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Pakistan blames Afghanistan for a spate of terrorist attacks - The Economist
BEIJING
China's Defense Ministry on Thursday dismissed reports Chinese military vehicles were patrolling inside Afghanistan, saying the two countries were only carrying out counter-terrorism operations along their common border.
This month, the Central Asia-Caucasus Analyst think tank said in a report on its website that Chinese troops were on Afghan soil conducting joint patrols with their Afghan counterparts. That followed a similar report in an Indian media outlet in November.
Defense Ministry spokesman Ren Guoqiang said Chinese public security departments had counter-terrorism cooperation along the China-Afghanistan border.
"This is law enforcement bodies from China and Afghanistan, in accordance with a bilateral agreement on strengthening border law enforcement, conducting cooperation along the border so as to jointly carry out counter-terrorism and to fight against cross-border crime," Ren told a monthly news briefing.
"Reports in foreign media of Chinese military vehicles patrolling inside Afghanistan do not accord with the facts," he added, largely repeating a similar ministry statement from November.
China and Afghanistan share a 76-km (50 mile) stretch of border in a remote, mountainous corner of central Asia.
China has long been concerned that instability in Afghanistan could spill over into the violence-prone Xinjiang region in china's far west, home to the Muslim Uighur people, where hundreds of people have died in recent years in unrest blamed by China on Islamist militants.
China has also worked with Pakistan and the United States to broker peace talks to end Afghanistan's Taliban insurgency that has raged there for 15 years.
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China Again Dismisses Reports of Military Patrols in Afghanistan - Voice of America
BBC News | Said Jamal from Afghanistan on cusp of Castleford Tigers spot BBC News A boy who fled war-torn Afghanistan after his father was killed by the Taliban is on the cusp of a professional rugby league career. Said Jamal, 15, arrived in the UK and settled in Rotherham, South Yorkshire about four years ago. He played school ... |
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Said Jamal from Afghanistan on cusp of Castleford Tigers spot - BBC News
Progress has been excruciatingly slow but the governments involved remain optimistic.
The Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India gas pipeline (TAPI) is a grand idea to bring gas from Turkmenistan which has ample supply to South Asia which has immense demand. In between is Afghanistan, a war-torn country which stands to make millions in transit fees should the project ever be realized.
Recently, as Tolo Newsreported, the Afghan Gas Enterprise and ILF, an international engineering consulting firm, settled an agreement for the Afghan legs engineering design. At a signing ceremony attended by Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and other high-ranking officials, acting mines minister, Ghezal Habibyar said the project would have two phases which would take about four years to complete.
The first phase of the project which includes the security of the project, agreements, design, social and environmental study, demining, a survey of the pipelines route and expropriation will be completed in one year, he said. The construction would presumably take the other three years to complete putting operation of the pipeline somewhere past 2021. That is if the deadlines arent extended and that seems like a very real possibility, given that the projects long history is short on met deadlines.
The 1,735 kilometer pipeline, estimated to cost upwards of $10 billion, is planned to carry 33 billion cubic meters (bcm) of gas annually from the Galkynysh field in Turkmenistan to markets in Pakistan and India.
Afghanistan stands to make $400 million annually from the pipeline. According to a late 2015 Integrity Watch Afghanistan report, the countrys national budget for 2016 was set at $7.331 billion. Since 2001, foreign aid has supplied about 70 percent of the annual Afghan budget. An extra $400 million in revenue would be much appreciated in Kabuls coffers.
Habibyar said at the ceremony, The pipeline will change Afghanistan into a transit hub for Central Asia. It will be an important economic corridor for Afghanistan because other projects like a power transmission project, a railway project, industrial parts and an optic fiber project will be built along the TAPI pipeline route.
Optimism has always surrounded TAPI, at least on the part of the governments involved. Turkmenistan is endlessly hopeful about the project, despite murky funding schemes and little evidence of actual on-the-ground progress. In December 2015, Turkmenistan broke ground on the pipelines construction, or so the state claimed. Pakistani media have carried reports recently that the country will begin its own work this month on design surveys and feasibility studies.
A major concern regarding the Afghan leg of the pipeline has been security. While only time will truly tell, its worth mentioning that in December the Taliban pledged to project infrastructure projects, like TAPI, in the country. The argument could be made that the Taliban which still harbors dreams of once again running the country is sincere in wanting these projects to proceed. If the Taliban find themselves in power in Kabul once again, they too will relish the extra $400 million.
The ADB last Spring said the project was doable.
A doability verdict and effusive government optimism are not completely worthless, but they arent sufficient to convince the projects skeptics (myself, admittedly, among them). With Afghanistan and Pakistan just now beginning serious feasibility and design studies, not to mention the onerous task of demining and maintaining enough security to allow for construction, talk of deadlines is dealing with meaningless numbers.
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Afghanistan Shouldn't Start Counting TAPI Revenue Just Yet - The Diplomat
Germany has sent home another batch of Afghan asylum-seekers denied haven as a plane carrying about 50 people left the city of Munich on Wednesday.
It was the third such flight since late last year, drawing protests from Amnesty International and left-wing opposition parties.
Germany deported a record 80,000 migrants denied asylum last year and officials have said that figure will rise in 2017, as Chancellor Angela Merkel seeks to win back conservative voters before elections in September.
The European Union's largest economy has taken in more than 1 million migrants in the past 18 months, most of them fleeing war in Syria. But it has argued that it can safely repatriate people to Kabul and other parts of Afghanistan, where German troops are part of NATO forces seeking to create stability.
Merkel, who is running for re-election in September, is facing fallout from those opposed to her decision in 2015 to open German borders to refugees.
Her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party has been pushing to deport more migrants whose applications have failed or foreigners who have committed crimes, as a way to placate the opposition.
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Germany Returns More Rejected Asylum-seekers to Afghanistan - Voice of America