The Afghan national security forces killed at least 45 militants including 9 militants affiliated with the Islamic State Of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) terrorist group. The Ministry of Defense (MoD) said the militants were killed in the latest clearance operations jointly conducted by the Afghan army and security personnel from the other security institutions. According to an operational update by the Ministry of Defense (MoD), at least 18 militants were also wounded during the same…
Posts published in “Day: March 23, 2016”
The commander of the NATO-led Resolute Support and US Forces for Afghanistan General John W. Nicholson said Tuesday that the coalition forces will not abandon Afghanistan. During a visit to the restive northern Kunduz province, Gen. Nicholson, said “You may have heard that the Taliban want to take Kunduz again – they will not,” stated Nicholson. “The Taliban want you to think that your government and the Coalition will abandon you — we will not.…
The leader of a breakaway faction of the Taliban is leading his fighters in Afghanistan, his deputy said on Tuesday, contradicting three senior members of the Islamist group and denying a newspaper report that he had been detained. Three senior Taliban said that Mullah Mohammad Rasoul, who leads a faction that has rejected the authority of the Islamist movement’s leader, Mullah Mohammad Mansour, had been detained two weeks ago in Balochistan province on the border…
The writer is a retired lieutenant general of the Pakistan Army and a former federal secretary. The relationship between India and Pakistan has not come out of its precarious mode. The Indian leadership is not serious about engaging with Pakistan in a formal, institutionalised format unless there is substantial progress on the Pathankot episode. This is part of their strategy to keep pressure on Pakistan so that it deals firmly with militant groups. Although there…
ISLAMABAD – A combination of efforts by Prime Ministers Nawaz Sharif, Narendra Modi the United States has put Pakistan and India back on track for top-level dialogue to resolve the bilateral disputes. Only a few weeks earlier, it was hard to imagine the two taking the table amid declining trust levels after the January 2 Pathankot airbase attack that India blamed on elements in Pakistan. The Pathankot incident struck when the two nations were riding…
The Bihari community has been in the country for over forty years. These were the people who migrated to East Pakistan after Partition and then were left with no option but to move to Pakistan after the 1971 war because they felt unwelcome in Bangladesh for taking West Pakistan’s side. One would think that those loyal to the state would be treated with a bare minimum of respect. Instead, there are many reports of Biharis…
PESHAWAR: A convicted Indian national Hamid Nehal Ansari on Tuesday filed a writ petition in the Peshawar High Court (PHC) seeking benefit of Section 382-B of the Criminal Procedure Code to count his detention in the conviction and visitation right with the family members. Nehal Ansari was convicted by a military court on December 14, last year in Kohat on spying charges. He was then shifted to Peshawar Central Prison. The convict has a right…
SHANGHAI—Before they called a truce in 2008, a contest between China and Taiwan to capture each other’s diplomatic allies among the world’s most impoverished nations had gotten out of hand. China, wielding a larger checkbook, was aggressively poaching Taiwan’s few remaining diplomatic friends to isolate the government of then-President Chen Shui-bian, a pro-independence hothead with the Democratic Progressive Party that Beijing despises. Taiwan’s efforts to stay in the game had gone embarrassingly awry: A scandal…
JINAN – Police in East China’s Shandong province have detained 37 suspects implicated in a vaccine scandal that has shocked the nation and raised questions over vaccine safety. Shandong police announced last month that they had arrested a mother and daughter alleged to have illegally sold improperly stored or expired vaccines worth more than 570 million yuan ($88 million) across 20 provincial-level regions since 2011. Three pharmaceutical companies are being investigated by police, according to…
BEIJING — China’s consumption of coal, a major contributor to climate change and the country’s horrific air pollution, is worsening a severe water shortage in the northern part of the country, Greenpeace said in a report released Tuesday. China’s coal-fired power plants consume more water where water is scarce than plants in any other country, according to the report, which assessed global water depletion from coal use. A decades-long drought in northern China — home…
The writer is an assistant professor at NUST in Islamabad. In 2013, it was uncertain whether Iran would succumb to Western duress and give up its nuclear weapons program or continue developing a deterrent to address its security concerns in the Middle East. The situation was so critical that Israel and Saudi Arabia threatened to bomb Iran’s nuclear sites, if the international community failed to stop the Iranian program from moving forward. In this environment…