Video - #Colbert #Comedy #Monologue New "Jeopardy!" Host Mired In Scandal Mere Days After Awarding Himself The Gig

Video Report - Why Nicole Kidman’s Hong Kong quarantine exemption is unfair

Video Report - Sierra Leone's locals refuse industrial harbour plan

Video Report - Kenyan Court Rejects Disputed Bid To Amend Constitution | Eye on Africa

Video Report - Special Report: Biden speaks on Afghan withdrawal, promises Americans "we will get you home"

Video Report - The U.S. ignored corruption within the Afghan government. Did that lead to its fall?

Video Report - Afghanistan latest: Taliban steps up search for Afghans who helped US and NATO

The Analytical Angle: Do children really learn in schools in Pakistan?

 

Natalie Bau | Jishnu Das

A narrative that suggests children drop out because they are not learning is not supported by the data.

As we struggle with Covid-19, when it comes to schooling, we are all asking the same questions — will we finally get back to normal? And is normal where we want to be, or is it time to change everything, starting from the ground-up?

But even as we ask these questions, here is a little secret: Despite the attention that schooling and learning have received in Pakistan, and internationally, we really don’t know what ‘normal’ is.

We know some things — for instance, children in many countries cannot read a full sentence or add two-digit numbers after spending 5 years in school. But for anything harder, we are still in the dark. We still don’t know how much children learn during primary school. Neither do we know whether children who are initially behind fall even further behind as they progress through school.

To address these problems, Jishnu Das, Tahir Andrabi and Asim Ijaz Khwaja started the Learning and Educational Achievement in Pakistani Schools (LEAPS) project in rural Punjab in 2003.

The LEAPS data follow more than 12,000 children as they progress from 3rd to 6th grade and are among the first data from a low-income setting to allow us to examine children’s test scores in a consistent manner across four years.

Our paper , jointly written with Andres Yi Chang, uses the LEAPS data to finally benchmark what normal means for a country like Pakistan.

Here is what we learned.

First, not surprisingly, children do learn in school. For instance, 58 per cent of children could correctly multiply “4 x 5” in grade 3, and this fraction increases to 60pc after a year, 73pc after two years, and 79pc after three years.

We see similar patterns across every question and subject and, on average, a child in grade 6 knows more than 77pc of children tested in grade 3. This rate of learning is similar to what we find in Vietnam, Peru, India and Ethiopia and also to the US state of Florida.

In all these school systems, the top 30pc of children in grade 3 score (roughly) the same as the bottom 30pc of children in grade 6. This, however, does not imply that they learn the same amount since the tests and initial learning levels are different across countries; the data to answer that question simply do not exist.

Second, policymakers in Pakistan have been deeply concerned about out-of-school children. To understand the link between learning and dropping out of school, the LEAPS data tracked and tested children who dropped out between grades 5 and 6.

Surprisingly, we found that children who eventually dropped out in the transition to middle school were learning just as much as those who had continued (even though in every year, their test scores were slightly lower).

Further, once children dropped out, their learning stalled, while for those who remained in school, it continued along the same trend (Figure 1). So, a narrative that suggests that children drop out because they are not learning is not supported by the data.

Figure 1: Children who drop out of school between grades 5 and 6 were learning as much as those who remained in school. The blue line shows standardised test scores of children who dropped out of school in 2005, as they transitioned to middle school. The red line shows the test scores of children who continued in 2005.

Third, we examined whether children who were performing worse in grade 3 fall farther behind. Figure 2 shows that this is not the case by grouping children by how much they learnt between grades 3 and 6 (from low to high) and showing their average test score in grade 3.

In fact, children whose test scores were in the bottom 10pc in grade 3 learned significantly more by grade 6 than children ranked in the top 10pc learners. The same happens across the other groups which suggests that schooling reduces inequality in learning.

Figure 2: Children who perform worse in grade 3 learn more through primary school. We have divided children into percentile groups based on their grade 3 test scores. For instance, “Bottom 10th percentile group” are the children who were in the bottom 10pc in grade 3. Then, we have shown their test scores as they progressed through school. Children who were in the bottom 10pc learned significantly more than those in the top 10pc.

To understand how these facts can still be consistent with low test scores, we then measure the patterns of gains and losses on a question-by-question basis.

We find that test scores do not increase every year. In fact, 20pc of children see declines in test scores on a yearly basis, and 10pc reported lower test scores in grade 5 compared to grade 3.

We propose a new term for these patterns in the data: ‘fragile learning’.

Children learn in one year but are about as likely to forget as to consolidate their learning. In fact, the proportion of ‘fragile learners’, or those who learn and then forget is worryingly high. The key message is that performance in school has as much to do with forgetting as it does with learning.

One of us grew up in a very similar schooling system where the emphasis was always on rote learning. We always knew that rote systems did not address conceptual weaknesses, but if there was one thing that such a system is meant to do, it was to ensure that children never forgot a question they could answer correctly once.

Perhaps weak conceptual understanding drives this phenomenon of ‘fragile learning’, but the fact of the matter is that despite hours spent in rote learning, children still can’t remember what they learnt in the previous year.

We now know what ’normal’ means. It means that children who go to school learn. It means that children who are dropping out leave school for a host of reasons, but not just because they were learning less. It means that our schools are an equalising force in these children’s lives — those who start off knowing less end up learning more as they progress through school, though they may not fully catch up.

But it also means that our current systems seem to be encouraging a ‘learn and forget’ rather than a 'learn and consolidate' approach, at least for a sizeable minority.

Our plea therefore is to not label all schooling as poor or useless. The fact of the matter is that a very important part of the schooling system — the pedagogical approach that leads to fragile learning — needs reform, now more than ever, as children return after a long absence.

But there are things that are working and we should be careful not to throw the good out with the bad as we start the journey to a system where every child can truly learn.

---

https://www.dawn.com/news/1634880/the-analytical-angle-do-children-really-learn-in-schools-in-pakistan

EDITORIAL: #Pakistan - Violence, assaults against women

It is very clear that shameful, sickening incidents like the one in Lahore on Independence Day, when a 400-storng mob harassed, assaulted, and stole from a female ticktoker after tearing her clothes off in front of everybody, are not isolated events and need to be dealt with very strongly. Just the other day normal, law-abiding and women-respecting Pakistanis were aghast at headlines narrating the ordeal of a 50-year old woman from Mazaffargarh in Punjab, who was also stripped, paraded and burnt with cigarette butts, after an attempt of rape was unsuccessful, just because her son married the daughter of an influential person who didn’t approve of the match.

Such trends put the spotlight squarely on the government. Because, at the end of the day, so many people can get away with so many such assaults because they know that the law will not catch up with them. And it’s not that we don’t have laws to protect women and stop people from assaulting others at whim. It’s just that the state does not have the will, or perhaps the capacity, to implement them with force. The only reason that most advanced countries have been able to overcome such problems is that they have made sure that nobody interferes with the legal process once it takes over relevant proceedings. And when people see for themselves what happens to people who break the law, it’s understandable that they are not too inclined to take it into their own hands too frequently after it.

Pakistan has clearly become a place where women are not given the respect and social status by most people that the law grants them. And the biggest reason is that the law is not always made to catch up with people who abuse it. How could we become a place where hundreds of people would choose to go out of their way, climb over a fence, and assault a woman in broad daylight, tearing away her clothes, tossing her around like a rag doll, and stripping her of her valuables as well as her dignity? It’s a good thing that Prime Minister Imran Khan himself has taken note of this travesty of justice and the police is moving to identify culprits through video footage. But the Punjab government has some serious explaining to do. How could an unruly crowd feel so confident about tearing the law to shreds in the heart of the provincial capital like this? Why did the police take hours to respond to the incident? And why is the security setup moving so slowly with this case? It has badly exposed the Buzdar setup, which must also be made to answer for this grave miscarriage of justice. The perpetrators of this crime must be caught and given extraordinary punishment so that once people see the state reacting with an iron fist, nobody ever dares to cross such lines again. https://dailytimes.com.pk/806096/violence-assaults-against-women/

What’s 50 Times More Dangerous Than Afghanistan?

By Sadanand Dhume

Since Kabul fell to the Taliban Sunday, critics have flayed President Biden for diminishing America’s global standing, empowering the Taliban and their al Qaeda partners, cold-shouldering U.S. allies, and abandoning Afghans who risked their lives to work with Americans. Add one more likely consequence of the cack-handed U.S. withdrawal: an emboldened Pakistan, whose Taliban-friendly generals and plethora of jihadist groups feel the wind in their sails.

In official statements, Pakistan says it backs a peaceful resolution in Afghanistan. But if there is one global capital where the Taliban victory was greeted with barely disguised glee, it was in Islamabad. On Monday, Prime Minister Imran Khan praised Afghans for “breaking the shackles of slavery.” On social media, retired generals and other Taliban boosters hailed the triumph of Islam, never mind that the defeated Afghan government too called itself an Islamic republic.

Exultant Pakistanis shared a video clip from 2014 featuring Hamid Gul, a former head of the army’s spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence. “When history is written, it will be stated that the ISI defeated the Soviet Union in Afghanistan with the help of America,” Gul says to a fawning TV studio audience. “Then there will be another sentence. The ISI, with the help of America, defeated America.”

You can understand why Taliban fans want to gloat. Between 2002 and 2018, the U.S. government gave Pakistan more than $33 billion in assistance, including about $14.6 billion in so-called Coalition Support Funds paid by the Pentagon to the Pakistani military. ( Donald Trump ended nearly all military assistance and also slashed nonmilitary aid from its peak in the Obama years.) During the same period, Pakistan ensured the failure of America’s Afghanistan project by surreptitiously sheltering, arming and training the Taliban.

“We found ourselves in an incredibly bizarre situation, where you are paying the country that created your enemy so that it will let you keep fighting that enemy,” says Sarah Chayes, a former adviser to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in a phone interview. “If you wanted to win the war, you had to crack down on Pakistan. If you wanted to conduct operations [in Afghanistan] you had to mollify Pakistan.”

For Pakistan’s generals, winning the “double game”—ostensibly aiding America while simultaneously abetting its enemies—required finesse. At times, it appeared as though the jig was up, especially in 2011 when U.S. Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden in a safe house next to Pakistan’s premier military academy. But successive administrations—Republican and Democratic—refused to take measures that could have forced Pakistan to rethink its support for the Taliban.

Ideas such as forcibly denuclearizing Pakistan, imposing sanctions on army officers, curbing the travel and education in the West of ISI operatives and their families, scrapping Pakistan’s farcical designation as a “major non-NATO ally,” and declaring it a state sponsor of terrorism never made it beyond think tank reports and newspaper punditry. Washington always blinked, fearing instability in a nuclear-armed nation of more than 200 million people.

“Pakistan is a country-sized suicide bomber,” Ms. Chayes says. “The message Islamabad sends is that if you get too close to us we’re going to blow ourselves up.”

The world will likely get that instability anyway. At least for now, the Taliban’s victory fulfills the Pakistani army’s decades-old quest to gain “strategic depth” by controlling Afghanistan. But this will not sate the generals; it will whet their appetite.

Before the 9/11 attacks, they used Taliban-controlled Afghanistan as a training ground for anti-India jihadist groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba. Afghanistan also gave the ISI a way to deflect responsibility from itself for terrorist attacks traced back to territory controlled by its protégés. Given the Taliban’s close links with groups like al Qaeda and the LeT, only the willfully naive would take at face value assurances by the jihadist group that they won’t allow Afghan territory to be used to target other countries.

The symbolic significance of an army of zealots humbling the world’s sole superpower is hard to exaggerate. In the Pakistani army it will strengthen the hand of those who view Afghanistan not merely in geopolitical terms, but as the fulfillment of a religious project rooted in an extreme interpretation of Islam that shuns all Western influence.

The same holds true in Pakistani society at large. If music-hating, anti-Western, anti-Shiite misogynists can seize power in Kabul, why can’t they do the same in Islamabad? At least one homegrown Pakistani jihadist group, the Tehreek-e-Taliban, is comprised of fighters already at odds with the Pakistani government.

In a phone interview from Islamabad, Afrasiab Khattak, a former Pakistani senator and Pashtun-rights activist, points out that Pakistan houses some 36,000 madrassas, or religious seminaries, some of which are militant. “The same places producing the Taliban are producing similar people in Pakistan,” he says. “They will contest for power in Pakistan too.”

In early 2009, when Afghan President Hamid Karzai pressed Vice President-elect Joe Biden to crack down on Taliban safe havens across the border, Mr. Biden reportedly rebuffed him by pointing out that “Pakistan is 50 times more important than Afghanistan for the United States.” As president, Mr. Biden may have ensured that Pakistan is 50 times more dangerous to the U.S. and the world as well.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-withdrawal-afghanistan-pakistan-nuclear-lashkar-e-taiba-tehreek-e-taliban-islamist-11629402468

Explainer | With the Taliban’s ascendancy in Afghanistan, does Pakistan stand to gain or lose?

 Tom Hussain

Islamabad has long had a paradoxical role in Afghanistan – accused of providing covert support to the Taliban, while playing a major supporting role in the US war on terror.

Experts say it is likely Pakistan will recognise a Taliban regime, though the expectations of Washington and Beijing will shape its decision.

Pakistan’s decision makers have their fingers crossed ahead of an eagerly anticipated speech by Taliban chief Mawlawi Hibatullah Akhundzada that will cast the die for Afghanistan’s political future.Islamabad hopes Akhundzada’s policy-defining address, expected to be delivered by Sunday, will reassure the international community that the Taliban has evolved from a globally reviled terrorist group into a palatably responsible state actor, according to journalists who this week attended a briefing conducted by Pakistan’s powerful military.However, Islamabad is also concerned that Akhundzada’s speech could trigger an international backlash against Pakistan because of its long-standing support for the Taliban – particularly from the United States and other Nato members humiliated by the sudden capitulation of the Afghan government last Sunday.

Since then, widespread shock at the ease of the Taliban takeover and heart-rending scenes of Afghans desperately trying to board evacuation flights out of Kabul have focused the world’s attention on the abandonment of Afghanistan by deposed president Ashraf Ghani’s administration, and the handling of the US military withdrawal by President Joe Biden.

At the same time, Pakistan has lobbied the international community – close allies China and Russia in particular – to garner support for collective diplomatic engagement with the Taliban as a means of ensuring that the group keeps its promises to form an inclusive administration, prevent terrorist attacks from Afghanistan, and allow women access to education and employment.Apart from Afghanistan, “Pakistan has the most to gain from peace in its neighbour and the most to lose from strife and instability”, said Maleeha Lodhi, a former Pakistani ambassador to Britain, the United Nations and the US. “As the situation today is in flux in Afghanistan, it is too premature to say what Pakistan stands to gain or lose. That would depend entirely on how the situation pans out,” she told This Week In Asia.

So what exactly is Pakistan’s relationship with the Taliban?

The South Asian nation has long had a paradoxical role in Afghanistan – accused of providing covert support to the Taliban on one hand, while playing a major supporting role in the US war on terror against al-Qaeda on the other. Pakistan’s relationship with the Taliban was formed in the mid-1990s, after the Islamist militia emerged from the southern Afghan province of Kandahar to quell the chaotic civil war that had been going on since the departure of occupying Soviet forces in 1989. Many of the predominantly ethnic Pashtun Taliban fighters and their families lived in Pakistan as refugees, spoke Urdu and were friendly with their hosts.

On the other hand, the non-Pashtun factions making up the Northern Alliance opposed to the Taliban had a history of hostility towards Pakistan predating the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.Islamabad was forced to set aside its preferences in Afghanistan when presented with an ultimatum by the US after the September 11 terrorist attacks planned by al-Qaeda leaders hosted by the Taliban. Pakistan’s military ruler Pervez Musharraf seized the opportunity to once again make his country a close ally of the US, thereby gaining it billions of dollars of debt relief and military aid.Islamabad, however, was galled when Washington ignored its advice to accept a Taliban surrender and include the group in negotiations on Afghanistan’s political future.Instead, the 2001 Bonn agreement led to the creation of an Afghan government dominated by the Northern Alliance, the leaders of which were friendly with India, Pakistan’s perennial foe. After US political attention switched to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and Washington began to draw down on its military assets in Afghanistan, Pakistan’s relations with the government in Kabul deteriorated.

American officials in 2004 reported that Islamabad had quietly resumed supporting the Taliban after the group showed signs of resurgence in the provinces of Afghanistan bordering Pakistan.

Abdul Basit, an associate research fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) in Singapore, describes the relationship between Pakistan and the Taliban as “a marriage of convenience based on tactical divergences in Afghanistan”. “For Pakistan, it was to keep India out of Afghanistan by helping the Taliban. For the Taliban, it was to resist the US presence and eventually force it out of Afghanistan by availing itself of sanctuaries in Pakistan,” he said.

Beyond this marriage of convenience, the relationship between Pakistan and the Taliban had “its own ups and downs, disagreements and divergences”, Basit said.

For instance, Islamabad was frustrated by the Taliban’s lack of action against the thousands of Pakistani Taliban fighters in eastern Afghanistan, he said.

At a confidential parliamentary briefing of Pakistan’s politicians on July 2, Inter-Services Intelligence agency chief Lieutenant General Faiz Hameed described the Taliban and the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) group as “sides of the same coin”. Likewise, the Taliban has not trusted Pakistan since it sided with Washington in the global war on terror and handed over several Taliban leaders to the US.Since the US signed a peace agreement with the Taliban in February last year and announced plans to withdraw its military from Afghanistan, the relationship between the Taliban and Islamabad “has been transforming and divergences will increase”, Basit said. The Taliban resisted pressure from Pakistan’s military leadership against launching a nationwide offensive while Nato forces were still in Afghanistan, and to engage in negotiations with the Kabul government on sharing political power.The Associated Press last month reported that Pakistan’s army chief of staff General Qamar Javed Bajwa was so frustrated by the Taliban’s intransigence that he twice walked out of meetings in Islamabad with its leaders.This friction was further evident in early August when the Taliban closed the Chaman-Spin Boldak border crossing with Pakistan to press demands for visa-free cross-border movement of Afghan nationals. The Taliban also threatened to suspend Pakistan’s trade via Afghanistan with Central Asia.

Stanford University analyst Asfandyar Mir said the Pakistan-Taliban relationship, “which has effectively weathered everything the last two decades”, will be further tested now that the Taliban are in power. Issues of governance, the decades-long border dispute between Afghanistan and Pakistan and the overall foreign policy of the Taliban would be at play, he said.

“The relationship will have more pressure points,” Mir said. “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it tends to rhyme, especially in this region. So I do remember that in the ’90s, after the collapse of the Najibullah government, Pakistan soured on the mujahideen once the power-sharing arrangements lapsed and the civil war intensified.”

What will Pakistan gain from the Taliban’s ascendancy?

Contrary to its oft-stated diplomatic position that it has no favourites in Afghanistan, Pakistan’s government is clearly comfortable with the return of the Taliban, according to analysts who spoke to This Week in Asia.

Within hours of the fall of Kabul, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan said the Afghan people had “broken the shackles of slavery” to the West. At least two members of his cabinet mocked the US for its military failure in Afghanistan in social media posts, while the prime minister’s office on Thursday posted a statement reminding the international community that Khan had for 20 years rightfully argued that there was no military solution in Afghanistan, and that negotiated political settlement was the only way forward. “Pakistan appears to be gearing up to further rehabilitate the Taliban on the international stage,” Mir said. Islamabad is optimistic that the fall of the Afghan government will deprive ethnic Baloch rebel groups of logistical support for attacks against Pakistani security forces in western Balochistan province, which houses the Chinese-operated port of Gwadar, said Basit from the RSIS. Pakistan frequently accused the Kabul administration of working with Indian intelligence agencies to support the Baloch rebels, thereby hemming it in between two hostile flanks – India to the east and Afghanistan to the west. With the Taliban in power, “Pakistan’s political influence will increase in Afghanistan”, Basit said. Stability there would enable the extension of the US$65 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor into Afghanistan, he said, opening the way for Pakistan to trade more freely and frequently with Central Asia and export energy via Afghanistan. But Pakistan only stands to gain in terms of stability on its western border if the Taliban were able to govern effectively, accommodate other ethnic groups and establish lasting peace, ex-ambassador Lodhi said. “Conversely, if they are unable to do so, Afghanistan could face an uncertain and unstable future which will not be in Pakistan’s interest,” she said.

What does Pakistan stand to lose?

Analysts said it was inevitable Pakistan would face political blowback from the humiliated US government and its allies. Islamabad will have to “bear the brunt of the Taliban’s oppressive policies in Afghanistan” because it was seen as the group’s main backer, Basit said. “The international community will judge Pakistan more than the Taliban for supporting them and helping them form a government in Afghanistan.” Mindful of this, officials told journalists and analysts in Islamabad this week that Pakistan had repeatedly advised Taliban representatives in recent months that it would not accord diplomatic recognition to its government if it sought to reimpose the brutal dictatorship overthrown by US invasion forces in October 2001. Nonetheless, “fears in Islamabad have begun to germinate that the surprising calm of the last few days could give way to an orchestrated campaign of scapegoating Pakistan”, Fahd Husain, the Islamabad-based resident editor of Dawn, Pakistan’s biggest English language newspaper, wrote on Thursday.

Meanwhile, the Taliban’s victory and triumphant jihadist narrative would embolden Islamist radical groups in Pakistan, Basit said. The leaders of Pakistan’s two strongest Islamist political parties this week welcomed the Taliban victory, with one even offering to help the group with its plans for governance in Afghanistan. “They will romanticise the Taliban, become more aggressive and less cooperative, and democracy, free speech and critical thinking will take a big hit,” Basit said. The TTP has “gained a lot with the Afghan Taliban’s ascendance, including the materials of the Afghan military”, said Mir of Stanford University. The Taliban also released some 780 former TTP leaders and fighters from Afghan jails this week. Rather than helping Pakistan, Basit said the Taliban government was likely to press Pakistan to negotiate with the TTP, “something which can become a point of inflection in the future”. Playing on Afghan nationalist sentiment, the TTP recently announced plans to reoccupy Pakistan’s northwest tribal areas and establish an independent emirate there.

So will Pakistan recognise a Taliban regime – and how will American and Chinese expectations shape its decision? Pakistan will recognise the Taliban government, according to the analysts, but not any time soon and based on conditions including the formation of a broad-based and inclusive government and respect of fundamental human rights. Islamabad and close ally Beijing would coordinate their positions on Afghanistan, but “both will take it slow and observe instead of rushing in” to recognise the Taliban-led government in Afghanistan, Basit said, adding that Pakistan would also wait for Russia to be on board. Mir said US-Pakistan ties would remain strained as well, with Washington asking for counterterrorism support and pressure on the Taliban. The respective decisions of the US and Pakistan on whether to recognise the Taliban government will not be linked, however. “If the Taliban behave responsibly and run their government moderately, US-Pakistan relations will stay afloat without showing any improvement,” Basit said, but if the situation in Afghanistan deteriorated, however, “US-Pakistan ties will nosedive”.

https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/politics/article/3145543/how-i-left-afghanistan-taliban-escort-airport?module=perpetual_scroll&pgtype=article&campaign=3145543

Pakistan’s hand in the Taliban’s victory - #SanctionPakistan

By Ishaan Tharoor

As the Taliban swept across neighboring Afghanistan, some Pakistanis saw it as a reason to celebrate. Islamist organizations in a number of Pakistani cities doled out sweets to locals. On social media, some people crowed over the failure of the U.S. war effort and nation-building project next door. “Afghanistan is presently witnessing a virtually smooth shifting of power from the corrupt Ghani government to the Taliban,” tweeted Raoof Hasan, a special assistant to Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan, mocking the assessments of Western experts on South Asia. He added that “the contraption that the US had pieced together for Afghanistan has crumbled like the proverbial house of cards.”

Khan himself made a curious remark at an event Monday in Islamabad. Commenting on the cultural dangers inherent in English-language education for Pakistani society — and the “mental slavery” it supposedly imposes — he seemed to point to the fundamentalist Taliban as an exemplar of a kind of empowering authenticity. Afghans, Khan said, “had broken the shackles of slavery.”

For now, Khan’s government has refrained from recognizing the new Taliban overlords as the legitimate government in Kabul. The prime minister, who has been a vocal opponent of the American “war on terror” in the region and blames it for stoking a parallel Pakistani Taliban insurgency, stressed the “importance of all sides working to secure an inclusive political solution,” according to local news reports Tuesday. He and his allies cast Pakistan as a victim of cycles of regional unrest and conflict, exacerbated by the interventions of foreign powers like the United States. “We under no circumstances are prepared to see protracted instability that in the past has caused spillover into Pakistan,” national security adviser Moeed Yusuf said in an interview this month. “Pakistan has suffered all of these 40 years.”

Such rhetoric would probably stick in the craw of the Afghan leaders of the defeated Western-backed government. For years, they bemoaned the support afforded to the Afghan Taliban by Pakistan, particularly by the country’s military establishment and its affiliated intelligence apparatus, known as the Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI. In January 2020, during a World Economic Forum roundtable with journalists, including Today’s WorldView, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani scoffed at Pakistani claims that the Afghan Taliban was no longer operating from safe havens in Pakistan. “One can also say that the Earth does not revolve around the sun,” he said.

The Taliban’s long-running insurgency and its rapid takeover of Afghanistan are inextricably linked to Pakistan. For the better part of half a century, Pakistan cultivated militant elements in Afghanistan as part of its own regional pursuit of “strategic depth.” The factions that coalesced into the Taliban maintained extensive logistical and tactical ties with Pakistani agencies, while many of their fighters came from a world of ethnic and tribal affiliations that spanned both sides of the rugged border. These same networks probably enabled al-Qaeda terrorist founder Osama bin Laden to find sanctuary in a leafy compound not far from Pakistan’s leading military academy until U.S. Navy Seals killed him in a raid a decade ago.For its allies in the Pakistani establishment, the Taliban’s appeal was both political and tactical, even as Pakistan served as a major U.S. ally during and after the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan. “Some sympathized with the Islamists’ extreme ideology, while others deemed it an indispensable asset to counter India,” noted the Financial Times. “Taliban leaders have lived and done business in Pakistan, and wounded fighters have been treated in its hospitals. The Haqqani Network, an affiliate of the Taliban, has a ‘close relationship’ with the ISI, according to a recent report from the US Institute of Peace.”This has long been an open secret. “When history is written, it will be stated that the ISI defeated the Soviet Union in Afghanistan with the help of America,” Hamid Gul, a former ISI chief, said on television in 2014. “Then there will be another sentence. The ISI, with the help of America, defeated America.”

Now, from former E.U. leaders to Afghans on social media, there are calls for tougher international action on Pakistan. “Without Pakistan’s intelligence and military establishment’s unstinting support for the Taliban, the group would be a nuisance rather than an effective fighting force,” wrote academic C. Christine Fair in Foreign Policy this week. “The United States has steadfastly refused to do the one thing it could have done long ago: targeted sanctions against those in Pakistan’s deep state who sponsor Islamist militants.”

On the contrary, the United States leaned on Khan’s government to facilitate talks with the Taliban. Under Trump administration pressure, Pakistan released Abdul Ghani Baradar — the political figure likely to be at the head of a future Taliban-led government — from prison in 2018 so he could participate in peace negotiations held in Doha, the Qatari capital. In a June op-ed in The Washington Post, Khan argued that he and his government did the “real diplomatic heavy lifting” to bring the Afghan Taliban to the negotiating table and urged Ghani’s government to “show more flexibility” in the talks.

Critics argue that the talks served as a smokescreen for the Taliban’s steady advance through Afghanistan, and that the ultraconservative faction never had any interest in preserving the constitutional republic that the United States sought to solidify in Kabul. This has implications for Pakistan, too.

“The Taliban’s military takeover of Kabul violates the peace agreement signed by the Afghan Taliban and the United States in Doha last year, so that agreement is essentially dead,” wrote Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir in a Washington Post op-ed. “Now we face a state of yawning uncertainty — one that affects Pakistan, perhaps, more deeply than any other regional power.”

At home, wrote political scientist Fahd Humayun, Pakistan could face a new influx of Afghan refugees, on top of the approximately 3 million it has hosted since the waning days of the Cold War. The Taliban takeover does not dim the threat of anti-Islamabad militancy, and it could also encourage Islamist extremist movements and ethnic Pashtun separatists operating within Pakistan. Meanwhile, Western frustrations with the Pakistani connection to the Afghan Taliban may only intensify in coming weeks.

“These developments will take Pakistan further away from becoming ‘a normal country,’ perpetuating dysfunction at home and locking it into a foreign policy defined by hostility toward India and dependence on China,” wrote Husain Haqqani, a former Pakistani ambassador now based in Washington. “The United States is unlikely to soon forgive Pakistan for its decades-long enabling of the Taliban.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/08/18/pakistan-hand-taliban-victory/

Protests in Pakistan erupt against China’s belt and road plan

Demonstrations shut down Gwadar, where Chinese are blamed for lack of water and electricity and threat to local fishing.

Protests have erupted in Pakistan’s port city Gwadar against a severe shortage of water and electricity and threats to livelihoods, part of a growing backlash against China’s multibillion-dollar belt and road projects in the country.

This week, demonstrators including fishers and other local workers blocked the roads in Gwadar, a coastal town in Balochistan. They burned tyres, chanted slogans and largely shut down the city, to demand water and electricity and a stop to Chinese trawlers illegally fishing in the nearby waters and then taking the fish to China. Two people were injured when the authorities cracked down on the protesters.

On Friday a suicide bomber killed two children, in an attack on Chinese nationals driving along the main expressway to the port, according to a senior Pakistani official. “The suicide bomber was able to hit the last car of the convoy as it passed,” he said, confirming that two children died and a Chinese engineer was injured.

Responsibility for the attack was claimed by the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA), which like other militant groups in the region accuses Chinese of exploiting Balochistan’s mineral resources, and has previously attacked Chinese nationals and the Chinese consulate in Karachi.

This week’s protests had been largely peaceful.

“It has been more than a month, we have been protesting and rallying against the Chinese trawlers, shortage of water and electricity. The government never paid heed to our demands, and we had to observe a complete shutdown strike and we were attacked by the district administration,” said Faiz Nigori, a local political worker.

The protests are part of a growing discontent with China’s presence in Gwadar, whose port is an integral part of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor project (CPEC), in which China has invested billions in infrastructure projects in Pakistan.

Under the project, Pakistan surrendered Gwadar port to a Chinese-backed multinational corporation for a lease of 40 years. It is part of China’s mammoth belt and road initiative, which stretches across 70 countries to give China a clear trade route from east Asia to Europe. The Pakistan government accepted China’s investment in the hope it would help boost the country’s ailing economy. But Balochistan is home to a long-running violent insurgency, and China’s presence in Gwadar has been the cause of much social unrest and led to great anti-Chinese sentiment. It has also given a fillip to Baloch militant insurgent groups, who have carried out terrorist attacks in protest at CPEC projects. However, there are signs that resentment at belt and road is growing across the country. Nine Chinese workers were killed last month when a vehicle laden with explosives and driven by a suicide attacker rammed a convoy heading out to work on the Dasu dam, another flagship CPEC project.

China’s ambassador to Pakistan was also targeted in a terrorist attack on his hotel in April, though he was not hurt.

China is not to blame for the power and water shortages that have plagued Gwadar in recent weeks. Balochistan is Pakistan’s most undeveloped and most neglected region, and Gwadar is not connected to the national grid. It had instead relied on power from neighbouring Iran, but that has slowed to a trickle in recent weeks. Water has also become scarce after a dam dried up.

However, locals said they had been promised that China’s investment in Gwadar would mean development for the area, including the establishment of a coal-fired power station to provide much-needed electricity. Yet, in the years since China was granted a lease on Gwadar port, no work has begun on any such projects and instead locals say that China’s presence is undermining their livelihoods and creating local food shortages by allowing Chinese fishing boats to illegally fish in Pakistan’s waters around the port.

Nigori said that when the Chinese started developing the Gwadar port, Pakistani officials claimed that the port city would become the Singapore of Pakistan. “But today, we don’t have water, electricity and Chinese trawlers are illegally fishing at our coast. We just want our basic rights,” he said. Mir Sher Baz Khetran, a senior research fellow at the Institute of Strategic Studies Islamabad, said such protests could prove very destabilising for China’s presence in Pakistan. “If there is no trickle-down of development projects under CPEC, it will strengthen the insurgents’ narrative of exploitation of resources of Balochistan,” he said.

Last month, Pakistan detained five Chinese trawlers on suspicion of illegal fishing not far from Gwadar port. Khudadad Waju, the president of Fisherfolk Alliance Gwadar, said it had sent a team of local fishers to examine the caught fish and they confirmed that “the fish were caught near Gwadar”.

However, Chinese authorities denied that the detained Chinese trawlers were illegally fishing and claimed instead that they were sheltering from a storm.

Akbar Askani, the minister for fisheries for the Balochistan state government, alleged that the central government, which has close ties with China, was granting Chinese vessels licences to fish in the seas around Gwadar, despite the cost to the local community.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/aug/20/water-protests-in-pakistan-erupt-against-chinas-belt-and-road-plan

Two killed in suicide bombing targeting Chinese nationals in Pakistan

Gul Yousafzai

A suicide bombing targeting a vehicle carrying Chinese nationals in southwestern Pakistan killed two children and wounded three on Friday, police said.

The suicide blast took place at the East Bay Road in the port of Gwadar around 7 p.m. Chinese nationals sustained minor injuries, a police statement said. Gwadar is in the southwestern province of Balochistan, where separatist militants have waged a long-running insurgency.

"Two children have been killed and three injured in the attack," said Liaquat Shahwani, a spokesman for the Balochistan government.

Balochistan Liberation Army, a separatist militant organisation claimed responsibility for the attack.

"BLA carried out a 'self-sacrificing' attack against a convoy of Chinese engineers," the group said in a statement.

China is involved in the development of the Gwadar port on the Arabian Sea as part of a $60 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, which is itself part of China's Belt and Road infrastructure project.The Pakistan interior ministry said that a young boy ran out of a nearby fishermen colony and exploded himself about 15-20 meters from the convoy.

"As a result a Chinese national was injured, he was rushed to nearby Gwadar hospital where he is stable", the ministry said in a statement.

The four vehicles carrying Chinese nationals were escorted by army and police.

Pakistan is already undertaking a comprehensive review of security of Chinese nationals in the country, the interior ministry statement added.

In July, an attack on a bus in the northwestern province of Khyber-Paktunkhwa killed 13 people, including nine Chinese workers. Two Pakistani soldiers were killed.

https://news.yahoo.com/two-killed-suicide-bombing-targeting-163251547.html

#Pakistan - #PPP appeals to the Supreme Court to review its decision regarding government employees

Secretary General Pakistan Peoples Party, Syed Nayyer Hussain Bukhari has expressed grave concern over the recent decision of the Supreme Court regarding government employees and requested the Supreme Court to reconsider the decision.

In his statement, the PPP Secretary General said that the PPP government had given financial relief to the forcibly dismissed employees during the period from 1996 to 2007 by reinstating them and compensating them for the injustice done to them so that they would be able to feed and educate their children, and get out of financial difficulties.

Syed Nayyer Hussain Bukhari requested the Supreme Court to grant relief to the poor government employees as it had given relief to Imran Khan and other bigwigs including the generals by recognizing them as the third parties. Syed Nayyer Hussain Bukhari said that today people are unemployed and facing financial difficulties due to Corona pandemic, their lives are under threat due to the decision of the Supreme Court. The PPP secretary general said that these government employees were subjected to political and economic discrimination from 1996 to 2007. Nayyer Bukhari has appealed to the Supreme Court to reconsider its decision and save the lives of these government employees.

https://www.ppp.org.pk/pr/25364/