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Afghans walk with camels on a road near the border with Pakistan. Photograph: Goran Tomasevic/Reuters

Pakistan and Afghanistan plan to use Google Maps to help settle a border dispute that led to deadly clashes last week, officials from both sides have said.

At least eight civilians were killed on both sides in fighting that began when a Pakistani census team accompanied by soldiers visited disputed villages along the southern border on Friday.

Pakistan inherited its 1,500-mile border with its western neighbour when it gained independence from Britain in 1947, but Afghanistan has never formally recognised it.

Official Afghan maps reflect the so-called Durand Line, but many nationalists believe the true border lies at the river Indus that runs though Pakistan and gave India its name.

Officials from the geological survey departments of the two countries will conduct a survey, and they will also make use of Google Maps, said a senior Pakistani security source in Islamabad who requested anonymity.

Abdul Razeq, the police chief of Kandahar province, southern Afghanistan, said: After negotiations, both sides have agreed that a geological survey should be conducted. Technical teams of both countries will use GPS and Google Maps as well as other means to get the answer.

Google complies with certain countries requirements to show borders in line with national demands. For instance, its Indian site shows the entirety of disputed Kashmir as controlled by India. In Pakistan, however, the site shows the internationally recognised de facto border, the Line of Control, marked with a dotted line to denote it is disputed.

In 2010 Google was embroiled in a dispute that prompted Nicaragua and Costa Rica to dispatch troops and armed police to their joint border.

A Nicaraguan commander cited Googles version of the border map in an interview with the Costa Rican newspaper La Nacin to justify a raid on a disputed area of Costa Rica. Google later said it had made a mistake and corrected its map to reflect one sanctioned by the US state department.

Last year Pakistan began trying to harden the traditionally soft border with Afghanistan through trenching and fencing, but its efforts were met with hostility from Kabul.

Ethnic Pashtuns living in the region have traditionally paid little heed to the border. Villages straddling the frontier have mosques and houses with one door in Pakistan and another in Afghanistan.

On Sunday Pakistani forces elevated their rhetoric when they said they had killed more than 50 soldiers in last weeks border clashes a claim quickly rejected by Kabul, which said it lost two soldiers.

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Google Maps to help settle Afghanistan-Pakistan border dispute - The Guardian

A National Guard medic and a pilot have been honored for their actions on a daring medevac mission in Afghanistan, where they quickly extracted wounded warriors and a dog while nearby friendly forces engaged enemy in a firefight. Chief Warrant Officer 2 Bryan Herget and Staff Sgt. Derrick Perkins received the Dustoff Associations Rescue of the Year award on Friday, May 5,at a ceremony at the Army Aviation Support Facility in Cheyenne, Wyoming, according to a release from the Wyoming National Guard.

Both of them had been deployed for less than a month when they flew the mission.

On Dec. 4, 2015, Herget and Perkins loaded a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter fromCharlie Company, 5-159th Aviation Regiment,fortheir first medevac mission of the tour. The two were part of a four-man crew that would meet up with a second Black Hawk helicopter responding, according to the release.

Lifting off within minutes of hearing the medevac request, they learned eight casualties were on the ground, along with a wounded dog from the handler team, and three patients needed urgent care.

As the crew approached the landing zone, they got the news that near the landing zone enemies and friendly troops were engaged in a firefight.

The wounded had been hurt in an IED blast.

The crew decided it was too risky to do the typical fly-over at the site before landing. They decided to take a quick and direct approach to try to avoid the enemy, Herget said in the release.

After landing, Perkins directed those who could walk to his Black Hawk, and sent the more seriously wounded to the lead aircraft, We took on five, a dog, and an escort from the ground forces, Perkins said in the release.

Six minutes after landing, they lifted off, and "the lead aircraft pulled all the power it had," Herget said.

They headed towards Kandahar Airfield and the military combat hospital going directly over bad spots, Perkins said.

At the airfield, they helped unload and transfer the wounded. Medical personnel said later that the crew's quick actions saved lives that day, according to the release.

After the mission, Herget and Perkins got to work resupplying their helicopter, without thinking what they had just done. It was the last thing you think of when youre doing your job, Perkins said.

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National Guard pilot, medic honored for Afghanistan medevac mission - ArmyTimes.com

In mid-November, International Criminal Court prosecutor Fatou Bensouda announced that her office would make a decision in the very near future on whether to launch a full investigation in Afghanistan. That statement meshed with my own reporting that prosecutors office had finally chosen to move ahead.

For more than a decade, the ICC has maintained a preliminary examination of various alleged crimes in that country, mostly by the Taliban but also allegations of torture by U.S. personnel. In its latest update on the examination (published as Bensouda announced the imminency of a decision), the prosecutors office even expanded the enquiry into U.S. activities to cover potential torture at black sites in Lithuania, Poland, and Romania.

But we are now more than six months from Bensoudas declaration, and there are no signs that the prosecutor will pull the trigger any time soon. So what happened? I checked in recently with Bensoudas deputy, the Canadian lawyer James Stewart, and he communicated the following:

Our statement in last Novembers [preliminary examination] activities report that a final decision on whether to seek judicial authorisation to open an investigation was imminent was accurate at that time (para. 230 of the activities report), but we also said in the report that the issue of admissibility of potential cases would be subject to further information that could be provided by the relevant national authorities in the course of the PE [and, we added, or any subsequent investigation] (para. 214).

We also noted the failure up to that time of the Government of Afghanistan to provide us with any information on national proceedings (paras. 217 and 226).

We stated as well that we were seeking to obtain further clarification on the scope of relevant preliminary reviews and investigations in the US before finalising a determination of admissibility of potential cases (para. 222).

Reading between these lines, the prosecutors office has a relatively simple, complementarity-based explanation for the delay: Bensoudas signal that the court was ready to leap into Afghanistan prompted scurrying in Washington and Kabul to provide additional information on their domestic processes and (perhaps) convince the court that no investigation was needed, at least of their activities.

Assessing the validity of the decision to delay is hard without knowing what new information has been provided. From the U.S. side, its tough to imagine that the Trump administration has provided compelling evidence that it is examining U.S. torture policies at anything like the systemic level that the prosecutor seems to want. The Afghan side is murkier. There are indications that Afghanistan has draft legislation on ICC crimes and may be considering new moves, but an Afghan civil society delegation that visited the court in April (facilitated by the human rights group FIDH) saw little progress on accountability.

Its tempting (if entirely speculative) to wonder if Trumps ascendancy has prompted some rethinking in the prosecutors office about the suitability of this moment for picking a fight with Washingtonand a fight would certainly result from the prosecutors first ever investigation of American conduct. There may also be more mundane budget and logistical issues at work. Moving to a full investigation requires substantial new investments of personnel and resources.

Whatever the factors influencing the prosecutor, the ongoing dance on the Afghanistan examination is a reminder that complementarity analyses have become a vital source of flexibility for the court. The prosecutor has very ample discretion about whether and when to move from a preliminary examination to a full investigation, and complementarity has in many contexts become the focal point for that discretion.

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Will the ICC Launch a Full Investigation in Afghanistan? - Lawfare (blog)

The Non-Choice in Iran Wall Street Journal (subscription) Iranian voters head to the polls later this month to elect their next president, without much of a choice. The contest is shaping up as a race between several Islamic hard-liners and one hard-liner whom the Western media prefer to cast as a moderate.

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The Non-Choice in Iran - Wall Street Journal (subscription)

This investment, should it be completed, represents an opportunity to capitalise on the continued strong growth expected in the Iranian broadband market, with an initial focus on eight of the main cities, said MTN.

Iranian Net has clinched a licence to build and operate an optical data transmission network and a fibre-optic access network across Iran. The deal is still subject to the conclusion of final transaction agreements.

But MTN has previously struggled to repatriate funds from the country, with MTN Irancell paying out only five years worth of dividends amounting to 468m earlier in 2017. The Iranian subsidiary also repaid a 425m loan to MTN.

The cash-repatriation problems have eased significantly [after] the easing of sanctions on Iran, said Peter Takaendesa, portfolio manager at Mergence Investment Managers. There is always a risk of geopolitical events affecting Iran again, so MTN needs to balance that risk with the significant growth [in] the Iranian market.

Consumers in Iran offered significant growth potential in the long term, supported by a population of 80-million people, Takaendesa said. MTN Iran reported 77% mobile data revenue growth for the quarter ended March 2017, he said.

MTN investor relations head Nik Kershaw said the data growth was driven by improved 3G and 4G penetration. Iran is our highest market around 3G or smartphone penetration We have seen a very strong performance around that.

The group reported 48-million subscribers in Iran, up 1% on the previous quarter.

Telecoms companies globally are moving more towards offering converged fixed and mobile connectivity services, so the proposed transaction would play into that theme if concluded as proposed, said Takaendesa.

Converged services would help MTN capture expected strong growth in data consumption in consumer and corporate markets, he said. While corporate customers were early adopters of fibre networks, the consumer market was increasingly doing so for home use.

Wireless network operators also require fibre networks to link up their base stations to provide faster wireless data services.

There are therefore several ways the Iranian Net transaction could complement MTNs existing mobile offering, said Takaendesa.

Originally posted here:
MTN deal to grow Iran presence - Business Day (registration)