With a deadly avalanche, it appears climate change may now be affecting a once stable region of the Tibetan Plateau.

That’s the conclusion of an international team of researchers who have published an analysis of the July 2016 disaster in the Dec. 9 issue of the Journal of Glaciology.

On July 17, more than 70 million tons of ice broke off from the Aru glacier in the mountains of western Tibet and tumbled into a valley below, taking the lives of nine nomadic yak herders living there.

To perform a kind of forensic analysis of the avalanche, researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences joined with two glaciologists from The Ohio State University: Lonnie Thompson, Distinguished University Professor in the School of Earth Sciences and research scientist at the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center (BPCRC), and Ellen Mosley-Thompson, Distinguished University Professor in Geography and director of BPCRC.

The most important fact about the avalanche, said Thompson, is that it lasted only four or five minutes (according to witnesses), yet it managed to bury 3.7 square miles of the valley floor in that time. He said something–likely meltwater at the base of the glacier–must have lubricated the ice to speed its flow down the mountain.

“Given the rate at which the event occurred and the area covered, I think it could only happen in the presence of meltwater,” Thompson said. Other nearby glaciers may be vulnerable, he added, “but unfortunately as of today, we have no ability to predict such disasters.”

Researchers could not have predicted, for example, that a neighboring glacier in the same mountain range would give way just two months later, but it did in September 2016. That avalanche appears not to have resulted in any deaths, and the cause is still under investigation.

The researchers used satellite data and GPS to get precise measurements of how much ice fell in the first avalanche and the area it covered. They’ve since pieced together more answers by working with computer modelers who were able to replicate the avalanche virtually. In those simulations, the only condition that led to an avalanche was the presence of meltwater.

“We still don’t know exactly where the meltwater came from, but given that the average temperature at the nearest weather station has risen by about 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) over the last 50 years, it makes sense that snow and ice are melting and the resulting water is seeping down beneath the glacier,” Thompson said.

Glacial collapse is unprecedented in western Tibet, which for decades has resisted the effects of climate change while glaciers in southern and eastern Tibet have melted at an accelerating rate. Increased snowfall has even led to the expansion of some glaciers in western Tibet–and the extra snowfall likely played some role in the avalanche by creating additional meltwater, said Lide Tian, a glaciologist at the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and lead author of the paper.

In an article titled, “Diversity = Intolerance,” I mentioned that Oregon’s Hillsboro School District issued a policy requesting that employees “refrain” from decorating their office doors with Santa. That’s because some feel “uncomfortable” seeing Christmas symbols.

We bombarded the local media in the Portland area where Hillsboro is located with our statement, and subsequently heard from the school district’s communications director, Beth Graser; she emailed me a letter explaining what happened and how this matter has been resolved.

There is good news: Santa is back. More good news: there are no reports of vomiting or levitation among the “uncomfortable” crowd.

“I apologize for the turmoil this has caused,” Graser wrote. Apology accepted. But her explanation of what happened suggests that some in the district still don’t get it.

Graser says the office door policy was meant to apply only to the district staff. However, a portion of the policy was sent to principals, and one of them shared it with others. It eventually wound up in the hands of an employee who is not anti-Santa, and that someone contacted the media. Once we learned of it, we jumped on it.

In her letter to me, Graser strains to say that all of this hullaballoo could have been avoided had the unhappy employee simply discussed the policy with school officials, instead of going to the media. But that dodges the real problem. There would have been no media issue in the first place had school district officials not sought to censor Christmas.

No matter, we are happy to say that the right decision has been made. Here is what Graser wrote: “We respect and value all religions, cultures, customs and traditions, including Santa and Christmas. We have not banned Santa. Many of our schools have Santa and/or Christmas-related decorations displayed and many are having visits from Santa over the next two weeks.”

A happy ending to a needless controversy.

Every Thursday in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, ha ome to the second largest Muslim population in the world, the nation witnesses celebration of its popular Sufi culture. There are gatherings at the shrine, there is music, there is dance and there is Qawwali. The festival of ‘urs’, the Arabic word for marriage, symbolizes the union of Sufis with the divine; Sufis can be seen traveling from one shrine to another, more so during this festival.

Sufism has a lot of different faces in the world and the one in South Asia is certainly very peculiar. In the wake of increasing religiously motivated violence and not-so-rare attacks on the shrines in Pakistan, the argument exists if Sufism is just a tolerant, mystical practice in this Islamic state or it’s a weapon that has the potential to backfire, further wounding rather than healing the domestic stability in Pakistan.

And there’s always a debate vis-à-vis the foreign policy towards the most immediate neighbor, India. Media calls it ‘normalization of bilateral relations’ every time Pakistani pilgrims get visas to visit Ajmer Sharif Dargah in India, and visa denials to Qawwali singers strain the bilateral relations immediately. Besides the political and economic diplomacy, does Sufi diplomacy exist as well between the two neighbors?

Pakistan is a key regional actor so far as security and broader economic landscape of South Asia is concerned. There is radicalization of religious beliefs, there is sectarian conflict, and there is power play between civil and military. The question arises, how do Pakistanis act and react in these circumstances; can Sufism, the guiding and counseling faith come to rescue?

Sufism has not just this mystical syncretic aspect. From the reformist Mohammed Iqbal, who reinterpreted Sufism in a more dynamic idiom, to the latest political endeavors of the National Sufi Council, not to mention the doctrinal struggles between the different sects like the Deobandis and Barelwis, Alix Phillippon remarks how Sufism has emerged as a relevant symbol to analyze the never ending ideological debate on the identity of a country caught in controversial political contexts, especially since the beginning of the war on terror.

But despite the looming terror, the drumming and dancing never stops, not even for the call to prayer!

Besides drumming and dancing, what are other ways for Sufism’s message of moderation and inclusiveness to be conveyed to general urban audience? Nicholas Schmidle talks about his interview with Rohail Hyatt, who was the music director of Coca-Cola in Pakistan. Hyatt hoped that he could leverage some of his cultural influence and access to corporate cash to convey Sufism’s message. He said “He used to work for Pepsi, but Coke is way more Sufic”. He produced a series of live studio performances that paired rock acts with traditional singers of qawwali. One of the best-known qawwali songs, we all know is “Dama Dum Mast Qalandar,” or “Every Breath for the Ecstasy of Qalandar” in the honor of the most popular Sufi saint Lal Qalandar.

In Punjab and Sindh, generally known as the heartland of Sufism, Hindu, Muslim and Sikh population, visit and pay tribute to the Sufi saints regardless of their own religious identities.

Nicholas Schmidle had so aptly put that the mystical faith of Sufism is not a sect, like Shiism or Sunnism. It is a personal, experiential approach to Allah. It exists throughout the Muslim world, perhaps most visibly in Turkey, where whirling dervishes and their millions of followers embrace Islam as a religious experience, not a social or political one. Sufis represent the strongest indigenous force, yet Western countries have tended to underestimate their importance as, since 2001, they spent millions of dollars on interfaith dialogues, public diplomacy campaigns and other initiatives to counter extremism.

On the domestic front, Sufism’s enormous influence over its followers continued to attract the attention of the ruling class. The Bhuttos most prominently, Benazir and her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto were great at marshaling Sufi support. Qalandar’s resting place became the geographical center of Bhutto’s political spirituality. As Benazir Bhutto began her first campaign for prime minister, her followers would greet her with the chant, “Benazir Bhutto Mast Qalandar” (Benazir Bhutto, the ecstasy of Qalandar). On Bhutto’s assassination, Anwar Sagar, a Sindhi poet, wrote, “She rose above the Himalayas; immortal she became; the devotee of Qalandar became Qalandar herself”.

In his inaugural address, Mohammad Ali Jinnah made his commitment to secularism in Pakistan very clear when he said,

“You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other places of worship in this State of Pakistan. We are starting with this fundamental principle that we are all citizens and equal citizens of one State. Now, I think we should keep that in front of us as our ideal and you will find that in course of time Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the State.”

Yet, politics and religion including Sufism remain so mystically and terrifyingly entangled.

Ever since Pakistan was established, religion has been the principle determinant of the country’s social and political environment. I agree with Uzma Rehman on how the question of Muslim identity has remained an unresolved issue which even creation of nation-states failed to resolve.

Back in 2009, Ishaan Tharoor wrote that what is needed, more than the West pushing any one form of religion, is a propagation of the underlying values of Sufism – love, harmony and beauty. At Sufism’s core, lies an embrace of the world. This is not easy, especially in Pakistan, where poverty, corruption and the daily toll of the global war on terrorism simmer together in a volatile brew. Seven years later, nothing much seems to have changed.

One thing is clear: as the Sufis in Pakistan preach faith and ecstasy, the whirling dervishes also have a role to play in the complex geo-political games of Pakistan. Only time will tell how Salafi Violence and Sufi Tolerance unfold in Pakistan; what lies ahead for Pakistanis.

*Nikita Singla is an International Affairs Consultant, engagements spanning Regional Cooperation, International Trade, Economic Integration and Overseas Development Assistance with a focus on South Asia. She is an Engineer from Indian Institute of Technology Delhi and Masters in International Economic Policy from Sciences Po Paris. She blogs@ www.nikitasingla.wordpress.com and tweets @nikitasingla17.

Originally published in Hudson Institute – South Asia Blog

By Anand Kumar*

Bangladesh has often been seen as a moderate Islamic country. But it has also seen several waves of religious extremism. And in recent times, there has been a fear of Islamic State getting a foothold in Bangladesh.

This fear was especially strong in the aftermath of the July 1 Dhaka Café attack. Fortunately, the prompt action of the government against the terrorist groups and their masterminds did enough to quell the apprehensions of emergence of ISIS in Bangladesh. Meanwhile, ISIS itself seems to be struggling for its survival as the battle for the territory controlled by it rages in West Asia.

But the ideology that the Islamist groups have propagated seems to linger on in Bangladesh.

Its manifestation was seen in the October 30 Brahmanbaria violence where houses and temples of the minority Hindu community have been vandalised. This attack was followed by a couple of more attacks of similar kind.

There is no doubt that the present Awami League government in Bangladesh is secular in orientation and is trying to protect the minorities, but the problem seems to be quite deep.

Bangladesh has always been a divided society where one section of the population is secular but there is also a section which has been extremist. This extremist section seems to be growing in strength as influence of radical ideology has grown worldwide.

Moreover, as Bangladesh depends on migration of its workforce abroad for remittances, it has also received Wahabi and Salafi ideology along with these remittances. The Gulf countries have also fuelled extremism through charities and donations for mosques and quami madrasas.

One such group which is intimately linked to quami madrasas is Hefajat-e-Islam. This group has its headquarters in Hathzari of Chittagong. It has been involved in recent attacks on the minorities in Brahmanbaria. It is also the same group which held Dhaka to ransom when it launched its protest against the secular Gano Jagran Manch — which supports war crime trials in Bangladesh and has called for capital punishment to Jamaat-e-Islami leader Abdul Quader Mollah Kader Molla.

The recent attacks by Hefazat-e-Islam are believed to be in retaliation against the alleged demeaning of Islam by a Hindu, Rasraj Das, who is a fisherman from Brahmanbaria. The group alleged that the person tried to belittle the holy Kaaba. Though the alleged guilty person has been arrested and sent to jail, the Hefajat-e-Islam, along with Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat, decided to bring out two protest marches on Diwali day against the minority community. During these marches, cadres of Hefajat-e-Islam went berserk and vandalised at least five Hindu temples and ransacked more than a hundred Hindu houses.

Actually, the modus operandi is quite similar to the 2012 Ramu attacks against Buddhists in Cox’s Bazar. Even then, a supposedly blasphemous post on social media site Facebook was used to attack them. Later, it was found that the alleged culprit did not post it but it was simply tagged on his page by someone and the post showed up on his Facebook page.

Even in the Brahmanbaria case, Rasraj Das has been cleared by investigators of the charge of hurting religious sentiments of the Muslims. The district police has found that the controversial Facebook image that triggered a wave of communal attacks on Nasirnagar Hindus a month ago was not uploaded from Rasraj’s mobile phone. Actually, the post was made from Dhaka. This has also been confirmed by the Forensic Department of Police Bureau of Investigation.

Brahmanbaria is the district of Islami Oikya Jote leader late Mufti Fazlul Haque. It is a stronghold of the Islamist parties in Bangladesh. It has also been a hotbed of extremist and terrorist activities. In January 2016, a music college named after famous Bangladeshi composer and music teacher Ustad Alauddin Khan was vandalised.

The minorities of Bangladesh have been coming under attack at regular intervals. This has created an atmosphere of panic among these people who look towards the Awami League government for protection. But so far, the government has not been very effective in preventing such attacks. The government alleges that these attacks are being orchestrated by the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and Jamaat who want to defame the country. But such allegations do not absolve the government of its responsibility.

It is also believed in Bangladesh that the organisational set up of Awami League has been penetrated by Jamaat-e-Islami and a number of Jamaat leaders have infiltrated the party. In many cases of violence against minorities, these people are suspected to be involved.

To the credit of the present Sheikh Hasina government, it must be said that it has promptly deployed security forces (RAB and para-military BGB) in the affected areas. But unfortunately the local police has not been doing its job with alacrity. The inaction of local police against the extremists has caused concern among the minority community.

Unless the government improves the law enforcement at the local level, violence against the minorities in Bangladesh would be difficult to prevent.

*Anand Kumar is an Associate Fellow at the Institute for Defence Studies & Analyses (IDSA), New Delhi. Comments and suggestions on this article can be sent to editor@spsindia.in

Malaysia’s besieged leader Najib Razak claims to have turned around his political fortunes despite the 1MDB scandal. While UMNO is increasingly confident of facing the coming general election, the ground may be far from sweet.

By Yang Razali Kassim*

The mother of all battles is shaping up in Malaysian politics as beleaguered prime minister Najib Razak pulled out all stops to defend himself in the face of a reconfiguring opposition. Putting his dominant party, UMNO, on a war footing at its recently concluded annual general assembly, Najib resorted to the Islamic doctrine of wala’ – or loyalty to the leader – as he manoeuvred to rally support and ready UMNO for a general election.

The enabler was his Number 2, Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi who started the ball rolling by pledging his own loyalty to Najib, who has been under siege since the outbreak of the 1MDB scandal last year. UMNO for the first time had to ward off an uprising against a sitting president led by a former prime minister and party president. In a single-minded drive to push Najib out, Mahathir Mohamad is leading a “people’s movement” to “Save Malaysia”. Having resigned from UMNO in protest against Najib, Mahathir has joined the opposition, even reconciling with his former ally-turned-nemesis Anwar Ibrahim to revive their once powerful political partnership.

Najib’s Survival Strategy

Mahathir is now demonised as a traitor who would even sleep with the enemy, the Chinese-dominated Democratic Action Party (DAP), to destroy UMNO, the Malay party he once led. The trigger that launched Mahathir on this warpath is 1MDB which has implicated Najib despite his denial of wrongdoing. The scandal has energised the divided opposition as well as Najib’s critics, culminating in the departure from UMNO of Mahathir and three other leaders, including deputy prime minister and UMNO deputy president Muhyddin Yassin. All three have formed a new party PPBM, also known for short as Bersatu.

This new party is set to join the Anwar-inspired Pakatan Harapan, formerly known as Pakatan Rakyat. This could strengthen the opposition coalition out to topple Najib, along with UMNO and the ruling national front coalition, Barisan Nasional (BN). It is this prospect of a reconstituted opposition coalition led in spirit and form by the two formidable former foes – Mahathir and Anwar – that caused Zahid to predict an epic clash. “We have to work triple-hard than previous elections because the mother of all battles will be in this coming elections,” he told the MalayMail in an interview. Another UMNO leader, the chief minister of Johor state, has described the coming general election as a “battle for survival”.

With his back to the wall, Najib’s strategy for survival has transformed him from a gentlemanly politician to an almost unrecognisable political animal. At the outbreak of the 1MDB scandal, he swiftly removed key senior officials who were not on his side, including the attorney-general, before sacking his chief critic, the deputy premier Muhyiddin. 1MDB has now grown into an international scandal as several governments launched probes where the financial fiasco affected their jurisdictions; yet at the UMNO general assembly over the weekend, 1MDB was hardly an issue as the entire party’s attention was deflected towards the impending general election.

Rohingya Issue

Najib the Malay nationalist then burnished his credentials as an Islamic leader by latching on to the latest humanitarian crisis on the Rohingya in Myanmar, which came at an opportune time for him. Usually cautious when making his moves and choosing his words, Najib was a different persona at the Rohingya solidarity rally the next day.

He did the unprecedented in ASEAN: He brushed aside a warning by Myanmar not to interfere in the country’s internal affairs. Upset that his foreign minister was turned away by Aung San Suu Kyi when he sought bilateral talks on the issue, Najib declared a limit to the ASEAN principle of non-interference when it came to human rights abuses. He even ticked off Suu Kyi for not living up to her name as a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, while urging Indonesian president Joko Widodo to mobilise a larger rally in support of the Rohingya: “Enough is enough!” he said. “They want me to close my eyes? Shut my mouth? I will not keep quiet. We will defend them (the Rohingya)!”

Billed as the Muslim Ummah Solidarity Rally for the Rohingya, it was clearly not just to show solidarity with the persecuted Rohingya, thousands of whom have taken refuge in Malaysia. It was also to showcase solidarity between UMNO and PAS, the Islamist opposition which Najib has been trying hard to woo. Indeed, this was a showcase moment – of him on stage together with the opposition Islamist PAS leader, Hadi Awang.

In coming together to support the Rohingya, UMNO and PAS have signalled their converging political interests. While this does not necessarily mean they would end up as formal allies in the coming elections, it does raise the prospect of an electoral pact. The more UMNO can win PAS over, the lesser the chances of the Pakatan Harapan opposition getting stronger. ASEAN will now have to contain the political fallout on the diplomatic and regional fronts.

The Mood Outside UMNO

Najib is clearly overflowing with confidence. UMNO leaders claimed the party had turned the corner and was now solidly behind him. While this may be so, it is too early to say if UMNO is completely out of the woods, going by publicly-aired sentiments. One came from a recent press conference by an UMNO Youth leader who quit the party after he was suspended for allegedly trying to “sabotage Najib” by attempting to provide Mahathir with a speaking platform.

It was not so much the Youth leader’s resignation but what he said. He said many more were standing behind him and claimed there would be “busloads” who would leave UMNO in “managed waves”. This would build up to the general election that is widely expected to be quickened to next year, before the fractured opposition could consolidate.

On a broader note, while UMNO may still be the dominant Malay party, it is no longer regarded as the sole representative of the Malay community’s political aspirations. Outside UMNO – indeed outside the Malay community – the mood may be in stark contrast. A recent article by a former senior civil servant and now a think-tank senior, Ramon Navaratnam, was telling. He warned of a “serious disconnect” between UMNO leaders and the wider Malaysian public.

Ramon wondered whether the UMNO leaders’ confidence and happiness was “shared by all Malays and Bumiputeras and especially, most Malaysians, including non-Malays and non-Muslims”. “Prime Minister Najib Razak and UMNO leaders are generally confident of the future, but are Malaysians happy too?” He listed five sources of discontent – inflation, corruption, unemployment, human rights, and deteriorating safety and security. The chairman of the ASLI Centre for Public Policy Studies said: “Malaysia’s public confidence by any measure is now low and declining…This is causing much loss of public confidence and unhappiness, which all political leaders must address expeditiously, before it’s too late for the 14th general election.”

*Yang Razali Kassim is Senior Fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

By Lt Gen P.C. Katoch (Retd.)*

The recently concluded Sixth Ministerial ‘Heart of Asia’ Conference at Amritsar, attended by some 30 countries and international and regional organisations, emerged as a platform for stronger India-Afghanistan relationship, and for the world to understand more the problems and instability being faced by Afghanistan and the region.

That the instability is primarily because of Pakistan’s decades-old state policy of exporting terrorism is without doubt. However, statements and deliberations at the Heart of Asia (HoA) conference, as well as other recent developments indicate new geopolitical pulls that the region is likely to face in the near and mid-term.

One highlight of the recent HoA Conference was that for the first time, a Heart of Asia (HoA) Declaration expressed concern at the violence caused in Afghanistan and the region by Pakistani proxies and other terrorist groups. The declaration made categorical reference to concern over the gravity of the security situation in Afghanistan and the region, and high level of violence caused by the Taliban, terrorist groups including ISIL/Daesh and its affiliates, Haqqani Network, Al Qaida, IMU, ETIM, LeT, JeM, TTP, Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, Jundullah and other foreign terrorist fighters.

Pakistan’s de-facto Foreign Minister Sartaj Aziz asserted at the HoA conference that blaming Pakistan for terrorism was too “simplistic” and maintained that the instability in Afghanistan is linked to Kashmir.

But the surprise statement came from Zamir Kabulov, Russia’s special envoy to Afghanistan, who stated at the HoA Conference that allegations made against Pakistan by India and Afghanistan are totally baseless, the allegations game should stop and criticising Pakistan is wrong. He also appreciated the speech by Sartaj Aziz, calling it constructive and friendly.

This was a surprise since Russia’s Spetsnaz Special Forces have been active in Pakistan over the years by proxy to block Pakistani support to Chechen insurgents. It is quite possible that Pakistan may have assured Russia of not supporting Islamic fundamentalism in Chechnya, in addition to pursuing a bilateral defence pact.

Then there has been the recent Russia-Pakistan gas deal, TAPI (Turkmenistan–Afghanistan–Pakistan–India pipeline) and CPEC (China–Pakistan Economic Corridor) are coming up and Russia is supplying defence equipment to Pakistan, even as the Barack Obama administration in the US is continuing to pressure Russia from multiple avenues, financial sanctions included.

Obviously, China is capitalising on the US-Russia estrangement by drawing Russia closer to herself and her protégé Pakistan.

Kabulov’s statement indicates Russian support for ‘good’ terrorists of Pakistan — very much like China. The games of Chinese checkers and Russian roulette appear coalescing despite prospects of cooperation between Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President-elect Donald Trump over Syria.

General John W Nicholson, Commander US Forces and Resolute Mission in Afghanistan, recently reviewed the situation in the region, highlights of which included:

US mission ‘Freedom Sentinel’ for Central Asia-South Asia region is focused on Al Qaeda and ISIS, as also advising and assisting ANSF to defeat Al Qaeda and IS Khorasan (ISK).

Of 98 US-designated terrorist groups globally, 20 are in Af-Pak who mix and converge.

US CT operations during 2016 killed/captured some 50 Al Qaeda/AQIS leaders and 200 cadres.

Mullah Mansour, emir of Taliban, was killed in Pakistan.

Top 12 leaders of ISK, including emir Hafiz Saeed Khan, were killed.

Resolute Support’s programme to train, advise, assist ANSF is the largest and longest NATO operation in history — 39 nations in ISAF together for 10 years-plus.

$800 million is pledged annually to support ANSF through 2020.

International donors at Brussels recently expressed intent to commit another $15.2 billion for developing Afghanistan.

Afghan Air Force has added MD-530 helicopters, eight ground attack aircraft and 120 Afghan tactical air controllers.

Sustainable security strategy during 2016 foiled enemy attempts to capture cities.

ANSF holds about 64 per cent of population, Taliban less than 10 per cent and balance is contested.

Despite Taliban promise to safeguard civilians, vast majority of civilian casualities due to insurgency — 61-72 per cent; Taliban have intentionally destroyed Afghan’s infrastructure while government seeks to build it.

Afghan police and army will focus on replacing ineffective/corrupt leaders.

Future concerns include: risk of Afghan political fracture; malign influence of external actors, particularly Pakistan, Russia, and Iran; convergence of terrorist groups, and; impact of a narcotics trade on insurgency and economy.

US President-elect Donald Trump, in his telephonic conversation with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, has assured that his administration stands ready to support Afghanistan, saying: “If Afghanistan needs more assistance, this administration, after assessing the needs, will focus on providing more security support.”

How the future US-Pakistan relations, which directly affect stability of Afghanistan and the region, will differ from those during the Obama Administration is yet to be seen, but presently the US House of Representatives has cleared $900 million economic aid to Pakistan, which — going by past experience — invariably gets diverted.

Significantly, Afghanistan has accused Pakistan of trying to change Russia’s and Iran’s perception about the Taliban, who are fighting against the Afghan government and Western coalition forces.

Afghanistan’s official spokesperson Sediq Seddeqi told media on November 5 that Kabul was hopeful that Russia and Iran would continue backing the Afghan government and people of Afghanistan, the way they had been over the past 16 years. He suggested that Pakistan was behind the US view that Russia and Iran support Taliban in the war-torn country.

Seddeqi pointed to General Nicholson briefing Pentagon on December 2 that “Russia has overtly lent legitimacy to the Taliban”. This needs to be viewed in the backdrop of Kabulov’s aforementioned statement at the HoA Conference.

Seddeqi also said: “Shifting to Iran, you have a similar situation — there have been linkages between the Iranians and the Taliban in the past”, adding that Nicholson had also said: “Pakistan, a US ally, was lending support to the Taliban, which had launched deadly attacks in Afghanistan in the past week, and; Taliban-affiliated Haqqani network was holding five Americans hostage.”

Sartaj Aziz recently announced that Pakistan was setting up a high-level committee to formulate “a doable and sustainable” policy to highlight the Kashmir issue globally, described by Dawn as “reaching out to Indians who are opposed to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ‘extremist policies’”.

This committee is to consist of senior officials from the Ministries of Defence, Interior and Information, the Military Operations Directorate, ISI and IB — and, significantly, none from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Obviously, the unstated aim would be to destabilise India as much as possible through increased terror.

In the case of Afghanistan, Kabulov’s statement at the HoA indicates Russia getting sucked into the China-Pakistan nexus. This will have ramifications for the Af-Pak region.

Additionally, the US has just announced it will not purchase helicopters from Russia for Afghanistan. What happens to the maintenance, spare parts and assembly of Russian equipment held by the ANSF, including attack helicopters, remains a question mark with the Russian stance changing.

Whatever the pulls and pushes in the ongoing Great Game, the Chinese appear to be on a winning streak as of now.

*The author is a veteran Special Forces officer of the Indian Army. Comments and suggestions on this article can be sent to editor@spsindia.in

By Mohammad Khajouei*

Following a short period of stagnation, Iran’s oil and gas industry has come to life again and is rapidly moving toward reviving its golden days. During the latest meeting of oil ministers of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in Vienna on November 30, Iran was not only excluded from implementing the organization’s decision to cut oil output, but was also allowed to continue crude production at the highest level that it has experienced during the past 16 years. However, restoring Iran’s oil power has not been achieved easily and has been the result of a continued and calculated effort.

When President Hassan Rouhani came to office as Iran’s chief executive in August 2013, the Iranian oil and gas industry, was suffering from paralyzing conditions. The biggest industry of Iran had practically run aground as a result of weak management as well as crippling sanctions. Not only Iran’s crude output had fallen, but the country was also facing sales restrictions and problems for foreign exchange transfer when it came to selling even the same small amount of oil, which was produced at that time.

Putting in charge an experienced person like Bijan Zangeneh as the new oil minister, was the first step that the administration of President Rouhani took to revive Iran’s oil power, because there was no more time for trial and error and experience should have had the first say.

The first and foremost problem facing Iran’s energy industry was the existence of sanctions. Therefore, in order to do away with those sanctions, nuclear talks between Iran and the P5+1 group of countries started the same year and reached their final result following two years of intensive diplomatic efforts.

Since June 2014, however, and in the heat of nuclear negotiations, global oil prices took a nosedive at a high pace. The reason behind the global oil price fall was a policy of increased production, which at that time was supported by such heavyweight producers like Saudi Arabia, which is the world’s biggest crude producer. Of course, supporters of that policy claimed that its main goal was to undercut such oil rivals as the shale oil, which was produced by the United States, but Iran strongly opposed that policy and described it as a “plot.” Finally, that policy led to an unprecedented reduction in oil prices and various oil producing countries, including Saudi Arabia, saw themselves face to face with severe budget deficits.

The final conclusion of Iran’s nuclear deal and subsequent dismantling of nuclear-related sanctions, gave new breathing space to Iran’s economy, including its most important sector, that is, oil and gas. Professional and efficient managers at Iran’s Ministry of Petroleum took advantage of this opportunity and the country’s oil output has continued to rise since that time. As a result, during the first month after removal of sanctions alone, Iran’s crude oil exports exceeded 400,000 barrels per day. According to global figures, the country is currently producing close to four million barrels per day of crude oil.

On the other hand, unveiling the new format of Iran’s oil and gas contracts, which is generally known as Iran Petroleum Contract (IPC) and is aimed at attracting foreign investment to the sector, has been an important step taken to further reinvigorate Iran’s oil and gas industry. In the most recent case, French oil giant, Total, joined hands with its Chinese and Iranian partners to develop one of the phases of the South Pars gas field.

However, under conditions when Iran saw the way paved for increasing its oil output, the country faced a new challenge due to a change in the viewpoints of countries, which had supported output rise in past years, after they came up with an “oil freeze” plan, which they claimed aimed to push up the oil price in international markets. However, Iran’s oil diplomacy managed to overcome this impediment at that juncture. On the one hand, Iran indicated its conditional support for the oil freeze policy, while, on the other hand, announced that the cost of this policy should be undertaken by countries, which once supported oil output hike, not Iran, which only sought to raise its oil production to the level it had before sanctions were imposed on the country’s energy sector.

Iran’s insistence on increasing its oil output to the pre-sanctions level was faced with Saudi Arabia’s opposition, but after about eight months of consultations, the member states of OPEC had to announce the launch of their oil freeze policy during their 171st meeting after excluding Iran from that policy. It has been said that consultations between presidents of Iran and Russia and subsequent convincement of Saudi officials by Russians have been effective in paving the way for the recent agreement among OPEC members. Many analysts have described the recent OPEC agreement as the “oil JCPOA [in reference to Iran’s successful nuclear deal, which is also known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)] and a “win-win” deal.

Now, the world’s biggest oil producers have reached a decision to keep their output at 32.5 million barrels per day from the beginning of 2017, which means they have slashed OPEC’s overall production by 1.2 million barrels per day.

OPEC’s recent decision will not only boost the oil price, but will also improve the organization’s international standing. During recent years, OPEC’s role in regulating the oil market had been greatly downplayed and the organization was in some sort of isolation. This point is very important as it shows that while having their own rivalries and even despite severe political differences, member states of OPEC can still cooperate and interact with one another.

In the light of suitable technical plans and active diplomacy, Iran’s oil industry has experienced a new spurt. During the five months that preceded Rouhani’s election and by August 2013, Iran’s crude oil production stood at 2.7 million barrels per day, but the figure has currently reached about four million barrels per day. In other words, Iran’s oil production has almost doubled.

As put by Zangeneh, according to Iran’s Sixth Five-Year Economic Development Plan, the country’s oil industry needs about 200 billion dollars in investment up to 2021, 134 billion dollars of which is to be spent on oil and gas projects. In the meantime, in order to develop 49 oil and gas fields, Iran is getting ready to launch a tender bid. The country’s petrochemical and refinery industries will also need 52 billion dollars and 15 billion dollars in investment, respectively, over the next five years. Tehran is planning to double the capacity of its petrochemical industry during the same period as well. All these facts prove beyond any doubt that Iran has regained its oil power.

* Mohammad Khajouei
Senior Middle East Analyst

By Ehsani2 for Syria Comment*

In a three-part series, Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Roy Gutman relies on a number of Syrian opposition members to make the central claim that “the Syrian regime’s collusion with the terrorists of the so-called Islamic State goes back a decade.” This is not the first time that Assad has been accused of complicity in the horrors of ISIS. But the claims have renewed urgency because the Syrian opposition is worried that Donald Trump’s anti ISIS strategy will come at the expense of U.S. support for the Syrian opposition. They worry that Washington will “shift policy in the Syria conflict from one of support for the moderate opposition to collaboration with the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.”

Credibility of the Sources

The article is based on testimonies from what Mr. Gutman refers to as political activists, defectors, Islamists from Hama province, former State officials and diplomats (asking for political asylum in the U.S), and former head of the Syrian Opposition coalition.

Bassam Barabandi, a former employee of the now closed Syrian Embassy in Washington, DC.

One key source whose name seems to appear often throughout the article is Bassam Barabandi. Mr. Barabandi is a 41 year-old ex-diplomat who worked at the Syrian Embassy in Washington. He defected to the opposition after he used his position as a consular officer to issue Syrian passports to a number of opposition figures whose travel documents had expired. Back in 2014, he wrote an article for the Atlanic Council, entitiled “Inside Assad’s Playbook: Time and Terror with Tyler Jess Thompson who is a director at United for a Free Syria. This was an early attempt to link President Assad to Islamist terror groups.

Had Mr. Gutman known anything about Syria, he would have been more suspicious of Mr. Barabandi based on a preposterous single claim he makes in the article. Supposedly, during a visit from Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki, Mr. Barabandi remembers being huddled with Deputy Vice President Mohammad Nasif and “taking notes, monitoring interactions, disrupting conversations and altering room dynamics.”

Mr. Barabandi quickly concludes that “no detail is too small for the Assad regime to overlook. There is always a plan, opportunities are never missed, and there are no accidents: the rise of ISIS is no exception to this rule.”

Barabandi’s story about sitting in the Four Season’s Hotel with Syria’s Deputy Vice President is unbelievable for several reasons. The most obvious is that Nassif, an elderly man and top security chieftain would not be hanging out with Barabandi, a young 30 something civil servant who had yet to take up a post of any consequence. Moreover, Nassif would certainly not explain to him the inner-most secrets of the regime, nor demonstrate to him how the secret service operates behind one-way mirrors to manipulate foreign dignitaries. This account is absurd.

When reading this article, one is reminded of Frontline’s Martin Smith when he confronted Ahmad Chalabi in Baghdad following the U.S invasion. Smith challenged Chalabi to provide the evidence of that he had promised existed to prove the existence of chemical weapons and Saddam’s links to Al-Qaida. Chalabi simply looked at Martin Smith with consummate distain and brushed off his nagging with the suggestion that such details were no longer important. He simply stated, “We are in Baghdad now.” For Chalabi, any number of fabrications were well worth the result. Saddam was destroyed and America had returned Iraq’s opposition to Baghdad where they could hope to take power. Chalabi’s smug dismissal of Martin Smith was well warranted because the date was 2003, before the Iraq insurgency had been able to organize, before al-Qaida had spread from one end of Iraq to the other, and before hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis had been killed and millions more driven from their country.

The sources of Mr. Gutman’s articles read like mini versions of Iraq’s Ahmad Chalabi connections. They are advocates for the rebel cause, who will say whatever they believe will convince the United States to invade Syria and depose Assad. They see no problem in stretching the truth if it can lead to foreign military action. After all, they have concluded that only U.S. military action can remove Assad and bring victory to the opposition.

Mr. Gutman meets most of his opposition contacts at a coffee shop in Istanbul; they spent hours offering him spectacular details on how the government bombed its own capital, assassinated its highest government security officials, and trained lethal Islamists to run terror organizations that have killed thousands of his best soldiers. All of this in order to convince the world that ISIS and al-Qaida are not products of the Sunni opposition but rather the Frankensteins of Assad’s invention. “Kill Assad,” they seem to be saying, “and you will kill the jihadists and win the war on terror.” This is all too good to be true, of course. They insist that Assad’s war against jihadists is fake. Faithful to his sources, Roy Gutman argues that President Assad is not only in cahoots with ISIS, but that he “built ISIS.”

Gutman relates that one opposition source explained that President Bashar al-Assad himself issued an order to remove roadblocks in Damascus so that a car bomber, claiming to be Nusra, could have easy access to a Damascus neighborhood, set off his huge explosion and make it look like the capital was being attacked by jihadists. This explosion was a false flag operation, Gutman argues, masterminded by Assad himself in order to deceive the world into believing that jihadists were a menace when they were not. Never mind that James Clapper, the director of U.S. National Intelligence, told Congress in mid-February that the explosions “had all the earmarks of an al Qaeda-like attack and so we believe al Qaeda in Iraq is extending its reach into Syria.” Never mind that Abu Muhammad al-Jawlani, the head of al-Qaida’s surrogate in Syria, the al-Nusra terrorist group, claimed responsibility for the explosion. Gutman insists that his source is telling the truth and everyone else, including the intelligence services of the United States are deceived by Assad propaganda. Why would U.S. news services publish these assertions? They make no sense. They reek of conspiracy theory, are transparently self-serving, and defy logic.

Assassination of Assef Shawkat, the President’s Brother-in-Law, 18 July 2012

Mr. Gutman’s sources are convinced that Iran, Syria’s closest ally, ordered the killing of Assad’s top security team. Not only do they speculate on who was behind the Damascus explosions, but they also attempt to deconstruct one of the most spectacular bombings that struck the inner circle of the Syrian leadership. On 18 July 2012 Assad’s Crisis Management Group was meeting at the heavily guarded National Security building in Rawda Square in central Damascus. Those killed included top members of Assad’s Crisis Group: Defense Minister Gen. Dawoud Rajha, his deputy, Assaf Shawkat, who was Assad’s brother-in-law, Major General Hisham Ikhtiyar, a top national security adviser to the president, and Gen. Hassan Turkmani, a former defense minister.

Gutman explains that Syrian Interior Minister Shaar placed a brief case against the wall in the room in order to blow up the security group. None of this makes sense, of course. Mr. Shaar stayed in the building, rather than escape. He blew himself up, severely injuring himself in the blast. He spent almost 40 days at Chami hospital in intensive care.

Ali Mamlouk, head of the Syrian intelligence apparatus

If this is not crazy enough, Mr. Gutman offers an even more preposterous story to explain why Iran would blow up its ally’s leading security chieftains. Gutman, once again quoting sources “within Assad’s entourage” insists that Iran killed Shawkat, the President’s relative, in order to place their own man, Ali Mamlouk, as the head of intelligence. All of this is preposterous. It includes stories about Assad’s mother and brother, who are part of this great plot. They are intimately involved in this family intrigue. How could Gutman’s low level defectors possibly know the details of this Assad family saga? The simple answer, of course, is they couldn’t. Gutman repeatedly expresses outrage and consternation at the perfidy and incompetence of the CIA for not debriefing his Syrian opposition contacts to find out the deepest secrets of the Assad regime that he has found out.

The Daily Beast, which publishes Gutman’s revelations, shares his outrage. Little wonder that so many Americans are having a hard time figuring out how to evaluate the “post-truth” age, when their news organs feed them such pablum. How in the world could Iran, Assad and Hizbollah be winning this regional war against Turkey, the Gulf States, Israel and a large array of Sunni rebel militias if Iran were blowing up the leadership of its closest ally? Certainly, it is comforting to believe that one’s enemies are incompetent, malevolent killers, but could they really have maintained a thirty-five year alliance if they were busy killing off family members and security chieftains of each other? These sorts of explanations for what is happening in Syria beggar belief. Such conspiracy theories are attractive in the absence of facts. Here is what I can reconstruct from a few sources who in a position to know.

The Real Perpetrators of the Bombing of the Assad’s Crisis Group

The only truth that Mr. Gutman’s sources told was that no one was “allowed to get close” to the investigation after the bombing. As we will see below, this would become an important factor in confirming the identity of the real perpetrators of the bombing.

The crisis group regularly assembled at the office of the National Security inside the Qiyade Qutriye (Central Command building) and not at Turkmani’s office as Mr. Gutman’s article posits. Nearly 3 months before the July 18^th bombing, an insider placed Mercury Cyanide inside the lentil soup that was offered to members of the crisis group. The poison almost killed Interior Minister Shaar and Turkmani. Asef Shawkat declined the soup dish and was not harmed. Following the incident, a decision was made to heighten security by regularly changing the meeting location. The offices of Hisham Ihtiyar and the Defense Minister became alternative venues for the meeting.

Nearly 7 months after the bombing, European diplomats, the identity of whom I have been asked not to disclose, called a meeting between a Syrian official and an opposition figure who insisted that he had been behind the assassination of Assef Shawkat. The reason that the European diplomats called for the meeting was to pressure President Assad and his generals to resign. They believed that the success of the opposition figure in assassinating so many top government officials would intimidate Assad and convince him to leave Syria. The opposition figure asked the Syrian official with whom he was meeting to relay to President Assad and his men that the opposition could assassinate him as surely as it has assassinated Assef Shawkat and the other principals of the regime.

In order to establish his credibility, the opposition figure explained in great detail how and where the bomb had been planted in the National Security building in Rawda. His details matched the evidence that was being uncovered by the regime investigation of the bombing and convinced its officials that the opposition figure was not bluffing. He knew that the bombs were placed in a suspended or drop ceiling that had been installed in the National Security room years earlier. A total of 5 explosives were placed inside the drop ceiling. One of the five did not explode. Such details were impossible for anyone outside the inner circle in Damascus to verify. It was clear that the opposition figure knew what he was talking about. The Syrian official quickly concluded that the opposition member, a Damascene financier, had been involved in the bombing that killed the President’s brother-in-law. He went on to explain how Saudi Arabian officials had promised him a large sum of money that he later collected once the bombing had been successfully carried out.

This was further confirmed when he described how he was able to recruit an Armenian officer who worked at Major General Hisham Ikhtiyar’s office to smuggle the explosives inside the building and use the adjacent office from which he was able to insert the bombs into the ceiling and have them placed into Mr. Ikhtiyar’s office, directly above the table around which the group convened. Fifteen minutes before the explosion, the Armenian officer left the building, claiming that he had to empty the garbage. He never returned. He had placed a timer in his office that triggered the explosion. He has never been seen again. His reward was $2 million out of the total of $7 million that was paid to the group. In 2012, barely a year into the Syrian crisis, the idea that the Syrian state might be the next government to fall in the Arab Spring was gaining momentum. With the probability of state collapse on the rise, it made sense for an Armenian officer and others like him to accept a $2 million payment in the hope starting a new life overseas.

Recall that officials from a European capital witnessed the meeting in which the Syrian financier explained to Syrian officials how he had executed the assassination of Asef Shawkat. They can confirm this entire account. Contrary to the speculations of Mr. Gutman’s sources, Iran was not involved in the bombing. The regime was not turning on itself. Assad’s closest ally was not assassinating Assad family members in order to gain control over Syria.

Iraq and the Jihadi Nexus

Almost immediately after 9/11, Assad authorized his intelligence services to share many of their files on the activities of the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria and Europe.

Late in 2002, Syrian intelligence helped disrupt an attack by al-Qaida on the headquarters of the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet in Bahrain. Assad then also agreed to house suspected terrorists for the CIA in Syrian prisons.  This developing collaboration between Damascus and Washington based on having al-Qaida as a common enemy was soon to go cold after Assad begun to publicly oppose the Iraq war.  George W. Bush soon responded by linking Syria to   an ‘axis of evil’ containing Iraq, Iran and North Korea.

With the Iraq invasion gathering force, both the Syrian leadership and their Islamist enemies started to plan for the possibility that Damascus could be next after Iraq. The Syrian Islamist militants started to move to the north east of the country ahead of the American invasion of Iraq. They planned to fill the void should the Syrian state become the next target of the U.S. The Syrian state was becoming equally convinced of the American plans towards Syria. It was the head of one of the Intelligence agencies who soon saw an opportunity in infiltrating those Islamists moving to the border and then organizing them to move into Iraq rather than wait for the Americans to cross into Syria.  This plan meant that those who cross into Iraq to fight are known to Syrian intelligence when they cross back into Syria.

It was through this system that Syrian prisons saw a nearly 10 fold increase in jihadist ranks. These hardened fighters were to spread their ideology throughout an overcrowded and largely mismanaged Syrian prison system infecting the minds of many none jihadist Syrians in the process.

Flirting With the Islamists

Since fighting an earlier war with the Muslim Brotherhood in the early 1980’s, Syrian jails have been home to many Islamists. Syrian security agencies have traditionally trumped the Syrian justice system when it comes to the final say on the length of stay of those arrested. Often, when the justice system sentenced a person, the security services had the authority to ignore the end of the sentence by invoking “national security” concerns. This meant that many of those in prison were there beyond their legal stay. Scores of families never got to see their loved ones even after their original legal sentences were over.

As the events in Daraa unfolded, the President invited key figures from the town to see what can be done to calm the demonstrations. One such figure was cleric Sayasneh. One of the consistent demands of such meetings was the release of prisoners. It was no different when Douma joined the uprising. Foreign Embassies were also pushing the Syrian State to release what it called political prisoners.

Zahran Alloush, Leader of opposition militia, the Islamic Army. See this article about his ideology and beliefs.

People like Zahran Alloush were sentenced to seven years in prison when he was arrested with a group of 40 people on the charge of promoting Wahhabi ideology and gun possession.  They had not killed anyone or even fired a shot. Yet, they were sent to prisons like Sednaya and kept there beyond the end of their sentence on the whim of one of the security agencies.  It was in this context when the residents of Douma demanded the release of prisoners from their districts. The Syrian leadership was under intense pressure to calm the crisis. The people of Douma promised to do their job at calming their own streets if some of those prisoners were released.  Zahran and many others like him were released under this rationale. This is not too dissimilar to the way the American prisons in Iraq worked. Zarqawi, Baghdadi and Golani were all released from those prisons either when their terms ended or when the local populations demanded their release.

Just like in Syrian prisons, the prisoners in American jails were also indoctrinated with jihadist ideology. Syria erred by releasing Alloush and Abboud who would go on to form Jeish al Islam and Ahrar just like the U.S. erred when it released Baghdadi who would go on to form ISIS.

The Aleppo Central Prison

One of the longest standoffs between the Syrian Army and armed groups was at the Aleppo prison complex.  Nearly 3,000 inmates and 500 Syrian police and soldiers were trapped inside the prison for close to 3 years by armed militias that regularly shelled it. Like so many similar regime-opposition standoffs, intense negotiations were regularly attempted between the two sides. Mr. Fedaa Majzoub, an Australian citizen, was the point man in the negotiations between the two sides.

One of the key demands of al-Nusra and Ahrar al Sham, the two militias that led the seige of the Aleppo prison, was the release of 80 jihadist comrades that were amongst the 3000 inmates. Had Damascus been following a strategy of releasing jihadists from Al Qaeda and the like onto Syrian streets to change the image of the uprising as suggested by the sources of Mr. Gutman’s article, there was never a better opportunity to do so by Assad. Instead of yielding to the demands of the negotiator to release the 80 jihadists, the Syrian leadership chose instead to defend the complex for resulting in a standoff that lasted nearly three years.

Almost since the start of the Syrian crisis, the debate on the timing of the radicalization of the conflict still rages on.  Supporters of the Syrian opposition refer to articles like Mr. Gutman’s to portray a peaceful uprising that Damascus desperately tried to radicalize through all means possible. Such sinister attempts were thought to include colluding with terrorists and releasing from their jails as well as bombing its own capital to prove a point. Loyalists and leadership insiders, on the other hand, believe that the uprising was radicalized very early on after the initial events were quickly hijacked by Islamists who had sat waiting for decades for this moment to start.

Based on extensive personal conversations with ex White House officials, there seems to be a consensus that the defining moment of this debate was the incident that occurred at the town of Jisr al –Shugour in June of 2011. This is when 120 soldiers were killed between 3 and 6 June. Opposition activists say it was one part of the army firing on another for refusing to kill protesters. Thousands of miles away in Washington, American officials were already eavesdropping on Syrian opposition and others. On Friday June 3^rd, White House officials knew that those soldiers were shot and killed by the opposition as the latter used various communication devices to boast about the incident. One particular official became convinced that the response of Damascus will be swift and devastating. He therefore decided to be at his desk over the weekend to monitor the situation. The weekend passed with no such response by Damascus. By Monday, officials at the White House were pleasantly surprised. Their worst fears of a harsh crackdown were never materialized. Over the coming weeks and months those early thoughts turned to be wishful thinking as Syria soon descended into its black tunnel.

Related: Joshua Landis and Roy Gutman debate the notion that Assad helped create ISIS and planned false flag operations to bomb Damascus on “NPR’s To The Point”.

This article was published at Syria Comment.

By Rajarshi Chakraborty*

The 6th Heart of Asia (HoA) conference was held on December 3-4 this year in Amritsar, India and was attended by 14 countries and participants from 17 supporting nations to tackle the issue of terrorism in the region along with trade connectivity between South and Central Asian regions.

The meeting, which was co-chaired by India’s Foreign Secretary Subrahmanyam Jaishankar and Deputy Foreign Minister of Afghanistan Hikmat Khaleel Karzai, is likely to bring India-Afghanistan brotherhood closer as Prime Minister Narendra Modi termed Afghan security as a ‘collective responsibility’ of the participating countries in the conference.

The objective of the platform was to bring all the neighbouring countries of Afghanistan together to develop the security, political and economic scenario in the adjacent region.

In the post-2014 period, this is the first time that India is cooperating closely with Afghanistan in countering the security threats in South Asia. The main goal of this conference for India is to revive the trade connectivity between Afghanistan and India, boosting security scenario in Afghanistan and in its neighbourhood and building development cooperation. Significantly, the idea of Heart of Asia conference has not brought any appreciable contribution in counter-terrorism, counter-narcotics, and eradication of poverty and extremism in Afghanistan and its neighbouring region since its inception in 2011.

The 4th Heart of Asia – Istanbul Ministerial Process (2014) held in Beijing which was aimed at bringing peace in the war-torn country was participated by Pakistan, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, China, India, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan and the United Arab Emirates. But the recent Taliban attacks in Afghanistan are a clear sign of growing extremist movements in the country in the post-transition period. If this trend continues, it is likely to result in deterioration of the whole security scenario in Asia.

The growing need for energy in India led it to pursue another trade linkage with the Central Asian region after the commitment to the Chabahar sea port project in Iran early this year. Both India and Afghanistan are fed up with the cross-border terrorism problem with Pakistan. India also raised the issue of Pakistan-backed terrorism issue in international forum like in G20 summit in September in China.

For India, apart from efforts to rebuild Afghanistan, terrorism is the main issue in organising the conference this year. Terrorism is the biggest security issue in the country and the Indian Prime Minister sought collective action against the terrorists and their masters.

On the developmental front, Prime Minister Modi pointed to the importance of the youth in bringing the two countries together along with the other significant aspects of India-Afghanistan relations. In his address to the conference in Amritsar, he mentioned how India’s attempts in reconstructing Afghanistan would help both Afghanistan and the rest of the world through the Chabahar port in Iran.

As Pakistan is the main barrier between the two countries in having land connectivity, India is also planning to connect through air corridor. Modi also talked about the importance of democracy and pluralism for the peaceful future of Afghanistan.

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani told the conference that international investment for the longer run can have a great impact on Asia. He observed that the illegal drug economy is destroying his country. The activity is conducted by terrorist groups functioning from Pakistan — as is claimed by a Taliban leader. Pakistan needs to check the cross-border activities to stop such kinds of activities.

The Afghan President even said that the reconstruction aid provided by Pakistan would be better used for tackling terrorism in the region. Pakistan responded to this criticism by proposing a solution in a holistic way.

The Pakistani Prime Minister’s Foreign Affairs Advisor Sartaj Aziz said one should not blame just one country for providing sanctuaries to the terrorist groups. Clearly Pakistan is not ready to be blamed entirely for the terrorism issue. Nevertheless, India-Afghanistan friendship is hoped to take a new turn in the post-North Atlantic Treaty Organisation scenario.

The participation of Sartaj Aziz, who chaired the Heart of Asia Conference last year in Islamabad, was an important aspect of the meeting as this is the first delegation coming to India from Pakistan after the Pathankot attack, Nagota base and Uri attack earlier this year.

Interestingly, last year, Sartaz Aziz’s meeting with his Indian counterpart Ajit Doval was cancelled due to Pakistan’s talks with Hurriyat leaders. However, Indian government officials have said that there would be no bilateral meeting between India and Pakistan to discuss the terrorism issue.

The Pak diplomat strongly opposed the blame game at the conference. He said Pakistan tried its best during the peace talks with the Taliban through the Quadrilateral Coordination Group as they think there are no military solutions to the Afghan problem but political negotiation. He also added that the boycott of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) summit meeting in Islamabad is a serious setback for the regional cooperation of the South Asian countries.

The HoA conference fulfilled two main objectives of India i.e. isolating Pakistan at the diplomatic level and strengthening the bond with its extended neighbour Afghanistan. After boycotting the SAARC summit meeting in Pakistan, this is the second successful attempt this year by India to isolate Pakistan and corner it on the terrorism issue.

As India and Afghanistan are facing similar problem of cross-border terrorism backed by Pakistan, it is needless to say that such meetings for security improvement and development cooperation are bound to bring the two closer in future.

Nevertheless, one could not afford to ignore the major economic player in the region, China, which has been always supportive of Pakistan. But as China is also growing its economic presence — both in Pakistan and Afghanistan – it would likely seek security in its neighbourhood.

*Rajarshi Chakraborty is a research scholar at the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Comments and suggestions on this article can be sent to editor@spsindia.in

By Col. Robert E. Hamilton*

(FPRI) — Over the past several months, much has been made of President-elect Donald Trump’s attitude toward and connections with Russia and its leader Vladimir Putin. Some observers have charged that Trump is naïve about Putin’s real objectives and have implied that a Trump administration is likely to subvert core U.S. security interests in a misguided attempt to repair the U.S.-Russia relationship. Others claim to have detected a genuine affinity between Trump and Putin and have wondered whether the two leaders – both known as pragmatic dealmakers – might be able to set the bilateral relationship on a more sustainable footing by ending the hostility and mistrust that have characterized it over the last several years. Neither is likely to happen: a President Trump will not abandon core U.S. security interests on the altar of cooperation with Russia, nor will he be able to cut a series of deals with Putin that repair the bilateral relationship.

The influence of the U.S. and Russian presidents on the bilateral relationship is significantly more limited than is commonly assumed. Despite our penchant for personalizing the actions of the Russian government – for example, by charging that “Putin is in Ukraine” or wondering whether “Putin is likely to attack the Baltics” – Putin is neither in Ukraine nor likely to attack the Baltics. Elements of his government are certainly in Ukraine, but the process that got them there is far more complex than many Western observers assume. He is not the only figure that matters in that process although he does wield outsized power in comparison to the U.S. president.[1] Governmental decision-making, even in autocracies, is rarely a simple or straightforward process. Rather than reflecting a sober analysis of costs and benefits or the preferences of the top political leadership of a state, national security decision-making processes often produce policy choices that reflect the idiosyncrasies of a decision-making group or the “pulling and hauling” among government bureaucracies.[2] Additionally, foreign policy decision-makers, regardless of regime-type, must remain sensitive to public opinion in making their decisions.

Thus, even if Trump and Putin decide to cooperate on the basis of what they both agree are interests shared between the U.S. and Russia, each will have to convince the rest of his government to go along, and each will have to push policies based upon this new vision of cooperation through his government’s bureaucracy. This task will be far from simple since there are powerful elements within both governments that believe a rapprochement is not in the national interest. This is not to say a period of pragmatic cooperation is impossible. The Obama administration’s 2009 “reset” with Russia is an example. Pursuant to the reset, the U.S. and Russia were able to agree on a new strategic nuclear arms treaty, on enhanced sanctions against Iran, and on the use of Russian territory as a resupply route for U.S. forces in Afghanistan, among other things. But within three years, the reset had largely run its course, and U.S.-Russian relations began to deteriorate. This deterioration began with the 2011-2012 anti-government protests in Russia (which the Kremlin suspected were supported by the U.S.), accelerated in the aftermath of the fall of the Gadhafi regime in Libya (which Russia saw as another instance of U.S.-sponsored regime change), and culminated in the fall of the Yanukovych regime (which Russia also blamed in the U.S.) and the Russian intervention in Ukraine. The failure of the Obama reset to put the bilateral relationship on a sustainable footing illustrates the reason a Trump reset will also fail in the long run. Namely, the issues in the U.S.-Russia relationship are largely structural, which gives the relationship a cyclical nature that defies control by leaders in either capital.

As Kier Giles of the UK’s Conflict Studies Research Centre has noted, there are predictable stages to Russia’s relations with the West: euphoria, realism, disillusionment, crisis, and reset. A review of U.S.-Russian relations since the end of the Cold War bears this out and reveals three cycles of these stages. The first stage began in the early 1990s with the West proclaiming the courage and asserting the democratic credentials of Russian President Boris Yeltsin and with Russia proclaiming its desire to fully integrate into the Western political and economic system. Yeltsin’s violent 1993 showdown with the Russian parliament and the 1994 Russian military intervention in Chechnya tempered the early euphoria in the West; the difficult economic conditions along with the perceived lack of economic support for Russia from the West tempered the early euphoria in Russia. Realism had descended into disillusionment on both sides by the late 1990s, spurred by the impacts of the Asian financial crisis, which spread to Russia in 1998, forcing the government to devalue the ruble and default on both domestic and foreign debt. A crisis in relations erupted over NATO’s 1999 war in Kosovo and the resumption of Russia’s war in Chechnya that same year.

The first reset came in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks in the U.S. when Russia offered cooperation with the U.S. against terrorism and agreed to U.S. use of bases in the Central Asian States to support its campaign in Afghanistan. This reset was typified by the comment of then-President George W. Bush, who after meeting Putin, claimed to have looked him in the eye and gotten “a sense of his soul.” Realism set in within a few years when the U.S. and Russia realized they defined the threat from terrorism and the legitimacy of measures to combat it very differently. This realism gave way to disillusionment over NATO’s 2004 enlargement, which included the post-Soviet Baltic states and the “Color Revolutions” in Georgia in 2004 and Ukraine in 2004, which Moscow suspected were carried out with the assistance of the U.S. intelligence agencies. Russia’s disillusionment was expressed publicly and bluntly in Putin’s now notorious 2007 speech at the annual international security conference in Munich, Germany, where he accused the U.S. of threatening international security by developing ballistic missile defenses, undermining international institutions, destabilizing the Middle East, expanding NATO, and attempting to overthrow governments in the former Soviet bloc, among other things. The crisis in relations that ended this phase of the U.S.-Russia relationship was Russia’s August 2008 invasion of Georgia. The third phase in bilateral relations began with the 2009 Obama administration’s reset and ended, as noted previously, with the crisis in relations over the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The reason relations between the U.S. and Russia tend to be cyclical is that many of the factors that influence them are structural, or “built-in” to the patterns of interaction between the two countries. Like any two countries, Russia and the U.S. have some interests in common and some interests that clash. What makes the U.S.-Russia relationship unstable and prone to crisis is not the periodic clash of interests, but a lack of other factors that can act as “shock absorbers” when interests do clash. In some bilateral relationships – the U.S.-China relationship is a prime example here – a robust economic relationship can provide that shock absorber. Despite periodic complaints from both sides about elements of the relationship that displease them, the fact is that a major disruption in the U.S.-China economic relationship would be potentially catastrophic for both sides. China’s export-dependent economy would lose access to its largest and most lucrative market, and the U.S. would lose a major foreign purchaser of its sovereign debt. Thus, when the U.S. and China find themselves in a situation where their interests clash, there are powerful incentives for both sides to contain the disagreement, lest it impact the bilateral economic relationship. No such economic shock absorber exists in the U.S.-Russia relationship: U.S. exports to Russia in 2013 totaled just $11 billion, or less than 0.1% of U.S. GDP, and U.S. imports from Russia totaled just $27 billion, under 0.2% of U.S. GDP. Compare these numbers with China, which, despite consistent U.S. complaints about the bilateral trade imbalance, constitutes a $300 billion market for U.S. exports.[3]

Even where there are no economic interests to act as a shock absorber in a bilateral relationship, a shared ideology, worldview, or value set can play that role, but this is also lacking between the U.S. and Russia. In fact, the two countries have largely incompatible worldviews, and this fact tends to magnify the impact of any clash in interests rather than minimize it. Glenn P. Hastedt argues that American foreign policy is guided by, among other factors, moral pragmatism and legalism. Moral pragmatism holds that “state behavior can be judged by moral standards” and that “American morality provides the universal standard for making those judgments.”[4] Legalism rejects power politics as a means of settling disputes and assumes that people are rational beings who abhor war. Therefore, the legalist tradition inclines American policy-makers to believe that a central task of U.S. foreign policy should be to “create a global system of institutions and rules that will allow states to settle their disputes without recourse to war.”[5]

A review of the four enduring U.S. national interests articulated in the 2015 U.S. National Security Strategy bears out Hastedt’s claim. The first two of these interests are fairly standard, revolving around “the security of the U.S., its citizens, and U.S. allies and partners,” and “A strong, innovative, and growing U.S. economy in an open international economic system that promotes opportunity and prosperity.”[6] These interests, focusing on the physical security and economic prosperity of the state, are widely shared, including by Russia. But the other two of the four enduring U.S. interests bring the clash in worldview between the U.S. and Russia into sharp focus. These are “respect for universal values at home and around the world,” and “an international order advanced by U.S. leadership that promotes peace, security, and opportunity through stronger cooperation to meet global challenges.”[7] This focus on promotion of values and a (U.S.-led) rules-based international order is so strong in the U.S. foreign policy tradition that even presidents largely seen as realists and pragmatists, such as Nixon and Obama, have been unable to set these factors aside and focus exclusively on core U.S. security and economic interests.

Russia’s view of the world, unsurprisingly, is different. Conditioned by its history to view the world as a threatening place and to believe that a country as vast and diverse as Russia can only be ruled by a strong center, Russian political thought places little value on post-modern ideas about individual rights and is supremely skeptical of the idea that a global set of institutions and rules can prevent war. Instead, it holds a strong state to be the supreme guarantor of domestic tranquility and a stable military balance among Great Powers to be the best guarantor of international security. Furthermore, many Russians believe the U.S. is not truly committed to the promotion of what it deems universal values or the preservation of a set of global institutions as a means of enabling international cooperation. Instead, they tend to believe that the U.S. cynically uses concepts such as values and institutions to advance its own security interests and damage those of Russia. This incompatibility in worldviews often leads to misperception and miscommunication in Russian-American relations.

A review of some of the main issues in the bilateral relationship since the end of the Cold War bears this assertion out. In Kosovo, for example, where the U.S. saw ongoing ethnic cleansing as justification for military intervention under the emerging doctrine of “responsibility to protect,” Russia saw a military operation designed to destabilize and dismember Serbia, Russia’s main ally in the Balkans. However implausible it may seem to those in the West, some Russians also saw the Kosovo operation as a dress rehearsal for a NATO-led intervention in Chechnya. NATO’s enlargement also presents a case of fundamentally different interpretations of the same issue. Where the U.S. and the West see the enlargement of NATO as a way to ensure security, stability, and prosperity in as much of the Euro-Atlantic zone as possible, Russia sees encroachment on its borders by a potentially hostile military alliance. Enlargement of the European Union, while not seen as a military threat by Moscow, is however seen as an attempt to isolate and weaken Russia.

A final example of how Russia and the West can observe the same phenomenon and come to fundamentally different conclusions concerns the so-called “color revolutions” in the former Soviet Union. Many in the West saw these popular uprisings, which peacefully ousted authoritarian governments in Georgia in 2003 (the “Rose Revolution”), in Ukraine in 2004 (the “Orange Revolution”), in Kyrgyzstan in 2005 (the “Tulip Revolution”), and again in Ukraine in 2014 (the “Maidan Revolution”) as evidence that the peoples of the former Soviet Union wanted no more than peoples everywhere: to be governed justly and democratically. The Kremlin, however, claimed to see the hand of Western intelligence services in these political transformations and suspected the West was intentionally destabilizing pro-Russian governments in Russia’s neighbors with the ultimate goal of bringing down the Russian government itself.

Disagreement over the last two of these issues – the enlargement of Western institutions and popular revolution in Russia’s neighbors – came together to cause war in Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014. In Georgia, the war started in August 2008, four months after NATO stated that Georgia and Ukraine would become members of the Alliance and after a long period of hostility between Georgia’s pro-Western government headed by Mikhail Saakashvili and the Putin regime. In Ukraine, the catalyst for war was the overthrow of the pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovych, which had used violence against protesters angered by Yanukovych’s rejection of an association agreement with the European Union. In both cases, fundamentally incompatible worldviews were the underlying cause of the conflict. The U.S. and the West espouse a liberal internationalist worldview that sees international institutions as focal points for cooperation, individual rights as sacrosanct, and democratic governments as inherently more legitimate and predictable – and therefore less threatening – than autocratic ones. Russia adheres to a more realist worldview, where military power is the currency that buys security, where stability is only maintained by a military balance among great powers, and where human rights and international law are seen as either irrelevant or as tools to be used – often cynically and instrumentally – by great powers to advance their security interests.

A President Trump will be unable to change the fundamental characteristics of this relationship because the powers of the American president are much more constrained than those of most corporate CEOs. Presidential historian Richard Neustadt has observed that U.S. presidential powers really amount to the “power to persuade.” Neustadt quotes Truman, who when contemplating an Eisenhower presidency in 1952, remarked, “He’ll sit here and he’ll say ‘Do this! Do That!’ And nothing will happen. Poor Ike – it won’t be a bit like the Army. He’ll find it very frustrating.”[8] The reason for this is that even inside his own administration, the president has to persuade a large and sometimes recalcitrant community of national security and foreign policy professionals to implement his vision.

And even if a president is able to get the executive branch moving in one direction with dispatch and purpose, he still has to deal with the Congress, which has more powers in foreign policy-making than is often assumed. As Edward Corwin has correctly observed, the U.S. Constitution is “an invitation to struggle for the privilege of directing American foreign policy.”[9] The Congress a Trump administration will have to deal with – despite the Republican majorities in both houses – will be far from compliant on national security issues, especially where Russia is concerned. First, the Democratic minorities in the Senate and the House, already skeptical of Russia due to its autocratic form of government and documented human rights abuses, will be even more unwilling to acquiesce to major deals with Russia due to its interference in the U.S. presidential election, which some Democrats believe was intended to prevent the election of Hillary Clinton. On the Republican side, there is a group of national security hawks, led by John McCain in the Senate, who are strongly opposed to any cooperation with Russia, seeing it as the biggest single threat to America’s interests. And although the president is less constrained in foreign policy than he is in domestic policy, Congress still has the power to deny him the achievement of his objectives in many areas. For example, Congress sets the levels of military aid for foreign partners, so even if a Trump administration were to request no aid for Ukraine and Georgia in an attempt to signal to Russia that the U.S. was not willing to contest their geopolitical affiliation, Congress could – and very likely would – reinstate robust military aid packages for both.

In short, a President Trump will neither be duped into subverting core American security interests on the altar of cooperation with Russia, nor will he be able to build a sustainable partnership with Russia on the basis of deal-making with Putin. Despite his inexperience in foreign policy, the natural aversion of the executive branch national security and foreign policy community to radically change, along with a skeptical Congress, will prevent the former; the fundamentally incompatible worldviews of the U.S. and Russia will prevent the latter. Sustainable partnership between the U.S. and Russia would require a fundamental change in the worldviews of one or both. Either the U.S. would need to begin seeing the world in realist, power politics terms, something anathema to most Americans, or Russia would need to abandon its great power politics view of the world and become a post-modern state. No matter how much Putin and Trump may want to make cooperation work, neither of these is likely to happen over the short term. There may indeed be a Trump reset – in the same way there was an Obama reset and a Bush reset – that results in deals over issues not involving critical U.S. or Russian national security interests. But over time, the structural factors impeding long-term cooperation will reassert themselves, and the relationship will proceed through its familiar stages of realism, disillusionment, and crisis. Trump’s main task – like those of Clinton, Bush, and Obama before him – will be to ensure that the as the relationship erodes, miscalculation and misperception do not allow it to escalate to open war. His predecessors managed to succeed in this; we should all wish President Trump similar success.

The views expressed are the author’s own and do not reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. Army War College, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.

About the author:
*U.S. Army Colonel Robert E. Hamilton is an Eurasian area specialist. His current assignment is as a professor in the Department of National Security and Strategy at the U.S. Army War College.

Source:
This article was published at FPRI.

Notes:
[1] Although Putin’s influence on Russian foreign policy is more pronounced than is that of the American president, the point here is that he is not unconstrained. Putin – and any Russian president – has to consider both the preferences of the Russian people and those of the Russian elite when making foreign policy decisions. In his 2016 book Russia’s Foreign Policy: Change and Continuity in National Identity, Andrei Tsygankov locates Putin’s foreign policy in Russia’s Statist tradition, arguing that it has deep historical roots that Putin appeals to but did not create. Similarly, in their 2015 paper “Russian Foreign Policy in Historical and Current Context: A Reassessment,” Olga Oliker and her co-authors note that while Putin’s leadership style and viewpoints are important factors in Russian foreign policy decision-making, the process also reflects deeply-held, underlying Russian attitudes about Russia’s place in the world and that these attitudes will drive Russian foreign policy decision-making after Putin is gone. Oliker and her co-authors also note that the Russian government is “deeply fearful of elite and public opposition to its actions,” which also influences its foreign policy decisions.

[2] David Patrick Houghton, The Decision Point: Six Cases in U.S. Foreign Policy Decision-Making (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 10.

[3] “U.S.-Russian trade relationship? There really isn’t one”, Fortune, March 18, 2014, internet resource at: http://fortune.com/2014/03/18/u-s-russian-trade-relationship-there-really-isnt-one/, accessed November 16, 2016.

[4] Glenn P. Hastedt, American Foreign Policy: Past, Present and Future, 10th Edition, (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015), p. 65.

[5] Hastedt, American Foreign Policy, p. 67.

[6] Barack Obama, National Security Strategy (Washington, D.C.: White House, February 2015), p. 2.

[7] Obama, National Security Strategy, p. 2.

[8] Richard E. Neustadt, Presidential Power; The Politics of Leadership (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1960), p. 9.

[9] Edward S. Corwin, The President: Office and Powers 1787-1948 (New York: New York University Press, 1948)

By James M. Roberts and Huma Sattar*

South Asia is one of the fastest-growing regions in the world, with average gross domestic product (GDP) growth projected to be 7 percent in 2015 and well above 8 percent by 2020. India is the bright spot in the region, with 8 percent GDP growth projected by 2018, spurred by 12 percent growth in investment as the country continues to shift from consumption to investment-led economic development.[1] The recent steep decline in global oil prices in this heavily oil-import-dependent region has been the catalyst for this growth and is helping to bring price stability to regional economies with lower inflation, decreased fiscal deficits, reduced electricity-generation costs, and, consequently, reduced energy-subsidy burdens for regional governments. That means that more money is available for investment in infrastructure and other public goods.

Home to 1.7 billion people, South Asia has the world’s largest working-age population. Although the majority of its people work in the agriculture sector, the share of the labor force in services has increased significantly in the past few years. Overall, the region’s flourishing services sector has been the main driver of economic growth (accounting for about half of the growth of GDP), whereas the contribution to GDP growth from the industrial sector has been nominal.

Average annual inflation for the region (as reported by the Asian Development Bank) remained “subdued as economic slack and low global food and commodity prices contain[ed] price pressures” such that the rate dropped from 6.2 percent in 2014 to 5 percent in 2015.[2] Remittances sent home by South Asian citizens working abroad are important contributors to regional economies, accounting in 2013 for nearly 30 percent of Nepal’s GDP, more than 9 percent each for Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, and 6 percent for Pakistan.[3]

Although the region’s GDP projections are rosy for the next five years, this promising scenario may not be sustained over the longer term if South Asian countries fail to exploit the unique opportunities that low oil prices and relatively free global markets present to them today. Countries in South Asia have a window open to them now that affords a chance to address the fundamental structural problems and regulatory inefficiencies that have obstructed optimal economic growth in the region in the past and simultaneously have discouraged regional economic integration.

The urgency of the need for new policies to stimulate economic growth is all the more poignant because the region as a whole remains plagued by extreme poverty. A quarter of South Asia’s population lives below the poverty line (defined as less than $1.25 a day)—the largest share of poor people among all regions of the developing world. In fact, 40 percent of all people trapped in extreme poverty worldwide live in South Asia. More than 40 percent of Bangladesh’s population alone is extremely poor, compared with nearly a quarter of people in Nepal and India.[4]

Corruption is another huge concern in South Asia—especially in public institutions—which creates an unfavorable business environment for foreign investors and has been the primary reason why the growing South Asian economies have remained mired in poverty.[5] Surveys show that 80 percent of people in the region believe the governments in their countries do not take effective action to fight corruption.[6]

Economic regional integration has been a casualty of political conflict, with the long-running Pakistan–India dispute over the territory of Kashmir since 1947 and disturbances at the Line of Control (LoC) largely preventing regional integration. Both countries have focused on strengthening bilateral economic relations with other regional partners, pushing their relations with each other to the back burner.

The geopolitical importance of South Asia, shared borders with Central Asia and the oil-rich Gulf, its natural resources, and its human capital make the region’s potential for growth enormous. The countries must open their markets and lower barriers to trade and investment, especially to regional partners, while improving economic freedom with a deliberate focus on strengthening rule of law, eradicating endemic corruption, and reducing bureaucratic regulations that harm businesses and investors.

This Special Report examines in detail the levels of economic freedom in five of the eight South Asian countries—India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka—that together account for a majority of the region’s GDP, discussing those areas that in the past have hindered the sustainable development of economic freedom and greater, more widely shared prosperity. In so doing, the report identifies opportunities for regional integration within South Asia that would provide additional impetus for these countries to achieve the economic growth now being enjoyed by other world regions that have made, and continue to make, steadier progress toward eradicating poverty and improving the livelihoods of their peoples.

I. South Asia: Very Gradual Improvement of Economic Freedom

Economic freedom scores for South Asian countries, as measured in the 2016 edition of the Index of Economic Freedom, published by the Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal, have improved and are moving (albeit slowly) toward the “moderately free” status accorded emerging-market economies such as Kazakhstan, Thailand, and the Philippines.

India and Bangladesh have achieved the most progress, rising from “repressed” (the lowest Index category) in 1995 to “mostly unfree” in the 2016 edition, with scores of 56.2 out of 100 and 53.3, respectively.

Pakistan, too, with a score of 55.9 has demonstrated improvement and, while remaining “mostly unfree,” appears to have achieved some positive momentum.

Nepal continues to lag behind, with a “mostly unfree” score of 50.9 that is just slightly above the “repressed” threshold. Sri Lanka, while remaining the freest economy in the region with a score of 59.9, has actually lost ground overall and is now less free than it was when the Index was first published in 1995.

All countries in South Asia remain below the world average of 60.7, and all but Sri Lanka are below the average for the Asia–Pacific of 59.0.[7]

Today’s Scores on Economic Freedom Will Determine Tomorrow’s Growth. In the past few years, South Asia has emerged as a growing economic region with great potential for further growth. In its South Asia Economic Focus report,[8] the World Bank called the region the fastest growing in the world during the last quarter of 2014, and credited India’s business-oriented reforms and improved investment environment, along with the sharp drop in world oil prices, with being the primary cause of that growth. The report projects steady growth of from 7 percent in 2015 to 7.6 percent by 2017 and predicts a steady increase in investment. An International Monetary Fund report projects similar growth patterns for Bangladesh, India, and Sri Lanka, with Nepal and Pakistan lagging behind at 4.4 percent and 5 percent growth, respectively, by 2020. GDP per capita, on the other hand, does not show massive improvements, with the region averaging growth of GDP per capita at between 4 percent and 5 percent since 2011.

In fact, while modest improvements in trade freedom, business freedom, fiscal freedom, monetary freedom, and government spending for the region have improved prospects for growth, other indicators, such as poor rule of law and corruption, lack of investment opportunities, and insufficient business freedom continue to limit economic growth and human capital development in South Asia as compared to other emerging and developing countries in the greater Asia region. As it stands, regional scores on the United Nations’ Human Development Index place South Asia just slightly ahead of Sub-Saharan Africa (0.502) with a value of 0.588 versus the world average of 0.702.[9]

Overall, South Asian countries face similar challenges—and hence have similar solutions. The World Economic Forum, in its 2015 Global Competitiveness Index, blames poor economic mobility in particular, with a deficit of infrastructure development and poor regional connectivity, excessive red tape, and pervasive and deep-rooted corruption as some of the common reasons for the dismal competitiveness of this group of countries.[10] Whereas India and Sri Lanka achieved moderately competitive rankings of 71 and 73, respectively, out of 144 countries, India’s score has been on a downward spiral. Nepal (102) and Bangladesh (109) have improved their rankings but remain among the least competitive countries both in the world and among emerging Asian countries. Pakistan, with the lowest ranking of 129, improved somewhat compared with its previous rank of 133.

A few South Asian countries in particular are laggards. Nepal’s earthquakes in 2015, for instance, inflicted widespread devastation not just in terms of loss of life and property damage, but also to its already feeble economic infrastructure. The earthquakes killed over 10,000 people and damaged many national heritage tourism sites. By some estimates, total economic losses could exceed the country’s annual GDP of $19 billion. These losses have cast a harsh spotlight on the structural impediments that have plagued the country for centuries.[11] Absence of rule of law, corruption, flimsy democratic processes, low freedom for investments, and poor governance have combined to make it more difficult for the country to revive in the aftermath of a series of natural catastrophes.

II. Persistent Structural Deficiencies Thwart Sustainable Growth

Endemic Corruption Has Long Plagued South Asia. As far back as 2002, a study conducted by Transparency International (and repeated for subsequent reports) found South Asia to be fraught with heavy corruption in public institutions, which, combined with a lack of effective monitoring systems, undermined economic growth, reduced efficiency, acted as a disincentive to potential investors, and, above all, diverted critical government resources that could have alleviated poverty.[12] According to the survey data published with that study, access to public services in South Asia—especially Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka—was denied to the lowest income strata due to corruption. Moreover, extensive levels of bribery and extortion translated into high levels of income erosion in those countries. Meanwhile, a severe lack of accountability and systematic abuse of political power by privileged elites ensured that the corruption only worsened.

The situation has not changed much since then: South Asia remains the world’s most corrupt region, and that has proven to be a barrier to development and poverty eradication. A survey conducted by Transparency International in 2010 and 2011 reported that nearly two-thirds of people across the region believed corruption in public institutions had increased since 2008. In India, about three-quarters of the population believed that corruption increased between 2007 and 2010.[13] Transparency International’s 2014 Corruption Perceptions Index[14] again ranks the South Asia region very low and reports little improvement. India and Sri Lanka are ranked as the least corrupt among their peers, tied for 85th place out of 174 countries (with a score of 38 of 100); Nepal and Pakistan stand at 126 (with a score of 29 of 100); and Bangladesh ranks dangerously low at 145 (with a score of 25 of 100), where a score of less than 50 indicates a serious corruption problem.[15]

A 2014 report by Transparency International on corruption in South Asia cites lack of accountability as the primary reason why corruption continues unabated. The report argues that “South Asia’s corruption epidemic is caused by opaque public institutions, lack of protection for anti-corruption actors and widespread government interference in the work of anti-corruption watchdogs.”[16] Although right-to-information laws exist in some form or another in all of South Asia, the region’s residents either are not aware of these laws or are sufficiently harassed by public agencies to refrain from pursuing information. In some cases, anti-corruption agencies—particularly in India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka—have been accused by transparency advocates of merely being used by those in power for old-fashioned score-settling or even to persecute the political opposition.

As the report notes:

The effectiveness of these supposedly independent accountability bodies is seriously undermined by systematic political interference and manipulation, either through deliberate restrictions on their powers to tackle corruption or through tight government control over appointments, transferals and removal from office of senior staff.[17]

In Bangladesh, ranked most corrupt in the region, the burden of petty corruption was estimated by Transparency International to amount to one-tenth of the national budget. Judicial watchdog organizations in the region are especially prone to a lack of independence and credibility.[18] The World Economic Forum, in its 2015 Global Competitiveness Index, cites rule of law, corruption, red tape, patronage, weak public institutions, and lack of property-rights protection as the primary reasons for the region’s poor competitiveness in the world.[19] Other surveys support this conclusion: 57 percent of business firms in Pakistan cited corruption as a major deterrent to trade and investment. Overall, as Transparency International’s “Global Corruption Barometer 2013” reported, two-thirds of the residents in South Asia are convinced that the level of corruption in their countries has been increasing rather than decreasing.[20]

Three Critical Areas in Need of Regulatory Reform. The 2015 Global Competitiveness Index identifies lack of structural reforms as the primary reason why most emerging economies, despite high economic growth, have neither increased their competitiveness nor boosted their productivity.[21]

The index points to three critical areas where reforms are needed:

1. Strategic economic sectors (in particular energy sources and power generation, textiles, pharmaceuticals, and small and medium-size enterprises), which must be opened up to competition by removing bottlenecks and barriers to entry;
2. Labor markets, which should be made more flexible and hence more efficient in making use of all available human capital; and
3. Public administration, which must be overhauled in order to implement structural reforms effectively.

These structural reforms would improve not only competitiveness, but also the resilience of South Asian economies to withstand the impact of “future external shocks, allow a more efficient allocation of resources, and facilitate the transition toward more productive activities.”[22]

Overall, then, South Asian countries rank low on competitiveness due to corruption, excessive red tape, and an absence of long-overdue regulatory reforms that are crucial for businesses to flourish. The World Bank’s “Doing Business” survey analyzes how vital an efficient regulatory regime is to the conduct of business and identifies necessary improvements[23] in 10 regulatory areas, such as the ease of starting a business, obtaining electrical service, business taxation, and property registration.

For most of these indicators, South Asia ranks well below global averages and far behind the world’s most economically efficient countries. On a scale of 0 to 100, South Asia’s distance to frontier (DTF)[24] scores show the same dismal pattern, well short in such categories as access to credit, contract enforcement, ease of cross-border trading, and registering property.

There have been some improvements: In 2015, Bangladesh made trading across borders easier by installing a fully automated customs data-management system; India made starting a business easier by reducing registration fees (then, however, offsetting that advance by introducing a requirement to file a declaration before the start of business operations); Pakistan made trading across borders better by introducing a unitary, Web-based customs application for submission and processing of trading documents. And in 2014, Sri Lanka introduced electronic payments systems for port services that enabled easier trade.[25] Unfortunately, these small, one-off improvements have all too often been canceled out by simultaneous imposition of other measures that make doing business more difficult.

Trading Across Borders Is Difficult. Cross-border trade volumes in South Asia are significantly low compared to East Asia and the Pacific and other regions—largely due to regulatory inefficiencies. According to the “Doing Business” survey, it is costlier and more time consuming for businesses in South Asia to export and import than it is in most other regions. As a point of context, it takes an average of nearly 35 days to export or import from or to South Asia. By comparison, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) average is 10 days; the average for East Asia is 21 to 22 days; and for the Middle East/North Africa (MENA) region, the average is 24 days.[26]

Unsurprisingly, transaction costs associated with export/import in South Asia are significantly higher: The average cost to ship one container of exports from South Asia is $1,922 compared to $864 in East Asia, $1,166 in MENA, and $1,080 in the OECD High Income group. By far, landlocked Nepal is costliest and most time-consuming for trade, whereas the island nation of Sri Lanka is one of the region’s better performers.

The Burden of Bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is a chronic nuisance in South Asia that makes routine commercial processes more difficult, costlier, and slower than elsewhere in the world. On average, it takes 16 days in South Asia to start a business, requiring about eight distinct bureaucratic procedures (much longer and more complicated than in OECD countries or even other emerging-market regions).

This is not to say that South Asian countries have not taken some steps to make starting a business slightly easier; India reduced its registration fees, while Bangladesh and Sri Lanka introduced automation to registration processes.[27] Other issues related to starting a business, such as acquiring electricity service, registering property, or obtaining construction permits, still require a significant number of days and procedures. To illustrate, it takes an average of 145 days for a new electricity hookup in South Asia as compared to 77 days in the East Asia Pacific and 76 days in OECD countries. In general, inefficient systems and bureaucratic procedures make it very difficult for new businesses to set up shop.

III. Higher Connectivity and Lower Trade Barriers Can Spur Growth

Gains from More Trade Freedom. The paradoxical nature of South Asia is that, while it remains the least integrated region in the world, it is also a region with continuously opening markets. Time-series data using trade freedom scores from the Index of Economic Freedom shows marked improvements for all the South Asian economies, all of them moving from “mostly unfree” into the higher “moderately free” category in recent years.

Imports as percentage of GDP show that South Asian countries are keeping up with East Asia and the Pacific and the high-income OECD groups in terms of opening their markets to international trade. South Asia’s global trade (exports plus imports) has increased considerably: from $118 billion in 2001 to $968 billion in 2014, whereas within the region, trade figures were stuck at a paltry $22 billion in 2014. India and Sri Lanka have improved their economies by moving from agriculture toward industrial bases: 31 percent and 32 percent of GDP, respectively. Both countries are now importing intermediate industrial inputs instead of finished manufactured products, and in the process, they are building local capacities and gaining economies of scale.

Despite their proximity advantages, however, South Asian economies tend to focus more of their trade on distant economic regions, such as the European Union, rather than on their neighbors. Intra-regional trade remains less than 5 percent. This is dismal compared to other growing regions in the world, such as the members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), for which 25 percent of the trade is intra-regional. “[The] growth in interregional and intraregional trade among emerging markets makes up one-fifth of the world’s total trade and is expected to surpass North–South trade flows by 2030,” reports the World Export Development Forum.[28]

The regional dynamic today is skewed in such a way that the larger economies, India and Pakistan, are more likely to import from more distant countries than from the region. For smaller economies, such as Nepal, more than 60 percent of imports come from the region, while the region contributes to around 20 percent of Bangladesh’s and Sri Lanka’s total imports. India is a major exporter to all of these countries.

On the other hand, India and Pakistan import very little from the region, with India importing considerably more from Sri Lanka and Bangladesh than neighboring Pakistan, the second-largest economy in the region. Bilateral trade between the two countries is scant, but not for the lack of trade potential. Most credible estimates of potential annual trade between Pakistan and India range from about $10 billion to $20 billion,[29] whereas the 2014 figure for their bilateral trade was just $2.4 billion.

Lack of Regional Trade and Investment Integration Inhibits Inclusive Growth. Under the South Asian Free Trade Agreement (SAFTA), signed in 2006, each member country in the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) area was offered tariff concessions under the SAARC’s Tariff Liberalization Programme. Least-developed countries (LDCs), such as Bangladesh and Nepal, enjoyed more concessions than the Non-LDCs. The sensitive-imports lists[30] under the agreement for non-LDCs were also smaller in size. For example, India’s sensitive list for Bangladesh had only 25 items, whereas its sensitive list for Pakistan and Sri Lanka included many more items: 614 in all. Pakistan, on the other hand has 936 items on its sensitive list for India (in addition to 1,209 product lines on its negative list that are not importable from India) for a total of more than 2,000 protected categories of imports).

Despite repeated promises by the government in Islamabad that Pakistan would offer India most-favored-nation (MFN) status—now known as non-discriminatory market access (NDMA)—those promises have never materialized, and as a result, SAFTA tariff concessions have never completely kicked in, while a major list of items (mainly automotive and textile) under the negative list enjoy absolute protection by the government of Pakistan from Indian imports. Many of the Indian items on the negative list, while not formally importable, nevertheless still find their way into the Pakistani market either through informal channels, including smuggling, or by transiting through third countries.[31]

Non-tariff barriers (NTBs) are also a major deterrent to formal trade. These NTBs include difficult and lengthy customs procedures, infrastructure disabilities, and technical barriers to trade, such as standards certification, labelling and marketing regulations, packaging specifications, health and safety controls, tricky rules of origins, difficult and tedious banking and payment procedures, a restrictive visa regime that inhibits free movement of people, and many other bureaucratic obstacles.[32] Transport and transit are also major obstacles: Overland road routes are virtually nonexistent, and restrictions exist on the modes of transport permitted to export certain goods. For example, exports of Pakistani cement to India are allowed only by train and must be accompanied by cumbersome paperwork. Any trade by sea is bogged down with restrictions and charges—ships must first dock at a third-country port (such as Dubai or Singapore) before arriving in India.[33] Despite being signatories of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade’s Article V (Freedom of Transit), the two countries do not extend transit facility to each other.[34]

A Sustainability Development Policy Institute estimate puts the annual amount of informal trade flowing from India to Pakistan at nearly $1.8 billion and contends that as many as 11 indirect routes are used to conduct this trade. “Contrary to the existing perception, smuggling, and not quasi-legal trade through third country ports constitutes a majority of the trade.… The greatest volume of trade is carried out via Afghanistan. Other major routes are situated over land across the Sindh border and via sea from Mumbai to Karachi via Dubai.”[35] This black market trade adversely affects local manufacturing in Pakistan by providing an undue advantage to these duty-free products over local products. It also translates into lost tax revenue to the government.

A State Bank of Pakistan report echoes this finding:

The three important factors [in informal trade between Pakistan and India]: [1] quick realization of payments; [2] zero documentation; and [3] no procedural delays are contributing to lower transaction costs in the informal channel. The principal implication of this informal trade is that unless the environment of the formal trade improves, informal trade will not only continue to coexist with formal trade, but it will also impact its potential magnitude in the coming years.[36]

Going forward, then, it is obviously in the interest of Pakistan to take immediate and firm steps to increase the ratio of formal trade with India. The first step would be for Pakistan to extend MFN status to India, matching the granting of MFN status that India extended to Pakistan in 1996. Pakistan’s refusal to reciprocate is rooted in several long-standing and difficult political problems, with the disputed region of Kashmir being the most prominent.

To date, neither side has been willing to budge on the Kashmir question. As a result, progress on any comprehensive dialogue on economic cooperation has been frozen. As a 2015 Heritage Foundation Special Report on economic freedom in Pakistan noted:

For years, the two countries have insisted on mixing trade negotiations with non-trade issues, with economic cooperation halting when political tensions intensified. As a consequence, trade talks have remained intermittent. Evidently, where trade might once have paved the way to better ties with India, it now may have become a negotiating chip for resolving other, larger issues between the two countries.[37]

This Pakistani intransigence has come at a cost. A recent Pew Research Center survey reveals that Pakistan is the least “favored” (or popular) nation in India, with 64 percent of respondents not hoping for better ties with the country and nearly 75 percent considering Pakistan a potent threat to India.[38] As far as opinion polls go, this survey not only reflects the mindsets of the majority of the Indian people, but also explains various decisions of the Indian government.

The upshot of the continuous and negative political rhetoric and actions from Pakistan, which has obstructed its trade normalization with India, has been to spur more bilateral linkages with countries in the region at the expense of more regional cooperation.

For example, India has free trade agreements (FTAs) with Sri Lanka and Nepal, has signed several agreements with Bangladesh, and is in trade negotiations with other smaller countries in South Asia. Nearly all products exported to India by Bangladesh, for example, enjoy duty-free market access in India.[39] Under the India–Sri Lanka FTA, India grants tariff concessions to Sri Lanka for product categories that are protected by the SAFTA sensitive list—undermining that regional agreement.

Pakistan, too, has an FTA with Sri Lanka and is in talks about one with Nepal. Meanwhile, SAFTA regional cooperation is pushed further to the back burner.

Although intra-regional trade[40] in South Asia moved from 2.9 percent[41] in 1990 to the 4 percent–5 percent range by about 2005, it has not changed much in the past decade, despite efforts in trade liberalization policy and the SAFTA regional trade agreement. Zahid Hussain, a World Bank economist, argues that regional convergence is absent in South Asia—where the region’s poorest country (Bangladesh) is growing faster than better-off countries such as Bhutan—because of the lack of regional integration. “Freeing the South Asian region from poverty and boosting shared prosperity will require addressing the barriers to intra-regional trade in goods, services, labor, and capital,”[42] Hussain contends.

Despite the tariff cuts that it includes, overall, SAFTA was poorly negotiated by its member states. All too often, they dodged difficult political issues by granting tariff concessions only on products that had little, if any, trade potential. Meanwhile, all countries in the region continue to restrict trade in many “infant industry” sectors they deem to be too weak to fend off heavy regional competition. In India, this protectionism is manifested through para-tariffs on its SAFTA list of sensitive items.[43] In addition, there are a variety of NTBs in the SAFTA countries. Many NTBs have been erected by India, and unlike India’s other agreements—such as the ASEAN–India Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement or the Asia–Pacific Trade (APEC) agreement, where India undertook to reduce NTBs—no such anti-NTB provision is included in SAFTA.[44] All of these constraints make trade less free.

To rectify this situation, the countries in South Asia must finish ratifying SAFTA—starting with Pakistan and India. SAFTA should be revised to include provisions requiring countries to eliminate NTBs. In addition, SAFTA should be amended to include a transit agreement that would improve connectivity between the South Asian countries and offer opportunities for greater infrastructure development.[45]

Any legitimate non-tariff measures that are related to health, security, or safety should be streamlined, reported, and addressed in a cohesive manner, relying on best practices already established in other world regions. For instance, under a grand Tripartite Free Trade Area between the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), the East African Community (EAC), and the Southern African Development Community (SADC), countries in that region have set up a mechanism to report, monitor, and remove NTBs that restrict trade. Under this agreement, private businesses are empowered to report an NTB to the regional COMESA secretariat while conducting business and tracking the progress of its resolution.[46]

Indian–Pakistan Cooperation Is Crucial for the Region. For the two largest countries in the region, the question of regional cooperation centers solely on whether the relationship between Pakistan and India can be salvaged. A 2013 Wilson Center study argues that better economic ties with India could fuel growth in Pakistan and that gains from trade should “outweigh geostrategic concerns.”[47] Pakistan should “expand the national security paradigm to include economic stability and trade,” the report recommends. The study also emphasizes the importance of reducing cross-border restrictions—such as the measures India has taken to allow movement of goods from Pakistan via Nepal, Bangladesh, and Bhutan, and what Pakistan has done to permit access of Indian goods via Afghanistan. In addition, the two countries must improve the efficiencies of trade routes by opening roads and railways to trade, improving infrastructure at border crossings, removing restrictions on transportation vehicles, and setting up better warehousing facilities.[48]

Pakistan stands to benefit not just from improved trade agreements and practices, but also from more liberalized investment regimes for foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows from India that would enable Pakistan to tap into the pool of India’s skilled workers and technology and thereby improve the global competitiveness of Pakistani industries.[49] In the pharmaceutical sector, for instance, Pakistan is burdened by high production costs that it could lower if Indian drug companies were permitted to invest in that sector and import their technical expertise. One encouraging recent development occurred when Biacon, a major player in the Indian pharmaceutical sector, granted an exclusive license to Pakistan’s Ferozpur Laboratory to market its drugs in Pakistan.[50] This could serve as a best-practice example for more investing collaborations.

Other studies project the gains that could result if these two geostrategically important countries could cooperate on more joint Indo–Pak projects for the production, trade, and delivery of energy. An Atlantic Council study claims that a joint hydroelectric power facility in the Indus Basin has the potential to generate 8,000 megawatts of power for the two sides. For energy-starved Pakistan, this is an opportunity worth considering. That study also suggests developing an oil and gas grid that would connect the oil-exporting Gulf nations to markets in India and Pakistan.[51] One such proposed project—the Iran–Pakistan–India gas pipeline—has been in negotiation for several years.

In 2011, a joint group of energy experts from both sides met to examine the feasibility of electricity trade. A broad understanding was reached between the National Transmission and Despatch Company (NTDC) in Pakistan and India’s Central Electricity Authority and Power Grid Corporation on the possibility of grid connectivity between Amritsar and Lahore to enable trade of up to 500 megawatts of power.[52] A Memorandum of Understanding was signed in 2014. Energy trade would provide relief to Pakistan, which is currently experiencing an energy crisis and chronic power shortages.

Yet another study, conducted by the Transnational Strategy Group, proposes the establishment of Pakistan–India cross-border special economic zones (SEZs) in the divided Punjab region that straddles the border between India and Pakistan that could facilitate trade.[53] Considering the security and border-related issues and trust deficits in the military and intelligence spheres of the two countries, this 2014 study realistically recommends that the two countries start with a pilot SEZ in which “investors and the two governments would work cooperatively to negotiate minimum regulatory and legal reforms, incentives and other policy-related measures that enterprises looking into potential investment in the SEZ need and that governments can, initially, provide.”[54]

Improving the Investment Climate. While there have been marked improvements in trade freedom, investment freedom in South Asia shows little progress. Compared to emerging economies, investment as a percentage of GDP constitutes less than 30 percent for most South Asian economies, where India leads the region with an investment-to-GDP ratio of 32 percent.[55] FDI for the region has fallen considerably since 2005, going from $10.8 billion to $3.9 billion in 2014. According to a World Bank database, FDI as a percentage of GDP averages less than 2 percent in recent years for South Asia. India’s FDI was 1.7 percent of GDP in 2014, whereas the same was 0.7 percent for Pakistan and 0.9 percent for Bangladesh.[56] FDI inflows into South Asia originate predominantly from outside the region, where intra-regional investment is even less than intra-regional trade, and the potential for investment-to-trade linkages is severely lacking. Both Bangladesh and Sri Lanka have high, FDI-driven investment in the textile sector, while for Pakistan, the highest investments are in the energy and power sector (with the U.S. being the primary investor country). India is one of Nepal’s largest investors in the chemicals industry.[57] Recently, India has invested heavily in thermal-power-generation facilities in Bangladesh, investing about $2.5 billion in 2013 alone.[58]

India is also the largest recipient of FDI in the region (90 percent of all FDI), whereas other countries in the region are not known for investment attractiveness owing to widespread corruption, political instability, and weak political and institutional structures. Pakistan, for instance, has introduced policy reforms that provide fiscal benefits to foreign investors, such as credit facilities and foreign exchange easing; it could be an attractive market for foreign investors, but political instability makes it fairly unfavorable.[59]

An Asian Development Bank report on South Asia’s trade and investment regimes argues that the similarity in the levels of technology and cultures in South Asia and the region’s more labor-intensive production structures combine to generate greater incentives to trade and investment within the region than outside it.[60] This is another area where SAFTA needs improvement. While it contains a framework for intra-regional trade in South Asia, it does not extend that framework to investments, and it should.

IV. What Must South Asia Do?

The recent growth spurt in South Asian economies is fairly misleading and likely may not have long-lasting impact unless the region improves rule of law, introduces tough reforms to fight corruption, makes doing business easier, and creates pathways for regional connectivity and cooperation. Here are some specific steps South Asian countries should take:

• Combat corruption by increasing transparency and building accountability. Corruption and lack of transparency in public institutions is seen as the primary deterrent to foreign investments and doing business in South Asia. Right-to-information laws should be strengthened, and citizens’ requests for information from the state should be handled systematically and transparently. Anti-corruption agencies, including the judiciary, should be given complete independence and autonomy from the influence of the government, political, or military elite. Governments in South Asian countries—especially Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka—should relinquish control of political appointments and no longer be allowed to transfer key decision-making positions to friends and family members. Such politically motivated appointments are known to have influenced decisions of these anti-corruption watchdogs.[61]
• Civil society, the media, and other non-state stakeholders should play an active role in applying pressure on their governments for sustainable accountability in society.[62]
• Introduce efficient regulatory reforms. Regulatory reforms to improve business, investments, and trade in South Asia are crucial for gaining global competiveness. Higher levels of regulation lead to inefficiency, and South Asia is an important example. The governments in South Asia must make processes easier for businesses by introducing automated systems, removing unnecessary procedural and administrative regulations that lead to delays and increased transaction costs. Processes must be streamlined to save time, and overall costs associated with bureaucracy should be reduced to make South Asia a thriving region for new businesses and investments.
• Boost regional connectivity through trade, investment, transport, and transit. Regional connectivity holds the baton for real and more sustainable growth in South Asia. Pakistan and India should allow normalization of trade and explore opportunities in trade, transit, and investment that come from shared borders and cultures, geographic proximity, and trade potential. The willingness of both countries to open their markets to each other would open a course for regional cooperation—something that can be accomplished under the current SAFTA. In fact, an empirical study shows that in terms of gains in both allocative efficiency and terms of trade, a fully implemented SAFTA would generate much larger welfare gains for India and Pakistan than those under a bilateral FTA between these two countries, and welfare gains for all South Asian countries would increase dramatically.[63] This would lead to stronger economic growth.The scope of SAFTA itself should also be expanded to facilitate transit trade and an improved investment climate while drawing a road map to address NTBs that have hindered trade in the past.

Conclusion

Countries with higher levels of economic freedom outperform others in reducing poverty, achieving greater prosperity, and ensuring broader progress in many dimensions of social and human development. As the Index of Economic Freedom has chronicled time and again, nations whose governments pursue policies that enhance economic freedom (such as through strengthening the rule of law, the promotion of competition and openness, or suitable restraints on the size and economic reach of government) are able to capitalize more fully on the ability of the free-market system not only to generate, but also to reinforce dynamic growth through efficient resource allocation, value creation, and innovation.

Although South Asian countries have enjoyed improved growth prospects recently thanks to the windfall resulting from lower oil prices, in order to sustain growth over the longer term, their governments must address the fundamental structural problems, regulatory inefficiencies, and endemic corruption that have blocked greater economic freedom. If they do correct these problems, they will foster a better life for their citizens and a more peaceful and prosperous world.

*About the Authors:
James M. Roberts is Research Fellow for Economic Freedom and Growth in the Center for Free Markets and Regulatory Reform, of the Institute for Economic Freedom and Opportunity, at The Heritage Foundation. Huma Sattar, of Karachi, Pakistan, is a former Visiting Scholar at The Heritage Foundation. Theodore Ellis, a member of the Young Leaders Program at The Heritage Foundation, made valuable contributions to this paper.

Source:
This article was published by The Heritage Foundation

Notes:
[1] The World Bank, “Forecast Table,” 2015, http://www.worldbank.org/en/publication/global-economic-prospects/summary-table (accessed November 9, 2015).

[2] Asian Development Bank, “Growth Prospects Soften for Developing Asia,” Asian Development Outlook Supplement, July 2015, http://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/publication/161734/ado-supplement-july-2015.pdf (accessed January 11, 2016).

[3] The World Bank, “Personal Remittances, Received (Current US$),” 2015, http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/BX.TRF.PWKR.CD.DT (accessed November 6, 2015).

[4] The World Bank, “Poverty and Equity,” 2015, http://povertydata.worldbank.org/poverty/region/SAS (accessed November 6, 2015).

[5] News release, “South Asia’s Corruption Watchdogs Need Sharper Teeth,” Transparency International, May 21, 2014, http://www.transparency.org/news/pressrelease/south_asias_corruption_watchdogs_need_sharper_teeth (accessed November 6, 2015).

[6] Transparency International, “Global Corruption Barometer,” 2015, http://www.transparency.org/gcb2013 (accessed November 6, 2015).

[7] Terry Miller and Anthony B. Kim, 2016 Index of Economic Freedom (Washington, DC: The Heritage Foundation and Dow Jones & Company, Inc., 2016), pp. 62–64, http://www.heritage.org/index/download.

[8] The World Bank, “Making the Most of Cheap Oil,” South Asia Economic Focus, Spring 2015, http://www.worldbank.org/content/dam/Worldbank/document/SAR/saef-final.pdf (accessed November 9, 2015).

[9] United Nations, “Table 1: Human Development Index and Its Components,” 2014, https://data.undp.org/dataset/Table-1-Human-Development-Index-and-its-components/myer-egms (accessed November 9, 2015).

[10] World Economic Forum, The Global Competitiveness Report: 2014–2015, 2014, p. 34, http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GlobalCompetitivenessReport_2014-15.pdf (accessed November 9, 2015).

[11] Huma Sattar, “Lack of Economic Freedom Will Hinder Nepal’s Recovery,” The Daily Signal, May 4, 2015, http://dailysignal.com/2015/05/04/lack-of-economic-freedom-will-hinder-nepals-recovery/.

[12] Gopakumar Krishnan Thampi, “Corruption in South Asia: Insights & Benchmarks from Citizen Feedback Surveys in Five Countries,” Transparency International, December 2002, http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/APCITY/UNPAN019883.pdf (accessed November 6, 2015).

[13] Transparency International, “Daily Lives and Corruption: Public Opinion in South Asia,” http://www.transparency.org/whatwedo/publication/daily_lives_and_corruption_public_opinion_in_south_asia (accessed December 15, 2015).

[14] The Corruption Perceptions Index measures the perceived levels of public-sector corruption, scoring from 0 (highly corrupt) to 100 (very clean).

[15] Transparency International, 2014 Corruption Perceptions Index, 2015, https://www.transparency.org/cpi2014/results (accessed November 6, 2015).

[16] Transparency International, “Fighting Corruption in South Asia,” May 21, 2014, http://www.transparency.org/news/feature/fighting_corruption_in_south_asia (accessed November 6, 2015).

[17] Ibid.

[18] Transparency International, “Corruption Risks in Bangladesh,” 2013, https://www.transparency.org/files/content/feature/2014_CorruptionSouthAsia_factsheet_Bangladesh.pdf (accessed December 15, 2015).

[19] World Economic Forum, “The Global Competitiveness Report: 2014–2015.”

[20] Transparency International, “Global Corruption Barometer 2013,” http://www.transparency.org/gcb2013,” as cited in Transparency International Sri Lanka, “Corruption Risks in Sri Lanka,” 2014, https://www.transparency.org/files/content/feature/2014_CorruptionSouthAsia_factsheet_SriLanka.pdf (accessed December 15, 2015).

[21] World Economic Forum, The Global Competitiveness Report: 2014–2015, p. 34.

[22] Ibid.

[23] World Bank Group, “Doing Business 2015: Going Beyond Efficiency–Regional Profile 2015, South Asia (SA),” pp. 4–13, http://www.doingbusiness.org/reports/~/media/GIAWB/Doing%20Business/Documents/Profiles/Regional/DB2015/DB15-South-Asia.pdf (accessed November 9, 2015).

[24] An economy’s “distance to frontier” (DTF) score is calculated on a scale from 0 to 100, where 0 represents the worst performance and 100 represents the best performance, the frontier. DTF scores measure an economy’s absolute progress against the best practice “frontier” in each of the 10 regulatory areas.

[25] World Bank Group, “Doing Business: Business Reforms in South Asia,” 2015, http://www.doingbusiness.org/Reforms/Overview/Region/south-asia (accessed November 9, 2015).

[26] World Bank Group, “Doing Business 2015: Going Beyond Efficiency–Regional Profile 2015, South Asia (SA),” p. 68.

[27] Ibid., p. 20.

[28] International Trade Center, “Interregional and Intraregional Trade in Emerging Markets Identified as Key to Addressing Global Economic Crisis,” October 2012.

[29] Nisha Taneja et al., “Normalizing India Pakistan Trade,” Indian Council For Research on International Economic Relations, Working Paper No. 267, September 2013, http://icrier.org/pdf/working_paper_267.pdf (accessed January 14, 2016).

[30] These are lists of items that are not subject to any concessions; regular duties apply on trade in these items.

[31] Some of these items are fruits and vegetables, textiles, automobile parts, pharmaceutical products, tobacco, herbal products, spices and herbs, and paper products.

[32] Pakistan Business Council, Preliminary Analysis: Pakistan India Trade and a Viable Roadmap for Trade Liberalization, 2015, pp. 13–15, http://pbc.org.pk/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Preliminary_Analysis_of_Pakistan_India_Trade-_PBC_2.pdf (accessed November 9, 2015).

[33] Selim Raihan and Prabir De, “India–Pakistan Economic Cooperation: Implications for Regional Integration in South Asia,” April 2013, p. 8, http://sanemnet.org/sanemafeefcontainer/uploads/2014/05/PS11953-5-India-Pakistan.pdf (accessed November 9, 2015).

[34] Ibid.

[35] “Study Sees $545m Informal Trade Between Pakistan, India in 2005,” The World Trade Review, June 2006, http://www.worldtradereview.com/news.asp?pType=N&iType=A&iID=133&siD=6&nID=27390 (accessed January 14, 2016).

[36] State Bank of Pakistan, “Implications of Liberalizing Trade and Investment with India,” in Trade Integration Between Pakistan and India, Chap. 2, 2006, http://www.sbp.org.pk/publications/pak-india-trade/Chap_2.pdf (accessed January 14, 2016).

[37] James Roberts and Huma Sattar, “Pakistan’s Economic Disarray and How to Fix It,” Heritage Foundation Special Report No. 172, June 30, 2015, http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2015/06/pakistans-economic-disarray-and-how-to-fix-it.

[38] “Pakistan Remains Least Favoured Nation in India,” Dawn, September 18, 2015, http://www.dawn.com/news/1207663/pakistan-remains-least-favoured-nation-in-india (accessed November 9, 2015).

[39] Joyeeta Bhattacharjee, “India–Bangladesh Relations: Finding the Way Forward,” Observer Research Foundation, September 2014, http://www.observerindia.com/cms/sites/orfonline/modules/issuebrief/attachments/OI_43_1349686362951.pdf (accessed November 9, 2015).

[40] Intra-regional trade share is the percentage of intra-regional trade to total trade of the region, calculated using trade data. It is calculated as Tii/ Ti, where Tii is exports of region i to region i plus imports of region i from region i and Ti is total exports of region i to the world plus total imports of region i from the world. A higher share indicates a higher degree of dependence on regional trade.

[41] Asian Development Bank, Asia Regional Integration Center, “Integration Indicators,” https://aric.adb.org/integrationindicators (accessed November 9, 2015).

[42] Zahid Hussain, “What Drags Poverty Reduction in South Asia?” The World Bank, August 5, 2013, http://blogs.worldbank.org/endpovertyinsouthasia/what-drags-poverty-reduction-south-asia (accessed November 9, 2015).

[43] Additional tariffs on top of basic duties.

[44] Asian Development Bank, Asia Regional Integration Center, “Free Trade Agreements,” http://aric.adb.org/fta-comparative-chapters?fta%5B0%5D=3&fta%5B1%5D=13&fta%5B2%5D=64&fta%5B3%5D=71&fta%5B4%5D=137&fta%5B5%5D=83&chapter%5B0%5D=14&chapter%5B1%5D=15 (accessed November 9, 2015).

[45] Rajiv Kumar and Manjeeta Singh, “India’s Role in South Asia Trade and Investment Integration,” Asian Development Bank Working Paper Series on Regional Economic Integration, No. 32, July 2009, http://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/publication/28506/wp32-india-role-south-asia-trade.pdf (accessed November 9, 2015).

[46] Non-Tariff Barriers, “Resolved Complaints: TradeMark Southern Africa,” 2015, http://www.tradebarriers.org/resolved_complaints (accessed November 9, 2015).

[47] Michael Kugelman and Robert M. Hathaway, eds., The Pakistan–India Trade Relationship: Prospects, Profits, and Pitfalls, The Wilson Center, 2013, p. 10, https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/ASIA_121219_Pakistn%20India%20Trade%20rptFINAL.pdf (accessed November 9, 2015).

[48] Ibid., pp. 12–13.

[49] Ijaz Nabi, “Pakistan’s Trade with India: Thinking Strategically,” in Kugelman and Hathaway, eds., The Pakistan–India Trade Relationship: Prospects, Profits, and Pitfalls, p. 44.

[50] Palakh Jain and Samridhi Bimal, “Enhancing India–Pakistan Economic Cooperation: Prospects for Indian Investment in Pakistan,” Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations Working Paper No. 274, May 2014, http://icrier.org/pdf/working_paper_274.pdf (accessed November 9, 2015).

[51] Shuja Nawaz and Mohan Guruswamy, “India and Pakistan: The Opportunity Cost of Conflict,” Atlantic Council, South Asian Center, 2014, http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/publications/reports/india-and-pakistan-the-opportunity-cost-of-conflict (accessed November 9, 2015).

[52] Jain and Bimal, “Enhancing India–Pakistan Economic Cooperation: Prospects for Indian Investment in Pakistan.”

[53] Transnational Strategy Group, “Study of the Benefits of Establishing a Pakistan-India Cross-Border Special Economic Zone (SEZ),” November 2014, http://transnationalstrategy.com/pakistan-india-special-economic-zone-sez-study/ (accessed November 9, 2015).

[54] Ibid.

[55] International Monetary Fund, “World Economic Outlook,” October 2015, https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2015/02/weodata/index.aspx (accessed December 15, 2015).

[56] The World Bank, “Data,” 2015, http://data.worldbank.org/ (accessed December 15, 2015).

[57] International Trade Center, “Investment Map,” 2012, http://www.investmentmap.org/ (accessed November 9, 2015).

[58] Monish Gulati, “Sushma Visit Gives Fresh Impetus to India–Bangladesh Ties,” South Asia Monitor, June 30, 2014, http://southasiamonitor.org/detail.php?type=sl&nid=8437 (accessed November 9, 2015).

[59] Jain and Bimal, “Enhancing India–Pakistan Economic Cooperation: Prospects for Indian Investment in Pakistan.”

[60] Asian Development Bank, “Study on Intraregional Trade and Investment in South Asia,” 2009, http://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/publication/28658/intraregional-trade-investment.pdf (accessed December 15, 2015).

[61] Transparency International, “Fighting Corruption in South Asia,” May 21, 2014, http://www.transparency.org/news/feature/fighting_corruption_in_south_asia (accessed November 6, 2015).

[62] Ibid.

[63] Selim Raihan and Prabir De, “India–Pakistan Economic Cooperation: Implications for Regional Integration in South Asia,” Commonwealth Secretariat, revised draft, April 2013, http://sanemnet.org/sanemafeefcontainer/uploads/2014/05/PS11953-5-India-Pakistan.pdf (accessed November 9, 2015).

Till now, the India – Africa relation was polarized. A new twist emanated with Japan making a foray to deepen the relation with Africa in cooperation with India.

In the Joint Statement during the recent visit of Indian Prime Minister to Japan in November, both Mr Narendra Modi and Mr Shinzo Abe committed to jointly develop jointly. The statement said, “the two Prime Ministers underscored the importance of India- Japan dialogue to promote cooperation and collaboration in Africa …. explore specific joint projects including in the areas of training and capacity building, health infrastructure and connectivity.”

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Look Africa drive can be viewed as India’s new turf for trade and investment expansion. Modi’s fervor to vie for the African heart is synergized by his visit to Africa in July 2016, closely following visits of President of India Pranab Mukherjee and Vice President Hamid Ansari in June 2016. Modi’s bent towards Africa stemmed from two factors. First, a large population of non-resident Indians in Africa are Gujaraties and Mr Modi , who is a Gujarati , has emotional link with the African Gujaraties. Second, Africa turned towards India to rebuild the economy after the decade long dust of political turmoil settled in the continent and fall in oil prices led Africa in dismay.

The African bent towards India can be gauged by the African participation in India – Africa Forum Summit. In the first two summits, held in 2008 and 2013, African participation was at a nadir. Only few African countries participated in the summits. The 3rd Summit, held in October 2015, was buzzed with 55 African nations participating. It drew a new synergy in cementing India – Africa relations.

Against this backdrop of sa urge in India’s relation with Africa, Japan’s relation with Africa has been promiscuous. The focus of Japanese relations has been Japan’s yearning for African support to the UN Security Council reform and concerns over China’s hegemony in South China Sea. The 20 years initiative of Japan — led by Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD) — has always been held in Tokyo. For the first time, the last conference was held in Nairobi in August 2016.

The Nairobi Declaration pitched for the concerns in maritime security, embracing piracy, illegal fishing and other maritime crimes. This is reckoned circuitous of China. Little focus was made on economic dimension, excepting pledging US $30 billion for infrastructure support in Africa. This suggests a lag to support the Africans who were looking forward for economic development with Japan, according to analysts. To this end, the move by Japan to have a joint cooperation with India for the development of Africa added a new direction in the Japanese strategic cooperation with Africa.

The African economy has made a phenomenal turnaround in the growth from negative to positive during 2000s. The average annual real GDP growth of sub-Saharan Africa was one of the highest with 5 percent in the world during 2013-2014, against the backdrop of simmering growth in the global economy.

Buoyed by strong domestic demand and resurgence in manufacturing activities, Africa emerged a potential destination for world export. Hitherto, Africa was an import sourcing continent. India’s export to Africa surged by over26 percent over a period of five years in between 2010-11 to 2015-16. Export to Africa became the legacy to drive India’s global export , amidst world recession. Africa’s share in India’s total exports increased from 7.9 percent in 2010-11 to 9.6 percent in 2015-16. As compared to this, shares of major countries in India’s exports showed downturn. Excepting USA , shares of EU and Asia in India’s total export declined from 20.9 percent to 20.5 percent and from 49.8 percent to 47.4 percent during 2010-11 to 2015-16 respectively.

Historically, East and Southern Africa are the centre for Indian descendants. However, in terms of trade, five African countries (South Africa , Kenya, Egypt, Tanzania and Nigeria) are the major trading partners of India. More than half of India’s export to Africa is shipped to these five countries.

In terms of commodity exports, petroleum products (refinery products) , drugs and pharmaceutical, motor car, textiles and ready made garments and plastic products are the major items in India’s export basket. In 2015-16, these five product groups accounted for 51.3% of India’s total export to Africa.

However, there were noteworthy changes in the Indian basket of export. India shifted its export more to value-added products to Africa. Export of car is an example. Till 2012-13, India did not export car and auto components to Africa at all. In 2015-16, car was third biggest item of India’s export to Africa. Africa was the second biggest destination of Indian car export ( after Latin America ) , accounting for 23 percent share in 2015-16. Of these, South Africa was the key destination for car exports.

Interestingly, India’s exports of car to Africa were driven by Indo-Japanese joint ventures. Toyota Kirloskar Motors India and Nissan India have already made bids in African car market and Maruti is under planning stage to export cars to Africa .
India has an adverse trade balance with Africa. But, the adverse trade balance proved benign to India. The main reason for adverse trade balance is India’s import of bulk crude oil from Nigeria. Even though import of crude oil is the cause for adverse trade balance, it leveraged India exports of oil refinery products, which are value added products.

Africa is projected the next attractive destination for foreign investment. Given the surging growth in investment opportunities in Africa, coupled with India’s emotional link with Africa, India stands for a good opportunity to invest in Africa. In Africa, India’s investment was US $ 32 billion by 2015, according to a media report. They are in telecommunications, hydrocarbons, IT, water treatment, drugs and pharmaceuticals.

Now, the triple axis between India, Japan and Africa should augur well for a deeper connectivity between Africa and India and Japan. There are various challenges to fructify this movement.

For example, development of African healthcare services can be an important challenge for India-Japan cooperation. Africa is reeling under acute laggard stage of healthcare services. Africa consists of 11 percent of global population, but is engulfed by sharing 24 percent of the burden of world disease. India has made notable contributions to perk up the African healthcare services. Through Pan–Africa e-Network Project (PAENP), medical practitioners in Africa can consult on-line with various Indian specialists in various disciplines and specialists, selected by African Union. India is the third largest pharmaceutical formulations supplier to Africa.
Given India’s strong platform in healthcare services in Africa, Japan can cooperate by supplying sophisticate medical instruments, diagnostic kits and grants for medical service infrastructures.

To begin with, improvement of African socio-economic activities should be the primary target for India – Japan cooperation.

*S. Majumder, Adviser, Japan External Trade Organization(JETRO), New Delhi, India. Opinions expressed are personal.

1. Only 10% of people have black money, but 100% people are inconvenienced by demonetization.

Clarification:

It is not true that only 10% of people have black money. The black money is well spread among people in the upper and middle income group in various forms all over India. Every fellow who takes bribe is a black money holder. Every person who evades tax is a black money holder. Many people in the upper and middle income group are known to take bribe money or pay bribe money or evade tax or conceal real income to reduce tax. Black money among such people also need to be brought out.

2. The government has not planned properly

Clarification:

The Indian government has planned quite well and Mr. Modi announced that people have to bear with this for fifty days and it is a fifty day plan.

Several times, it has been explained that new currency printing exercise can start in a big way only after announcing demonetization to maintain secrecy.

The new currency is being released every day and the suffering of the people are reducing daily. This is clearly evident now.

The release of new currency notes should be completed in fifty days to a reasonably comfort level, when the sufferings of people will go away and in the process bring relief to see gradual success of movement towards less and less corruption.

It may be noted that there is no need to print around Rs.14.2 lakh crore of new currency notes, which was the amount withdrawn by demonetization. With the black money gone and more people getting into digital mode of payment, currency requirement will be less at least by 20%.

3. Estimation of black money and fake currency in circulation wrong

Clarification:

This was an estimate and nobody knows clearly the amount. Neither the government nor the critics. This will be clearly known only after fifty days.

4. Most of the black money is not in the form of cash, but real estate and gold. Why is Mr. Modi is targeting cash only?

Clarification:

Eliminating corruption in India has to be done in stages. When black money is curtailed and with the available black money with people becoming less and less, the value of real estate which is mostly done by black money will automatically come down. Black money holders will lose heavily. This is already happening.

Please await the implementation of measures to put down the benami land holdings. Spectacular results can be felt before long

5. Poor people and wage earners are suffering.

Clarification:

It is true that poor people have temporarily suffered in the initial thirty days. But, it is gratifying that many of them feel that there is need to initiate drastic steps to put down corruption and black money and they want demonetization to succeed. Poor people realise that they are the worst hit due to the widespread corruption in India. Those who interact with poor people know this.

Some politicians predicted that there would be riots on 1st December, the pay day. Even the learned judge who is supposed to know better made similar statement. Nothing of this sort has happened. When opposition parties called for nationwide bandh, it was a flop, reflecting the mood of the people including the deprived class.

The media is creating panic atmosphere, instead of explaining to the people about the issues in a responsible way. One cannot ignore the fact that considerable segment of Indian media is under the control of politicians and business men.

Appeal to the critics

People have been asking for firm steps to root out corruption for the last several decades. Possibly, all wanted that corruption should be eliminated in a painless manner.

The demonetization exercise is the least painful way of removing black money and putting down corruption firmly. Demonetisation inevitably lead to greater digital mode, which will do a lot of good to the cause of less corrupt India in the course of time.

If we lose this opportunity now to remove black money, the country will not be able to do it in the foreseeable future.

There is nothing wrong in one being a critic. But why not be a constructive critic?

So far, none of the critics who want black money to be removed but disagree with the demonetization measure, have suggested any better alternative plans.

Any slackening of demonetization measure will only satisfy the business men and the black money holders who are well spread throughout the country in various measures and remain powerful due to their black money power.

There is already an unholy trio of small section of bank staff, business men and chartered accountants, who have managed to take out millions of rupees of new currency notes to hoard them, by using their evil genius. Anti-corruption crusaders should help the government by pointing out such unholy trio. Let the critics become anti corruption activists and help the cause.

A new era of trade cooperation between China, Mongolia and the Russian Federation was opened in Moscow on December 8, when the governments of the three countries signed the Intergovernmental Agreement on International Road Transport along the Asian Highway Network.

By signing the Agreement, each country agreed to give the other two countries traffic rights for international road transport operation on the parts of Asian Highway routes AH3 and AH 4 connecting their respective territories.

“Member States use of the Asian Highway network as a pivot to negotiate an operational agreement will position infrastructure networks to provide impetus for trade and people connectivity, particularly to landlocked Mongolia, and enable the network to act as a platform for multilateral and regional cooperation,” said Dr. Shamshad Akhtar, Under-Secretary General of the United Nations and Executive Secretary of ESCAP.

The Agreement was negotiated by the three countries over a three-year period, with ESCAP providing technical assistance on its formulation.

To demonstrate the benefits of the initiative, in August 2016, the transport ministries of the three countries concerned organized a pilot run of a nine-truck caravan that travelled a 2,150-km distance in seven days from the Chinese port of Tianjin to Ulaanbaatar in Mongolia and then on to Ulan-Ude on the shore of Lake Baikal in the Russian Federation.

Under the Agreement, Asian Highway route No.4 (AH4) will be opened to China’s border with Pakistan, then connected by bilateral and quadrilateral agreements with China and some Central Asian countries along the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor for connectivity, creating a western corridor of the Silk Road Economic Belt.

The Agreement also opened Asian Highway route No. 3 from Ulan-Ude (Russian Federation) – Ulaanbaatar (Mongolia) –Beijing to Tianjin port (China), and Asian Highway route No. 4 from Novosibirsk (Russian Federation) – Urumqi (China) – Kashi – Honqiraf (Chinese border with Pakistan), making it the first substantive achievement of the new China-Mongolia-Russia trilateral economic cooperation initiative.

Other countries willing to exchange similar transit rights along Asian Highway routes will have the opportunity to accede to the Agreement after its entry into force.

By Jayshree Sengupta

The father of economics, Adam Smith, believed in free trade and advocated it in the 18th century England. Most American presidents in the past believed and practiced it too. Trump is planning to reverse it for the ‘good of American people’ because as he said in his election campaign he wants jobs to come back to the US by blackballing Chinese imports.

He may however not take the drastic step of imposing 45 percent punitive tariffs on China, but he will probably not endorse the North American Free Trade Treaty Agreement (NAFTA) between Canada, Mexico and the US. After the treaty was signed in 1993, many US and Canadian industries moved to Mexico to take advantage of cheap labour. Recently, the President-elect forced Carrier, the makers of Air conditioners, to move back its plant from Mexico to the US (Indiana) saving some 1000 jobs.

Unfortunately, it is too late for Trump or anyone else in the world to reverse globalisation. Today capital can move freely between countries and a product in America can have components made in all parts of the world and not only in China. China itself is facing rising labour costs and is currently outsourcing the manufacture of parts from Vietnam and the Philippines which have relatively cheaper labour.

India is in China’s radar for outsourcing because of relatively cheap labour costs. It wants to increase investments in India. Indian textile and garment producers are outsourcing their products in Bangladesh because of cheap Bangladeshi (mostly women) labour which is skilled. All over the world, outsourcing is going on and to the extent that product parts are made outside the country, it will mean some jobs will be lost.

Even if India wants, nobody will favour a reversal of globalisation today. India has championed freer trade and has been very generous to its neighbours and has reduced tariffs on all products while the countries of SAARC still maintain long negative lists banning many product imports and imposing high duties on several items.

Fear of free trade comes from falling competiveness and fear of job losses. When India was protectionist till 1991, there was a craving for imported consumer goods. The government’s fear was that if imports were allowed, people would spend more on them than on domestic goods for which demand would fall and the industries would perish. While many economists like Jagdish Bhagwati were vehemently against the government’s protectionist policies and argued that exports would also suffer if there is a restriction on imported parts and embellishments, the quota tariff raj continued — though in the 1980s, attempts at liberalisation of imports were made strongly. But even now under Modi’s regime, certain restrictions have been placed on imports of agricultural goods against the wishes of the WTO. This is because India has to protect its farmers from being exposed to dumping of cheap agricultural products from countries which heavily subsidise their agriculture. Hence there is no country which is actually practising complete free trade according to text book tenets.

US however is the most open country trade-wise. As a result, it is the marketplace of the world. Every country tries hard to sell to the US and with China, it has a huge trade deficit of $345 billion. The high tariffs contemplated by Trump may help to reduce the deficit but will not be able to bring back the jobs.

There are many reasons for this. Factories in China are making products for the high end of the US market — designer outfits like Ralph Lauren jackets. They sell for over $300 in the US. Having visited the factory in China near Shanghai, making these jackets, I found out that their actual raw material plus labour cost was only around $30 to $50. How can fashion houses afford not to outsource from China when the margins are so high?

Recently in a report in The New York Times on a factory making recliner movie hall seats, the owner, who is currently doing well, said that costs would rise by 20 percent if high tariff was imposed on Chinese imports. Many of the parts came from the US but the fabric and a switch box that controlled the chair’s movement came from China. Also, if Trump succeeds with his protectionist policies, a number of multinational companies based in the US would shift to other countries where they can buy components at lower prices.

Around 34 percent of components in American manufacturing are coming from abroad. Also, when a high tariff is imposed on imported consumer goods, it cuts into total consumer spending as prices go up of such goods and will result in falling demand for American goods as well and will result in net loss of jobs.

It will affect countries in Europe which are selling manufacturing equipment or finished products like synthetic yarns to China. Thus it may affect adversely the manufacturing industries of Europe. Meanwhile, China is already in the process of shifting many of its manufacturing processes to Vietnam and Africa. They would be able to export from their new locations and evade the tariff and continue to remain competitive.

There are many places in the world, especially where you can still run sweat shops in which labour is paid poorly, working six days a week, 12 hours a day, and with no environmental standards. Laws can easily be flouted and human rights violated in these factories, but the end products are cheap and of good quality. Such labour force, willing to work in factories under stressful conditions, does not exist in the US any more, according to the American factory owners themselves.

Also, with the rapid advances in science and technology, robots and automation are replacing human hands in US manufacturing. Even if Trump manages to get many factories humming with activity again, it is unlikely that there will be a huge amount of job creation. Even if everyone may hate the Chinese as they take over markets all over the world and manage to take away jobs, their cutting edge technology, the discipline of the labour force and the resulting cost effectiveness is not something trivial and cannot easily be replicated either by the US or India so soon.

Overnight, political turmoil migrated to Asia after South Korean lawmakers voted 234-56 to impeach President Park Geun-hye over accusations of bribery, abuse of power and violating her constitutional duties, setting the stage for her to become the country’s first elected leader to be expelled from office in disgrace.

The impeachment motion was carried by a wider-than-expected margin in a secret ballot in parliament, meaning more than 60 of Park’s own conservative Saenuri Party members backed removing her. The votes of least 200 members of the 300-seat chamber were needed for the motion to pass. The Constitutional Court must now decide whether to uphold the motion, a process that could take up to 180 days.

“I solemnly accept the voice of the parliament and the people and sincerely hope this confusion is soundly resolved,” Park said at a meeting with her cabinet, adding that she would comply with the court’s proceedings as well as an investigation by a special prosecutor.

As Reuters reports, Park, whose abysmal approval rating stands at just 5%, has resisted demands that she step down immediately. Under the constitution, Park’s duties were assumed by Prime Minister Hwang Kyo-ahn on an interim basis until the court rules.

“I stand here with heavy-hearted sadness,” Hwang said in a televised address. “As an aide to the president, I feel deep responsibility about the situation we have come to face.”

Meanwhile, cheers erupted outside the chamber of the domed parliament building when the vote was announced. People held signs saying “Victory for the People” and “New Republic of Korea”. Earlier, anti-Park activists scuffled with police as they tried to drive two tractors up to parliament’s main gate.

Choi Jung-hoon, a 46-year high school teacher, joined the rally outside parliament with his wife and daughters, age 7 and 18 months. “I wanted my kids to be here, making history, at a historic moment, and show we people can win,” he said.

The impeachment culminated a series of mass protests demanding for the resignation of Park, 64, who has been accused of colluding with a friend and a former aide, both of whom have been indicted by prosecutors, to pressure big businesses to donate to two foundations set up to back her policy initiatives. The scenario is vaguely familiar of a similar “non-scandal” to take place in recent years in the US when a particular presidential candidate was accused to exchanging political benefits for foreign cash.

Park, who is serving a single five-year term that was set to end in February 2018, has denied wrongdoing but apologized for carelessness in her ties with her friend, Choi Soon-sil. If Park leaves office early, an election must be held within 60 days. The poll frontrunners are United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and ex-lawmaker Moon Jae-in, the former leader of the main opposition Democratic Party, who lost the 2012 election to Park by 3 percentage points.

“The power of candles has made a big change without any arrest or casualty,” said third-placed presidential hopeful Lee Jae-myeong, mayor of the city of Seongnam, referring to the candle-lit anti-Park rallies that have drawn huge, peaceful crowds to central Seoul for the last six Saturdays. Another rally was planned for this weekend.

“It has opened up a new era in the history of the Republic of Korea’s democracy,” Lee – who has said he wants to be the South Korean Bernie Sanders – told Reuters. Kang Dong-wan, a professor at Dong-A University in Busan, said the large impeachment vote from Park’s own party was probably a result of rising crowds at weekly demonstrations. “It looks like more from the ruling Saenuri Party gave their support than many had expected after realizing that the party could collapse if the bill doesn’t get approved,” Kang said.

Prime Minister Hwang, whose post is largely ceremonial, assumed interim presidential powers while the court deliberates.

He takes the helm at a time of heightened tension with North Korea, and said after the vote that the chances of a provocation by Pyongyang were high. Various agencies, including the Finance Ministry and financial regulators, planned emergency meetings later on Friday.

South Korea’s economic outlook is also worsening, in part because of the internal political uncertainty. Investors are likely to be spooked when trading resumes on Monday and remain jittery until the Constitutional Court ruling, analysts said. The won =KRW was forecast to lose further ground against the dollar on Monday.

What happens next? According to Reuters, the daughter of a military ruler who led the country for 18 years before being assassinated by his disgruntled spy chief in 1979, Park would lose presidential immunity if she left office early, and could be prosecuted for abuse of power and bribery, among other charges. The Constitutional Court will determine whether parliament followed due process and whether there were sufficient grounds for impeachment. Arguments from the two sides will be heard in public hearings, which Park is unlikely to attend.

The nine-member Constitutional Court is considered conservative in its make-up, but some of its former judges have said the case against Park is strong and was likely to be approved. In 2004, parliament impeached then-president Roh Moo-hyun, suspending his powers for 63 days while the court reviewed the decision, which it overturned. Unlike now, on that occasion public opinion was against Roh’s impeachment. The prime minister at the time, Goh Kun, said in a 2013 memoir that he had decided to stay “low-key” while he held the reins of power.

By Lin Htet Aung*

The people of Myanmar voted in the NLD in the November 2015 elections, throwing their belief behind the NLD election promise of “real change.1” But in practice, even before change could really take place, the majority of NLD members had to spend much of their time in preparations to take over administrative and economic priorities. 2 Despite widespread public expectations of change for real, the reality was that not all the bureaucracy could be expected to work in line with the NLD’s priorities for change, as, under the 2008 Constitution, the ministries for defence, home affairs, and border affairs would have ministers appointed by the Commander-in-Chief.

The people of Myanmar have been anticipating “democracy” since the 1988 democracy protests that catalysed a nation-wide uprising.3 The 2015 elections thus showed people revealing their high hopes for the NLD and for Daw Aung San Suu Kyi to assume a leading role in the country’s politics.

The people’s desire for a democratic state was re-affirmed by the installation of a true civilian President, U Htin Kyaw4 which seemed to indicate that political objectives had been accomplished.

In fact, the game has just begun. State Counsellor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi has highlighted in her address to the United Nations General Assembly in New York on 21 September 2016 that the democratization of Myanmar is just the beginning of the road.5 The NLD-led government thus needs to prove by performance, and produce tangible results within the limitations of conditions handed over from previous military governments. In such a scenario, the NLD-led government is dealing with a mix of expectations and myths.

The article engages with questions about the democratization of Myanmar, a process in which mainly elites including the NLD and USDP have had an impact in different ways. It will also highlight the “lessons learned” from the experience of Myanmar parliamentary democracy during 1948 to 1962. And it analyses the post-2015 picture in the country.

EXPECTATIONS AND REALITIES: THE PAST EXPERIENCES OF MYANMAR PARLIAMENTARY DEMOCRACY

Like other newly independent nations, Myanmar walked into democratic ways after she gained independence from the British in 1948. Unfortunately, this democracy lasted only fourteen years due to various mistakes by the elites.

In successive elections held in 1948-56, 1957-58 and 1960-62, people continually voted for the Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League (AFPFL), which had led the independence struggle. The AFPFL government was led by Prime Minister U Nu, who implemented the first phase of Myanmar’s democratization. Initial popular support for U Nu’s economic plans, including the famous slogan of “Everyone has a private car, a brick-house, and 800 kyat monthly income,” claimed by Prime Minister U Nu.6 To this end, the Pyi Taw Thar Plan (ျပည္ေတာ္သာစီမံကိန္း) (State’s Welfare Plan) was established by U Nu in 1952, but, generally speaking, none of the economic plans were completely carried out.7

Some argue that foreign input for such projects had mainly served their interests rather than those of the Burmese people.8 In reality, there was also corruption which led to bad governance and eventually caused a bad reputation . 9 Other factors adding to the economic policy’s failure included the ideological differences between the AFPFL’s Socialist- Democracy faction led by Swe-Nyein (U Ba Swe and U Kyaw Nyein) and the Democratic-Socialists led by U Nu.10 This political factionalism ironically had the effect of giving the growths for the Tatmadaw to build up its economic (power) base Burma Economic Development Committee in the name of counter-insurgency11 Holding and Enquiry Centre and Military Intelligence Training Centre were set up in the democratic government on 1950 and 1951 respectively. 12 These centres later became notoriously famous in Myanmar politics. Many people, from students to prime minister, had been visited there for a ‘temporary’ purpose of custody. Moreover, Tatmadaw affiliated associations such as Union Solidarity Associations (ၾကံခိုင္ေရးအသင္း) was also set up.13

The elites were also criticized for not paying attention to the Constitution and democratic culture. U Nu’s cabinet members have observed that he (U Nu) sometimes made decisions in private without consulting them, and did not pay attention when people tried to explain matters to him. A former cabinet member stated U Nu did not understand the collective responsibility of the Cabinet. U Nu neglected other people’s opinion. 14
Splits among parties and Myanmar leaders also caused major difficulties.
Senior politician U Thu Wai has commented, “[it] was true that ten-year democracy survived not because of U Nu-led government. But, democracy had been survived just because of factional spirit of opposition groups again and again.”15 Factionalism is a reason why the split in all sectors of Myanmar politics started.16

Thus, although the Myanmar people faithfully supported their leaders in the context of democracy, the elites were wrapped up in their ideologies and in-fighting. As a result, democracy declined with the military’s rising inclinations to be more involved in Myanmar politics and economic life.

If today’s elites in Myanmar wish to consolidate democracy, it is better to assess how the earlier efforts at parliamentary democracy failed. Learning from these past mistakes, today’s leaders can hopefully separate the myths from realities. Of course, some of the challenges are not exactly the same as those today. But, history provides useful parallels for
similar myths that kill democracy.

EXPECTATIONS AND REALITIES: POST 2015 ELECTION

Many analysts and experts have given their views on the ‘landmark’ 2015 Elections.17 But not many have come forth with their views on what happened post elections. In order to meet the people’s expectations for change, the NLD government initiated “100-dayplans” in all government sectors since the start of its administration.18 In fact, not all the government institutions had the capacity to produce the targets that the NLD administration had been expected to meet in the short term.19 Daw Aung San Suu Kyi admitted in her address to the United Nations that the NLD government had spent almost half a year in “preparation time”.20 The inertia seems almost ironic as many public servants had been concerned about losing their jobs when the NLD took office.21

Another consideration is that the majority of NLD members had spent long periods of incarceration as “political prisoners.”22 This has hampered their capacity to pick up speed in policy and other administrative functions. But, the majority of the members of the government are appreciated as being the least corrupted administration in the country’s history thus far.23 Several ministers in the NLD government have been appointed on the basis of having “administration experience.” This has caused some criticism by some members of the NLD party as to the political credentials of these cabinet appointees who had not undergone prison terms.24 This was cited by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi as one of the “various reasons” for the slow pace of change25.

While the NLD is continues to deal with its new governmental role, the USDP is also dealing with so-called re-organization.26 The USDP is now trying to appear as a “true” major opposition party. After a wide-ranging reorganisation exercise on 24 August 2016, the USDP is now led by a new chairman, U Than Htay, a retired lieutenant general.27 The government newspapers, however, have stated that the opposition party may not be respected if it cannot maintain public support.28 The USDP has not made any clear positions on important issues facing the current administration.29 In a situation where no “true” opposition party can provide an alternative view and position, a single-party democracy may be unhealthier for the long term.

Ironically, one of the top public worries is not actually about whether the state is going to be democratic, but about inter-elite relations between former Tatmadaw personnel and the civilian polity where the majority comes from the NLD party and its allies. President U Htin Kyaw has stressed in his Thingyan (Water Festival) speech that fruitful and warming civil-military relations is necessary for building the state. 30

In reality, it is difficult for both sides to have an entirely shared view of important topics on the national agenda. When the State Counsellor announced the aim of a democratic federal union as the NLD government’s guiding principle, Commander-in-Chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing warned not to skip steps outlined in the Nation Wide Ceasefire Agreements (NCA) that the previous USDP government had negotiated.31 Myanmar analysts have pointed out that the Myanmar politicians are stuck in their fixed ideology or own logic. There are only a few who are flexible, but those usually do not last long on Myanmar’s political scene.32

Discussions on civil-military relations are also affected by the hate-speech that occupies much media space. The Union Daily, issued by the USDP, has said that State Counsellor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s continued criticism of the role of Tatmadaw reflects old thinking, and that she talked about democratization without the cooperation of Tatmadaw.33 The Union Daily’s view is that without the Tatmadaw playing a role, no one can improve the political situation, including NLD, for important aspirations such as the 21st Century Panglong Conference.34 It goes on to refer to the Myanmar proverb, kyee-ko-bote-yo-tae- bote-ko-kyee-yo-tae, which means mutual respect is important.

While the ruling politicians want 2008 constitution amendment and civilian supremacy, many analysts raise the question of the Defence Service Personnel representatives as members of parliament (or “Military MPs”) in Myanmar’s Hluttaw. In addition to these military MPs, a large number of mid-level or senior-level officers have been “retired” or “exported” from military to civilian posts, in a practice that started from the military-led governments of the past. Almost all government institutions have been run by soldier-cum- civil servants in senior decision-making positions. There is no legal means to remove such personnel at the moment.

It is thus easy for such soldier-officers to run the inter-ministry administration through their network. 35 Moreover, time and budget to train new administrative officers is limited. 36 Thus, the Tatamdaw retaines a politically and economically important role, and this is another reality that all civilian leaders have to live with.

There is also a gap between Myanmar people and NLD elites on the topic of the country’s economy. The NLD has highlighted national reconciliation as the first priority of its 12- point economic policy announced in late July 2016. In addition, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi has said that the “crony class” should be encouraged to cooperate for the country’s business to meet “the global business practice.” She has also observed that Myanmar’s success is the world’s success. But the Myanmar people have different views of the cronies and want to see tangible results immediately. The only advantage is that the NLD government has large international support for reinvigorating the economy However, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi has also frankly admitted that the economy has not progress that fast..37

If the leaders and people of Myanmar are aware of the failure of the previous parliamentary democracy mentioned earlier, the goal of democratization is within reach. If Myanmar’s civil and military leadership can deal with each other in a manner that is free from hate speech, free from low trust, and free from factionalism, there is every possibility that the dream of Myanmar people having good income, a private car and owning a house will come true at last.

About the author:
* Lin Htet Aung is Visiting Fellow at ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute.

Source:
This article was published by ISEAS as ISEAS Perspective 2016 65 (PDF)

Notes:
1 Three key messages for NLD election platform: Time for Change, Change for Real and Vote for NLD
2“ႏုိငံေတာ္၏အတိုင္ပင္ခံပုဂိၢဳလ္ႏွင့္ စီးပြားေရးလုပ္ငန္းရွင္မ်ား၊ ဖံြျဖိ ုးမွဳမိတ္ဖက္မ်ား
ေတြ ့ဆုံပြဲအခမ္းအနား”၊ ေၾကးမ၊ုံ ေအာက္တိုဘာ ၂၃၊ ၂၀၁၆ ။ “Meeting with entrepreneurs and developers”, Kyaemon, October 23, 2016. Remarks by Kyi at a meeting with entrepreneurs on the sidelines of the Myanmar Entrepreneurship Summit held at Naypyitaw on 22 October 2016, and reported in the Kyaemon Myanmar edition of 23 October 2016.
Scholars have doubted the Myanmar people’s understanding of democracy at that time.
4 Most people may not argue about different kinds of democracy. President U Htin Kyaw’s first
speech however stressed a “federal democratic union”, ဖက္ဒရယ္ ဒီမိုကေရတစ္ ျပည္ေထာင္စု
which is new term introduced by the NLD government and stressed as 7-point guide lines announced at an anniversary of Nationwide Ceasefire Agreements (NCA) on 15 October 2016 by State Counsellor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. http://www.pre sident-office.gov.mm/zg/ ( accessed on October 11, 2016 ) and http://www.statecounsellor.gov.mm/zg/node/338 ( accessed on October 21, 2016 )
5 (a) An address by State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi of Myanmar, Asia Society, September 21,
2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5Wbda6Z_jc ( accessed on September 23, 2016 ) (b) The State Counsellor’s Office Website home page displays the sentence, “This is just the beginning of the road. Not the end.” http://www.statecounsellor.gov.mm/zg/ ( accessed on September 29, 2016 )
6 : At the time, Myanmar had one of the top GDP in Southeast Asia.
7 ၀င္းတင့္ထြန္း။ အေမွာင္ၾကားကျမန္မာျပည္(အနီးေခတ္ဗမာျပည္ႏိုင္ငံေရးလႈပ္ရွားမႈသမိုင္းအက်ဥ္း
၁၉၄၈-၂၀၀၀)။ လူ ့ေဘာင္သစ္ဒီမုိကရက္ပါတီ၊ ၂၀၀၇၊ စာ ၁၄၃ ။ Win Tint Tun, Burma in Dark, Lu Baung Tit Democrat Party, 2007, p. 143.
8 Dr. Maung, Maung, Myanmar Politics and U Ne Win, Third Printing, Yangon, Thu Yi Ya
Sar Pe, 2014, p. 289.
9 (a) ေက်ာ၀္ င္း။ ျမန္မာ့နိုင္ငံေရးေလ့လာဆန္းစစ္ခ်က္ [၁၉၄၈-၁၉၈၈] ။ Plastic Rainbow Publishing ၊ ရန္ကုန္၊ ၂၀၁၂၊ စာ- ၁၂၀။ Kyaw Win: Myanma Naing Ngan Yae Sit Tan 1948-1988 (Case
Study of Myanma Politics, (1948-1988), Plastic Rainbow book Publication, July 2012, Yangon , p. 120
(b) Win Tint Tun: Burma in Dark, pp. 163-165. 10 Ibidpp.297-298.
11 (a) Ibid pp. 248-249.
(b) Tatmadaw run Myanmar Economic Holdings can be linked to BEDC.
2 Tatmadaw History, Vol. IV. , 1948-1962, War History Museum , Tatmadaw Archives, 1996, p. 106 တပ္မေတာ္သမုိင္း၊ စတုတၳတြ၊ဲ ၁၉၄၈-၁၉၆၂၊ စစ္သမုိင္းျပတုိက္ ႏငွ ့္ တပ္မေတာ္ေမာ္ကြန္းတုိက္ မူွးရံုး၊ ၁၉၉၆၊ စာ ၁၀၆
13 Win Tint Tun: Burma in Dark, p.258.
14 ၁၉၅၈-၁၉၆၂ ျမန္မာ့ႏိုင္ငံေရး (ပထမတြဲ) ၊ ရန္ကုန္၊ တကၠသိုလ္မ်ားပုံႏိွပ္တိုက္၊ ၁၉၉၁၊ စာ- ၁၀၄။
1958-1962 Myanmar Politics, Vol. I. , Yangon, Universities Publishing, 1991, p.104
15 ဦးသုေ၀၊ ပါလီမန္ဒီမိုကေရစီႏွင့္ကြ်န္ေတာ္၊ ရန္ကုန္၊ လြင္ဦးစာေပ၊၂၀၁၂၊ စာ- ၁၄၈။ U Thu Wai,
Kyun daw hnit Parliamentary Democracy (Me and Parliamentary Democracy), Yangon, Lwin U Publishing, 2012, p. 148.
16 1958-1962 Myanmar Politics, Vol. 1. , Yangon, Universities Publishing, 1991, pp.99-104. 17 Former US Ambassador to Myanmar have enjoyed to talk about his experience on 2015 Election Day when he encountered Myanmar people who excited for their purple fingers after they had cast votes to NLD. “The United States and Myanmar: Next Steps,” CSIS, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZ_PwYIefvI (accessed on September 15, 2016 )
18 For 100 day plans/projects launched by new government, some ministries understood as plans while some figured out as projects. Some had difficulty to carry out, for example, MOFA.
19 (a) To draw attention, Myanmar civil servants tried to add the outcomes of 100-day projects on paper.
(b) ဒီလွိုင္းဂ်ာနယ္၊ ၁၀ ေအာက္တိုဘာ ၂၀၁၆။ D-Wave Journal, October 10, 2016,
https://www.scribd.com/document/327117816/D-Wave-Journal-Vol-5-No-38-pdf , ( accessed October 12, 2016 ).
20 (a) An address by State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi of Myanmar, Asia Society, September 21, 2016.
(b) Chief-minister U Phyo Min Thein admitted less capacity of NLD appointed administration staffs although he pointed out the team is good at team work, transparency, and no corruption. “Interview with U Phyo Min Thein ( Part I )” by Ko Ko ( Set Hmu Tatkkatho ) , Live Broadcasting, Skynet Up-to-date Channel, October 19, 2016.
21 Pyae Thet Phyo, “NLD pledges not to axe bureaucrats,” Myanmar Times, December 21, 2015. http://www.mmtimes.com/index.php/national-news/nay-pyi-taw/18218-nld-pledges-not-to-axe- bureaucrats.html (accessed on September 29, 2016).
22 Even people who have close relations with NLD members had been suspected under the previous successive military governments.
23 (a) Personal Interview with an officer, President Office. October 11, 2016.
(b) Daw Aung Suu Kyi however admitted that only ministers’ level are clean, other staffs
remain unchanged. “Meeting with entrepreneurs and developers”, Kyaemon, October 23, 2016
24 (a) During NLD campaigns for 2015 elections, State Counsellor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi told as
NLD slogan: Vote NLD Not look NLD people. Moreover, when she had been criticized by a well- known business man about the NLD people incompetency, she asked him “do you know who’s who in the country?”
(b) It is contradict to what State Counsellor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi used to select party member which is based on “character rather than skill.” It is similar what General Ne Win used to say,
“လူေကာင္းလူေတာ္” (“Honest man first, smart man later.”).
25 “Meeting with entrepreneurs and developers”, Kyaemon, October 23, 2016.
26 Of course, NLD too have been trying not to have more splitter groups such as National Democratic Force (NDF) who joined 2010 election while NLD boycotted.
27 (a) USDP Website, http://www.usdp.org.mm/ and The Global New Light of Myanmar , August 25, 2016, http://www.globalnewlightofmyanmar.com/usdp-elects-new-chairman/
(accessed on September 15, 2016 ).
(b) ျပည္ေထာင္စုေန ့စဥ္ ၊ ၉ ေအာက္တုိဘာ ၂၀၁၆။ Pyi Htaung Su Nae Sin (Union Daily) ,
October 9, 2016, http://uniondaily.net/News/DetailView_EditorView.aspx?id=60122&path=EditorView.aspx ( accessed October 13, 2016 ).
(c ) ပါတီဥကၠဌဦးသန္းေဌးႏွင့္ ျပည္တြင္းျပည္ပမီဒီယာမ်ား ေတြ ့ဆုုံုျခင္း၊
ျပည္ေထာင္စုၾကံခိုင္ေရးႏွင့္ဖြံျဖိဳးေရးပါတီ၊ Press meeting with U Than Htay, USDP Official Website,
24 August, 2016, http://www.usdp.org.mm/ ( accessed on September 16, 2016 ).
28 အယ္ဒီတာ့အာေဘာ္၊ ျမန္မာ့အလင္းသတင္းစာ၊ ၁၉ စက္တင္ဘာ ၂၀၁၆ ။ Editor Perspective,
Myanma Alin , September 19, 2016 , http://www.moi.gov.mm/npe/?q=editor- remark/19/09/2016/id-48598 (accessed on September 19, 2016 ).
29 ေမာင္ ျမင့္ ၊ “USDP ႏွင့္ opposition mindset” The Voice ၊ ေအာက္တိုဘာ ၇ ၊ ၂၀၁၆။ Maung Myint, “USDP and Opposition Mindset,” The Voice , October 7, 2016.
30 Skynet Live Broadcasting , 12th April 2016.
31 ေၾကးမ၊ံု ေအာက္တုိဘာ ၁၆၊ ၂၀၁၆ ။ Kyaemon , October 16 , 2016.
ျမဝတီ ၊ ေအာက္တိုဘာ ၁၆၊ ၂၀၁၆ ။ Myawaddy , October 16, 2016.
32 ေက်ာ္ဝင္း၊ “ၾကိ ုတင္ထုပ္ပိုးထားေသာ အိုင္ဒီယာ ဖတ္ဇီးေလာဂ်စ္ႏွင့္ ႏိုင္ငံေရး၊” The Voice ၊ ေအာက္တိုဘာ ၈၊ ၂၀၁၆။ Kyaw Win, “ Fixed idea and Politics,” The Voice, October 8, 2016.
33 (a) ျပည္ေထာင္စုေန ့စဥ္ ၊ ၂၈ စက္တင္ဘာ၊၂၀၁၆။ Pyi Htaung Su Nae Sin (Union Daily)
September 28, 2016,
http://uniondaily.net/News/DetailView_EditorView.aspx?id=59312&path=EditorView.aspx
(accessed on September 28, 2016 ).
(b) It is interesting to learn while USDP emphasized about this, Tatmadaw issued paper Myawaddy remained silence.
34 Unlike NLD government beginning days, State Counsellor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi finally appreciated U Thein Sein administration and people who devoted for NCA on its first anniversary
event. ျမဝတီေန ့စဥ၊္ ၁၆ ေအာက္တိုဘာ ၂၀၁၆ ။ Myawaddy , October 16, 2016 http://myawady- myawady.blogspot.sg/2016/09/blog-post_13.html ( accessed October 16, 2016 ).
35 အကိုၾကီး၊ ညီေလး Brotherhood sprit or senior-junior relations, trained in their respective military schools, eventually help when they need to work together under different capacities.
36 Interview with U Tin Aye, former Chairman of UEC, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0QTp63yTtY (accessed on September 28, 2016 ).
37 Remarks in Myanmar language by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi at a meeting with entrepreneurs on the sidelines of the Myanmar Entrepreneurship Summit held at Naypyitaw on 22 October 2016, and reported in the Kyaemon Myanmar edition of 23 October 2016.

By Terri Moon Cronk

US Defense Secretary Ash Carter and Afghan President Ashraf Ghani reaffirmed their strong strategic partnership and common vision for a secure and prosperous Afghanistan during a meeting in the country’s capital of Kabul.

In a joint press conference, the two leaders discussed their meeting — one of the secretary’s many stops on his around-the-world trip to visit and thank U.S. troops during the holiday season.

Ghani has been a valued U.S. partner, Carter said, telling the Afghanistan president, “I want to thank you again for your continued leadership, your resolve, for your friendship … throughout your time as president.”

Ghana made a deep impression on the Pentagon when he visited to honor U.S. service members’ sacrifices in Afghanistan, Carter said, adding, “We won’t … we can’t forget that.”

The U.S. and its coalition partners continue to support Afghan forces, Carter said. He noted that the U.S.-Afghan strategic partnership demonstrates to the world that America is, and will remain, committed to a sovereign and secure Afghanistan.

Year of Successes

In the past year, the secretary said, Afghan security forces have assumed the lead for securing their country, and were put to the test. And despite great sacrifices, they passed the test, he said.

“They demonstrated their growing capabilities and resilience, and they denied the Taliban its own stated goal of seizing a major population center. That reflects the progress Afghan forces have made with the help of the United States and our NATO partners,” Carter noted.

Reflecting upon America’s 15 years in the country after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Carter highlighted three important decisions the United States has made this year that will “continue to define the U.S. commitment in Afghanistan.”

— President Barack Obama gave expanded authorities to U.S. forces to proactively assist and enable its Afghan partners in operations that have strategic effects;

— The plan was modified to retain some 8,400 U.S. troops during 2017 in Afghanistan, compared to the original 5,500; and

— The United States will continue to maintain its financial commitment to the Afghan National Defense and the country’s security forces through 2020.

Commitments to Afghanistan

NATO has committed to continuing the Resolute Support mission, the secretary said, adding that combined international community pledges to maintain Afghan security forces, including from the U.S., total about $5 billion per year thru 2020.

“These robust American commitments … in forces and finances will ensure that not only can we continue supporting our Afghan partner, but [we can] also continue our counterterrorism mission well into the future to ensure no terrorist group can seek safe havens such that it can threaten the stability of Afghanistan, of the U.S. homeland or the coalition,” Carter said.

Alongside its Afghan partners, the United States recently conducted two large-scale operations against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, the secretary said, killing its top leader in the country, and significantly degrading its capabilities in Afghanistan. The United States also struck remnants of al-Qaida in Afghanistan, killing its top plotter, he added

U.S. Troops’ Sacrifices

“Many of the men and women of the Defense Department have given their all, and so many years of their lives, here in Afghanistan,” the secretary said. “Many have given life itself, including three service members and two contractors in last month’s suicide attack at Bagram. Today and every day, I join President Ghani in remembering those we’ve lost in the last decade and a half in the United States and Afghanistan.”

As we remember the fallen, we’ll honor their memory by ensuring the U.S.-Afghan strategic partnership is strong and enduring, Carter said, “and by remaining firm in our resolve to secure a brighter future for all Afghans and a better world for all our children.”

Did you know you can “taste” garlic with your feet?

Or that chocolate can instantly dissolve that wad of gum in your mouth? Or that nose grease can get rid of the foam on a badly poured beer in seconds?

This week, Reactions explains these three offbeat food-chemistry tricks.

In the name of science, readers are encouraged to play with their food with these do-it-yourself experiments.

Check out the videos here: http://bit.ly/WeirdFoodTricks.

Breast cancer mortality rates continue to decline in many nations, but a review of mortality trends in 47 countries around the world indicates some significant disparities, particularly in South Korea and some Latin American nations, according to results presented at the 2016 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, held Dec. 6-10.

“Breast cancer is by far the primary cancer site in women and, worldwide, represents a quarter of all cancers in women,” said the study’s lead author, Cécile Pizot, MSc, at the International Prevention Research Institute in Lyon, France. “Comparing mortality trends between countries helps identify which health care systems have been the most efficient at reducing breast cancer mortality.”

In this study, Pizot and colleagues extracted information on breast cancer deaths from the World Health Organization database and calculated mortality rates over the years 1987-2013, stratifying results according to age groups.

Overall, breast cancer mortality declined in 39 out of 47 countries, including the United States and most developed European nations. England and Wales had the sharpest drop in mortality, with a 46 percent decline. Pizot said this trend was to be expected, due to advances in detection and treatment over the past few decades.

Latin American nations experienced scattered increases in mortality; for example, Brazil and Colombia saw mortality rates increase in women of all age groups, while in Argentina and Chile mortality rates decreased in all women.

South Korea had the most dramatic increase in breast cancer mortality, with an 83 percent increase overall and higher mortality in every age group. However, the breast cancer mortality rate is still lower than the rate in the United States (5.3 per 100,000 women in South Korea compared with 14 per 100,000 women in the United States in the 2011-2013 period).

“South Korea has experienced major societal changes since the 1950s and quickly evolved from an agricultural, developing country to a highly industrialized and Westernized country,” Pizot said. “Such quick changes might explain the considerable shift in cancer mortality.”