Mediaboss Marketing

BySayed Yahya Akhlaqi

Afghanistan, given its ancient history and strategic and geopolitical location in the heart of Asia and on the ancient Silk Route can play a pivotal role in the economic development of the region. Afghanistan with its unique location is able to act as a linking ring of Southern and Northern Asia, Middle East and Western Asia and can play its extraordinary role in regions economic development and stability.

Considering the rich energy resources of Central Asian countries, and an acute need for it in the South Asian countries, Afghanistan can serve as a link for this connectivity. Without a doubt facilitating transit and access by Central Asian countries to South Asian Markets and vice versa can very much help in the economic growth and prosperity of the region. On one hand, it is important to transport natural gas, fuel and electricity from countries located northwards of Afghanistan to her southern neighboring countries like India for the development of domestic production and industrial development. And on the other hand, for the products of these South Asian countries can be exported to Central Asian countries, particularly those products from India such as tea, coffee and equipment required for upgradation and modernization of the existing industrial infrastructure and in the agricultural sector as well.

When Afghanistan acquires the capacity to build a port and the road via Vakhan Valley to Xinjiang province of China, then Afghanistan would get not only better transit advantages but this route would serve as a shortest path for export of products of PRC to West Asian countries by road, and on the other hand China for increase of its productions would need more raw materials and the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan could be the source for supply of those materials because this country as a linking land bridge which offers unique opportunities for the economic development of the region.

Afghanistan is one of those countries which possesses especial geographical location with special transit advantage, and can desirably use this advantage through the extension of transport, transit, communication networks and establishment of a reliable transportation system to enhance economic benefits. Chabahar can be a good example of transit transport communication between Afghanistan and India as well as other Asian and African countries. Chabahar allows India to side-step Pakistan, which blocks its access to Afghanistan and Central Asia.

On their part, Indians are cognisant of its strategic location and its potential for opening a route to Afghanistan and Central Asia. There have been two significant trips where the port has figured in discussions on investment and connectivity. During Prime Minister Narendra Modis trip to Tokyo last November, his Japanese counterpart, Shinzo Abe, agreed to help India with the Chabahar project. Both leaders directed their aides to hammer out a plan to fast-track the project. India wants Japanese investment and help in building the railway track between the port city and Zahedan. Both India and Japan see strategic convergence in Chabahar as it allows the landlocked countries of Central Asia to find a route away from ports that enjoy Chinese domination like Gwadar.

The presidents of Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan, during their visits to Delhi, were also promised access to this warm water port. From all standpoints Chahbahar located in the Oman Sea away from the turbulence of the Persian Sea region, has the potential to reorder old routes into new ties. Afghanistan can act as a land bridge to Eurasia including Central Asian countries. Russia and the Central Asian countries are also in need of a southern opening into South Asia. Importantly the Central Asian countries will also have access to warm water ports in the Arabian Sea.

Completion of Railway project Sangan-Khaf in Iran and its extension up to Afghanistan, the extension of the Railroad from Aqina up to Shirkhan Bandar and finally into Tajikistan, operationalization of final station of the Hairatan- Mazar-e-Sharif railroad, completion of transportation of energy which includes electricity transmission project from Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan to Pakistan via Afghanistan, operationalization of route to Chabahar port, Lapis Lazuli Route Agreement for exports and imports Afghanistan position as the hub of trade, transit and transport corridor connecting east with west, and north with south is obvious.

(Director of Transit and Trade Facilitation in Afghanistan Ministry of Commerce and Industries)

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

See the article here:
Afghanistan: Transit hub for the region - Economic Times (blog)

Army Maj. Gen. Robin Fontes on Saturday assumed the highest position of any female servicemember in Afghanistan since the war began, taking over command of Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan.

I promise to give you my full support, my best effort, my respect and my loyalty every day, Fontes told a crowd at a change-of-command ceremony. Fontestook over fromoutgoing Commander Army Maj. Gen. Richard Kaiser.

Fontes, a U.S. Military Academy graduate, has spent 12 years in the region, serving in Afghanistan multiple times, as well as in India, Pakistan and Tajikistan. She speaks three regional languages.

Army Gen. John Nicholson, commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, described Fontes as the most proficient and competent officer in the field of security assistance within the military. He said he had to fight to get her the position because she was heavily sought after in Washington.

There is no officer of any service in the United States military that has more experience in this region than Maj. Gen. Robin Fontes, Nicholson said. She is the best possible commander for this command. She will take this command to the next level.

In addition to taking control of CSTC-A, Fontes will assume the role of deputy chief of staff, security assistance for Resolute Support headquarters.CSTC-A is part of NATOs Resolute Support mission aimed at developing Afghan security forces. It provides resources and training in areas such as management and sustainability.

Before relinquishing command, Kaiser, who Nicholson described as universally respected, told Stars and Stripes that he believed his tenure as CSTC-A commander was productive.

I always hesitate to use the word success, he said. Weve had many successes, but there are many challenges that remain.

Kaisersaid establishing Afghanistans Anti-corruptionJustice Center and implementing measures to identify and prevent so-called ghost soldiers were among his biggest successes.

He saidissues regarding genderremain one of the biggestchallenges, but he believes progress will be made underFontes.

Im confident shell do a wonderful job, Kaiser said.

2017 the Stars and Stripes. Distributed byTribune Content Agency, LLC.

WATCH NEXT:

Excerpt from:
New Commander Is Highest Ranking Female Officer In Afghanistan ... - Task & Purpose

This 2009 photo released by a friend of Xiyue Wang shows Wang at his apartment in Hong Kong. Princeton University professor Stephen Kotkin, who advised Wang, defended his former student as innocent of all charges against him. Friend of Xiyue Wang/AP hide caption

Iran says it has sentenced an American graduate student to 10 years in prison for spying for U.S. and British intelligence agencies. The Princeton University student was in Iran doing research when he was arrested.

Xiyue Wang, 37, is pursuing a Ph.D. in Eurasian history, studying local government in predominantly Muslim regions during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Stephen Kotkin, Wang's advisor at Princeton, says Wang came well-prepared for an extremely ambitious thesis topic.

"He had tremendous background, life experiences, linguistic capabilities, and so he entered the program and hit the ground running and developed his interests even more," Kotkin says.

The fieldwork stage of Wang's scholarly research took him to Iran about a year ago, Kotkin says. Before he left, Wang called upon established scholars for information.

"Everything he did is normal absolutely everything he did is normal, standard practice for scholars in this region and elsewhere," Kotkin says.

When doing academic fieldwork, he says, a researcher's time is limited but the need for documentation is infinite.

"So you're hurrying, hurrying, hurrying to encompass all the documents that you can, sometimes photocopying and scanning, and then trying to bring those out for further study," he explains.

But Wang never got that opportunity. He was arrested 10 months ago. Princeton says it has been working quietly to win his release.

"He was arrested in Iran last summer, while there doing scholarly research on the administrative and cultural history of the late Qajar dynasty in connection with his Ph.D. dissertation," Princeton spokesman Daniel Day said in a statement. "Since his arrest, the university has worked with Mr. Wang's family, the U.S. government, private counsel and others to facilitate his release."

This weekend, the Mizan news agency, a mouthpiece for Iran's judiciary, broke the news of Wong's 10-year sentence.

It said Wang was accused of gathering confidential articles with the intention of delivering them to the State Department and Western academic institutions.

Alex Vatanka, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, says materials "dealing with matters going back to the 19th century would be a very different matter than, say, Iran's ongoing nuclear program."

Wong is a U.S. citizen, born in China. His arrest comes as several Iranian-Americans are already being held in jails in Iran.

Vatanka says Wang may have been caught up in a power struggle in Iran between hardliners and more the moderate government of President Hassan Rouhani. Two years ago, Rouhani signed a nuclear agreement with the U.S. and other world powers to curb Iran's nuclear capability in exchange for easing economic sanctions. Since then, Rouhani has been trying to bring in foreign investment and burnish Iran's image, Vatanka says.

"When something like this happens, it takes them back 10 steps to images of Iran that they certainly don't think are helpful for the kind of future of the country that they'd like to build," he says.

Suzanne Maloney of the Brookings Institution says these sorts of arrests and prison sentences are a persistent risk in Iran, especially for individuals traveling on their own, students and dual nationals.

"There's often a temptation to look for some kind of logic here," she says. "I think that this particular case highlights the fact that the logic is simply the paranoia of the Islamic Republic its judiciary and its security services in particular."

The State Department issued a statement saying it's aware of the reports of Wang's incarceration and is calling for the "immediate release of all U.S. citizens unjustly detained in Iran so they can return to their families."

Read the original here:
Academic Adviser Of US Student Jailed In Iran: 'Everything He Did Was Normal' - NPR

BEIRUT (Reuters) - A senior commander in Iran's Revolutionary Guards warned the United States on Monday that if it designated the group a terrorist organization and applied new sanctions its action could be perilous for U.S. forces in the region.

U.S. officials said earlier this year that President Donald Trump's administration was considering a proposal that could lead to potentially categorizing the powerful Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organization.

In Mid-June the U.S. Senate voted for new sanctions on Iran over its ballistic missile program and other activities not related to the international nuclear agreement reached with the United States and other world powers in 2015.

To become law, the legislation must pass the House of Representatives and be signed by Trump.

"Counting the Revolutionary Guards the same as terrorist groups and applying similar sanctions to the Revolutionary Guards is a big risk for America and its bases and forces deployed in the region," said Armed Forces Chief of Staff Major General Mohammad Baqeri, according to Sepah News, an official news site of the Guards.

He did not give details on what form of risk he foresaw for U.S. forces and bases.

The Revolutionary Guards are the most powerful security force in Iran, overseeing vast economic holdings worth billions of dollars and wielding huge influence in its political system.

Baqeri said on Monday that Irans missile program was defensive and would never be up for negotiation, according to Sepah News.

Three days after the U.S. Senate voted on the new sanctions, Iran fired missiles into eastern Syria, targeting bases of Islamic State which had claimed responsibility for attacks in Tehran which killed 18 people.

The Revolutionary Guards are fighting in Syria against militant groups which oppose President Bashar al-Assad.

Baqeri was also critical of recent remarks by U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis that regime change would be necessary before the United States could normalize relations with Iran.

"American officials should speak a little more wisely, thoughtfully and maturely about other countries, particularly a powerful country like Iran which has stood against all plots with strength and pride," he said, according to Sepah News.

Reporting By Babak Dehghanpisheh; Editing by Richard Balmforth

Read more from the original source:
Iran's Revolutionary Guards warn US against terrorist designation, new sanctions - Reuters

War between Israel and Iran could be "inevitable" by the end of the Syrian civil war, according to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's former national security advisor.

Iran is trying to build "an air base in Syria" and provide additional weaponry to terrorists in Lebanon in an apparent effort to threaten Israel from two directions, according to the Netanyahu ally. This fear has been brewing in U.S. and Israeli circles for years, but the Israelis think the terms of a nascent Syria ceasefire negotiated by the Trump administration, Russia and Jordan exacerbates the danger.

"Israel should take care for its strategic goal and this is to prevent the Iranians and Hezbollah from building launching pads in Syria," Yaakov Amidror, who counseled Netanyahu from 2011 to 2013, told reporters on a conference call hosted by The Israel Project. "If [the Iranians] begin to build infrastructure which might be used against Israel in Syria and will connect this land corridor into Iraq and begin to move materials from this area into Syria, that will make the war inevitable."

U.S. officials in both parties have raised the same concerns. "A permanent Iranian military base in Syria, potentially near the border with Israel or Jordan, would increase Iran's operational capacity to inflict serious damage against two of our closest allies in the region," Rep. Peter Roskam, R-Ill., and Rep. Ted Deutch, D-Fla., wrote in a May letter to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.

Netanyahu lobbied throughout the talks for Russia and the United States to keep Iran away from Israel's border and said Russian forces ought not to be trusted to police the southern Syria safe zone. But Israeli officials say their position was ignored in the final agreement.

"The agreement as it is now is very bad," an official told Haaretz. "It doesn't take almost any of Israel's security interests and it creates a disturbing reality in southern Syria. The agreement doesn't include a single explicit word about Iran, Hezbollah or the Shi'ite militias in Syria."

Russia and Iran have fought to protect Syrian President Bashar Assad for years, particularly after then-President Barack Obama declined to attack the Syrian regime in 2013 in response to Assad's use of chemical weapons. Tillerson's ceasefire negotiations may have been influenced by the Trump administration's overall determination to limit U.S. military deployments to Syria.

"They picked the best small footprint option that they could for the maximum amount of impact," House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., told the Washington Examiner in June. "Meaning: small troop numbers, heavy involvement with our partners. But in the long run, I don't know if that's going to be successful."

Nunes and other lawmakers worry the United States will succeed in defeating the Islamic State in Syria, only to see Iran gain long-term strategic benefits from its decision to partner with Russia in support of embattled Syrian President Bashar Assad. Amidror hinted that Israel might tolerate some sort of Iranian presence in Syria that didn't impinge on Israeli security, but emphasized they will use their "military capability" to "destroy "enemy forces too close to their border.

"If that will not be taken into account by the those who are making those arrangements, the Americans the Russians and others, that might lead the IDF to intervene and to destroy every attempt to build infrastructure in Syria," the retired Israeli military intelligence general said. "We will not let the Iranians and Hezbollah to be the forces which will win from the long and very brutal war in Syria and to move the focus into Israel."

Read the original:
Former Netanyahu adviser: Syria cease fire could make Israel-Iran war 'inevitable' - Washington Examiner