Wednesday, April 14, 2021
Video Report - Sen. Kaine: Pulling troops from Afghanistan is the right call
Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va, joins Morning Joe to discuss the president's plans for a full troop withdrawal from Afghanistan by September and why he supports the withdrawal. Sen. Kaine also discusses urging the president to rejoin the Iran nuclear agreement.
Biden, saying it is ‘time to end America’s longest war,’ declares troops will be out of Afghanistan by Sept. 11.
Under Biden, Pakistan and the US face a dilemma about the breadth of their relationship
By Madiha Afzal
After the unpredictability of the Trump years, Pakistan approached Joe Biden’s win and the new administration with both expectation and apprehension. It hoped that the administration would buy its pitch for a reset and for broadening relations beyond Afghanistan, but it worried about “baggage” that the Biden team could bring from its experience during the Obama years — the second half of which was a relative low point in the U.S.-Pakistan relationship. Nearly 100 days into the new administration, it appears that redefining U.S.-Pakistan relations isn’t going to be quite as easy as Islamabad had hoped, even as Pakistan concertedly pushes a new geo-economic vision.
President Biden has not yet spoken to Prime Minister Imran Khan. Nor did Biden invite Pakistan to a planned leaders summit on climate change later this month, though the leaders of India and Bangladesh will be there, and Pakistan was the only country among the world’s 10 most populous to not receive an invitation. Its absence is all the more pointed given Pakistan’s efforts to mitigate climate change, including its commitment to plant a billion trees. Khan claims he’s not bothered. Biden’s Special Envoy for Climate Change John Kerry, meanwhile, is currently in the region — visiting India and Bangladesh, but not Pakistan. Separately, Pakistan continues to play a key role in the Afghan peace process.
Trump took a transactional approach to Pakistan, which worked well in some ways. What Pakistan wants now is a relationship with the U.S. that is broader in scope, and includes trade and investment. Will Biden deliver?
WHAT PAKISTAN WANTS
In recent months, Pakistan’s civilian and military leadership have together been promoting a new focus on “geo-economics” — an approach that emphasizes regional trade and connectivity, and stresses that Pakistan is open for business. The new focus recognizes that a geostrategic approach only goes so far, and if Pakistan is to rise on the world stage (as its neighbor India has done), that position will have to be predicated on economic growth.
In tandem, Pakistan says it wants to co-exist with its neighbors and wants a peaceful outcome in Afghanistan. It seeks a potential détente with India: In February, the two agreed to honor a 2003 ceasefire agreement along the Line of Control in Kashmir, and there might be more in the offing on a rapprochement. In a recent speech in Islamabad, Pakistan’s chief of army staff, General Qamar Javed Bajwa, notably said: “We feel that it is time to bury the past and move forward.”
Pakistan also wants a more broad-based relationship with the U.S., one that goes beyond strategic concerns and the war in Afghanistan. It is conveying openness to the West, with its leadership stating that the country’s economic fortunes are not wedded to China — and the $62 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a flagship project of China’s Belt and Road Initiative — alone. In his speech last month, Bajwa said: “While CPEC remains central to our vision, only seeing Pakistan through CPEC prism is also misleading. Our immensely vital geostrategic location and a transformed vision make us a country of immense and diverse potential.” Pakistan’s foreign minister has also said as much: “[Americans] have to understand that our relationship with China is not a zero-sum game for them. They should come, compete and invest.” The problem with this pitch is that Pakistan’s regulatory climate is less than ideal for investors.
The foreign minister and other officials have also suggested that Pakistan can serve as an interlocutor in the U.S. relationship with China, harkening back to an approach that worked well half a century ago. But in 2021, the U.S. likely won’t take Pakistan up on this.
A TOUGH START
Pakistan’s relationship with the Biden administration got off to a bumpy start. On January 28, Pakistan’s supreme court upheld a lower court’s judgment acquitting Omar Saeed Sheikh, the man convicted of masterminding the kidnapping of Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002 — a kidnapping that led to his murder. The Biden administration swiftly denounced the court’s decision, calling it an “affront to terrorism victims everywhere, including in Pakistan,” adding that the U.S. expected “the Pakistani government to expeditiously review its legal options to ensure justice is served.”
The decision came the day before Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s first calls with the foreign ministers of India and Pakistan. The juxtaposition of the two readouts presented a sharp, unavoidable contrast. In his conversation with Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi, Blinken focused on America’s concern with the Sheikh judgment; in his conversation with Indian Minister of External Affairs S. Jaishankar, he emphasized the importance of the U.S.-India relationship moving forward.
THE AFGHANISTAN FACTOR
The Biden administration looks at Pakistan through the lens of Afghanistan, much like the Trump administration did. Special Envoy Zalmay Khalilzad continues his regular visits to Islamabad and the army headquarters in Rawalpindi for discussions on the peace process. But while the Trump administration privileged Pakistan over all other third parties on Afghanistan, the Biden administration hasn’t done so. In a leaked letter to Ghani, Blinken notably mentioned India and Iran as well as Russia, China, and Pakistan as countries that could help in the peace process. The mention of India, in particular, worries Pakistan. Ultimately, at the troika-plus-one (China, Russia, and the United States, plus Pakistan) talks on the Afghan peace process that were held in Moscow last month, Pakistan was the “plus one,” but it seems likely that India will play a greater role going forward than it has in the past few years.
The dilemma is that the U.S. wants more from Pakistan on Afghanistan, including to try to get the Taliban to agree to a ceasefire. Pakistan insists that it is doing all that it can, that it has already done a lot by bringing the Taliban to the negotiating table, and that there are real limits to its leverage over the group. There is truth to those limits, given that the Taliban has evolved away from Pakistani control since the 1990s, and Pakistan’s influence over Taliban field commanders, in particular, may be a lot less than we imagine. While Pakistan wants to retain its key position in the Afghan peace process, one it attained precisely because of the leverage it has over the Taliban, Pakistanis tend to begrudge the demand to “do more” to rein in the Taliban, particularly after the U.S. negotiated a peace deal with the group. Across recent U.S. administrations, of course, the thinking has been that Pakistan’s support for the Taliban (including sanctuaries for the group in Pakistan) caused the United States to lose the war in Afghanistan. The two countries continue to see past each other, bedeviling the relationship.
Through it all, the U.S. ends up privileging Pakistan’s military — its usual partner and the one institution in Pakistan it perceives as effective — over its civilian officials.
THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION
Biden knows Pakistan well through his years on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and as vice president. Pakistanis had hoped that that would be enough for a reset and for widening the scope of the relationship, but the reality is that Biden is too busy elsewhere — with more pressing concerns both domestically and abroad — to focus on Pakistan beyond the Afghanistan issue, at least for now. Pakistani officials have acknowledged privately that the Biden administration “was not giving encouraging signals.”
Washington will likely continue to see Pakistan through the prism of countries in its neighborhood: Afghanistan, India, and China in particular. Paradoxically, Trump’s unorthodoxy had soothed some of Pakistan’s fears; its leaders felt for a time as if America’s relationship with Pakistan was decoupled from its relationship with India. That feeling is unlikely to last. In Pakistan, the old perceptions that Republican administrations are better for it than Democratic administrations and that the U.S. favors India at Pakistan’s expense are never far from the surface.
The legacy of the Obama years likely weighs heavily, and not just on the issue of Afghanistan and safe havens for the Haqqani network in Pakistan, which became a sticking point in the relationship during Biden’s time as vice president. The Navy Seal raid on Abbottabad in May 2011 that killed Osama bin Laden marked a low point during those years. For Pakistan, this raised the issue of sovereignty. For America, the episode laid bare a greater issue: that it could not trust Pakistan, and the Obama administration’s relationship with the country never recovered from this. (Pakistanis have their own grievances from that year, when a CIA contractor, Raymond Davis, shot and killed two Pakistani men in Lahore, and a NATO attack in November accidentally killed 24 Pakistani soldiers.)
LOOKING AHEAD
Pakistan has made it clear that it wants a different relationship with the U.S. But what’s equally clear is that the United States isn’t buying its new geo-economic pitch quite so easily. Part of this is because it is unrealistic: Pakistan doesn’t yet have the economic depth needed for this new approach. But it would still be useful for the Biden administration to look beyond its singular Afghanistan lens at Pakistan. The country has changed since 2016; it knows it needs a new paradigm, and business as usual is not enough. This presents a good time to rethink U.S. engagement with Pakistan. Climate change would have been an obvious new issue on which to cooperate, and not engaging with Pakistan in that arena could be a missed opportunity.
For a new approach for getting the relationship to work, both countries will have to do more to meet each other somewhere in the middle. The Biden team needs to keep an open mind and look at Pakistan with a broader lens. And if Pakistan doesn’t want strategic concerns to dominate its relationship with the U.S., it needs to offer up something more than words: real economic incentives.
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2021/04/12/under-biden-pakistan-and-the-us-face-a-dilemma-about-the-breadth-of-their-relationship/
Editorial - #Pakistan - TLP protests
#Pakistan - Hostage to extremism
Pakistan’s marginalised Hazara women turn to Chinese martial arts for self-defence
Up to 4,000 people are attending regular classes in more than 25 clubs in Balochistan province, of which Quetta is the capital, according to Ishaq Ali, head of the Balochistan Wushu Kung Fu Association, which oversees the sport. The city’s two largest academies, which train around 250 people each, said the majority of their students were young Hazara women. Many of them go on to earn money from the sport, taking part in frequent competitions.It is still unusual for women to play sport in deeply conservative Pakistan where families often forbid it, but martial arts teacher Fida Hussain Kazmi says exceptions are being made.
“In general, women cannot exercise in our society … but for the sake of self-defence and her family, they are being allowed,” he said. The uptake is also credited to national champions Nargis Hazara and Kulsoom Hazara, who have won medals in international competitions.
#Pakistan - Terms for Peace
By: Sherry Rehman
The first problem is that this view is not necessarily reflected beyond a point in current Indian thinking, particularly among the ranks of the hyper-nationalist Modi’s BJP, which is overtly different from the Vajpayee BJP, in as much as it has gone the extra mile in aggressively alienating Kashmiris and Indian Muslims as well as its own population of the poor, dispossessed and socially excluded Indians.
The second problem is that, despite an ‘Islamabad Dialogue’ in Pakistan, that suggested a moving away from the burdens of the past, the language of strategic ambiguity, which is often used to invite an opening to dialogue, was unpacked by Indian hawks as an acceptance of the status quo.
Which is why before unilateral or backchannel-led steps are taken by Islamabad to move further into terrain it has not been able to manage, a clear-eyed assessment of a policy review is needed. There is no doubt that the revival of the 2003 ceasefire on the Line of Control is an important step for saving Kashmiris on both sides of the divide. It was sorely needed as a de-escalator of kinetic violence in a fragile zone inhabited by civilian populations.
Violations had exponentially escalated since 2017, with the Indian military often extending its aggressive shelling to the Working Boundary into Sialkot and Kasur, where the plains of Punjab offer a clear line of vision to all sides, particularly the Indian government that routinely weaponised allegations of cross-border terrorism, irrespective of the facts on the ground. Modi’s misadventures such as the false-flag attack in Pulwama, followed by the Balakot debacle where an Indian Airforce pilot was grounded inside Pakistani territory and then repatriated with a cup of Pakistani tea, did not evoke rebuke for Modi from the international community, but exposed a strong vein of anti-Pakistani pathology inside the BJP’s ranks. The latter lost no opportunity to excoriate Pakistan at the highest levels, routinising threats of invasion and calls for escalated violence to a point where no talks were even possible, let alone palatable.
Yet it was Modi’s attempted annexation of Indian Occupied Jammu and Kashmir in 2019 that marked an existential turning point in the relationship between Pakistan and India. While his manifesto had always contained the dark promise of revoking the special status of IOK, the actual act of removing Articles 370 and 35-A of the Indian constitution signalled a move towards a unilateral ‘end of history” from the Indian side. Since then, despite Modi’s inability to contain the story of political trauma and barbaric human rights violations inside what came to be known as the largest open jail in the world, New Delhi has remained intransigent on its ruinous path. At that point, Modi’s calculus was likely based on managing the crisis on that border while reshaping the map of Kashmir by simply ending its disputed status. It was Pakistan that was caught unawares.
Now, over 18 months later, for this February 2021 ceasefire, change seems to be driven by ground assessments. New Delhi may have been driven by its new Ladakh military front with China, nudged on by external players, as well as the fact that the politics of managing dissent in IOK has proven to be more difficult than Modi’s advisers imagined.
The policy-path, at the same time, from Islamabad, left a lot to be desired. Since August 5, 2019, in fact, PM Imran Khan did not call a joint session of parliament until the opposition raised it as a non-negotiable intervention. He did not in fact even brief – on Kashmir – a committee room full of Pakistan’s leadership that waited for him for over an hour. Pakistan needed to send the message that it stood united on the issue of Kashmir, and statements from parliament convey a powerful message, but there was no call to unity from the leader of the National Assembly. The opposition did it anyway.
Lessons from the past may be salutary for a clear-eyed assessment of policy today. The PPP government in 2012 was able to achieve tough foreign policy milestones while facing a stressful situation with an angry superpower on the closing of mission-critical Ground Lines of Communication for Nato with Afghanistan after our soldiers were martyred on the Afghan border at Salala by ‘friendly fire’. Parliament took a united position on closing air bases previously outsourced to the US by General Musharraf, and on obtaining an apology from a recalcitrant Obama administration.
Today, when Imran Khan sends messages of conciliation to Modi, while an ostensible backchannel clears the path, saner minds need to remind this government of where such serial non-transparency landed such policy and its architects in the past. The much touted four-point Kashmir formula of Musharraf is a classic case in point, where once again, tactical relief was almost traded for Pakistan’s core position on Kashmir, without any consultation with key stakeholders, either in Islamabad or Azad Kashmir. Ancillary CBMs worked temporarily, as the intra-Kashmir bus service ran for a while. Trade was welcomed too, as it should be, but then it all fell back to old patterns because the basis of the formula was not grounded in sustainable peace that was owned by the people on the ground. Today as well questions are being asked about Pakistan’s parliament, let alone AJK, being in the policy loop.
A great deal of diplomatic groundwork can be gained by backchannels, but they only work as test-conversations, not policy substitutes. All governments have used them, but none have succeeded when they were unable to leverage at the right time and the right level, the democratic consent of the people of Pakistan.
Even though it came into force two years later, the most enduring security protocol between India and Pakistan being used today was set up and secured by Shaheed Benazir Bhutto’s government in 1988 as part of a non-attack agreement on India and Pakistan’s nuclear installations. It took months of work between diplomats to just design and redesign, but the actual agreement was welcomed by the people of Pakistan because it was shared with parliament and secured by a democratically elected PM, who behaved like a democratically elected PM. In contrast, a weak Indian PM, like the erudite Manmohan Singh, for instance, was unable to follow through discussions from the Non-Aligned Summit at Sharm-al-Shaikh with Pakistan’s then PM Yusuf Raza Gilani in 2009, because when he returned to New Delhi, the entire Lok Sabha erupted against him for making promises he wasn’t authorized to do.
In any scenario between India and Pakistan, the minefields are so manifest that agreements can only be seen as legitimate or irreversible if grounded in democratic institutions. The current government would do best to remember that. The people may not seem sovereign in Pakistan, or even India, but their buy-in changes history, nothing else. Peace never needs a mandate, but its terms certainly do.
https://jinnah-institute.org/publication/terms-for-peace/
Chairman PPP Bilawal Bhutto Zardari strongly condemns violence across the country during last three days
Chairman Pakistan Peoples Party Bilawal Bhutto Zardari has strongly condemned violence in different parts of country during last three days, in which two policemen among seven people were killed in different incidents.
In a statement, the PPP Chairman said that this kind of violence, ransacking, vendalizing public and private properties and mob-attacks on policemen could not be allowed to go unchecked. Those responsible must be dealt with in accordance to the law, and the govt cannot be allowed to abdicate its responsibility.
This week’s naked violence shows that the selected regime has dragged the country into a deadly quagmire, where no one is safe, he said . Under the PTI regime, even the police seems to be in need of protection, as the govt has abandoned the people.
PPP expressed sympathised with the martyred policemen as well as the innocent people who lost their lives in violence in Punjab and other parts of the country and stressed for best possible medical facilities to those wounded.
https://www.ppp.org.pk/pr/24652/