War is a Big Business…

Syed Sohail Ahmad

Neoconservatives’ policy of promoting democracy by strength, military intervention, and change of regime idea has come a full circle.

The Vietnam war to prevent the communist victory, reshaping the Middle East with the invasion of Iraq, Libya and Syria, and promoting democratic values in a tribal society like Afghanistan has floundered but not without a colossal financial and human cost.

President Eisenhower in his farewell address in 1961, warned the nation of what he viewed as its biggest threat–The military-industrial complex consisting of contractors and lobbyists perpetuating war.

War is a big business with lots of money going to and fro and unfortunately with a lot of angst, a lot of fear and lots of doubt. (Jon Anderson).

The first World War was fought at an estimated cost of 208 billion dollars and caused the greatest economic depression of the twentieth century. The second World War cost nearly 4 trillion dollars. War-related production skyrocketing from 2 to 40 percent of the total GNP.

War is not only about one country’s military invading another country, it’s about logistics, arms and ammunition, constant supply of them, airpower, navy, missiles, unmanned aerial vehicles and aircrafts. It is about the intelligence network and surveillance satellites.

To sustain one’s presence on the ground one needs accommodation, food, and medical supplies. Bagram base is an example of it. It has two runways and cost nearly a billion dollars.

The treatment and rehabilitation of injured soldiers, both physical and psychological, further cost millions of dollars.

War is not just about the military, but also about private contractors. The role of Blackwaters in Afghanistan and Iraq, and Russia’s Wagener’s group in Libya is well known. This outsourcing of the military and security function has been a recent phenomenon and costs the exchequer a fortune.

The Vietnam War, the post 9/11 invasion of the Middle East and Afghanistan, brought a lot of instability and Misery to the regions.

The question is, has it brought any progress or development in the society or the country where the coalition of the willing has invaded. Did liberation by invasion bear fruit. Did it promote democratic values, and has it improved the quality of life of the general masses in the region? The answer is NO, and a big NO!

Questions arise, whether without knowing the history, culture, and traditions of a particular region which is known as the graveyard of the empires and without the knowledge about the level to which a society has evolved, …will imposing the values and norms of a developed society results in the betterment of that society?

Looking into Iraqi society, we see that the Sunni minority has been ruling the country with a dictator, who for his own ambitions fought an 8-year long war with Iran. His intention was to control Shate Al Arab waterway, to seize Khuzestan, an oil-rich province and was fully supported by the Western powers and the USA.

The dismantling of the ruling Baath party in Iraq with secular roots, on allegations of possession of weapons of mass destruction, and having links with Al-Qaida, both of which were proved false later, resulted in total chaos in the region. It also resulted in the rise of the crescent for the first time in Islamic history.

Analyzing the fabric of the Afghan society, we see that 22% of the population is urban and 78% lives in rural areas. 42 % Push toons live on both sides of Durand. 28% of Tajiks live in the northeastern region. Uzbeks 9%in the northern region. Hazaras 9%in Central Afghanistan in the Hazarajat area. Baloch’s 2% and Turkmens 3%.

Imposing a marionette government with no connection to the masses, in Afghanistan, but had to fail. The first president was a man, who worked for an American oil company UNOCAL. The second president was an employee of the World Bank. How could either connect to a tribal society! The outcome was that, when Taliban takeover was imminent, the finance minister took off and went to the USA. The information minister opted to be a delivery boy in Germany and the President of the country flew to the land of his safety, leaving behind a human catastrophe that the whole world is watching.

The Iran-Iraq war cost 350 billion dollars along with one million people dead, one and a half million injured, and two million people rendered homeless.

The first ten days in the Libyan War cost the administration nearly 550 million dollars.

The Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs, in Brown University, regarding the cost of wars, reports:

The war in Afghanistan cost 2.26 trillion dollars to the USA from 2001 till now, which is nearly 300 million dollars every day for 20 years. By 2050 this will be nearly 6.5 trillion dollars. That amounts to 20,000 US dollars for every US citizen. It includes 800 million dollars in direct warfighting cost and 85 billion in training the Afghan army. Not only this, the US taxpayers were paying 750 million dollars for the payroll annually. The biggest chunk, 1.1 trillion went to overseas contingency operation under the department of defense, and nearly 530 billion dollars on the interest of the loans borrowed by the US government to finance the war.

Another study by the cost of war project post 9/11 by Pradee and Watson Institute of Brown University, also reported nearly 6 trillion dollars plus expenditure.

Yet only a very small amount was spent on human resource development, education, health infrastructure, power generation, and roads. Very recently, President Ashraf Ghani said that 90 percent of the Afghans are living on 2 dollars per day.

The human cost is also high with 2,500 US soldiers and 4,000 civilian contractors killed. To take care of 20,000 US casualties will cost another 300 billion US dollars.

If we look at the civilian casualties, it amounts to 111,000 since the United Nations assistance mission in Afghanistan started recording in 2009.

Another report suggests 69,000 Afghan military police officials, 47,000 civilians, 51,000 opposition fighters were killed, though the actual figures could be much higher.

Other than all the people who have been killed, a large number have been displaced, having to take refuge in the neighboring countries. People incurring disabilities, being caught in the Crossfire, collateral damage, aerial bombardment, victims of IED (improvised explosive device), and the loss of male family members who are the breadwinners of a family in a tribal society has led to a total collapse of the family structure and the loss of hope for a better future. This does not account for post-traumatic stress disorders and psychological illnesses.

Global arm expenditures rose to 1981 billion dollars in 2020 an increase of nearly 2.6 % than the previous year at this time of the pandemic. The United States is the biggest spender on defense with 778 billion dollars in 2020 with China 252, India, 72.9, Russia 61, and UK 59.2 billion dollars

United States is the world’s largest exporter of arms with 37% of the share of the global arms market, Russia 20%, France 8.2%, Germany 5.5%, and China 5.2% (SIPRI Stockholm International Peace Research Institute).

The military-industrial complex thrives on war. War, as the saying goes, makes a select few richer. The United States is home to five of the ten World’s largest defense companies.

Lockheed Martin is the biggest defense manufacturers and contractor. Then there’s Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Raythorp Grumman, BAE systems.

These companies have benefited immensely from the expansion in the military budget, which is the largest in the world. War on terror military intervention in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria has made this a very profitable business. It supports and creates millions of jobs in America. According to a report by SIPRI, arms sales grew by 51% by 2011. Not only this, Halliburton with Dick Cheney as its CEO, gained 39.5 billion dollars of federal contracts during the middle-eastern war.

Involvement in foreign lands involves military, civilian contractors, intelligence operatives, arms manufacturers, companies involved in logistics, food, the housing of personnel, paychecks, careers, pensions, and lots of misappropriation of unaccounted funds, and it benefits the military-industrial complex.

War is a big business.

References

1. Cost of war Watson Institute of International and Public affairs Brown University.
2. New research from the cost of wars project post 9/11 Frederick. S Pradee Centre and Brown University Watson Institute of International and Public affairs
3. Cost of war now and then Norwich University study

https://en.humsub.com.pk/3098/war-is-a-big-business/

The Pakistan Connection: How ISKP Became Islamabad’s Latest Proxy

By Abhinav Pandya

Pakistan’s double game of keeping up the pretense of being a U.S. ally against terror while sheltering, funding, and training terrorist groups with U.S. aid money is likely to continue.

The Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP) claimed the Kabul explosions that killed more than 100 people, including thirteen U.S. marines. Following the attack, ISKP, hitherto a second fiddle in the Afghan conflict theatre, emerged as a new target of the global war on terror and is providing a new rationale for U.S. intervention. Moreover, it is leading some to have a rosier view of the Pakistan-backed Taliban, which are now being viewed as a counterweight to ISIS.

However, ISKP is also a Pakistani proxy that is thriving under Islamabad’s patronage. Most of ISKP’s cadres include disgruntled elements from the Taliban, Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, and Pakistan’s other proxy groups like Jaish-e-Muhammad (JeM) and Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT). The rest include foreign fighters from Uzbekistan, Kerala (India), etc.

In the Afghanistan-Pakistan region, there are numerous heavyweight proxies that are supported by the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) like the Haqqani Network (HQN), JeM, LeT, and the Taliban. Given these groups’ presence, it is almost impossible for a new organization to survive without the blessings of the Pakistani Army’s General Headquarters in Rawalpindi. Reportedly, since its formation in 2015, the ISI has infiltrated ISKP with a sizable number of its cadres from LeT, JeM, and HQN.

Since the ISKP and Taliban are competing for recruits, territory, and revenue sources, a lay observer understands that they are sworn enemies. However, the groups have much in common. Ideologically, the Taliban and ISKP are both Sunni extremists aiming for a sharia-ruled Islamic society. Until recently, NATO forces and the Afghan government were their common enemies, and in regard to their brutal treatment of women, non-Muslims, and Shias and Ahmadiyyas religious minorities, the Taliban and ISKP are more or less on the same page.

With Pakistan-sponsored terrorist groups, it is common to overlook ideological differences and work on tactically compromising towards larger objectives. For example, in Kashmir, JeM, a Deobandi terrorist group with generational ties to the Taliban—as the Taliban also subscribes to Deobandi ideology—comfortably works with groups with differing ideologies such as LeT, a Salafi group, and Hizbul Mujahidin, which subscribes to Maulana Maududi’s version of political Islam. Al Qaeda, a Wahhabi outfit, has maintained close ties with the Taliban and affiliated Deobandi groups like JeM and Harkat-ul-Mujahidin. Then, there are marriage and tribal ties between the different groups. Due to these aforementioned reasons, most of these groups are interconnected. Hence, there is no reason to believe that ISKP and the Taliban are sworn enemies due to perceived ideological differences. If some disgruntled individuals deserted the Taliban to join ISKP, it mainly was over leadership clashes, turf wars, and the distribution of financial resources from opium smuggling.

Interviews I had with informed interlocutors in Pakistan suggest that key figures in ISKP have had links with individuals and entities associated with the Pakistani ISI since the group’s inception. Further, this claim was substantiated through my conversations with members of India’s intelligence fraternity. In 2016, they found compelling evidence of Pakistani agencies radicalizing Indian youth from Kerala on ISKP’s behalf. Reportedly, they also assisted them in moving to the ISKP stronghold in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region through third countries.

Ismail Punjabi, an Indian national who is reportedly in charge of ISKP’s foreign fighters, was a LeT cadre before joining ISKP. He worked with LeT between 2003-07 and was involved in planning the Mumbai Taj attack (2008) in which several U.S. citizens were killed. Later, he joined Al Qaeda before transferring to ISKP. He was killed in 2016. Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost, ISKP’s former religious head, was an Afghanistan-based former militant commander and a key member of Kunar-based Salafi group, Jamaat-ul-Dawa-al-Quran, which maintained close ties with LeT.

Huzaifa al-Bakistani, an ISKP commander who is in charge of the group’s operations in Kashmir, was also an ex-LeT cadre and close to ISI. He was a relative of Aijaz Ahmad Ahangar, known as alias Abu Usman al Kashmiri (a resident of Srinagar), who also joined ISKP. Previously, Ahangar was with Tahreek-ul-Mujahidin (TuM) and Harkat-ul-Mujahidin (HuM), two other Pakistan-backed terrorist groups operating in Kashmir. Ahangar is also a son-in-law of Abdullah Ghani Dar, known as Abdullah Ghazali, former commander of TuM and LeT. ISKP chief Aslam Farukhi, the mastermind of the Kabul gurudwara attack, which killed twenty-seven Sikhs, is also an ex-LeT member. After his arrest in Kandahar, Pakistan asked for his extradition because the ISI feared he would reveal too much about his links to Pakistani intelligence. Another influential ISKP leader, Abdul Haseeb Loghari (an Afghan Taliban defector), was an alim (a religious position) with HQN before he joined the group.

HQN, also known as the Taliban’s sword arm, has maintained a close relationship with the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Its chief, Sirajuddin Haqqani, is the deputy commander of the Taliban. Notorious for its suicide bombings, HQN has conducted many deadly attacks in Afghanistan, killing many American and Afghan soldiers. It also runs a vast criminal drug trafficking enterprise. Had it not been for the ISI’s deep-rooted provision of training, weapons, safe heavens, and finances, HQN would not have endured for the last twenty years.

ISKP has collaborated with HQN in several tactical and strategic matters. Aslam Farookhi’s interrogation revealed highly synchronized operational dynamics between ISKP, JeM, HQN, and LeT. ISKP individuals received training at JeM camps at Chaman and Tolandi in Pakistan. The LeT provided operatives and identified targets in Afghanistan which could generate socio-political and economic concerns. Through its control of vast criminal resources and military muscle, HQN helped with logistics and coordination. ISKP worked on propaganda, provided the recruits, and claimed the attacks. Farookhi’s revelations helped the Afghan police neutralize several ISKP networks that were intertwined with the Haqqanis.Having discussed the interconnected and overlapping nature of terror groups in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region, it becomes clear that the ISI is the common denominator among all of them.

Decoding the Kabul Blasts

Following the recent Kabul blasts, it is worth questioning ISKP’s claims. HQN has been managing Kabul’s security as it is a natural choice given its vast resources, military muscle, ties with the Taliban, and ISI’s backing. Also, a senior Pakistani army major-general was reportedly in Kabul to oversee the security and other affairs in the days following the Afghan government’s collapse. It stretches credulity to understand how members of a second-rung terror group, reportedly having strong ties with HQN, managed to breach the Kabul airport’s high-security zone, bypassing rigorous security checkpoints and committing an act of terror. Any objective analysis is incomplete without exploring whether others, including HQN, Pakistan, or the Taliban itself provided tacit support to ISKP. Thus, we must also consider who benefits from the aforementioned blasts, especially since the Americans are leaving and the Taliban needs international recognition. Indeed, neither the Taliban nor HQN owned up the attack. Instead, by taking responsibility, ISKP has served its purpose.First, the attack has demolished French president Emmanuel Macron’s idea of establishing a safe zone at Kabul’s airport for civilian evacuations after August 31, the U.S. withdrawal deadline, and also put brakes on the evacuation of Afghans who assisted coalition forces. Second, raising the specter of ISKP enables Pakistan to project the Taliban as a responsible actor—the so-called “good guys”—and compel the Americans to support Pakistan and Taliban in fighting ISKP and via military and financial assistance. Third, the Taliban’s projection as a responsible and reformed entity offers some respite and much-sought-after justification for the United States’ withdrawal decision, at a time when Washington is facing colossal embarrassment because of its hasty and bungled withdrawal. Fourth, with U.S. help, the Taliban is likely to weed out anti-Taliban and anti-Pakistan factions in ISKP, gaining some plaudits for contributing to the war on terror.Given the ISI’s history of intelligence operations, it is not challenging to understand how Pakistan’s nexus with ISKP furthers Islamabad’s objectives. Pakistan has raised many two-tier proxy groups with secular names in Kashmir after the first layer got exposed. For example, The Resistance Front (TRF) is a LeT offshoot. The People’s Anti-Fascist Front (PAFF) is JeM’s proxy. LeT and JeM stand exposed as Pakistan-backed terror groups, and any attacks claimed by them may invite a harsh reaction by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) against Pakistan.

Hence, since raising multiple proxies gives Pakistan deniability, the ISI is using the same model in Afghanistan. For example, luring Indian nationals into ISKP and inducing them to target Indian interests in Afghanistan has offered convincing deniability to Pakistan compared to using known proxies like LeT and JeM. Likewise, since Pakistan’s links with the Taliban and HQN are well-known, it is nurturing ISKP for three reasons: to maintain a degree of plausible deniability, to project an image of also being a victim of terror, and to make the Taliban more acceptable to international actors.

There is a strong likelihood that ISKP will claim responsibility for more attacks on Western and Indian targets in the region soon. Moreover, Pakistan’s double game of keeping up the pretense of being a U.S. ally against terror while sheltering, funding, and training terrorist groups with U.S. aid money is likely to continue. The only difference now is that ISKP has replaced Al Qaeda and the Taliban as America’s latest antagonist. Regardless, as long as the Pakistani Army’s General Headquarters in Rawalpindi continues to play its bloody and covert intelligence game from behind the scenes, innocent Afghans will continue to suffer.

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/pakistan-connection-how-iskp-became-islamabad%E2%80%99s-latest-proxy-193221?page=0%2C1

Video - طالبانو د مظاهره چیانو خورولو لپاره ډزې کړې - بي بي سي پښتو، نړۍ دا وخت

Opinion | Pakistan Wants to Cash in on Its Taliban 'Victory.' But China Is Wrecking Its Plans

Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Twitter: @khuldune

From politicians to cricketers to Islamists, Pakistan is celebrating the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan.But, as Beijing flexes its muscles, its attempts to start a bidding war for access to Kabul will be short-lived.

After an interlude of two decades, Pakistan has conquered Afghanistan, again.

Or so you would think, looking at the reactions of Pakistani leaders over the past three weeks. From leaking intelligence meetings to celebrating Western leaders’ calls, Islamabad is relishing, loudly, the attention it is getting.Imran Khan is lauding the Taliban for breaking Afghans’ "shackles of slavery," while he leads a country that received billions of dollars to maintain exactly that "slavery." Army Chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa, head of a military that has been taking orders from the U.S. for 20 years, is now lecturing Washington on the failures of its geopolitical strategies, while peddling a Taliban that, he asserts, would champion human rights. This, only a month after Bajwa expressed concerns about cracking down on the Pakistan Taliban for fear of violent "blowback" within Pakistan itself, acknowledging that the Afghan and Pakistan Taliban are "two faces of the same coin."

For Pakistan’s real rulers, the military, the time has come to cash in on that coin.

Pakistan’s triumphant tub-thumping began last year, after Donald Trump’s deal with the Taliban in Doha. The U.S., by legitimizing the Taliban as a critical stakeholder, signified a victory for Pakistan’s decades-old plan to establish an Islamist regime in Kabul.

That plan even predates the U.S.’s utilization of the jihadists to drive out the Soviets. Pakistan formulated the policy of cultivating an extra-territorial mujahideen force under its writ soon after the state’s inception, to counter Indian influence and ‘liberate Kashmir.’

To those ends, it sought ‘strategic depth’ in Afghanistan and first sent jihadists to target the Daoud Khan regime in the early 1970s. Pakistan has also been anxious about an Indo-Afghan ploy to incite separatism among the Pashtun-majority areas on Islamabad’s side of the Durand Line that no regime in Kabul has ever officially recognized as a border.

In addition to being the foundation of the Pakistan’s regional policies, the jihadists also help the military suppress civilian leaders to maintain its position as the omnipotent hegemon at home. Therefore, a lot was at stake when, in the wake of 9/11, the U.S. threatened that if Islamabad didn’t uproot its jihadist superstructure, it would bomb "Pakistan back to the Stone Age" — even if George W. Bush didn’t in fact use those exact words.

But Pakistan barely even paid lip service to its pretense to clamp down on jihadists, including those responsible for 9/11, gambling, correctly, that an overextended U.S. wouldn’t make good on its lurid threat. In addition to establishing this inherently duplicitous counterterror game with/against the U.S., the then military ruler Pervez Musharraf built a similarly paradoxical ideological narrative at home, selling "enlightened moderation" to the West, while radically Islamizing Pakistan.

Little wonder, then, that Taliban’s takeover has also been met with jubilation by Pakistanis across ideological and political divides. Some Islamists are exalting the return of Islamic rule, while simultaneously plugging in the timeless ‘Jewish-Hindu’ conspiracy theories. 'Moderates' use half-baked sarcasm ("Pakistani women should wear hijab to make us as powerful as the Taliban!") to test the waters on where their mass audience stands on the Afghan Islamists. Cricketers, senior female judges and even some women’s schools and organizations vocally back the Taliban. Their victory is our victory, say the educated women, journalists and cultural figures who would be forced into silence across the border.

As is evident, during the decades of turmoil it fostered in Afghanistan to facilitate the Taliban’s rise to power, Pakistan has successfully completed its own Talibanization. Indeed, last year, just as it became clear that a second Taliban reign was imminent in Afghanistan, Imran Khan began paying tribute to Osama bin Laden, whom he called a "martyr," (while his own foreign minister refused to call bin Laden a terrorist) talking up Islamic modesty codes as solution to growing sexual violence against women, and even rallying for the country’s murderous blasphemy laws to be exported to the West.

But the establishment doesn’t appear to be entertaining the possibility that this grand strategy could backfire: instead of propping up Afghan puppets in a satellite state, Pakistan may just have empowered a jihadist regime to expand over the border into its own de facto territory. Instead, Pakistan’s rulers see only victory: The victory of their Islamist narrative, of their patronage over the Taliban, which they still hope means control, and the boost to their Muslim world leadership pedigree.

Pakistan hopes to win credit with both Iran and Saudi Arabia by selling the story of its influence over Taliban and as kingmaker in Afghanistan, compensating for the dent in Islamabad’s budding bromance with Turkey, caused by Pakistan pushing its way much of the Afghan refugee flow, aided by the extremely timely erection of a fence on the Afghan border last month. Pakistan knows it can play both sides of the Shia-Sunni divide because, as the Taliban’s rise indicates, the Muslim world is no longer bipolar: those spheres of influence are permeable and elastic, with Iranian and Saudi officials now meeting regularly, and power struggles within the Gulf and beyond. Fighting intra-Muslim sectarian proxy wars won’t be as lucrative as it used to be for Riyadh and Tehran.

Pakistan’s army, a longstanding beneficiary of big powers’ proxy jihad in the Middle East, now needs something new to attract Saudi funds. And just like good old days of anti-Soviet jihad, Pakistan is all set to vend the same product to both Saudi and the U.S. albeit under different packaging: Leverage with the Taliban – or else. Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi chose to urge Western leaders to stay invested in Afghanistan by, in effect, warning them that instability could lead to another 9/11, while accusing India of supporting jihadist groups.

Pakistan’s narrative – that the West needs it to access and influence the Taliban – comes with spikes for extra persuasive power. Islamabad is concurrently blackmailing Western powers into accepting Pakistan’s primacy in Afghanistan, or at least that of its omnipotent army, by alluding to its status as a potentially turbulent nuclear-armed state.

Pakistani military leaders since Pervez Musharraf have repeatedly asserted that its nuclear bomb might fall into jihadist hands should whatever it is demanding isn’t done.

Few Western leaders appear to have paused to contemplate if they’re now giving a helping hand to a Pakistani military which has refused to cede even the minutest bit of authority to civilian leaders over seven decades, ensconced in an alliance with an Islamist militia, highlighted again by this weekend’s visit by the head of Pakistani intelligence to Kabul.

Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal has been within jihadist proximity for decades, but now, that access could be even closer, compounded by Gen Bajwa’s own admission that jihadist elements (including those heavily sympathetic to the Taliban) are present within the Pakistan army itself. Pakistan is eagerly publicizing the attention it's won since the Taliban takeover, and not only to attract U.S. President Joe Biden’s attention. It is simultaneously intended as a message for Gulf rulers, whose plans for the Middle East, and especially formalization of ties with Israel, might be derailed by events in Kabul not least if Pakistan takes over the antisemitic conspiracy hysteria mainstreamed in the past by the Arab states now queuing up to recognize the Jewish state.

Islamabad’s advertising of its own significance might even be a soft whisper towards China, which has increasingly asserted economic control over Pakistan, but was recently given a painful reminder of the jihadist threat from within Pakistan looming over the China Pakistan Economic Corridor, the spine of Beijing’s much touted Belt and Road Initiative.

While the U.S. withdrawal left China to deal with a jihadist regime, armed with arsenal worth millions, Pakistan will struggle to bleed Beijing the way it did Washington.

Thanks to territorial contiguity, and an autocratic, neoliberal diplomacy that puts modern-day Western imperialism in the shade, China can micromanage its interests in Pakistan, leaving little margin for double play. Just have a look at Pakistan’s ‘counter-terrorism’ record: While allied to the U.S., it shielded Osama bin Laden, the world’s most wanted terrorist, but is now eagerly hunting down second-generation Uyghur shopkeepers who found sanctuary in Afghanistan, on China’s orders.

Pakistan might have hoped that the Taliban takeover, and the bidding war for influence it aspires to foment, would give it some breathing space to negotiate better terms on the China front. But for all Pakistan’s noisy attempt to claim ownership over access to the Taliban and Afghanistan, it can’t compete with Beijing’s economic attractions, on which the survival of the new Kabul regime depends. Having this week declared China its "principal partner," if the Taliban can prove itself to be a more reliable guarantor of stability along the Af-Pak border, then the now-preening Pakistani army will, at best, now quickly sell the West one more delivery of empty reassurances for one last hefty payday, before China takes over.

https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/.premium-pakistan-wants-to-cash-in-on-its-taliban-victory-but-china-s-wrecking-its-plans-1.10185530

Pakistan cheers Taliban out of ‘fear of India’ – despite spillover threat

Tom WHEELDON

After years of accusations that Islamabad was covertly backing the Taliban, Pakistan's prime minister overtly hailed the fall of Kabul on Monday. Experts say geostrategic concerns about its archenemy India motivate Pakistan’s pro-Taliban stance – making it unlikely to change course, even amid fears that the militants’ control of Afghanistan accentuates the jihadist threat at home.

Islamabad’s reaction to the Taliban’s victory was the opposite of the despair in Western capitals: Their triumph showed that Afghans had “broken the shackles of slavery”, Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan asserted.

Khan’s special assistant Raoof Hasan framed the fall of Kabul – for many, a moment encapsulated by footage of hundreds of Afghans running alongside a departing US plane, desperately trying to flee – as a “virtually smooth shifting of power from the corrupt Afghan government to the Taliban”.Perhaps most tellingly, Pakistani Climate Minister Zartaj Gul Wazir singled out the country’s perennial antagonist India as the audience for her delight, in a subsequently deleted tweet: “India gets an appropriate gift for its Independence Day”.

New Delhi’s backing of Afghanistan’s pro-Western governments under Hamid Kharzi and then Ashraf Ghani was anathema to Islamabad – as three wars and repeated skirmishes over disputed Kashmir have marked Pakistan’s relations with India since the British Raj ended in 1947.

“Under Ghani, Afghanistan was seen as particularly close to India, and this of course caused a great deal of consternation because Pakistan’s entire foreign policy is shaped by fear of being encircled by India to the east and by a pro-Indian Afghan government to the west and north,” noted Farzana Shaikh, a Pakistan specialist at Chatham House in London, speaking to FRANCE 24.

Consequently, Shaikh continued, “Pakistan sees the return of the Taliban as the success of a longstanding policy designed to ensure a friendly government in Afghanistan.”

‘The wrong enemy’

Many analysts and journalists – notably former New York Times Afghanistan correspondent Carlotta Gall in her 2014 book, The Wrong Enemy – have accused the Pakistani state of surreptitiously backing the Taliban, pointing the finger especially at Islamabad’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency.

Richard Holbrooke, the veteran US diplomat and then special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, furnished Gall with her title shortly before his death in 2010: “We may be fighting the wrong enemy in the wrong country,” he said – implying that, behind the scenes, the ISI and Pakistani military were the real US nemeses in the region.Pakistan pledged its support for the post-9/11 US invasion of Afghanistan that toppled the Taliban – and has repeatedly denied backing the Islamist insurgents.However, the country’s Interior Minister Shaikh Rashid Ahmed admitted in June that, “Taliban families live here in Pakistan” and “sometimes they come here in [sic] hospitals to get medical treatment”. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistani president from 2001 to 2008, told The Guardian in 2015: “Obviously we were looking for some groups to counter […] Indian action against Pakistan. That is where the intelligence work comes in. Intelligence being in contact with Taliban groups.” “There’s no doubt among scholars, officials and people on the ground in Afghanistan that Pakistani intelligence agencies strongly supported the Taliban right from its inception in the 1990s, that this support continued beyond 2001, that the group’s leadership was based on Pakistani soil – and that this is an important reason why the Taliban was able to sustain itself for so many years,” Shashank Joshi, defence editor of The Economist, told FRANCE 24.

US ‘kid gloves’

Concerns persist that Pakistan is Janus-faced in the fight against jihadism. The Financial Action Task Force (FATF), a Paris-based multilateral organisation combating terrorist funding and money laundering, announced in June that it was giving Pakistan another four months to enact an internationally agreed plan to stop the financing of jihadist groups on its territory.

If Islamabad does not comply, the FATF will call on its member states to add the country to its blacklist of nations, including North Korea and Iran, that are shut off from global financial institutions.

Long before the FATF report, many observers were asking why recurrent allegations of Pakistani support for the Taliban never prompted US sanctions. “A lot of people remain mystified by the US kid-glove handling of Pakistan,” as Shaikh put it.Decision-makers in Washington felt their hands were tied, she explained. “The most immediate reason was that the US needed access to Pakistani territory to move supplies into Afghanistan; a more fundamental issue was US concern that the costs of alienating and destabilising a nuclear-armed power like Pakistan, containing scores of jihadist groups, were incalculable.”

‘Fear across the establishment’

But now analysts say the Taliban’s victory in Afghanistan is what risks destabilising Pakistan – and that the exultation in Islamabad is myopic.

The Taliban’s win does pose a security risk for Pakistan, a member of Khan’s cabinet admitted to the Financial Times under condition of anonymity.

The Afghan militants’ closeness to Pakistani jihadist group Tehrik-e-Taliban (TTP or, simply, the Pakistani Taliban) is a particular source of concern. The TTP have carried out scores of deadly attacks since their inception in the 2000s, including the infamous 2014 Peshawar school massacre.

The Taliban and the TTP are “two faces of the same coin”, Pakistani Army Chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa and ISI boss Lieutenant General Faiz Hameed acknowledged at an off-the-record briefing in July. Indeed, the Taliban reportedly freed a senior TTP commander earlier this month during their sweep through Afghanistan. “Pakistan definitely worries about the galvanising effects the Taliban’s victory will have on other Islamist militants, and especially the TTP, which was already resurging before the Taliban marched into Kabul,” Michael Kugelman, a South Asia expert at the Wilson Center in Washington, DC, told FRANCE 24. “It’s a fear across the establishment.”

Pakistani military ‘will not budge’

Trying to contain the damage from its pullout as Afghan cities fell like dominos, the US repeatedly warned the Taliban it would face pariah status among the international community if it seized full control of the country. But Washington tried this approach in the 1990s and it did not diminish the Taliban’s grip over Afghanistan – with Pakistan acting as the militants’ key ally.

This time, US-Pakistan relations are at a low ebb – auguring badly for any attempt to enlist Islamabad in Washington’s plan to isolate the Taliban. Joe Biden has not yet spoken to Imran Khan since he became US president.

https://www.france24.com/en/asia-pacific/20210818-pakistan-cheers-taliban-out-of-fear-of-india-%E2%80%93-despite-spillover-threat

What ISI chief Faiz Hameed’s visit to Kabul has to do with new Taliban govt

By JYOTI MALHOTRA

In Afghanistan, war and peace have been inter-changeable, with players cutting deals with the enemy without fully informing even their friends.

Afghan journalist and spokesperson of the anti-Taliban National Resistance Front (NRF), Fahim Dashty, has been killed. Panjshir province, the last holdout against the Taliban has fallen. NRF leaders Amrullah Saleh and Ahmed Massoud are believed to have fled Panjshir. Pakistan’s intelligence chief Faiz Hameed has returned from Kabul. The Taliban have announced a new government – and invited China, Russia, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey and Qatar to the inaugural.

That, in a nutshell, is how the story of Afghanistan has played out, three weeks after the Taliban took Kabul on 15 August. The trauma of these last few days is giving way to a recognition that the Taliban is here to stay. Even the UN has informally accepted the reality on the ground with its under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, Martin Griffiths, traveling to Kabul to meet Taliban leader Mullah Baradar. Note the Afghan, not the Islamic Emirate flag, between the two seated gentlemen in their meeting.

As Afghanistan turns a new page, this is the granular reality on the ground:

Almost 20 years exactly to the day that Ahmed Shah Massoud, Afghanistan’s iconic leader, was assassinated on 9 September 2001, by two al-Qaeda men posing as journalists in his hideout in the Panjshir valley, Fahim Dashty was killed Sunday in the battle for Panjshir. The NRF was being led by commander Massoud’s son Ahmed Massoud and key Afghan leader Amrullah Saleh.

Only hours before Dashty’s death, Pakistan’s ISI chief Faiz Hameed, had left Kabul. He was said to have flown there on Saturday to talk to the Taliban to put together a government – some reports claimed there were differences between the Taliban and the Haqqani Network over key positions.

Dashty’s death is a sobering finality in what has obviously been one of the dirtiest conflicts of our times; in fact, Afghanistan is worse than any ordinary conflict, when at least you know who is fighting on which side. In Afghanistan, war and peace have been inter-changeable, with players cutting deals with the enemy without fully informing even their friends. For example, US special envoy Zalmay Khalilzad brokered a peace deal with the Taliban, without the Afghan government being on board. Or former President Ashraf Ghani fled Kabul without informing even his Cabinet – one of them was busy attempting to secure the city against the Taliban when he heard that his president had run away.

Unlike Ghani, my friend Fahim Dashty – one of Afghanistan’s most respected journalists – fled to the Panjshir valley, barely a 100 km from Kabul, along with commander Massoud’s son Ahmed Massoud. Twenty years ago, when commander Massoud was killed, Dashty had been in the room, but survived the explosion. When Kabul fell to the Taliban on 15 August, Fahim exchanged his pen for the sword and became a spokesperson of the National Resistance Front — hoping to recreate the spirit of 2001.

It was not to be. According to Taliban spokesperson Zabiullah Mujahid, Panjshir has fallen, the last of the provinces. According to The Washington Post, Saleh has fled to Tajikistan, while Massoud’s son has tweeted that he is alive and well.

The effort to normalise the Taliban as the new rulers of Kabul continues apace.

The new Taliban head of state, according to Pakistani media reports, is Mohammed Hasan Akhund, who, analysts believe, was among those who pushed to destroy the Bamiyan Buddhas back in 2003. Sirajuddin Haqqani, the dreaded head of the anti-India Haqqani Network, is set to become the new interior minister. The Haqqani Network is on the UN sanctions list and Sirajuddin carries a $5 million US bounty on his head. Taliban founder Mullah Omar’s son, Mullah Yaqoob, is expected to be the new defence minister. Mullah Ameer Khan Muttaqui has been nominated to be the new foreign minister. Mullah Baradar will work as a deputy to Mullah Akhund.

In one word, the Taliban government has the stamp of the Pakistani intelligence agency all over it.

There is no word on Sher Mohammed Abbas Stanekzai, the head of the Islamic Emirate political office in Qatar, who came to the Indian embassy last week to meet Indian ambassador Deepak Mittal.

As for the future, the signs are clear. The Taliban has invited China, Russia, Pakistan, Turkey, Iran and Qatar to the inauguration of its government. Saudi Arabia, one of the three countries that had recognised the first Taliban government in 1996, is missing from the list. The Taliban is eager for Chinese investment— China is a big country with a huge economy and capacity. I think they can play a very big role in the rebuilding, rehabilitation, reconstruction of Afghanistan, Taliban leader Sultan Shaheen has told CGTN.

Considering the World Bank has shut down aid to Afghanistan, pending recognition of the Taliban at the UN, China is expected to become a key aid and reconstruction donor. There has been talk of expanding the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor to Afghanistan; one of Faiz Hameed’s talking points in Kabul is said to have been the expansion of trade between Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Post reported.

https://theprint.in/opinion/global-print/what-isi-chief-faiz-hameeds-visit-to-kabul-has-to-do-with-new-taliban-govt/729165/

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#Pakistan - The Khorasan chapter threat

Muhammad Amir Rana

WITH the Afghan Taliban takeover of Kabul, the militant Islamic State group’s Khorasan chapter (IS-K) has also come under the global radar after its horrific recent bombing in the Afghan capital. Many experts are projecting the terrorist group as a major threat to the Taliban regime as well as to regional peace and security. The terrorist attack in the high security zone of the Kabul airport during the evacuation of foreigners and under-threat Afghans have strengthened perceptions that IS-K will become a major factor of instability in Afghanistan and beyond.

However, the potential threat posed by IS-K must be assessed objectively and scientifically without falling for any vague ‘evidence’. The Taliban may also tend to exaggerate the threat with a view to winning the support of the regional powers especially Russia, China and the Central Asian states, which are concerned about the terrorist group. IS-K may also want to make Afghanistan a launching base in its efforts to restore its lost ‘caliphate’ of Iraq and Syria. But does it have the potential to convert Afghanistan into a new battlefront?

First, one must investigate the strengths of the terrorist group. After taking over power in Afghanistan, the status of the Taliban has apparently changed from a non-state to a state actor. That has ‘elevated’ the status of IS-K as a major violent non-state actor in Afghanistan. Now the group can use all those strategic and propaganda tactics against the Taliban regime, which the Taliban once used against the outgoing regime. IS-K has a history of effective use of its propaganda capabilities. After the Kabul attack, it fed the media with the propaganda it had long been desiring to unleash in Afghanistan. The group conveyed a message that besides being “filthy nationalists”, the Taliban were merely America’s puppets like their predecessors in Kabul, and were not capable of bringing peace to the country. Most importantly, it has challenged the ideological credentials of the Taliban while declaring them apostates and companions of the ‘Crusaders’. IS-K has also claimed that it is the sole custodian of the ideology of an ‘Islamic state’. The potential threat posed by IS-K must be assessed objectively and scientifically.

In recent years, IS-K has managed to survive in Afghanistan in the form of small cells, which were also found involved in sporadic high-impact terrorist attacks. Some reports suggested these cells were used as proxies in many instances. After the Taliban takeover of Kabul, IS-K can make a global call for intensifying its violent campaign. There is no demonstrable evidence available that the group can survive long if it changes its strategy and launches big-scale guerrilla operations. According to the group’s own accounts, the current head Shahab al-Muhajir is considered a great strategist and expert in urban warfare, and he will continue relying on his terrorist strategies. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, the central body of the terrorist group, is also focusing on the restoration of its image and glory and has ordered its chapters all over the world to raid prisons to release its detained members. Hundreds of IS-K prisoners were among those recently freed from Afghan jails and are reportedly being hunted by the Taliban.

Even before the Taliban takeover, the IS-K was creating new pockets in Afghanistan, especially along the borders of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. These border areas have large Salafi populations that suits IS-K because of their sectarian affinity. Also, apart from Afghan and Pakistani members, several IS-K fighters come from Central Asia and China’s Xinjiang region. If the group succeeds in its relocation plan, it could hit several targets. One of the reasons for Russia’s engagement with the Taliban was to seek assurances against the IS-K’s march towards northern Afghanistan and further to Central Asia. The Taliban have taken over the northern regions first, not only to reduce the prospects of any local uprising but also to eliminate the chances of IS-K’s advance. However, IS-K will continue focusing on these areas, as unlike the border with Pakistan, even a smaller resistance by IS-K can create problems for the Taliban regime and can disturb their relations with China and Russia.

The IS-K will also be of advantage to the Taliban regime to get legitimacy through acting against it and winning the support of its regional allies. Meanwhile, it will be a major security concern, and IS-K will remain a big ideological challenge as well.

The real potential of the IS-K will be determined by its ability to survive in Afghanistan including through displaying political and ideological flexibility. Since its inception in January 2015, the group’s ideological differences with the Taliban have remained a major bone of contention. It is less likely that the terrorist group will show any flexibility in that regard in the future and allow the entry of recruits from either the ranks of Taliban rebels or from the TTP without their conversion to their brand of Salafism. A recent IS-K statement reflects that the group will not amend its ideologically oriented policy just to gain more recruits. Rather, the group is focusing on expanding its urban network and is hunting for educated youth which was alienated after the Taliban victory and become prone to ideological radicalism.

It is interesting that the IS-K and TTP have survived long while living together in the same vicinity in the Kunar and Nangarhar provinces. Neither have challenged the other and even when the Haqqani Network expelled IS-K fighters from some areas of Kunar, the TTP remained a silent spectator. The TTP might have avoided confrontation with IS-K because many of its former commanders are now in the group. Thus, despite having ideological differences both have tried to keep their human resources intact. There are few chances that the TTP will join hands with IS-K as it is an ally of Al Qaeda with allegiance to Mullah Haibatullah, the Taliban’s supreme leader.

The probability is also very low that the defeated Afghan army and police will join IS-K ranks as happened in Iraq. Unlike the Iraqi army, the Afghan army was demoralised and was not ready to fight. Secondly, the IS-K is an external and weak terrorist outfit, which cannot manage massive inclusions.

The IS-K is a potential terrorist threat, but not beyond being controlled. If the Taliban and regional actors craft better strategies and the ‘drone support’ from the US remains intact, the IS-K can be neutralised effectively.

https://www.dawn.com/news/1644581/the-khorasan-chapter-threat

Taliban confirms meet between leader Mullah Baradar & Pakistan’s ISI chief Faiz Hameed

Hameed dashed to Kabul on an unannounced visit last week, becoming the only high-ranking foreign official to visit Kabul since the Taliban seized the Afghan capital in mid-August.

The Taliban on Monday confirmed that Pakistan’s powerful intelligence chief Lt Gen Faiz Hameed has met its de-facto leader Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, amidst efforts by the insurgent group to finalise a government in Afghanistan.Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Director General Lt Gen Hameed dashed to Kabul on an unannounced visit last week, becoming the only high-ranking foreign official to visit Kabul since the Taliban seized the Afghan capital in mid-August.

During a press conference in Kabul on Monday, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid confirmed that the ISI chief had met with Mullah Baradar during his visit to Kabul, BBC Urdu reported.

The Taliban has assured Islamabad that Afghan territory will not be used against Pakistan, it said.

Earlier, Pakistani media reported that a delegation of senior officials led by Lt Gen Hameed was in Kabul at the invitation of the Taliban, but the insurgent group said that Islamabad had proposed his visit to Kabul.

On Sunday, the Taliban said that the top Pakistani spy was in Afghanistan to improve bilateral relations between Kabul and Islamabad.

Ahmadullah Wasiq, deputy head of the Taliban’s Cultural Commission, said that the Taliban leaders talked with Lt Gen Hameed about bilateral relations and the problems of Afghan passengers at the Torkham and Spin Boldak passes between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

“This Pakistani official has come to solve Afghan passengers’ problems at the border areas, especially in Torkham and Spin Boldak. They wanted (his visit to Kabul) and we accepted, Wasiq was quoted as saying by TOLO news.

Pakistan on Thursday temporarily closed the Chaman border crossing – the second-largest commercial border point with Afghanistan after the Torkham commercial town in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa due to security threats.

At his press conference, Mujahid noted that the recent delegation to Kabul said the crossings had been closed due to security concerns linked to release of prisoners inside Afghanistan, and requested checks for those seeking to enter or leave the country.Citing sources close to Hizb-e-Islami party leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the channel said that Pakistan’s intelligence chief also met him and discussed the current situation in the country.In a short video clip circulated in the media last week, Lt Gen Hameed was seen trying to respond to questions by a journalist who first asked: Will you be meeting senior people in the Taliban?”

“No, I’m not clear ” the ISI chief said and looked towards Pakistan ambassador to Kabul Mansour Ahmad Khan, who was standing by his side, to respond to the question.

In response to another question, Hameed smiled and said: “Don’t worry, everything will be okay.”

Hameed’s visit to Afghanistan came amidst mounting pressure on the Taliban to form an inclusive government acceptable to the international community. The insurgent group is struggling to give shape to a broad-based and inclusive administration acceptable to the international community.

It was the first high-level visit of any Pakistani official to Afghanistan since the Taliban took over Kabul on August 15, in a move that surprised both their foes and friends.

Since then, the Taliban have been trying to form a government but so far have held back the announcement.

Pakistan was often accused by the Afghanistan government of giving the Taliban military aid, a charge denied by Islamabad.

https://theprint.in/world/taliban-confirms-meet-between-leader-mullah-baradar-pakistans-isi-chief-faiz-hameed/728837/

پاکستان پیپلزپارٹی کبھی بھی چور دروازے سے اداراتی دھاندلی کرنے کی اجازت نہیں دے گی اور اس کی ہر فورم پر مخالفت کرے گی۔ سیکریٹری جنرل پاکستان پیپلزپارٹی پارلیمنٹیرینز سینیٹر فرحت اللہ بابر

پاکستان پیپلزپارٹی نے سینیٹ کی کمیٹی برائے پارلیمانی امور کی ساخت میں یکطرفہ تبدیلی کرکے اسے حکومت کی جانب جھکانے کی سخت مذمت کی ہے۔ ساخت میں یہ تبدیلی اس وقت کی گئی ہے جب حکومت الیکٹرانک ووٹنگ مشین پر متنازعہ قانون سازی کرنا چاہتی ہے سیکریٹری جنرل پاکستان پیپلزپارٹی پارلیمنٹیرینز سینیٹر فرحت اللہ بابر نے ایک بیان میں کہا ہے کہ پاکستان پیپلزپارٹی کبھی بھی چور دروازے سے اداراتی دھاندلی کرنے کی اجازت نہیں دے گی اور اس کی ہر فورم پر مخالفت کرے گی۔ 

جمعہ کے روز سینیٹ سیکریٹریٹ نوٹیفکیشن کے ذریعے پی ٹی آئی کی ایک رکن کو پارلیمانی امور کی کمیٹی میں شامل کر لیا اور اس کے لئے نہ تو قائد حزب اختلاف اور پارلیمانی امور کمیٹی کے چیئرمین سے کوئی مشاورت بھی نہیں کی۔ ایک نیا ممبر شامل کرنے کا مقصد اس متنازعہ بل کو بلڈوز کرنا ہے۔ انہوں نے کہا کہ اس کمیٹی کی اصلی ساخت میں 13ممبر شامل تھے جن میں اپوزیشن اور حکومت کے چھ چھ ممبر تھے اور اس کمیٹی کے چیئرمین پی پی پی کے سینیٹر تاج حیدر ہیں ۔ اس کمیٹی میں توازن خراب کرنے کے لئے پہلے چیئرمین سینیٹ نے یکطرفہ طور پر پی پی پی کے سینیٹر مصطفی نواز کھوکھرکو بغیر کوئی وجہ بتائے کمیٹی سے نکال دیا حالانکہ یہ ان کا اختیار ہی نہیں ہے۔

 جب اس اقدام کی پرزور مخالفت کی گئی تو مصطفی نواز کھوکھر کی کمیٹی کی رکنیت بحال کر دی گئی۔ جس کے بعد سینیٹ سیکریٹریٹ نے ایک نوٹیفکیشن کے ذریعے پی ٹی آئی کی ثمینہ ممتاز کو اس کمیٹی میں اضافی رکن کے طور پر شامل کر دیا۔ سینیٹر فرحت اللہ بابر نے کہا کہ کچھ عرصہ قبل سینیٹ سیکریٹریٹ نے اس کمیٹی کے چیئرمین کو اس بات کی اجازت نہیں دی کہ وہ فافن کو الیکٹرانک ووٹنگ مشین کی بریفنگ پر دعوت دیں۔ یہ تمام اقدامات یہ ظاہر کرتے ہیں حکومت ہر صورت میں انتخابات میں دھاندلی کرنا چاہتی ہے۔ انہوں نے کہا کہ پیپلزپارٹی کا موقف اس بارے میں نہایت واضح ہے۔

 اس سے قبل 2018ءکے انتخابات میں آرٹی ایس کو بٹھا دیا گیا تھا اور اس کے علاوہ مشین کے ذریعے پلاٹوں کی قرعہ اندازی میں بھی ٹیکنالوجی کی ساکھ پر سوالات اٹھا دئیے ہیں۔ اس تجرے کے بعد الیکٹرانک ووٹنگ مشین پر اعتماد کا سوال ہی پیدا نہیں ہوتا اور جب تک تمام سیاسی پارٹیوں کا اتفاق رائے نہ ہوجائے الیکٹرانک ووٹنگ مشین استعمال نہیں کی جا سکتی۔ اس کے علاوہ الیکشن کمیشن اوار تمام اسٹیک ہولڈروں کو بھی اس تمام معاملے میں شریک کرنا انتہائی ضروری ہے اور یہ بات بھی دیکھنا ہوگی کہ دیگر ممالک میں الیکٹرانک ووٹنگ مشینوں کا استعمال کیوں کامیاب نہیں ہو سکا۔ 

پاکستان پیپلزپارٹی چوری چھپے اس قسم کی دھاندلی کی ہر قیمت پر مذاحمت کرے گی۔

https://www.ppp.org.pk/pr/25445/

شہداء کی لازوال قربانیاں، فوجی جوانوں کا غیرمتزلزل عزم اور عوام کا ناقابل تسخیر اتحاد ہماری طاقت اور ہمارے روشن مستقبل کی ضمانت ہے، چیئرمین پاکستان پیپلز پارٹی بلاول بھٹو زرداری

اسلام آباد / کراچی (5 ستمبر 2021) پاکستان پیپلز پارٹی کے چیئرمین بلاول بھٹو زرداری نے کہا ہے کہ شہداء کی لازوال قربانیاں، فوجی جوانوں کا غیرمتزلزل عزم اور عوام کا ناقابل تسخیر اتحاد ہماری طاقت اور ہمارے روشن مستقبل کی ضمانت ہے۔ یومِ دفاع کے موقعے پر میڈیا سیل بلاول ہاؤس کی جانب سے جاری کردہ اپنے پیغام میں پی پی پی چیئرمین نے کہا کہ پاکستان پیپلز پارٹی کی جدوجہد پاکستان کو مضبوط سے مضبوط تر بنانے کے لیے ہے۔ 

یومِ دفاعِ پاکستان کے موقعے پر قوم کو مبارکباد دیتے ہوئے چیئرمین بلاول بھٹو

زرداری نے کہا کہ یوم دفاع منانے کا مقصد پاکستان کی جغرافیہ، اس کے نظریے اور جمہوریت کا تحفظ کرنا ہے۔ پی پی پی چیئرمین نے نشاندہی کرتے ہوئے کہا کہ یہ ملک کے پہلے منتخب وزیراعظم شہید ذوالفقار علی بھٹو تھے، جنہوں نے قوم کو ایٹمی پروگرام کا تحفہ دیا، جبکہ یہ ان کی دختر وزیر اعظم شہید محترمہ بینظیر بھٹو تھیں، جنہوں نے ملک کو میزائل ٹیکنالوجی پروگرام دیا، تاکہ ملک کے دفاع کو ناقابل تسخیر بنایا جائے۔

 بلاول بھٹو زرداری کا کہنا تھا کہ وہ تمام فوجی جوان، جنہوں نے پاکستان کے دفاع کے لیے اپنی جانیں قربان کیں، ہماری قومی تاریخ کے ناقابل فراموش ہیرو ہیں۔ انہوں نے مزید کہا کہ میں آج یوم دفاع کے موقع پر پوری قوم کی جانب سے اپنے شہداء کے خاندانوں کو مکمل یکجہتی کا یقین دلاتا ہوں۔ انہوں نے کہا کہ وہ ان تمام شہریوں کو بھی سلام پیش کرتے ہیں، جنہوں نے دہشت گردی اور انتہا پسندی کے خلاف جنگ میں بے مثال قربانیاں دی ہیں۔

 بلاول بھٹو زرداری نے اس عزم کا اعادہ کیا کہ وہ قائد اعظم محمد علی جناح کے فلسفے کی روشنی میں نظریہ پاکستان کی پیروی مضبوط دفاع کے ساتھ کریں گے۔

https://www.ppp.org.pk/pr/25442/

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OPINION: How Has Joe Biden Become So Unpopular?

 JAMELLE BOUIE

President Biden’s job approval rating is on the downslope. As of Friday morning, he was at 45.8 percent approval and 48.5 percent disapproval — from a high of 54 percent approval, 41 percent disapproval at the end of his first 100 days.

There is a laundry list of reasons for this. Not only is the United States still in the grip of a pandemic, but also the Delta variant of the coronavirus has led to record infections and deaths in Florida, Texas and other states with relatively low vaccination rates (and where officials have taken a stand against mitigation efforts). At the same time that Delta took hold, Biden also faced a huge backlash from the press and his partisan opponents over the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, which began in chaotic fashion with the collapse of the Afghan National Army, the subsequent advance of the Taliban and of course the suicide bombing in Kabul that killed 13 U.S. service members.

The administration quickly adjusted to the chaos, though, and by the time the last American soldiers left on Monday, the U.S. military and its allies had evacuated around 124,000 people, including thousands of U.S. citizens and tens of thousands of Afghan nationals. And as seen in the latest jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the economy is growing at a slower rate than it did at the start of the summer.

Taken together, you have a pretty good explanation for why Biden is doing much worse with the public than he was at the beginning of the year.

One of the most consistent findings from the past 20 years of public opinion research is that each new president is more divisive than the last. George W. Bush was more divisive than Bill Clinton; Barack Obama was more divisive than Bush; Donald Trump was more divisive than Obama; and Biden may well end up more divisive than Trump, at least in terms of approval rating by partisan affiliation. Some of this reflects circumstances, some of it reflects the individuals, but most of it is a function of partisan and ideological polarization. Modern presidents have a high floor for public opinion but a low ceiling.

This is a major change from the 1970s and 1980s, when the public was less polarized and numbers could swing from the low 30s (even the 20s) to the high 60s and beyond. At the peak of his popularity, in the wake of the Persian Gulf War of 1991, George H.W. Bush had a job approval rating of 89 percent, including 82 percent among Democrats and 88 percent among independents. Those numbers are just not possible in today’s environment.

Biden’s slide is noteworthy, but it is also exactly what we should expect given the structural conditions of American politics in the 21st century. But this cuts against the unstated assumption that a president should have an approval rating above 50 percent. It’s an assumption that, as Sam Goldman, a professor of political science at George Washington University, observed, is “another example of how we’ve adopted the deeply exceptional midcentury interlude as our baseline — partly because it remains our vision of normality, and partly because that’s when reliable data start.”The “deeply exceptional midcentury interlude” — roughly speaking the years between the end of World War II and the election of Richard Nixon in 1968 — is the source of a lot of our normative understandings of American politics, despite the fact that the conditions of that period are impossible to replicate. When politicians and political observers pine for an era of bipartisanship, they are pining for the 1950s and 1960s (and to an extent the 1970s).If we were to look farther back in time, to say, the late 19th century, we might find an era that, for all of its indelible foreignness, is closer to ours in terms of the shape and structure of its politics, from its sharp partisan polarization and closely contested national elections to its democratic backsliding and deep anxieties over immigration and demographic change.

We don’t have polling data for President Grover Cleveland. But we do know that he won his victory in the 1884 election by 37 votes in the Electoral College and a half-a-percent in the national popular vote. His successor, Benjamin Harrison, lost the popular vote by a little less than 1 percent and won the Electoral College by 65 votes. Those narrow results suggest, I think, a similarly narrow spread for presidential approval — high floors, low ceilings.

American politics eventually broke out of its late-19th-century equilibrium of high polarization and tightly contested elections. In the 1896 presidential election, William McKinley became the first candidate in decades to win more than 50 percent of the popular vote, beating his Democratic opponent, William Jennings Bryan, by 4.3 percent. He won re-election in 1900 and after his assassination the following year, his successor, Theodore Roosevelt, would win in 1904 by the most lopsided margin since Abraham Lincoln’s 1864 re-election victory. What changed in American politics to produce more decisive national victories? Well, that’s not a happy story. Suffrage restrictions of immigrants in the North, the rise of Jim Crow in the South, and the success of capital in suppressing labor revolt and setting the terms of political contestation had removed millions of Americans from the electorate by the turn of the 20th century. Political power was concentrated and consolidated in a bourgeois class (mostly) represented by the Republican Party, which, with the exception of Woodrow Wilson’s twin victories in 1912 and 1916, held the White House from 1897 to 1933. It would take another catastrophe, the Great Depression, to change that landscape.

As for the tectonic force that might break our partisan and ideological stalemate? It is impossible to say. Oftentimes in history, things seem stable until, suddenly, they aren’t. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/04/opinion/biden-job-approval-rating.html

Video - Pakistan Peoples Party Workers Convention in Dera Ghazi Khan

Pakistan faces accusations of undercounting Hindus, Christians in latest census

 

• The results of Pakistan's sixth Population and Housing Census were delayed after some provinces, including Sindh and Balochistan flagged the issue of undercounting.

Religious minorities in Pakistan have accused the government of undercounting them in the latest census data published in May, four years after the survey was conducted. The survey for the sixth Population and Housing Census was undertaken under former Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and got completed in 2017. The results, however, were delayed after some provinces, including Sindh and Balochistan flagged the issue of undercounting.

Pakistan Bureau of Statistics published the data of the sixth Population and Housing Census after approval from a constitutional body that resolves power-sharing disputes between the provincial and federal governments. While Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan caved in under pressure from the Imran Khan government, Sindh continued to raise objections on the census data.

According to the 2017 census data, Pakistan’s overall population has grown to 207.68 million, an increase of around 75 million since 1998 when the country recorded 132.3 million people. The census suggests that the Muslim population in Pakistan grew by 96.47% while the population of other religious minorities reported negligible growth and even shrank in some cases.

Hindus in Pakistan account for 1.73% of the total population while Christians make up for 1.27% of Pakistani residents. Other minorities like Ahmaddiyas account for less than 0.1% of Pakistan’s population. Karachi Supreme Court attorney Neel Keshav claimed that the Hindu population in Pakistan is likely to be much higher, reported Pakistan Today.

"The 1998 census data showed a Hindu population of nearly 2 million. Yet the new census showed that it had only risen to 3.5 million in 20 years," the Pakistani daily quoted Keshav as saying.

Human rights groups have frequently raised concerns over the condition of religious minorities in Pakistan. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) had said in a 2019 report that both the Hindu and Christian communities in Sindh and Punjab continued to report cases of forced conversion.

"Even though Christians have migrated overseas and converted to Islam, our church records make us suspect that Christians may have been undercounted by at least half a million. We're struggling to find accurate data, and somehow the government is not helping. It is not investigating," Pakistan Today quoted Center for Social Justice Director Peter Jacob as saying.

https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news

How the Taliban's Afghanistan takeover could hurt US-Pakistan ties

By S Khan

NATO has said Pakistan has a "special responsibility" to make sure Afghanistan lives up to its international commitments. But some Pakistanis say they refuse to be the "scapegoats" of the West's failure in Afghanistan.

The fall of Kabul to the Taliban has left many people in Pakistan questioning their country's future relations with the US.  

Some hard-liners in Pakistan say Washington will blame Islamabad for the Islamic fundamentalist group's takeover of Afghanistan.   

Pakistan's Human Rights Minister Shireen Mazari wrote an article on Tuesday asserting that "her country would no longer accept being scapegoated for the failures of others."  

Bill Emmott, former editor-in-chief of The Economist, wrote last week in a commentary for Project Syndicate that "the blame" for failure in Afghanistan and the return of the Taliban "lies largely with Pakistan and America's inability to bring the country onside."  

Pakistan is said to be the largest backer of the cloistered group of the Taliban whose regime was recognized by Islamabad when they governed Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001.  

Husain Haqqani, the South and Central Asia director at the Hudson Institute — a Washington-based think tank — says Pakistan's past role in Afghanistan has always created friction between Washington and Islamabad.  

"Most Americans believe Pakistan's consistent support enabled the Taliban to succeed," Haqqani told DW.   

"There is resentment against Pakistan's role in Afghanistan which may not help improve US-Pakistan ties in the near future," he added.  

Waning interest for Pakistan   

Pakistan in the past relied heavily on the US military and financial assistance, with some estimates suggesting that the country may have received over $30 billion (€25.5 billion) from Washington since 2001.   

Islamabad also received generous aid packages and financial assistance during the Cold War when it was a close ally of the US.   

But Haqqani says there is very little support in Washington "for resuming large-scale economic or military assistance for Pakistan right now."   Author Ayesha Siddiqa believes Washington has "lost interest" in Islamabad. Pakistan has always sought funds and military assistance from the US, but such support would no longer be on the cards, Siddiqa told DW.

"The ties are already strained and there is a sanction-like situation with Pakistan being in the grey list of FATF (Financial Action Task Force)," she added.

The China factor

Defense analyst General Amjad Shoaib says Pakistan's close ties with China have also strained Washington-Islamabad relations.Pakistan has sought a strategic partnership with China, throwing support behind the Belt and Road Initiative, Shoaib told DW, adding that the move particularly did not go down well with Washington.The US still has many supporters in Afghanistan, he says, predicting that the war-torn country would be used against Pakistan by "pampering" Baloch insurgents who would target Chinese interests in Pakistan.

According to Haqqani, the US and Pakistan have very different foreign policy strategies, and so will have to find a new basis.

"Pakistan has made the strategic choice of aligning with China while the US seems to have chosen India as its strategic partner in the region. With tactical cooperation relating to Afghanistan diminishing, the relationship will have to find a new basis," he told DW. Pakistan's 'special responsibility'

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg on Friday told reporters that Pakistan "has a special responsibility to make sure that Afghanistan lives up to its international commitments" and does "not once again become a safe haven for international terrorists."

"A stable Afghanistan is in the interest of all countries and not least the neighbors as Pakistan," he said at the press conference.

According to Haqqani, "Any evidence of international Jihadi groups becoming active again will also result in sanctions against Afghanistan which has implications for Islamabad as well." But for Amjad Shoaib, the US could use the "pretext" of human rights and the presence of international terror groups to blackmail Pakistan. The defense analyst questioned why such groups were not eliminated during NATO's 20-year-long occupation.

Disruptions to Pakistan's economy

Economist Azra Talat Saeed warns that deteriorating Washington-Islamabad relations would have a catastrophic impact for Pakistan. Saeed also believes the US will use its leverage against Pakistan. "The US and its allies will make it more and more difficult for us (Pakistan) to access funds," she told DW, adding that the country is at risk of economic chaos like Iran and Venezuela. Saeed believes that Washington will pressure Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies to "create problems for Pakistani workers" and cause crucial remittances to plummet.

"This would be very devastating for our economy," she said.

The coronavirus pandemic has already dealt a severe blow to Pakistan's economy, prompting the closure of over 55,000 small businesses, rendering more than 20 million people jobless. The country already faces over $100 billion dollars in external debt.

Salman Shah, a former federal minister for finance, says that if Pakistan is "pushed to the corner," then Islamabad has Russia, China and other regional countries "to fall back upon."

"We wish to have good ties with the US and want it to be involved economically in the region," he told DW.

Pakistan’s Support to the Taliban is One of the Greatest Feats of Covert Intelligence

 

N.C. Asthana

The presence of the Inter-Services Intelligence chief in Kabul this week is an in-your-face reminder of Pakistan’s role in protecting and promoting the Afghan Taliban during the course of the latter’s war with the United States.

Pakistan’s aim throughout was to use the Taliban as a proxy to curtail Indian influence in Afghanistan. and, circumstances permitting, to perhaps escalate violence in Kashmir.

During this period, India invested $3 billion worth of goodwill in Afghanistan – building civilian infrastructures like dams and schools – but its efforts came to naught in a matter of few days. This is because the Indian strategic establishment’s military assessment of the war in Afghanistan – which relied on ‘wisdom’ borrowed from the United States – was wrong from the very beginning. It should have been clear to New Delhi that something was fundamentally flawed in the American strategy when the 21,600 pound MOAB (Mother of All Bombs), the 15,000 pound Daisy Cutter and 2,000 pound Thermobaric bombs failed to break the will of the Taliban to continue fighting. However, India persisted with American blinkers on its vision.

We did not wake up even when the Taliban, beginning in 2005, stopped engaging the Americans in direct combat and started laying emphasis on asymmetrical warfare tactics like suicide bombing and IED attacks. We could never appreciate the fact that the US counterinsurgency strategy floundered because ‘securing’ the territory won or liberated proved enormously difficult, both operationally and in terms of cost.

What Pakistan has gained and stands to gain On the other hand, by helping the Taliban come back to power, Pakistan has ensured that its eastern frontier is rendered safe from two of its old fears: Afghan alignment with India; and a refugee flow that could cause destabilisation among Pakistan’s Pashtuns. The Taliban have also, as Anatol Lieven points out, given the Pakistani military an assurance that they will not, at least for the time being, support any Pashtun Islamist rebellion within Pakistan.

Contrary to what some Indian diplomats think, the mere fact that the Taliban still do not recognise the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan is not likely to make much difference to the equation. The Durand Line might not be buried but there are issues and forces much larger than that which are at work, and its ghost cannot haunt Pakistan to its detriment.On August 17, Noor Wali, the emir of the TTP (Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan) congratulated the Taliban. However, so far there is no indication that the Taliban will help the anti-Pakistan establishment TTP merely on grounds of ethnicity. Even if morality is not their strong suit, they know that fighting Pakistan on Pakistani soil would be materially different from fighting the US on Afghanistan soil.More importantly, the Taliban know that the Pakistani army had never gone whole hog in its 2003 counterterrorism operations in the FATA (Federally Administered Tribal Areas) bordering Afghanistan against pro-Taliban insurgents enjoying a safe haven there. Gen. Musharraf undertook the action basically to appear to be doing a favour to the US under its pressure. However, as K. Alan Kronstadt et al had pointed out in their 2008 study for the Congressional Review Service, long-held doubts existed about Islamabad’s commitment to some core US interests and the operations were largely ineffectual with the militant groups having only grown stronger and more aggressive in 2008. Finally, I do not think that too much should be read into the release of TTP ex-deputy Maulvi Fakir Mohammad from a Bagram prison. When the Taliban freed hundreds of prisoners, there was no good reason that they would hang on to a TTP leader.

Pakistan’s 22-month long counterterrorism operations in North Waziristan were undertaken after 2014 far more seriously and were effective too, having killed some 3,400 militants. However, by that time their concerns were different. The fate of Afghanistan was sealed by then. In 2011 itself, Robert Gates had confirmed that the US was holding reconciliation talks with the Taliban; two agreements were signed in March-April 2012. This time, Pakistan knew that investments from China would not materialise if Chinese workers kept getting killed.

How US intelligence floundered in Afghanistan

Christine Fair writes that Washington failed to understand the perturbing nature of Pakistan’s interests in Afghanistan, and ignored very early signals that Musharraf had in fact done a U-turn on its U-turn on the Taliban. This assessment, though corrret, does not capture the whole sordid story.

Pakistan’s support to the Taliban prior to 9/11 was not a closely-guarded secret. When analysts say that the Taliban regrouped across the border in Pakistan at the end of 2001, from where they waged an insurgency for 20 years, they forget that the ‘border across Pakistan in FATA’ was not a black hole where the Taliban simply got lost.

The US was using Pakistani air bases and was in full contact with the Pak military. It stretches credulity to believe a nation that spent over $500 billion during 2001-13 on intelligence ­– as revealed by the Washington Post – and $527 billion more during the next seven years, was so utterly inept that it had no idea of Pakistan’s relationship with the Taliban for over two decades. Logically, only two conclusions are possible: either the famed capability of US intelligence is a hoax or, finding itself mired in a faulty strategy in Afghanistan, Washington was left with no option but to ignore what Pakistan had been doing.

It was an open secret that Pakistan had given safe haven and support to the Taliban while overtly denying their presence on Pakistani soil except in the FATA on the border with Afghanistan. The Pak army even had the gall to claim that they had carried out a 20-month long operation in the area and cleared it of the Taliban.

In 2016, Sartaj Aziz had admitted in a talk at Washington’s Council on Foreign Relations, “We have some influence on them because their leadership is in Pakistan, and they get some medical facilities, their families are here. So we can use those levers to pressurise them to say, ‘come to the table’.”

Had the US not given up on Taliban by then, could they have not pressurized Pakistan or used their HUMINT to take those leaders out? Were they so naïve as to blindly believe in the claim of the Pak army regarding military operations against the Taliban in FATA? Could US intelligence not verify their claims? If they chose not to verify, it was their mistake. Apparently, the ISI was so persuasive that they took the US for a ride or the US had run out of options.

Later also, it was indeed very clever of the ISI to make it clear that Pakistan could not negotiate with the Taliban on behalf of the Afghan government.

ISI gained its expertise during mujahideen war

The US-driven mujahideen war against the former Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s was one of the most brilliant covert operations ever designed in the history of warfare and intelligence. The CIA’s covert operation was called ‘Operation Cyclone’, in which they recruited, armed and trained fighters on a massive scale—according to some estimates, the mujahideen casualties were in the range of 150,000 to 180,000. It cost the US about $20 billion in that era.

Since the US was extremely particular about ‘plausible deniability’ for the entire operation, they had no option but to involve the ISI in recruiting, arming and training the mujahideen. Since the training had to be imparted secretly, the invented the device of the madrasa. The CIA and ISI opened a large number of such ‘Islamic schools’ in the remote, border areas. Instead of religious education, they were given military training there. Arms for the mujahideen were arranged from the illicit arms bazaar across the world. Weapons were shipped to Pakistan and from there they were sent over land to the fighters in Afghanistan. Brig. Mohammad Yousaf has described the operation in detail in his books, Afghanistan: The Bear Trap: The Defeat of a Superpower and Silent soldier: The man behind the Afghan jehad General Akhtar Abdur Rahman Shaheed.

The whole operation was brilliant in theory. There was but a small undesirable side-effect. And the world is paying the price of that side-effect even now. ISI, being closely involved in the whole process, pilfered a great quantity of arms. Citing arms-trades specialist James Adams in his book, Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism, John K. Cooley writes that between the delivery point at Karachi to the border checkpoints of the Pakistani army from where they were meant to be distributed to the Mujahideen, the ISI pilfered about 50% of the arms, which ended up either in their warehouses or sold off in international black market.

During the Battle of Kandahar (2011) as a part of 2011 Taliban Spring Offensive, foreign-aid officials leaving the city at the time or shortly before fighting broke out, reported seeing grease paper everywhere as the Taliban removed the wrappings from the packed weapons. It is understood that the weapons had come directly from ISI warehouses. An idea of the scale on which Pakistan siphoned off money can be had from a revelation by Andrew Elva of the Federation for American Afghan Action, who had claimed before the US Senate that between 1980 and 1981 itself, the ISI had siphoned off $700 million out of $1.09 billion in aid earmarked by the Congress for the rebels. The still unexplained 1988 Ojhri arms depot explosion in Rawalpindi may also have been part of this process.

ISI’s crowning glory In the 20 years from 2001 to 2021, the ISI pulled the wool over the American eyes with such panache that, despite a constant uncomfortable feeling all along about what they had been doing, the Americans could never pin any clear blame on Pakistan. Having earned their spurs in the Mujahideen War, the ISI, while pretending to be an ally of the US in their two-decade long war in Afghanistan, pulled the rug from under their feet.

They duped the only superpower in the world. They made them believe that they were undertaking counterterrorism operations against the militants hiding in FATA in 2003, whereas they cleverly avoided putting all their might behind it. They continued to equip the Taliban with weapons from the Mujahideen War. The smallarmssurvey.org publication ‘Surveying the Battlefield: Illicit Arms in Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia’ infers from an analysis of the seized caches that most Taliban weapons were of older models. It also says that in 2005, the Afghan Defence Ministry had reported 475 seizures of weapons, including more than 2,000 rockets, 4,000 land mines, and 5 million cartridges on the border with Pakistan. Similarly, in January 2007, Afghan forces found 40 truckloads of machine guns, explosives, and rockets belonging to the Taliban that were hidden in mountain caves near the border with Pakistan. Obviously, the ISI had ‘made’ them ‘survive’ the 2003 military operations! As Stephen Tankel discloses in his US Institute of Peace study, they established a pattern of military incursions into FATA followed by peace deals that empowered the pro-Taliban Pashtun militants. These included a February 2005 peace agreement with Baitullah Mehsud in South Waziristan and the September 2006 Waziristan Accord in North Waziristan.

From a purely professional angle, what Pakistan has achieved in Afghanistan today has to be regarded as one of the greatest feats of covert intelligence. If anyone deserves to celebrate the Taliban victory, it is surely the ISI.

https://thewire.in/south-asia/pakistans-support-to-the-taliban-is-one-of-the-greatest-feats-of-covert-intelligence

Several soldiers killed in southwestern #Pakistan suicide bombing

At least three soldiers killed and 15 others wounded near Quetta in Balochistan province, police said.

A suicide bomber has detonated his explosives near a security checkpoint in restive southwestern Pakistan, killing at least three paramilitary personnel and wounding 15 others.The attacker walked towards the checkpoint manned by the paramilitary Frontier Corps on Quetta-Mastung Road, 25km (15 miles) south of Quetta, capital of Balochistan province, senior police officer Azhar Akram said on Sunday.

A suicide bomber on a motorcycle packed with 6kg of explosives rammed one of the vehicles in a convoy, Akram said.

He said some of the wounded were in critical condition and the death toll could rise, adding body parts were found at a distance from the security post after the bombing.

Banned armed group Pakistan Taliban, known by the acronym TTP, claimed responsibility for the attack.

It was the first time TTP claimed an attack on Pakistani security forces since the Taliban – a separate organisation – took control of neighbouring Afghanistan.TTP, which renewed its allegiance to the Afghan Taliban after the fall of Kabul, has recently stepped up its campaign against the Pakistani army.“Condemn the TTP suicide attack on FC checkpost in Mastung Road, Quetta,” Prime Minister Imran Khan said in a tweet.

Attacks continue

Balochistan has also seen a low-level armed uprising by Baloch separatist groups for nearly 20 years, calling for independence for the gas and mineral-rich province. Most attacks on security forces in Balochistan in the recent past have been claimed by Baloch separatist groups Balochistan Liberation Army and Balochistan Liberation Front.Balochistan, bordering Iran and Afghanistan, is a key province in southwest Pakistan, where China has been working on projects related to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. The projects, including road construction, power plants and agricultural development, have cost billions of dollars.

China has in recent years also played a key role in developing the deep-water port of Gwadar on the Arabian Sea. But there have been attacks on Pakistanis and Chinese working on the economic corridor projects.

A suicide bomber last month detonated his explosives near a vehicle carrying Chinese workers, killing two Pakistani children playing by the roadside and wounding a Chinese national and two other Pakistanis in the port city of Gwadar.

Suspected separatists also last month hurled a hand grenade at a store selling national flags in Quetta, killing one man and wounding four others who were buying flags to celebrate Pakistan’s independence day.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/9/5/several-troops-killed-in-southwestern-pakistan-suicide-bombing