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For decades, U.S. policy toward Pakistan has been predicated on Americas goals in Afghanistan. Pakistan both helped and hindered the U.S. war on terror, making for a notoriously dysfunctional relationship. Now the United States is out of Afghanistan, and the relationship is on shaky footing. Its time to reimagine it.

The United States must treat Pakistan as a country in its own right, not as a fulcrum for U.S. policy on Afghanistan. That starts with America disentangling itself from the close military relationship with Pakistan.

A reset wont be easy: Resentment is rife. America sees Pakistans support for the Taliban as one reason it lost in Afghanistan; Pakistan sees the Taliban insurgency it faced at home as blowback for partnering with America next door. In Washington the grim mood has led to talk of disengagement and sanctions. Neither approach will work or be satisfactory in the long run.

Pakistan, meanwhile, wants a broad-based relationship with the U.S. focused on geoeconomics which is not realistic.

Instead, the Biden administration seems to be defaulting to the status quo: largely limiting engagement with Pakistan to Afghanistan, mostly for over-the-horizon counterterrorism options. This sets up a repetition of the old, failed cycle, missing the opportunity to steer Pakistan away from its own harmful overreliance on the military to a more productive future.

It would be smarter and safer for the United States to pivot to a multidimensional approach that acknowledges the realities of the country and its neighborhood. Pakistan is a nuclear-armed country with a population of more than 220 million, neighboring not just Afghanistan but also Iran and Pakistans close friend China and nuclear-armed rival India. Pakistan faces immense domestic challenges, including with governance and terrorism. It also has unrealized economic potential.

The first and most important step to this pivot would be explicitly reducing American dependence on its usual partner in Pakistan: the military and intelligence services. While Pakistans military is perceived as more efficient than its civilian institutions, it has repeatedly shown that its incentives are not aligned with Americas.

U.S. reliance on Pakistans military has weighted the civilian-military equation evidenced in how military spending accounts for about 16 percent of Pakistans annual expenditures. (U.S. military spending accounts for 11 percent.) Pakistans dominant military has kept active the specter of potential conflict with India, and its intelligence services have cultivated relationships with an array of dangerous nonstate armed actors.

A civilian-focused U.S. policy will help Pakistan begin to shift the balance away from its military and will, in the longer term, bolster Pakistans democracy. While that certainly wont guarantee liberalism in Pakistan, it can in time curb approaches favored by the military including relationships with jihadists that have proved harmful for the region and Pakistan itself.

In practical terms, that will mean U.S. cabinet secretaries make fewer calls to Pakistani army chiefs and more to civilian ministers. It will mean that President Biden should finally make a long-awaited call to Pakistans prime minister to discuss China, India, counterterrorism and the economy, not just cooperation on Afghanistan.

There are risks to this approach. The military and intelligence services in Pakistan wont be thrilled about this downgrade in their status, and they may choose to retaliate by reducing cooperation in areas like intelligence sharing or by limiting access to Pakistani airspace for counterterrorism operations. This approach might also seem to be asking the U.S. government to overlook past issues with Pakistan (especially its support of the Taliban) and will require a level of generosity that some believe Pakistan does not deserve. But the benefits from such a reset stronger Pakistani civilian institutions, which will mean a more reliable partnership both diplomatically and militarily for the United States will ultimately outweigh short-term risks.

Once Americas reliance on Pakistans military is explicitly and clearly reduced, U.S. policy toward Pakistan can be steered toward economic and other forms of engagement. This can be a step-by-step process.

First, America and Pakistan should look for avenues to boost trade. (The United States is Pakistans top export destination, but Pakistan is Americas 56th-largest trading goods partner.) Washington could, for example, provide technical support to industries like textiles while making clear Pakistan must produce and market its goods at competitive prices. Second, U.S. firms should be encouraged to consider investments in Pakistan which could be a strong incentive for Pakistan to further improve its investment climate.

America can also engage with Pakistan in other ways, like helping it tackle its massive air pollution problem. Engagement that is not conditional on security concerns wins hearts and minds in Pakistan.

Thats not to say there wont need to be an Afghanistan element to this new approach, given that America still needs Pakistans help for over-the-horizon counterterrorism options to deal with any threats from militant groups in Afghanistan. Plus, America wants Pakistan to withhold recognition of the Taliban. But it should be only one aspect not all of U.S.-Pakistan policy.

This new approach can reset the relationship in a constructive direction in the longer term, compared to the alternative: a policy menu of disengagement and sanctions.

Disengagement may satisfy Pakistan hawks in Washington, but it makes for disingenuous policy. It reduces Americas leverage with Pakistan in the event of a conflict with India and ignores the reality of Pakistans nuclear status and domestic struggle with terrorist groups. Disengagement also risks pushing Pakistan further into Chinas arms, which is not inevitable. (China has promised Pakistan $62 billion under the Belt and Road initiative, though the project has seen slowdowns.)

As for sanctions: Not only did U.S. sanctions against Pakistan in the 1990s fail to curtail its nuclear program, but also Pakistans takeaway was to hedge against future American abandonment which in turn partly contributed to its dual-track policy after 2001.

Whats more, a wealth of evidence shows broad-based sanctions make for ineffective foreign policy. And their effect is limited when other countries dont sign on. More effective and multilateral tools exist to shape Pakistans behavior, like the Financial Action Task Force, an international watchdog monitoring terrorist financing. Its graylisting of Pakistan in 2018 prompted the country to crack down on Lashkar-e-Taiba and other jihadist groups.

To be fair, shifting the U.S. approach to Pakistan wholesale will not be easy. Decades of American policy have seen Pakistan squarely through the Afghanistan prism, and government inertia makes change difficult. Mr. Bidens focus is on the Indo-Pacific. Critical statements by Pakistans Prime Minister Imran Khan regarding the United States havent gone over well in Washington, and his move to skip Mr. Bidens summit for democracy may have left a sour taste. Pakistans military wont be happy. But such a policy change is possible, if done deliberately and done right.

This shift would be in line with the Biden administrations foreign policy frame of great power competition, helpfully keeping Pakistan from gravitating further toward China.

Pakistan is simultaneously important and complicated. There is no magic bullet when it comes to reimagining a new policy, but the United States now has an opportunity to steer the relationship in a potentially more productive direction. Washington should give it a shot.

Excerpt from:
Opinion | U.S. Policy Toward Pakistan Can't Be All About Afghanistan - The New York Times

KARACHI, Pakistan For these four young people, Pakistan is home. They were born and raised there. They have big plans: to study, to open their own businesses, to succeed.

But Pakistan says their home is elsewhere. Each of the four a lab technician, a web developer, a jewelry maker, a former welder with dreams of travel was born to parents from Afghanistan who fled to Pakistan because of war and persecution.

The children have been in legal limbo all their lives, at risk of deportation to a strife-torn country they have never seen.

Some live in Al-Asif Square, a neighborhood of low-slung, barrackslike apartment buildings on the outskirts of the port city of Karachi, where the refugee population is often blamed for high crime rates and gang violence. With their vulnerable legal status, opportunity is hard to come by.

Pakistan is home to an estimated hundreds of thousands of children of Afghan refugees. Without official recognition or citizenship, they cannot attend most schools or universities, get many jobs or buy property or cars.

Muhammad Saleem, 24, a lab technician, does not have documentation, so no medical school will admit him.

His lack of documents also means he earns about one-quarter of the market rate for lab technicians, or $85 a month.

Unfortunately, I could not fulfill the dream of my parents of becoming a doctor, he said.

While Pakistani law grants citizenship to those born there, the government has long refused to recognize the claims of children of Afghans amid public pressure to stem the tide of refugees from Afghanistan. Recently, Prime Minister Imran Khan introduced an alien registration card system that would allow Afghans and their locally born children to start businesses but it would still deny them full legal rights, human rights groups warn.

The problem may soon get much bigger.

Politicians and the public alike worry that more refugees will cross into Pakistan from Afghanistan after the Talibans takeover of the country in August, further crowding cities and camps for displaced people. Already, Pakistan officially hosts 1.4 million refugees, according to the United Nations, though experts say hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants live there, too.

Afghanistan Under Taliban Rule

With the departure of the U.S. military on Aug. 30, Afghanistan quickly fell back under control of the Taliban. Across the country, there is widespread anxiety about the future.

The wave of new refugees has been smaller than expected, in part because of Pakistans tighter border controls. However, Islamabad expects an influx once the border is opened as economic conditions and stability worsen in Afghanistan.

Pakistans stateless young people work and live on the edges of society.

Madad Ali, a 23-year-old web developer, has been working through online platforms such as Upwork that connect freelancers with employers. But jobs that pay electronically require identity cards and bank accounts, so he has found under-the-table methods.

Mr. Ali is Hazara, an ethnic group that has been persecuted in Afghanistan and in parts of Pakistan. His parents fled in 1995, a year before the Taliban occupied roughly three-quarters of the country and enforced a harsh interpretation of Islamic law.

While working on a computer in his modest apartment, Mr. Ali says that his lack of credentials depresses him. To overcome depression, he said, I often go to the beach.

Tens of thousands of children do not go to school because they have no government-issued birth certificates, and most either study in religious seminaries to memorize the Quran or collect recyclable trash for scrap dealers in the major markets.

In Al-Asif Square, most of the residents are refugees, and amid the apartments is a school for the refugees children that offers classes up to grade 12. It is registered with the Afghan Ministry of Education, but the schools certification is not recognized by Pakistan.

Sameera Wahidi, 22, completed school there but could advance no further because she does not have the proper documents.

A person who wants to keep studying has to go to Afghanistan, said Ms. Wahidi, whose parents moved from Afghanistans Takhar Province during the 1980s. But I was born in Pakistan, and I have never seen Afghanistan in my life.

She added, For our parents, Afghanistan could be their homeland, but for me, Pakistan is my country.

She learned how to make earrings, necklaces and bangles at a United Nations center for Afghan refugees. She made a modest living until the coronavirus pandemic.

Now the buyers have stopped purchasing our work, Ms. Wahidi said, but we are hopeful it will be resumed soon.

When Mr. Khan, the prime minister, pledged to grant citizenship to the children of refugees after he assumed office in 2018, Samiullah, a child of Afghan refugees, was among thousands including Rohingya and Bengalis long stranded in Pakistan by decades of unrest who took part in a rally to thank Mr. Khan.

But political backlash forced Mr. Khan to back down from that commitment. Political parties in Pakistan said that the Afghan refugees upset the ethnic balance in parts of the country.

This year, Samiullah, 23, had to quit his $7-a-day job as a welder at a workshop in Al-Asif Square because the work was affecting his eyes.

Now I am searching for jobs, but everyone has been asking me to bring a Pakistani national identity card, said Samiullah, who like many Afghans uses only one name.

Samiullah once wanted to open his own metal shop. Like many young people, his mind wanders, and he dreams of seeing the United States or Australia. But he has no passport.

It is not my fault that I was born and raised in Pakistan, and it seems that Ill die here, too, he said, adding, But I firmly believe that the government, one day, will give us citizenship cards.

Progress has come in small steps. In 2019, Mr. Khan allowed refugees holding proof of registration cards to open bank accounts.

Still, the refugees of Al-Asif Square live in a precarious state. Their nonlegal status makes them vulnerable to exploitation. Law enforcement officials, they say, frequently target them.

I avoid going outside the neighborhood because of fear of the police, said Samiullah. They frisk him and ask to see his identity card, he said, and then let him go after taking a bribe of about $3.

Read more from the original source:
Born and Raised in Pakistan, but Living in Legal Limbo - The New York Times

A spokesperson of the Taliban Inamullah Samangani reacted to the recent concerns of Russias President Vladimir Putin and added that there is no threat from Afghanistans borders to regional countries.

Inamullah Samangani in a voice clip on Monday, December 28 said that there is latterly neither potential nor a de facto threat from Afghanistans border to any other country.

During his meeting with Tajikistans President Emomali Rahman, Vladimir Putin said that the security situation on the Afghanistan-Tajikistan border is concerning.

Putin mentioned his countrys military equipment given to Tajikistans military forces to get stronger and address potential threats from other countries.

As we have assured security inside Afghanistan, the borders of Afghanistan are likewise well protected and are under surveillance. Rumors over Potential threats from our borders are baseless. Said Samangani.

Vladimir Putins concerns over insecurity on Afghanistans borders with Central Asian countries are not new, earlier; he had expressed some concerns and had discussed the issue with Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistans heads of state.

Russia has also conducted military drills with Tajikistans forces on the border with Afghanistan.

See the rest here:
No threat from Afghanistan's borders to region: Taliban reacted to Putin's concerns - The Khaama Press News Agency

Former Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani, who fled the country in the wake of the Talibans takeover of Kabul in August 2021, is runner-up for the annual Person of the Year award for Corruption in 2021. Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko tops the list of the corrupt person of the year prepared by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) in recognition of all he has done to propagate organised criminal activity and corruption, a statement said.

Ghani certainly deserves an award, too. He was breathtaking in both corruption and gross incompetence. He deserted his people, leaving them to misery and death so he could live among the corrupt former state officials in the moral cesspool that is the UAE, said OCCRP.

Ghani attracted negative criticism from across the world after he fled from Afghanistan amidst an imminent takeover by the Taliban. He issued his first message after fleeing the country on 15thAugust after the Talibancapturedthe capital Kabul. In a video message issued on Facebook, Ghani alleged that he was forced to leave Afghanistan as the Taliban was planning to kill him, and denied reports of taking huge amounts of money with him.

The former Afghanistan President said that he wanted to transfer power to the Taliban peacefully. But he was evicted against his will, as he didnt want to hang as the president of Afghanistan. He said that he was forced to leave Kabul as the Taliban was looking for him. He said that he decided to not cause bloodshed in the capital, and thats why fled the country to avoid a huge disaster.

Drew Sullivan, one of the co-founders of OCCRP and who appeared on the panel as a judge, said that it has been a banner year for corruption, but Lukashenko stood apart from the crowd.

Besides Ghani and Lukashenko, other finalists included Syrian dictator Bashar Hafez al-Assad, Turkish President Recip Tayyip Erdogan, and Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz.

As per the OCCRP statement, Assad led Syria into a catastrophic civil war and robbed the country of millions of dollars while clinging to power.

Erdogan, on the other hand, was presiding over a corrupt government that laundered Chinese funds for Iranian oil using state-owned banks, the group said.

Kurz, the leader of the Austrian Peoples Party(OVP), along with nine other politicians and media personalities, was embroiled in a case, with allegations of embezzlement and graft.

OCCRP said Lukashenko consolidated unlimited power at home and turned a blind eye to international criticism. Instead, he precipitated the refugee crisis in response to EU sanctions against his country, the statement said. The group further added that Lukashenko was indifferent to the sufferings of his own citizens and desperate migrants, including children, shivering, hungry and barred from settling in Belarus.

Originally posted here:
Former Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani runner up in corrupt person of the year list topped by Belarus Lukashenko - OpIndia

TUCSON, Ariz. (KGUN) Evacuees from Afghanistan began to arrive in November and have continued throughout the year.

"They are trying to get everyone off the bases out by middle of January," ConniePhillips, thePresident and CEO of Lutheran Social Services of the Southwest, said.

So far at least 88 people have arrived in Tucson. The majority of them are younger adults, according to Phillips.

As more evacuees arrive, the Tucson community has stepped up to help.

"The community has been so wonderful," Phillips said. "They have just shown up. You know they have donated goods and items. They've given kitchen items, furnishing, clothing, they've given so much."

They are also continuing to help each person with jobs.

"It really is about finding the best fit," Phillips said. "We work with the evacuee to find out what kind of work they were doing what skills do they have."

If you want to help the new members of the community, click here.

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Evacuees from Afghanistan continue to arrive in Tucson - KGUN