Tag Archives: Pakistan

The Iran-Pakistan border is a geopolitical powder keg, by Dr. Lawrence Sellin

Posted on March 23, 2018 | 1 comment

China is wading into Pakistan and Iran as part of its New Silk Road project. There is no assurance the chaos that plagues much of that region won’t overwhelm China. From Dr. Lawrence Sellin at southasiahudson.org:

The Iran-Pakistan border contains all the ingredients for a geopolitical explosion – regional rivalries, Sunni-Shia conflicts, ethnic insurgents, espionage, drug smuggling and human trafficking.

China considers the stability of the region so important that it brokered a series of border security meetings between Iran and Pakistan over the past year.

Much of China’s multi-billion-dollar investment in the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) hinges on the commercial viability of the Pakistani port of Gwadar, near the Iranian border, for which it has a 40-year operational lease. Moreover,  CPEC is the regional linchpin of the Belt and Road Initiative, an ambitious plan to connect Eurasia, the Middle East and Africa to China through a series of land-based and maritime economic zones.

Additionally, the planned Chinese naval base on Pakistan’s Jiwani peninsula, even closer to the Iranian border and located at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, is a critical military node in China’s “String of Pearls” facilities designed to dominate the strategic sea lanes in the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean.

Such ambitions present a direct economic and military threat to India. Commercially, Gwadar competes with joint Iranian-Indian development of the port of Chabahar, just 150 miles to its west.

According to numerous reports, Saudi Arabia contributes to the instability of the border region by sponsoring virulently anti-Shia Sunni militant groups, such as Jaish al-Adl, who launch attacks on Iran from safe havens in Pakistan.

Iran retaliates by supporting the Baloch Liberation Front (BLF), an ethnic separatist group, whose sanctuaries and leader, Dr. Allah Nazar Baloch, are claimed to be inside Iranian territory and routinely conduct cross-border operations against Pakistani government targets. Members of the BLF are suspected to be in contact with Iranian intelligence, often through drug lords acting as intermediaries. BLF members are occasionally confused with their anti-Shia counterparts. Some months ago, a BLF team was mistakenly attacked by Iranian border guards. One member, shot in the encounter, was taken to Imam Ali Hospital in Chabahar for treatment, but later died of his wounds. The other team members were subsequently released by Iranian forces.

To continue reading: The Iran-Pakistan border is a geopolitical powder keg

 

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Change Is Coming: China Is Accelerating Its Plan For A Military Base In Pakistan, by Lawrence Sellin

Posted on March 4, 2018 | 1 comment

China appears to be expanding its regional influence more than Russia. How the US responds will be an interesting question. From Lawrence Sellin at dailycaller.com:

On January 1, 2018, The Daily Caller published information — later confirmed in two separate reports, here and here — about a plan for a Chinese military base on the Jiwani peninsula in Pakistan, near Gwadar, a sea port critical to the success of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).

According to noted national security correspondent Bill Gertz:

“Plans for the base were advanced during a visit to Jiwani on Dec. 18 by a group of 16 Chinese People’s Liberation Army officers who met with about 10 Pakistani military officers.”

“The Chinese also asked the Pakistanis to undertake a major upgrade of Jiwani airport so the facility will be able to handle large Chinese military aircraft. Work on the airport improvements is expected to begin in July.”

Sources now say the plan has been accelerated. Upgrade of the Jiwani airport is already underway. In addition, procedures are being formulated for the relocation of the local population to make way for Chinese military and other support personnel. The sensitivity and importance of this issue to China and Pakistan cannot be overstated. After the disclosures and the expected denials from both Islamabad and Beijing, Pakistani officials, as early as January 5, 2018, launched a leak investigation and it was jointly decided to advance the schedule for the Jiwani base.

Strategically, China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is their roadmap to geopolitical dominance. It is soft power with an underlying hard power, military component, the so-called “String of Pearls” bases and facilities.

A Chinese military base on the Jiwani peninsula will complement the Chinese base in Djibouti, which became operational in 2017. Both are located at strategic choke points. The Djibouti base is near the entrance to the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, while the Jiwani base will be within easy reach of the Strait of Hormuz, a combination, not only capable of dominating vital sea lanes in the Arabian Sea, but boxing-in U.S bases in the Persian Gulf and outflanking the U.S. naval facility on Diego Garcia.

There is concern that the Chinese will transform its 99-year lease of the Sri Lankan port of Hambantota into another naval base, the exact “debt-trap” method the Chinese used in Djibouti and after its acquisition of a 40-year lease of the Pakistani port of Gwadar. There are also continuing Chinese diplomatic efforts to gain access to the Maldives.

To continue reading: Change Is Coming: China Is Accelerating Its Plan For A Military Base In Pakistan

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US Preparing To Attack Pakistan? by Eric Margolis

Posted on January 13, 2018 | Leave a comment

Is Pakistan being made the scapegoat for the US’s hapless foray into next-door neighbor Afghanistan? From Eric Margolis at lewrockwell.com:

Henry Kissinger rightly noted that it’s often more dangerous being an ally of the United States than its enemy.  The latest victim of this sad truism is Pakistan, a loyal ally of the US since the dawn of our era.

President Donald Trump’s visceral hatred of Muslims (never mind what kind, or why, or where) erupted this week as he ordered some $900 million in US aid to Pakistan to be abruptly cut off.  Trump accused Pakistan of lying and deceiving the US and providing a safe haven to Afghan resistance forces of Taliban (`terrorists’ in US speak) battling American occupation forces.

Frustrated and outwitted in Afghanistan, US imperial generals, Pentagon bureaucrats and politicians have been trying to cast blame on anyone they can find, with Pakistan the primary whipping boy.  Next in line is the notorious Haqqani network which is blamed for most US military failures in Afghanistan, though its active combat role is modest.  I knew its founder, old man Haqqani.  In the 1980’s, he was the golden boy of the CIA/Pakistani-led effort to oust the Soviets from Afghanistan.

Why has Washington given billions in aid to Pakistan?  In 2001, Washington decided to invade Afghanistan to uproot or destroy the Pashtun resistance movement, Taliban, which was wrongly blamed for the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington.  The ethnic Pashtun warriors President Reagan had hailed as ‘Freedom Fighters’ became ‘terrorists’ once the west wanted to occupy Afghanistan.

But invading land-locked Afghanistan was an awesome undertaking.  US troops there had to be supplied through Pakistan’s principal port, Karachi, then up twisting mountain roads and across the torturous Khyber Pass into Afghanistan.  The huge amount of logistical supplies required by US troops could not be met by air supply.  It cost $400 per barrel for one gallon of gasoline delivered to US troops in Afghanistan, and as much as $600,000 per sortie to keep a single US warplane over Afghanistan.   Without 24/7 air cover, the US occupation force would have been quickly defeated.

To continue reading: US Preparing To Attack Pakistan?

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Pakistan Says The US Is No Longer Its Ally (And It’s A Much Bigger Deal Than You Think), by Darius Shahtahmasebi

Posted on January 11, 2018 | 1 comment

There are some countries that are important simply because of where they are. Turkey comes to mind. Pakistan is another. It’s bordered by Iran, Afghanistan, India, China, and Tajikstan, an interesting neighborhood. Oh, and Pakistan has nuclear weapons. From Darius Shahtahmasebi at theantimedia.org:

Donald Trump’s decision to ring in the New Year by simultaneously demonizing both Iran and Pakistan on Twitter has already backfired tremendously. Following threats that the U.S. would withhold aid to Pakistan, the U.S. confirmed it would withhold $255 million in aid (which has now become $900 million) and is now reportedly threatening a roughly $2 billion more, as well.

“We’re hoping that Pakistan will see this as an incentive, not a punishment,” a State Department official told reporters.

According to the Wall Street Journal, this recent animosity towards Pakistan has not gone over well. Pakistani Foreign Minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif said in an interview that the U.S. has failed to behave as an ally, and as a result, Pakistan no longer views it as one.

If anything, Washington’s recent behavior has only pushed Pakistan into the open arms of America’s traditional rivals, China and Iran. China has long been providing financial and economic assistance of its own to Pakistan with plans to expand an economic partnership in the years to come.

China has already pledged to invest $57 billion in Pakistani infrastructure as part of the so-called “Belt and Road” initiative. Just last month, Pakistan announced it was considering a proposal to replace the U.S. dollar with the Chinese yuan for bilateral trade between Pakistan and China.

Following the Trump administration’s recent attacks on Pakistan, Pakistan confirmed that dropping the dollar was no arbitrary threat and immediately replaced the dollar with the Chinese yuan.

“Chinese investment in Pakistan is expected to reach over $46 billion by 2030 with the creation of a [China-Pakistan Economic Corridor] connecting Balochistan’s Gwadar Port on the Arabian Sea with Kashgar, in Western China,” Harrison Akins, a researcher at the Howard Baker Center who focuses on Pakistan and China, told Newsweek.

In the middle of last year, it was reported that China was considering establishing its own naval bases in Pakistan. These reports began to immediately resurface again in the past week, though Pakistan has vehemently denied that any such naval base will be built (even though Chinese military officials were the ones to expose the plan to build a naval base at Gwadar Port, in Balochistan).

To continue reading: Pakistan Says The US Is No Longer Its Ally (And It’s A Much Bigger Deal Than You Think)

 

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Asia’s Other Nuclear Standoff, by Conn Hallinan

Posted on December 7, 2017 | Leave a comment

North Korea is not the only tense situation with possible nuclear ramifications in Asia. From Conn Hallinan at antiwar.com:

With the world focused on the scary possibility of war on the Korean Peninsula, not many people paid much attention to a series of naval exercises this past July in the Malacca Strait, a 550-mile long passage between Sumatra and Malaysia through which pass over 50,000 ships a year.

With President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un exchanging threats and insults, why would the media bother with something innocuously labeled “Malabar 17”?

They should have.

Malabar 17 brought together the US, Japanese, and Indian navies to practice shutting down a waterway through which 80 percent of China’s energy supplies travel and to war game closing off the Indian Ocean to Chinese submarines. If Korea keeps you up at night, try imagining the outcome of choking off fuel for the world’s second largest economy.

While Korea certainly represents the most acute crisis in Asia, the diplomatic maneuvers behind Malabar 17 may be more dangerous in the long run. The exercise elevates the possibility of a confrontation not only between China, the US, and India, but also between India and Pakistan, two nuclear-armed countries that have fought three wars in the past 70 years.

A Wedge Against China

This tale begins more than a decade and a half ago, when then Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Douglas Feith – one of the most hawkish members of the George W. Bush administration – convened a meeting in May 2002 of the U.S.-India Defense Policy Group and the government of India.

As one of the founding members of the Non-Aligned Movement, India traditionally avoided being pulled into the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union. But the Bush administration had a plan for roping India into an alliance aimed at containing China, with a twist on an old diplomatic strategy: no stick, lots of carrots.

To continue reading: Asia’s Other Nuclear Standoff

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A Global Nuclear Winter: Avoiding the Unthinkable in India and Pakistan, by Conn Hallinan

Posted on December 10, 2016 | Leave a comment

Here’s a couple of facts that will surprise most people. Pakistan has between 110 and 130 nuclear warheads and will have 200 by 2020. India currently has between 110 and 120 nuclear weapons. The consequences of a nuclear war between them would be horrific for the entire planet. From Conn Hallinan at antiwar.com:

President-elect Donald Trump’s off the cuff, chaotic approach to foreign policy had at least one thing going for it, even though it was more the feel of a blind pig rooting for acorns than a thought-out international initiative. In speaking with Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, the New York Times reported, Trump said he wanted “to address and find solutions” to Pakistan’s problems.

And what big problems they are.

Whether Trump understands exactly how dangerous the current tensions between Pakistan and India are, or if anything will come from the November 30 exchange between the two leaders, is anyone’s guess. But it’s more than the Obama administration has done over the past eight years, in spite of the outgoing president’s 2008 election promise to address the ongoing crisis in Kashmir.

Right now that troubled land is the single most dangerous spot on the globe.

War, Famine, and Radiation

India and Pakistan have fought three wars over the disputed province in the past six decades and came within a hair’s breadth of a nuclear exchange in 1999. Both countries are on a crash program to produce nuclear weapons, and between them they have enough explosive power to not only kill more than 20 million of their own people, but also to devastate the world’s ozone layer and throw the Northern Hemisphere into a nuclear winter – with a catastrophic impact on agriculture worldwide.

To continue reading: A Global Nuclear Winter: Avoiding the Unthinkable in India and Pakistan

 

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The Cost of Secrecy, by Waqas Mirza

Posted on May 26, 2015 | 1 comment

Get with the Pakistani and Yemeni governments’ drone programs, which are supported by the US government, or get abducted, incarcerated, convicted, tortured, murdered, or some combination of the above. A disturbing article from Waqas Mirza, at antiwar.com:

Early last year, Pakistani anti-drone activist Kareem Khan received an unannounced visit at his Rawalpindi home from over a dozen unidentified men, some in police uniforms. He was subsequently abducted without being offered any explanation and, over the course of the next nine days, interrogated about his anti-drone work and tortured. After a local court ordered Pakistan’s intelligence agencies to produce Khan he was released and told not to speak to the media.

Khan was due to travel to Europe to testify before parliamentarians about a December 2009 U.S. drone strike on his North Waziristan home that killed his brother and son along with a local stonemason staying with his family. He had also filed a case against the Pakistani government for its failure to investigate the deaths of his family members.

There is a long history in Pakistan of irksome journalists and activists being disappeared, tortured, or killed by the state. Kareem Khan’s abduction and torture, however, is not just another example of the criminality of the Pakistani state. It also reveals a broader pattern concerning the U.S.-led War on Terror and its global consequences.

Over the past thirteen years the U.S. has been involved in a perpetual war that includes covert operations spanning the globe, at times pursued unilaterally and other times in collaboration with local regimes. These operations require extreme secrecy, preclude all attempts to redress grievances, and ultimately uproot any semblance of democratic accountability. The intimidation, torture, and even murder of journalists and activists seeking to document and publicize these policies are crucial components of an embedded imperative to secrecy. While legal and human rights groups in the United States argue for more transparency on covert operations and drone strikes, it is usually forgotten that challenging secrecy in targeted areas involve much deadlier stakes.

In Pakistan the need to silence journalists and critics is largely prompted by the necessity of hiding the state’s collaboration with the U.S. drone program. Its history can be traced back to one of the first U.S. drone strikes in the country’s tribal areas in December 2005 that reportedly killed a total of six people including al-Qaeda member Hamza Rabia and two children.

http://original.antiwar.com/waqas_mirza/2015/05/25/the-cost-of-secrecy/

To continue reading: The Cost of Secrecy

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Only 4% of drone victims in Pakistan named as al Qaeda members by Jack Serle

Posted on October 17, 2014 | Leave a comment

From Jack Serle, of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London:

As the number of US drone strikes in Pakistan hits 400, research by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism finds that fewer than 4% of the people killed have been identified by available records as named members of al Qaeda. This calls in to question US Secretary of State John Kerry’s claim last year that only “confirmed terrorist targets at the highest level” were fired at.

The Bureau’s Naming the Dead project has gathered the names and, where possible, the details of people killed by CIA drones in Pakistan since June 2004. On October 11 an attack brought the total number of drone strikes in Pakistan up to 400.

The names of the dead have been collected over a year of research in and outside Pakistan, using a multitude of sources. These include both Pakistani government records leaked to the Bureau, and hundreds of open source reports in English, Pashtun and Urdu.

Naming the Dead has also drawn on field investigations conducted by the Bureau’s researchers in Pakistan and other organisations, including Amnesty International, Reprieve and the Centre for Civilians in Conflict.

Only 704 of the 2,379 dead have been identified, and only 295 of these were reported to be members of some kind of armed group. Few corroborating details were available for those who were just described as militants. More than a third of them were not designated a rank, and almost 30% are not even linked to a specific group. Only 84 are identified as members of al Qaeda – less than 4% of the total number of people killed.

These findings “demonstrate the continuing complete lack of transparency surrounding US drone operations,” said Mustafa Qadri, Pakistan researcher for Amnesty International.

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