which discriminates against Muslim immigrants, Banerjee said her government will oppose it.

She has also been a vocal critic of other opposition parties, particularly the Congress. Banerjee started her political career with the party in the 1990s and left to start her own group known as the All India Trinamool Congress Party.

In 2011, she pulled off a landslide victory in West Bengal and is now serving her third consecutive term as chief minister. She was one of the main leaders behind the opposition alliance but has since stepped back, saying her party won’t share any seats with the Congress in her West Bengal stronghold.

Akhilesh Yadav, 50

Yadav was India’s youngest chief minister at one point, governing the most populous and politically significant state of Uttar Pradesh. In the past two elections, he’s posed the biggest threat to the BJP in the state, the heartland of India’s Hindi-speaking belt.

With a population of 200 million people, Uttar Pradesh sends 80 lawmakers to the national parliament. The BJP has consolidated its support there under Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, a former monk turned politician. In January, Modi opened a controversial Hindu temple on the site of a destroyed 16th century mosque in the state, fulfilling a long-held promise of the party.

Unlike other regional leaders, Yadav and his Samajwadi Party have agreed with the Congress on seat-sharing allocations. Yadav’s party will contest 63 seats in Uttar Pradesh with the Congress targeting the remaining 17. If he’s able to win a substantial number of seats, Yadav will be seen as a major player in the alliance.

M.K. Stalin, 71

The politician’s father named him after the Russian dictator Joseph Stalin, who died four days after he was born. Leader of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, or DMK, Stalin was elected chief minister in Tamil Nadu in the south in 2021. An atheist, Stalin stands out among political leaders in India who often use religious identity politics to build support.

The DMK prides itself on being a secular party. It faces an energized BJP attempting to make inroads in Tamil Nadu with a Hindu nationalist agenda. In 2019, the BJP failed to win any of the 39 parliament seats from the state.

Tamil Nadu is one of the richest states on a per-capita income basis, and among the biggest contributors of consumption taxes collected by the federal government. However, Tamil Nadu, as well as other opposition-controlled southern states, have complained that they’re not receiving a fair share of their revenue contribution.

Pinarayi Vijayan, 78

Voters in the southern state of Kerala have oftern switched between the Congress party and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) every five years. A stalwart of the latter, Vijayan though won a second term as chief minister — due in part to his development programs and his ability to act swiftly in times of crisis, be it the pandemic or cyclones.

Kerala is economically strong, with a population that’s the most literate in the country. The BJP’s Hindu-first strategy has failed to resonate with voters there. While Vijayan’s Kerala unit hasn’t joined the alliance, he’s been a vocal critic of the government’s dealings with the southern states.

India’s Modi shows confidence about elections; asks ministries for 5-year goals (Reuters)

Reuters [3/20/2024 4:08 AM, Sarita Chaganti Singh, 5.2M, Neutral]
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has asked all ministries to propose annual goals for their departments for the next five years, according to a government document, underlining his confidence of winning a general election starting next month.

The document listing the instructions from Modi to government bureaucrats, which was reviewed by Reuters, was sent earlier this month, just before the Election Commission announced dates for the voting.

Opinion polls predict an easy win for him and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), with the opposition led by the Congress party struggling to present a united front to take on Modi’s immense popularity. The tenure of the new government will last five years.

The March 11 document says Modi asked all departments to prepare five-year action plans as part of his goal to lift India to a fully developed country by 2047 from middle-income levels. A 100-day plan for the next government will flow from that, it said.

The prime minister’s office and spokespeople for the government did not respond to requests for comment.

The thrust areas include agriculture and the rural economy, and employment and labour, according to the document.

According to another government document from October and seen by Reuters, the plans on agriculture and the rural economy include developing cold chain logistics, infrastructure for organic farming and exports and collective large‐scale farming by 2030. It also calls for more private sector participation.

The aim is to "transform the rural economy via an increase in agri productivity and employment diversification in non‐agri sectors", it said.

One of the major failures of Modi’s current term is his missed goal of doubling farm incomes by 2022. Farmers’ groups recently hit the streets seeking guaranteed higher prices for their produce.

On jobs, the target is to reduce unemployment to less than 5% from around 8%.

In the March document, Modi has also asked officials to interact with industry bodies as well as consider adding themes on how India can become a developed country in the curriculum for schools and colleges.

He has also ordered 100% school enrolment and vaccination for children, although the document does not give a clear timeline for that. India’s current literacy rate is 77.75% and children immunisation is about 90%.

"The country can move at a pace faster than we imagine," he was quoted as saying. "This vision is an example of coming out of silos."

India’s Adani Green says aware of US probe into third party, denies relationship (Reuters)

Reuters [3/19/2024 6:38 AM, Chris Thomas and Varun Vyas, 5239K, Neutral]
India’s Adani Green Energy (ADNA.NS), opens new tab said on Tuesday it is aware of a U.S. investigation into potential violations of anti-corruption laws by a "third party", but denied any relationship with the entity.

Adani’s comment comes days after Bloomberg News reported that U.S. investigators were probing whether an Adani entity or individuals linked to the company, including founder Gautam Adani, were involved in paying officials in India for favourable treatment on an energy project.

In a statement filed with exchanges, Adani Green said it has no relationship with the third party and is "thus unable to comment" on the scope of the U.S investigation into the alleged dealings.

It also said it had not received any notice from the U.S. Department of Justice in respect of the allegations in the report.

Adani did not reply to Reuters’ request for additional details on the third party.

The Bloomberg report said the United States was also looking at Indian renewable energy company Azure Power Global. Azure Power Global also did not respond to Reuters’ request for comment.

In separate statements, Adani Wilmar (ADAW.NS), opens new tab, Adani Enterprises (ADEL.NS), opens new tab, Adani Ports (APSE.NS), opens new tab, Adani Power (ADAN.NS), opens new tab and Adani Energy Solutions (ADAI.NS), opens new tab said the report was "false".

In a note, JP Morgan analysts stood pat on their recommendations on the Adani Group, saying it would likely face limited financial or fundamental impact from the investigation.

Shares of Adani Green closed 2.6% lower in a broadly weak domestic equity market.

India stares at summer water crisis as reservoir levels slide (Reuters)

Reuters [3/19/2024 7:19 AM, Staff, 11975K, Negative]
India’s main reservoirs have hit their lowest March levels in five years, government data showed, indicating a possible squeeze on drinking water and power availability this summer.

In major centres such as India’s ‘Silicon Valley’ Bengaluru, home to firms like Google (GOOGL.O), opens new tab, water supply is already being curtailed.

The 150 reservoirs monitored by the federal government -which supply water for drinking and irrigation and are the country’s key source of hydro-electricity - were filled to just 40% of capacity last week, government data showed.

In the southern state of Karnataka, home to Bengaluru, the main reservoir was down to 16% capacity.

Water reserves are the lowest for March since 2019, when reservoir capacity fell to 35% and saw southern cities such as Chennai run out of water.

The situation could escalate the crisis in central and southern cities which face extreme heatwaves in April and May. India’s water resources get replenished only around June with pre-monsoon and monsoon rains.

In other industrial states such as Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and agricultural states Uttar Pradesh and Punjab levels are below their 10-year averages.

Longer term, there is a risk of water wars if governments do not act now, said Sandeep Anirudhan, convener of the Coalition for Water Security.

The low water levels follow a monsoon season last year that saw the lightest rains since 2018, after the El Nino weather pattern made last August the driest in more than a century. The monsoon was also uneven, with some areas receiving more rain than others.

A senior official in the federal power ministry said the ministry is monitoring reservoir levels but does not yet anticipate a situation that could lead to a shutdown of plants.

"If the situation becomes worse due to lack of rains, drinking water supply will get priority over power generation," he said.

The federal water resources ministry and the water commission did not respond to e-mailed requests for immediate comment.

India’s hydro generation in the 10 months from the beginning of the current financial year which began last April is down 17% despite strong electricity demand.

Hydropower generation in Asia has plunged at the fastest rate in decades amid sharp declines in China and India.

Pirate ship capture showcases India’s world-class special forces, analysts say (CNN)

CNN [3/19/2024 8:53 PM, Brad Lendon, 225K, Neutral]
The Indian Navy’s rescue of a commercial ship from pirates off Somalia’s coast last weekend shows how Delhi’s military has developed special forces capabilities on par with some of the world’s best, analysts say.

The navy rescued 17 crew members of the vessel MV Ruen during an anti-piracy operation lasting nearly two days, according to an Indian Navy news release, with no casualties reported. Dozens of pirates were taken into custody, it said.

The operation involved a navy destroyer, a patrol ship, an Indian Air Force C-17 transporter flying more than 1,500 miles to airdrop marine commandos, a naval drone, a reconnaissance drone and a P-8 surveillance jet, the release said.

“The success of the operation marks the Indian Navy as a top-class force in terms of training, command and control and other capabilities,” said John Bradford, Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs fellow.

“What marks this operation as impressive is how risk was minimized by using a coordinated force that includes use of a warship, drones, fixed- and rotary-wing aircraft, and marine commandos.”

Experts fear the volatile security situation in the Red Sea due to attacks by Yemen-based Houthi rebels on commercial shipping may tie up international forces and provide a window for Somali pirates in the nearby Horn of Africa – presenting a multi-billion-dollar threat to the global economy.

Yemen and Somalia are among the region’s poorest nations, both ravaged by years of civil war.

Somali pirates’ capture of the MV Ruen in December last year marked the first successful hijacking of a vessel off the country’s coast since 2017.

Spanish, Japanese and Indian warships tracked the Malta-flagged, Bulgarian-managed bulk carrier as it was taken into Somali territorial waters, according to a December report from the European Union Naval Force.

But when the Ruen, now operated by a pirate crew, last week left Somali waters with the intent of committing acts of piracy on the high seas, the Indian Navy made moves to intercept it, according to a navy statement posted on social platform X.

The destroyer INS Kolkata, operating in the area to help ensure international maritime security, used a ship-launched drone to confirm the Ruen was being operated by armed pirates, the Indian statement said.

After the pirates fired on the drone, destroying it, and then on the Indian warship itself, the Kolkata responded by firing on the Ruen, disabling its steering and navigation, the statement said.

As the Kolkata sought the surrender of the pirates, the commandos parachuted in after a 10-hour flight from India, the air force said on X. Rafts were also dropped into the ocean from the large transport for marines to reach the Ruen.

The Indian show of force proved too much for the pirates.

“Due to sustained pressure and calibrated actions by the Indian Navy over the last 40 hours, all 35 Somali pirates surrendered,” the navy statement said.

Bulgarian leaders, including President Rumen Radev, thanked India and its Prime Minister Narendra Modi for the operation.

“My sincere gratitude to (Modi) for the brave action of (the) Navy rescuing the hijacked Bulgarian ship ‘Ruen’ and its crew, including 7 Bulgarian citizens,” Radev posted on X.

Analyst Carl Schuster, a former US Navy captain, said the incident highlighted the professionalism of the Indian Navy and said Delhi’s marine commando force, known as MARCOS, had learned from its US and British counterparts.

“The Indian Navy itself is a highly trained and disciplined professional force,” Schuster said.

“MARCOS’ nearly eight months of training is modeled after Britain’s SAS. Despite a very intense selection process, only about 10% to 15% of those who enter the training graduate,” he said.

The analysts noted that the Indian Navy is experienced in anti-piracy operations, going back more than 20 years – and the restive security situation in one of the world’s major shipping lanes meant they were likely to be called on again.

In a January media briefing, an Indian Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson said maritime security in the region is a priority for India.

“The ongoing activities there are indeed a matter of concern, and it affects our economic interests,” official spokesperson Shri Randhir Jaiswal said.

“We are consistently monitoring the situation. Our naval forces, naval vessels are engaged in ensuring the safety of our commercial vessels,” Jaiswal said.

Why India continues to support Putin as Modi congratulates him for sham election victory (The Independent)

The Independent [3/19/2024 7:34 AM, Alisha Rahaman Sarkar, 3055K, Neutral]
Narendra Modi has joined the handful of foreign leaders to congratulate Vladimir Putin on his victory in Russia’s sham presidential election, a sign of the two countries’ warm ties despite Moscow’s global isolation following its invasion of Ukraine.

The 71-year-old ex-KGB spy won by a landslide in Russia’s presidential elections, where his only opponents refused to publicly criticise him, getting 87 per cent of the vote and cementing his grip on the country for the next six years.

Western democracies have severely criticised the three-day-long elections as neither free nor fair due to mass censorship and the persecution of any genuine opposition to Mr Putin’s regime. Meanwhile Russia’s closest allies – a small club including China, North Korea and Iran – have rushed to congratulate Mr Putin on winning a fifth term in power.

India describes itself as non-aligned to this East-West axis, and its decades-long strategic ties to Russia have only continued to flourish since the start of the Ukraine war, while the Modi government has also pursued new defence and trade links with the US and European nations.

"Warm congratulations to H.E. Mr. Vladimir Putin on his re-election as the President of the Russian Federation," the Indian prime minister wrote on X.

“Look forward to working together to further strengthen the time-tested Special & Privileged Strategic Partnership between India and Russia in the years to come,” he added.

Cultural ties between India and Russia go back many generations, and in more recent decades the two countries have worked closely on defence, nuclear and space collaboration.

India, a major recipient of Russian military hardware, dramatically expanded its purchases of Russian crude oil after Western nations brought sanctions and a price cap in response to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

India became the world’s leading importer of Russian crude oil last year, according to Kpler market data analysed by The Independent, importing an average 1.75 million barrels per day at a 140 per cent increase in 2022.

The importance of India’s continued investment has not been lost on the Kremlin, which has repeatedly praised India for resisting international pressure to reduce or severe ties.

"India pursues an independent foreign policy, which is not easy in the modern world. But India, with a population of one and a half billion, has the right to this," Mr Putin said in January. "We have very good relationships with India, and our faith in India is demonstrated by the fact that Moscow is New Delhi’s greatest foreign investor," he added.

A month earlier, Mr Putin hosted the Indian foreign minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar at the Kremlin in December 2023. During the meeting, Mr Putin said: “Everything is in your hands and I can say that we are successful because of your direct support.”

Meanwhile, China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey and North Korea joined India in congratulating the Russian president.

"We firmly believe that under the strategic guidance of president Xi Jinping and president Putin, China-Russia relations will continue to move forward," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian told reporters.

"China and Russia are each other’s largest neighbours and comprehensive strategic partners in the new era," he said.

India and China, along with Russia, are members of the BRICS group of emerging economies that aims to challenge US domination of the global economy.

Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman offered his congratulations on Mr Putin’s "decisive" victory and the Kremlin said the two men expressed readiness on the telephone to pursue their "effective coordination" in the OPEC+ oil producers group.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and Iran’s president Ebrahim Raisi, both accused by the West of supplying weapons to Russia, stressed their desire for further expansion of bilateral relations with Moscow in Mr Putin’s fifth term.

NSB

India-friendly Bhutan walks tightrope as it seeks to end border row with ‘aggressive China’ (South China Morning Post)

South China Morning Post [3/19/2024 6:00 PM, Junaid Kathju, 951K, Neutral]
Bhutanese Prime Minister Tshering Tobgay’s recent visit to India, taking place amid ongoing border negotiations with China, underscores the kingdom’s careful diplomatic strategy aimed at strengthening its ties with New Delhi without provoking Beijing, analysts have said.

Bhutan and China have been engaged in long-running talks to resolve their border dispute, a matter of strategic interest to India given its implications for regional security.

According to Aditya Gowdara Shivamurthy, an associate fellow with Observer Research Foundation’s Strategic Studies Programme, Bhutan was currently at a “crossroads”.

“On one hand, Bhutan is trying to demarcate its borders with its aggressive northern neighbour China,” Shivamurthy said. “On the other hand, it is facing an economic crisis and mass migration, and needs India’s support and collaboration more than any other time in the past.”

India has two significant tri-junction points involving Bhutan and China. One is in the west, which includes Doklam, and the other is in the east, marking the eastern terminus of the McMahon Line that Delhi uses to define the Sino-Indian border.

China’s increasing presence and influence in Bhutan could pose a threat to India’s security interests.

India and China had a military stand-off at Doklam in 2017, when the Indian Army intervened to halt the construction of a road by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in the contested area.

Bhutan and China also have competing claims over the area, with the former asserting that Doklam is part of its territory and Beijing claiming it as part of its Donglang region. The stand-off lasted for some two months and ended in August 2017 after diplomatic talks between the three countries. China stopped road construction and India withdrew its troops. Satellite imagery, however, has revealed ongoing Chinese construction of military infrastructure in the region.

Shivamurthy, who focuses on broader strategic and security related-developments throughout the South Asian region, said Bhutan was keen to bring its dispute with China to an end.

“Bhutan has to close its disputes, there’s no option B and India knows it. In fact, India has been consistently informed about the progress made in the negotiations,” he said.

In 2021, Bhutan and China signed an agreement to expedite boundary talks with a “three-stage road map”. By October last year, after the 25th round of talks, they agreed on guidelines for a joint technical team to delimit and demarcate the boundary.

Shivamurthy said these talks had also been aimed at soothing India’s concerns. “The negotiations with China will go on. That won’t change. Bhutan cannot ignore there is a military and economic power to its north. But it is trying to assure that Indian interests are respected,” he said.

Strategic location

As a small state squeezed between two large powers, Bhutan has a geopolitically strategic role in the region.

Analyst Amit Ranjan noted that Modi’s first foreign visit after becoming prime minister in 2014 was to Bhutan.

“That was a master stroke. [Modi] began his foreign visits with a smaller South Asian country, which demonstrated India’s strategic priorities,” said Ranjan, a research fellow at the Institute of South Asian Studies, an autonomous research institute at the National University of Singapore.

On December 13, Bhutan officially left the least developed countries (LDCs) category established by the UN General Assembly in 1971.

As Bhutan transitions from a LDC and enters the World Trade Organization, it would require investment and capital to fuel further growth, making its relationship with India all the more significant, Ranjan said.

“So, it will be a test for the Bhutanese leadership, of how they are going to deal with India and how much they are ready to engage with China,” he said.

On March 13, the Indian cabinet approved two agreements with Bhutan on energy efficiency and conservation measures.

Bhutan and India have a strong economic partnership, especially when it comes to hydropower. India is Bhutan’s largest trading partner, largest source of foreign investment and largest importer of its surplus electricity, which makes up about 40 per cent of Bhutan’s revenue.

India contributed 45 billion rupees (US$542 million) to Bhutan’s 12th Five Year Plan, which ended in October 2023, and it has committed to stepping up its assistance in the next blueprint.

The kingdom is seeking to build the “Gelephu Mindfulness City”, 1,000 sq km green economic zone bordering India’s Assam state that is aimed at creating infrastructure and jobs.

Ranjan said India needed to maintain tight relations with Bhutan, considering its less-than-favourable relations with some of its immediate neighbours.

“[India doesn’t] have good ties with Afghanistan. With Pakistan, the relationship is at its lowest point in the past 75 years. In Bangladesh, there is a simmering anti-India campaign. So, India wants Bhutan to remain in its good books and not fall into China’s lap,” he said.

Bhutan is the only country in India’s neighbourhood that has not officially joined China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

According to Indian media reports, the government has proposed to build a motorable road connecting Arunachal Pradesh and Assam through Bhutan. But Thimphu is reportedly not enthusiastic about the proposal until its border with China is demarcated.

Ranjan said that while Bhutan might initially resist the plan due to its discussions with China, it would eventually need to prioritise ease of business with India.

Meanwhile, Modi’s coming visit to Bhutan would be watched closely by China, Ranjan said.

“India is concerned about Doklam. They don’t want Chinese presence at the tri-junction border, which may cut the ‘chicken-neck’ corridor,” he said, referring to a stretch of land that connects India’s northeastern states to the rest of the country. “And I am sure that Modi on his visit to Bhutan will talk about it with the Bhutanese.”

In 1949, India and Bhutan signed the Indo-Bhutan Treaty of Peace and Friendship, which gave Delhi significant control over Thimphu’s foreign policy and defence in exchange for security guarantees and economic support. Though revised in 2007 to grant Bhutan more autonomy, India still plays a major role in Bhutan’s external affairs.

Nitasha Kaul, an international relations professor at the University of Westminster who specialises in Bhutan, said while the country faced limitations given its dealings with China on diplomatic and border issues, it was cautiously advancing its democratic consolidation and international engagement, given its strong economic ties with India.

“Bhutan’s relationship with China is not hostile but amicable, and it is rooted in the understanding of its long-term and multidimensional orientation towards India,” she said.

“Bhutan’s main aim has been to keep its own domestic politics coherent with its national interest, and avoid the splintering of its political sphere into pro-India and pro-China voices,” Kaul said, adding that during the Doklam dispute, Bhutan made strategic use of silence to avert confrontation with either power.

Kaul said the main threat to the Himalayan region in contemporary times was posed by India-China hostilities, and the Doklam incident very nearly escalated into war.

“Bhutan’s careful diplomatic navigation of the stand-off was a crucial contribution to averting it, thereby illustrating that small states can play a role in war not being a fait accompli on a volatile frontier.”

Pavan K Verma, a former Indian ambassador to Bhutan, said ties between the neighbours were deeply interwoven, and the kingdom consistently consulted India before entering any discussions with China.

“Talks with China on border issues have been going on for many years. China has unresolved border issues with Bhutan and India. And they (Bhutan and India) always consult with each other how to proceed with these negotiations with China, so that they are not only fair but of strategic relevance to both countries,” he said.

China, India Compete for Influence in Indian Ocean (VOA)

VOA [3/19/2024 10:19 AM, William Yang, 761K, Positive]
China has increased efforts to deepen security ties with countries in the Indian Ocean in recent weeks, signing a new security agreement with the Maldives and sending a military delegation to three regional countries earlier this month.

On March 4, the Maldives’ Ministry of Defense announced that the country had signed a military assistance agreement with China that aims to “foster stronger bilateral ties.” The ministry didn’t elaborate on the details of the agreement.

China’s Ministry of National Defense also sent a military delegation on a 10-day visit to the Maldives, Sri Lanka, and Nepal earlier this month.

According to the ministry, the delegation met with Maldivian President Mohamed Muizzu and defense officials from all three countries to discuss “regional security issues of common concerns,” develop bilateral military ties, and promote bilateral defense cooperation.

These developments come as India begins to withdraw around 80 security personnel stationed in the Maldives at Muizzu’s request. The Indian security personnel were deployed to the archipelago to operate helicopters and other aircraft for surveillance or rescue missions.

It also follows the visit of a Chinese research ship to the Maldives last month. Chinese research vessels’ increased activities in the Indian Ocean over the last few months have sparked security concerns in India, which worries that Beijing could deploy naval vessels to the region based on insights gained from these activities.

Some analysts say recent developments in the Indian Ocean are part of China’s long-term efforts to increase its regional security presence. “China has been doing so for about 15 years, and it’s been taking an opportunistic approach to [increase its security presence] in the Indian Ocean,” David Brewster, a senior research fellow at the Australian National University, told VOA by phone.

Instead of focusing on cultivating security ties with one specific country, Brewster said China often waits for opportunities to “enhance its position” in certain countries in the Indian Ocean region.

In the case of the Maldives, China “is taking advantage of the fact that the new [Maldives] government under Muizzu came into power last November having taken advantage of the ‘India Out’ feelings among many people in the country,” he said.

Responding to inquiries about the withdrawal of Indian security personnel from Maldives, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said on March 12 that China “supports the Maldives in safeguarding its territorial sovereignty and carrying out friendly cooperation with all sides on the basis of independence.”

While the Maldives has increased its exchanges with China under the new government, Brewster said it’s unclear how substantial the relationship can be. “The first steps of military cooperation [between China and the Maldives] is fairly modest and it’s not clear how the bilateral security relationship is going to develop,” he told VOA.

Even so, some experts say India will be concerned about China’s growing security presence in the Indian Ocean and will try to counter Beijing’s attempts by expanding its presence or strengthening exchanges with neighboring countries.

“If you have a country of China’s size, resources, and capabilities making a presence in the Indian Ocean and South Asia, India’s options get constrained,” said Harsh Pant, Vice President of Studies and Foreign Policy at the Observer Research Foundation in India.

India has adopted some measures to strengthen its presence and safeguard its interests in the strategically important region, with 80% of global maritime shipments passing through the waters.

Earlier this month, India unveiled a plan to build a new naval base on Minicoy, which is the southernmost island in India’s Lakshadweep archipelago and is close to the Maldives. Pant said New Delhi is also building new facilities in other regional countries such as Mauritius.

“India has its approach to managing the security transformation in the region,” he told VOA by phone, adding that the efforts include delivering projects in neighboring countries, enhancing India’s capabilities for maritime domain awareness, and leveraging its partnership with like-minded democracies such as the U.S. and Japan.

Brewster in Australia said recent developments are part of the constant jostling for influence between Beijing and New Delhi.

“In any given island country [in the region,] it’s a bit of a pendulum that swings back and forth between Indian and Chinese influence,” he told VOA, adding that domestic political changes in regional countries can often create conditions that favor either China or India.

Some analysts say the region will become another area of fierce geopolitical competition between major powers.

“China may try to establish more naval bases, tactical air support or logistics reinforcement in the Indian Ocean region over the next decade,” Srikanth Kondapalli, a professor of China studies at India’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, told VOA by phone.

Kondapalli thinks India and its allies may increase the number of naval vessels in the Indian Ocean and “cobble up” some naval arrangements with regional countries. “We would probably see some low-level skirmish and contestation in the Indian Ocean region in the future,” he said.

China forges defense ties with India neighbors Maldives, Sri Lanka (Nikkei Asia)

Nikkei Asia [3/19/2024 12:41 PM, Yukio Tajima and Satoshi Iwaki, 293K, Neutral]
China’s military is pursuing closer cooperation with the Maldives, Sri Lanka and Nepal, all countries that border India, in a bid to strengthen its position amid an ongoing territorial dispute with New Delhi.

A delegation from the Chinese military this month met with Maldivian President Mohamed Muizzu and held talks with defense representatives from all three countries, according to China’s Ministry of National Defense. In addition to bilateral cooperation, the discussions covered shared regional security concerns.

The Maldives, Nepal and Sri Lanka are geopolitically important to Beijing, which is wary of India’s growing military strength as well as its recent moves toward closer security cooperation with the U.S. and Japan.

Relations with the Maldives, an island nation in the Indian Ocean, have grown especially quickly. The country’s Defense Ministry said March 4 that it had "signed an agreement on China’s provision of military assistance gratis to the Republic of Maldives, fostering stronger bilateral ties."

At the same time, the Maldivian government has demanded the withdrawal of Indian troops stationed in the country for disaster relief and other purposes, aiming for a full pullout by May 10. Muizzu, who won the presidency on a platform seen as anti-India, picked China as the destination for his first state visit after taking office in November.

Nepal is also friendly with China. Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal, who assumed the post in 2022, belongs to the pro-China Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist Centre).

Kathmandu has participated in China’s Belt and Road initiative to build infrastructure in the country. The Nepalese economy has grown even more reliant on China after the COVID-19 pandemic dealt a heavy blow to its tourism sector.

Nepal officially maintains a nonaligned foreign policy, and has long received economic support from India. But it has tilted markedly closer to China in recent years.

Sri Lanka defaulted on its debt in 2022 as its tourism industry foundered. China is the country’s biggest creditor, accounting for $4.7 billion of its $37.3 billion in outstanding debt at the end of 2023.

The 2017 deal granting China a 99-year lease to the Hambantota port project after Sri Lanka fell behind on debt payments has been cited as an example of a "debt trap."

Relations between China and India have remained strained since a June 2020 military clash over disputed territory in the Himalayan region of Ladakh. Their leaders came face to face last August at the BRICS summit with Brazil, Russia and South Africa, but did little more than talk on the sidelines.

New Delhi has been broadening its efforts to check Beijing as well. Last year, it reached deals with the U.S. to buy drones and jointly produce fighter jet engines in India.

India is also open to security cooperation with Japan. External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar told Nikkei in an interview this month that New Delhi and Tokyo should step up cooperation on defense technology transfers and joint development.

Central Asia

Kazakhstan: Ex-police officers convicted for Bloody January torture (EurasiaNet)

EurasiaNet [3/19/2024 4:14 PM, Staff, 57.6K, Neutral]
A court in Kazakhstan has convicted three former police officers on charges of committing acts of torture in the wake of the political unrest that roiled the country in early January 2022.

The Zhetysu regional prosecutor’s office said in a statement that the court proceedings that ended in the city of Taldykorgan on March 18 saw three defendants sentenced to prison terms ranging from four to six years. A fourth defendant received a non-custodial sentence.

The ex-policemen have also been stripped of their ranks and barred from any future employment in the civil service.

This case stemmed from a broader investigation led by prosecutors into the conduct of the police during and after a nationwide surge of turbulent public discontent that has come to be known as Bloody January.

One of the alleged victims of the officers on trial was Azamat Batyrbayev, who is reputed to have been responsible for pulling down a statue of former President Nursultan Nazarbayev in Taldykorgan. Images of the toppled statue became emblematic of the general rage against the corrupt cronyism that prevailed under Nazarbayev, who resigned in 2019 but retained considerable power while in retirement.

Investigators determined that the Almaty region police officers in the dock had employed “prohibited investigative methods” – a euphemism for the use of physical violence against detainees. Prosecutors argued that this abuse had led to seven individuals sustaining injuries of varying severity.

This was one of a trickle of similar cases that have been tried in Kazakhstan over the past year or so.

In June, the General Prosecutor’s Office announced that 39 law enforcement officers were behind bars at that time on suspicion of “using unauthorized investigative methods against 88 citizens.” At the start of this year, prosecutors said in response to a query filed by news website Vlast that 12 criminal cases involving 42 Interior Ministry and National Security Committee, or KNB, employees had been passed on to the courts for further processing. That number did not appear to include the four officers convicted this week.

Rights activists have charged that the authorities are severely undercounting the number of law enforcement officials responsible for acts of torture.

In another relatively recent trial, seven former KNB employees were sentenced to prison terms ranging from three to five years in December for torturing people detained during the January 2022 events. Three other KNB staff received suspended sentences, and one was acquitted.

A lawyer acting for the victims argued that the punishment was insufficiently severe.

Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan Agree to Install Transboundary Water Meters (The Diplomat)

The Diplomat [3/19/2024 11:51 AM, Catherine Putz, 201K, Neutral]
Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan have agreed to install meters in each other’s territory to monitor water consumption and share data online with each other.

Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation announced the agreement on March 19, noting in a press release that Kazakhstan will install meters on Uzbek territory and Uzbekistan will install meters on Kazakh territory. The statement also said that talks are underway over where to install the meters and also with international organizations for assistance in the project.

Minister Nurzhan Nurzhigitov said, “The installation of meters will make it possible to monitor the volumes of water consumed by both countries online. Already in April, we plan to begin negotiations on the implementation of similar projects with our other neighbors.”

While water is often characterized as a potential spark for conflict in Central Asia, it is at the same time an opportunity for cooperation.

In late February, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan inaugurated two flow-monitoring stations on transboundary canals – the Great Fergana Canal and the Northern Fergana Canal – enabling real-time monitoring of water flows. The project was made possible by the Swiss government’s Blue Peace Central Asia Initiative, which it launched in 2017 to pursue a transboundary approach to managing Central Asia’s water resources. As Blue Peace notes, the majority of the region’s water resources are shared by two or more countries.

“In the absence of reliable water measurement systems,” Blue Peace noted in a project description, “it remains difficult to manage transboundary water resources and monitor compliance with water withdrawal limits.”

Take the Syr Darya: Originating in two headstreams – one in the Tian Shan Mountains in Kyrgyzstan and the other in eastern Uzbekistan – that meet in the Uzbek portion of the Fergana Valley, it flows more than 2,200 kilometers west through the northern Tajik city of Khujand and then across Uzbekistan and northwest into Kazakhstan where it empties, eventually, what little water is left into the North Aral Sea. Along the way, the river feeds the Toktogul reservoir in Kyrgyzstan, the Kayrakkum reservoir in Tajikistan, and the Shardara and Koksaray reservoirs in Kazakhstan – as well as feeding the Fergana Valley’s significant agricultural industry.

Given Kazakhstan’s downstream position, effective cooperation with upstream countries is necessary. Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation noted in its press release that “the agreement reached is important in the interests of our country, which geographically has less access to the sources of the rivers.”

In July 2023, Kazakh authorities announced their intention to amend agreements – adopted in 1998 – with Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan on the use of water and energy resources along the Syr Darya. Under these agreements, excess electricity generated by Kyrgyzstan’s hydropower plants in summertime is transferred to the other two, in exchange for energy resources (whether coal, gas, or other such supplies) in winter. As illustrated by Kyrgyzstan’s declaration of a three-year energy emergency on August 1, 2023, and worryingly low water levels at the Toktogul reservoir as spring approaches, there are valid concerns that the existing system cannot hold up in the face of climate change and growing consumption.

In its July 2023 announcement, Kazakhstan also complained about pollutants in the water flowing out of Uzbekistan, illustrating another difficult dynamic in the management of shared water resources.

At the time, Kazakhstan expressed hopes to sign an agreement with the government of Uzbekistan on joint management and use of transboundary water resources by December 2023. In late January 2024, Nurzhigitov, the Kazakh minister of water resources and irrigation, said that Astana still planned to sign such an agreement with Uzbekistan, as well as a separate agreement with China on transboundary rivers – but did not stipulate a timeline. The agreement on meter installation is nevertheless a signal of progress, as accurate and shared data about water flows will be critical in determining the more difficult matter of allocation.

In a November 2023 report, the Eurasian Development Bank noted that the countries of Central Asia “teeter on the brink of being categorized as ‘insufficiently supplied’ with water resources…” The report went on to conclude, “Water use issues require new mechanisms and tools for cooperation in transboundary river basins, primarily rooted in deeper economic integration among the region’s countries.”

Reporters Without Borders Welcomes Kyrgyz Decision To Stop Blocking Of Kloop Website (Radio Free Europe)

Radio Free Europe [3/19/2024 2:06 PM, Staff, 223K, Negative]
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has welcomed a decision by a court in Bishkek to cancel a move by Kyrgyzstan’s Culture Ministry to block the Russian-language website of the independent media outlet Kloop.

In its March 19 statement, RSF also urged Bishkek city prosecutor Emilbek Abdymanapov to drop liquidation proceedings against Kloop.

Kloop’s website in Russian will resume its operations if the Bishkek Administrative Court’s decision is not appealed or if a possible appeal is rejected by the Bishkek City Court.

The website was blocked in September 2023, and in November, Kloop’s Kyrgyz-language website was also blocked amid a government campaign to pressure the Kloop Media Public Foundation.

The Culture Ministry said it blocked the sites after the State Committee for National Security (UKMK) claimed the media outlet distributed false information.

The claim referred to a report that appeared on Kloop’s website in September about jailed opposition politician Ravshan Jeenbekov and a statement he made about being tortured while in custody.

The ministry demanded Kloop remove an article about the alleged torture of Jeenbekov from its site in Russian or face being blocked.

On September 12, Kloop published a statement saying it refused to remove the material as the story in question attributed all information about the situation faced by Jeenbekov while in custody to actual individuals and sources.

Kloop said at the time it was officially informed of the lawsuit against it and that the move was taken after an audit by the UKMK determined its "published materials are aimed at sharply criticizing the policies of the current government" and that "most of the publications are purely negative, aimed at discrediting representatives of state and municipal bodies."

Established in June 2007, Kloop is a Kyrgyz news website whose main contributors are students and graduates of the Kloop Media Public Foundation School of Journalism.

As an independent media entity, it is known for publishing reports on corruption within various governmental bodies and providing training to Central Asian journalists in fact-checking and investigative techniques.

Turkmenistan: Election bias (EurasiaNet)

EurasiaNet [3/19/2024 4:14 PM, Staff, 57.6K, Neutral]
Turkmenistan was repeatedly invoked – and in a pejorative way – as voting in Russia’s presidential election closed over the weekend.

With his 87.3 percent of the vote, President Vladimir Putin has now come to look like his fully authoritarian Central Asian peers, commentators noted.

Fantastical electoral results in Turkmenistan are a sui generis affair, though.

In the 2017 polls, for example, ex-Turkmen President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov won 97.7 percent of the vote. The intent of such galactic figures is not to signal popular consensus but to snuff out the possibility of a conversation at the outset.

It was for this reason that it was mildly intriguing to see how Berdymukhamedov’s handpicked successor, his son Serdar, managed in 2022 to garner a mere 73 percent of ballots cast – far less than what even Putin managed.

The relevant parallel there is with Dmitry Medvedev, the Kremlin throne-warmer who secured a similar-looking 70.3 percent of the vote in the 2008 presidential election, while Putin ran things from the prime minister’s office. And just as the Putin-Medvedev pair were derisively referred to as Russia’s ruling tandem, so the Berdymukhamedovs are now jointly running Turkmenistan. The older Berdymukhamedov does so in his bespoke capacity as National Leader.

In spite of these commonalities, Turkmenistan has unwittingly shown up their fellow election-massagers in Russia. Ahead of the vote, the Russian diplomatic mission revealed that “tens of thousands” of Russian citizens are registered on their books. Polling stations were set up across five Turkmen cities to accommodate the potential demand. In the event, however, only 2,750 people cast their ballot, down from more than 4,000 in 2018.

Confusingly, RFE/RL’s Turkmen service, Radio Azatlyk, produced another set of numbers. Citing data from the Russian Central Election Commission website (which has been mostly inaccessible over the past few days), the outlet reported that turnout in Turkmenistan was 95 percent and that more than 98 percent of those ballots were cast for Putin.

Either way, President Berdymukhamedov (the younger) congratulated Putin on his victory, which he described as “an indication of the high level of trust placed on you and a recognition of your services to the country.”

As is so often the case, gas was high on the agenda at the Cabinet meeting on March 15. Addressing the meeting, Batyr Amanov, the deputy prime minister with the portfolio for overseeing the oil and gas industry, said that state-run Turkmengaz is carrying out what he termed “targeted work” to increase the volume of natural gas production. Turkmengaz is focusing specifically on ramping up output of sulfur-free gas, which is less corrosive and consequently more straightforward to transport and store.

The other problematic aspect of high-sulfur natural gas is how it produces noxious sulfur dioxide when the gas is burned. Removing sulfur compounds, meanwhile, is an energy-intensive process of the kind that Turkmenistan would like to avoid as it tries to adopt the cloak of a more conscientious fossil fuel producer.

Turkmenistan produced 80.6 billion cubic meters of gas in 2023, a 2.9 percent increase on the year before.

On the subject of gas transportation, the exasperating pace of progress on the trans-Afghan TAPI pipeline came up again this past week, when India’s recently appointed ambassador in Ashgabat, Madhumita Hazarika Bhagat, reasserted her government’s active interest in the project happening.

“We hope that this project will be implemented very soon,” Bhagat told a journalist from SNG.Today news website.

The sense of hazy listlessness evoked by these remarks may trouble Turkmenistan.

Radio Azatlyk on March 12 cited its sources as saying that Turkmengaz has sent “thousands” of energy industry laborers and technicians to Afghanistan for three months to work on building TAPI. The urgency is such that the workers are not even required to have foreign travel passports, the broadcaster reported.

“They said that everyone should be in Afghanistan by March 15,” the source said.

This outcome was semaphored earlier this month when Muhammetmyrat Amanov, chief executive of the Ashgabat-based TAPI Pipeline Limited Corporation, was reported as saying that Turkmenistan is working with the Taliban-run government on “implementation of a strategy for the construction of a 150-kilometer section of the [trans-Afghan TAPI] gas pipeline” to Herat.

It is challenging to square this solicitous conduct from Turkmenistan with the news that Afghanistan has begun work on the second phase of the Qosh-Tepa canal, which some experts worry may end up diverting up to 20 percent of water from the Amu Darya River on which Turkmenistan also heavily depends. In an article published on March 18, ToloNews cited a contractor as saying that the canal would have the “capacity to transport approximately [6.5] million cubic meters of water per second."

When Turkmen Foreign Ministry officials met with a visiting Taliban delegation earlier this month, they gingerly suggested adopting a “science-based approach to drawing water from transboundary rivers” and the enlistment of “highly qualified personnel” to properly manage the canal now under construction. If the Afghans paused for thought, they did not do it for very long.

On March 14, President Berdymukhamedov met with Mark Bowman, the vice president for policy and partnerships at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. A government readout of this exchange had Bowman voicing approbation for how Turkmenistan has improved its financial and banking system, as well as adopting policies to ensure economic stability.

Berdymukhamedov in turn dangled the idea of the EBRD getting involved in sustainable energy and transportation projects in Turkmenistan. In a point of strong relevance to the Afghan canal initiative, Ashgabat appears interested in tapping EBRD money and expertise to integrate more water-saving technologies in the agriculture sector.

All well and good, but EBRD engagement has shown limited results so far. Back in the dreamy days when it was authored, the lender’s Turkmenistan Country Strategy 2019-2024 envisioned all manner of beneficial outcomes, such as robust private sector growth, improvements to the business environment, and greater energy efficiency and environmental protections. But the fact that investments from the bank itself have dwindled away in the past couple of years suggests they do not think much progress has been achieved.

Not to say there is not strong opportunity for doing business. It is just the kind of business that is the problem.

Internet blocking has, unaccountably, become even worse. Amsterdam-based Turkmen.news reported on March 14 that yet more IP address subnets are being made inaccessible. In layman’s terms, this just means more online space is off-limits to Turkmen internet users. The situation goes beyond state censorship, however. Officials in state cybersecurity departments are reportedly monetizing censorship by selling access to unblocked IP addresses and creating their own VPN services, and blocking others at the same time so as to eliminate competition.

This ability to turn a public issue into a private business opportunity is an embrace of market rules after a fashion.

Twitter

Afghanistan

Morgan Ortagus
@MorganOrtagus
[3/19/2024 3:45 PM, 122.3K followers, 1K retweets, 1.7K likes]
Devastating. General Milley confirms that Afghan allies have been brutally murdered by the Taliban. “I think some of the Afghans were tracked down that worked with us and I think some of them were killed. I’m pretty certain some of them [were killed] in pretty brutal ways…”

Madiha Afzal
@MadihaAfzal
[3/19/2024 1:00 PM, 42.5K followers, 42 retweets, 141 likes]
Gen Milley testimony: "At the end of 20 years, we, the military, helped build an army, a state, but we could not forge a nation. The enemy occupied Kabul, the overthrow of the government occurred, & the military we supported for 2 decades faded away. That is a strategic failure."

UNAMA News
@UNAMAnews
[3/20/2024 1:22 AM, 304.8K followers, 2 retweets, 7 likes]
The UN in Afghanistan joins Afghans in celebrating #Nowruz and the beginning of spring as a time of renewal and shares their hopes for a peaceful, stable and prosperous #Afghanistan for all. #NowruzMubarak

Lina Rozbih
@LinaRozbih
[3/19/2024 7:58 AM, 406.5K followers, 7 retweets, 34 likes]
Taliban government claims that nine Pakistani military bases were targeted by the Taliban & Pakistani forces suffered casualties as a result of this attack. But no details provided. Is this another fake statement from the Taliban’s government? #PakistanArmy #Taliban

Mariam Solaimankhil
@Mariamistan
[3/19/2024 2:21 PM, 92.6K followers, 2 retweets, 6 likes]
If the Taliban were genuinely committed to standing against Pakistan, they’d start by getting rid of every Pakistani sympathizer from their government. But then, pause and think: who would that leave? Perhaps an empty hall, making way for a truly free Afghanistan.

Husain Haqqani
@husainhaqqani
[3/19/2024 11:15 AM, 460.3K followers, 125 retweets, 412 likes]
As Taliban controlled Afghanistan ratchets up tensions with Pakistan, important to remember that some of us foresaw this crisis. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/afghanistan/2021-07-22/pakistans-pyrrhic-victory-afghanistan

UNICEF Afghanistan
@UNICEFAfg
[3/19/2024 7:26 AM, 129.9K followers, 3 retweets, 36 likes]
We welcome Dr. Tajudeen Oyewale as the new Representative for UNICEF in Afghanistan. Read about Dr. Oyewale in English/Pashto/Dari below, and follow him [@TajudeenOyewale] for updates on UNICEF’s work for children across the country.

Pakistan

Asif Ali Zardari
@AsifAliZerdari
[3/19/2024 6:44 AM, 6.7K followers, 5 retweets, 17 likes]
The Auditor General of Pakistan, Mr. Muhammad Ajmal Gondal, presenting the Audit Report of the Federal Government for the Audit Year 2023-24 to President Asif Ali Zardari, at Aiwan-e-Sadr.

Sajjad Burki
@SajjadBurki
[3/19/2024 11:59 PM, 7.7K followers, 57 retweets, 105 likes]
My remarks today at a press conference in Washington DC today before the much awaited congressional hearing for Under sec of State Donald Lu. I commend the zeal and efforts of Pakistani Americans in bringing this subject to the forefront and forcing congress to question the State Dept about the stolen mandate in Pakistan. @PTIofficial @PTIOfficialUSA @PTIOfficialCA @PACThinkTank @ImranKhanPTI

Hamid Mir
@HamidMirPAK
[3/20/2024 2:18 AM, 8.4M followers, 9 retweets, 65 likes]
2023 report by the Overseas Investors Chamber of Commerce and Industry estimated that digital transformation could add a staggering $60 billion to Pakistan’s economy in the next seven to eight years but Pakistani state banned X and discouraged investors.

India

Narendra Modi
@narendramodi
[3/20/2024 1:47 AM, 96.4M followers, 1.5K retweets, 5.3K likes]
Speaking at Startup Mahakumbh. Powered by the innovative spirit of our Yuva Shakti, India’s Startup ecosystem is flourishing at an unprecedented pace. https://twitter.com/i/broadcasts/1gqxvQqmnnjJB

Narendra Modi
@narendramodi
[3/19/2024 11:08 AM, 96.4M followers, 8.1K retweets, 37K likes]
Here are highlights from Palakkad. Kerala’s youth is tired of UDF and LDF. Both have no vision to develop the state. Their interests are only corruption and vote bank politics. It is only BJP which can improve people’s lives. https://twitter.com/i/status/1770120148822667624

Narendra Modi
@narendramodi
[3/19/2024 9:45 AM, 96.4M followers, 5.9K retweets, 41K likes]
Thank you Salem! From the fervour there, it is clear NDA is Tamil Nadu’s preferred choice.

Dr. S. Jaishankar
@DrSJaishankar
[3/19/2024 9:56 AM, 3.1M followers, 1.4K retweets, 15K likes]
Welcome to @BJP4India, Ambassador @SandhuTaranjitS. Our close association gives me fullest confidence that you will continue contributing to the nation’s development and progress.

Brahma Chellaney
@Chellaney
[3/19/2024 6:45 AM, 262.7K followers, 137 retweets, 595 likes]
India slams China’s defense ministry for “advancing absurd claims over the territory of the Indian state of Arunachal,” saying it must stop repeating “baseless arguments.” China’s Tibet-linked claim to Arunachal shows that Tibet remains at the center of the China-India divide.

NSB

Awami League
@albd1971
[3/19/2024 11:03 AM, 637K followers, 23 retweets, 70 likes]
Criticizing @bdbnp78 leaders’ relentless rants, #AwamiLeague’s Gen-Sec @obaidulquader said that the leaders of #BNP are tired and its activists are frustrated. He also said the party holds #IftarParty only to slander against the government. https://bssnews.net/news-flash/179608

Awami League
@albd1971
[3/19/2024 9:11 AM, 637K followers, 25 retweets, 71 likes]
#Bangladesh govt’s effective initiatives including treatment management and #vaccination have reduced the death rate from Pneumonia among children under 5. The #Pneumonia deaths were about 100 thousand in 90’s decade. But it has now reduced by eight per cent in the last 18 years. https://link.albd.org/807m5

Awami League
@albd1971
[3/19/2024 6:18 AM, 637K followers, 37 retweets, 114 likes]
Prime Minister #SheikhHasina urged the United Nations Development Programme (@UNDP) to make an effort to raise a larger international funds for the support of the #Rohingya people. She made the call at a meeting with visiting UNDP goodwill ambassador and Crown Princess of Sweden Victoria @SwedeninBD @SwedenAmbBD @BDMOFA @UNDP_BD @UlrikaModeer @JohanForssell https://link.albd.org/i03lh

Sabria Chowdhury Balland
@sabriaballand
[3/20/2024 12:35 AM, 5.1K followers, 2 retweets]
Some one-fourth of the families take loans to meet basic human needs - food, clothing, shelter, medical care and education. People in rural areas are taking these loans more. A major portion of these loans are taken from non-government agencies at a high interest rate. The figures came up in the final report on Food Safety Statistics- 2023 of the #Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS). Various information came up with this survey, including the level of food insecurity in the country, its impact and people’s income and expenditure and the loans taken by them to fight food insecurity. 26% families take loans to meet basic needs

Sabria Chowdhury Balland
@sabriaballand
[3/20/2024 12:41 AM, 5.1K followers, 2 likes]
Many Bangladeshis are having to take out high interest loans to barely survive & are food insecure. Compare this reality to the fairytales of “development” the unelected regime concocts. Sheikh Hasina’s regime simply exists to loot the country & to serve its masters in Delhi. It has no relationship whatsoever with working class Bangladeshis. #Bangladesh

Zunaid Ahmed Palak
@zapalak
[3/20/2024 2:19 AM, 517.6K followers, 6 likes]
Her Royal Highness Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden, during her visit to Bangladesh as a Goodwill Ambassador for UNDP, observed the significant strides made by the country in achieving digital transformation in an event titled ‘Innovate Together for #ZeroDigitalDivide’, organized by the ICT Division and Aspire to Innovate-a2i with the support of UNDP. The event was held at the Foreign Service Academy in Dhaka on 18 March. The event underscored Bangladesh’s steadfast commitment to realizing a future free of digital disparities, aligning with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the vision of leaving no one behind. https://undp.org/bangladesh/press-releases/swedish-crown-princess-witnesses-bangladeshs-digital-progress

Tshering Tobgay
@tsheringtobgay
[3/19/2024 10:14 AM, 94.5K followers, 19 retweets, 121 likes]
Back in Bhutan after an enjoyable visit to India meeting friends in government and business. I thank my friend Prime Minister @narendramodi Ji and his government for their warm hospitality and excellent arrangements. Already looking forward to meeting again, soon, in Bhutan!

Embassy of Nepal, Washington, D.C.
@nepalembassyusa
[3/19/2024 5:01 PM, 3.2K followers, 1 retweet, 5 likes]
Ambassador Khatri held a meeting today at the Embassy with DAS Afreen Akhter, Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs of the US State Department and exchanged view on matters of mutual interest in further advancing the bilateral relations between Nepal and the USA.

Harsha de Silva
@HarshadeSilvaMP
[3/20/2024 3:45 AM, 357.7K followers, 1 like]
1/3 #COPF presented report to @ParliamentLK today on @CBSL salary revision. COPF recognizes #CBSL independence in monetary policy u/ new Act. CBSL also has autonomy over its budget & staff salaries, but COPF raises concerns on accountability & reasonableness in current econ situ.

Harsha de Silva
@HarshadeSilvaMP
[3/20/2024 3:45 AM, 357.7K followers]
2/3 While @CBSL has administrative & financial autonomy, Clause 5 & 80 of CBSL Act & SC Determination hold CBSL #accountable to @ParliamentLK. Thus, #COPF finds the across-the-board salary increase for #CentralBank staff unreasonable. #SriLanka #SalaryIncrease

Harsha de Silva
@HarshadeSilvaMP
[3/20/2024 3:45 AM, 357.7K followers]
3/3 COPF proposes Indepen Committee to be appointed by Fin Minister to review salary increase in 4 weeks. @CBSL is to defer raise until fair solution is found. Comm to address expertise & market rates, w/ decoupling of method for salaries; prof. staff vs non prof. & minor staff.

Central Asia

UNODC Central Asia
@UNODC_ROCA
[3/20/2024 1:02 AM, 2.3K followers, 1 like]
On 19 March, a #CND67 side-event presented Tajikistan’s 2023 Annual Review of the Drug Situation. UNODC praised Tajikistan’s efforts and emphasized the need for evidence-based treatment integrated into public health measures to combat drug issues effectively. @MittalAshita

UNODC Central Asia
@UNODC_ROCA
[3/19/2024 6:33 AM, 2.3K followers, 3 retweets, 3 likes]
On 18 March 2024, @CARICC_2018 hosted a side-event during #CND67, stressing its role in international anti-drug cooperation, crucial amid ongoing trafficking threats. UNODC’s @MittalAshita urged sustained support and resource allocation for CARICC to bolster regional security.

Joanna Lillis
@joannalillis
[3/19/2024 2:54 PM, 28.8K followers, 3 retweets, 8 likes]
Nazarbayev’s nephew Samat Abish gets a lenient suspended sentence for involvement in Bloody January (238 dead) in what Tokayev’s painted as attempted coup by security service, he was deputy head. His boss Karim Masimov got 20 years in prison #Kazakhstan

Navbahor Imamova
@Navbahor
[3/19/2024 2:40 PM, 22.9K followers, 5 retweets, 12 likes] Karakalpakstan/Uzbekistan/Kazakhstan #HumanRights: Muratov will remain behind bars, according to Kazkhstan officials. @MihraRittmann @hrw said in a February 26 statement that the charges “have no merit and should be dropped, and Kazakhstan should release him from custody immediately.”

Navbahor Imamova
@Navbahor
[3/19/2024 1:17 PM, 22.9K followers, 1 retweet, 2 likes]
Activists are urging Congress to authorize additional visas, known as SIVs, with less than 8,000 remaining amid a backlog of over 120,000 applications. https://www.voanews.com/a/advocates-call-on-congress-to-avert-end-of-afghan-special-visa-program/7526138.html

Shavkat Mirziyoyev’s Press-service
@president_uz
[3/19/2024 6:23 AM, 160.1K followers, 2 retweets, 13 likes]
President Shavkat #Mirziyoyev toured the “Foundry mechanical factory” in #Tashkent, capable of producing 1,200 and repairing 1,500 freight wagons annually. The plant boasts a high-demand product range, notably manufacturing six types of freight wagons, including semi-open, closed, long-base, and those designed for transporting grain, cement, and mineral fertilizers. From 2018 to 2023, the enterprise implemented a program to localize the production of about 100 types of products. This year, there’s a plan to boost export volumes up to 15 million dollars. #ShavkatMirziyoyev #IndustryTour #Manufacturing #FreightWagons #Tashkent #Localization #ExportGrowth #Innovation #EconomyBoost #Uzbekistan

Shavkat Mirziyoyev’s Press-service
@president_uz
[3/19/2024 6:10 AM, 160.1K followers, 5 retweets, 16 likes]
President Shavkat #Mirziyoyev chaired a pivotal meeting aimed at propelling investments and expanding export capacities within the agricultural and food sectors. Industry stakeholders, including export-oriented businesses and logistical entities, were in attendance. As a result of the #dialogue, it was resolved to formulate a comprehensive three-year program that spans the full spectrum from growth to warehousing, packaging, refinement, and marketing of goods. The upcoming strategy will include initiatives to bolster existing agricultural exporters and escalate their proliferation.

{End of Report}

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