Posts published in “Day: March 3, 2016”

Pakistan’s Foreign Affairs Adviser Sartaj Aziz has admitted that Islamabad has influence on the Afghan Taliban leaders based Pakistan and that the country could use certain leverages to bring the Taliban leaders to negotiations table with the Afghan government. Speaking at an event organised by the Council on Foreign Relations, Aziz said the leadership of the group is based in Pakistan along with their families who are using certain facilities, including health centers in the…

The Pakistani Chief of Army Staff General Raheel Sharif met with President Mohammad Ashraf Ghani during a brief visit to capital Kabul. A spokesman for Inter Services Public Relations (ISPR), the media wing of the Pakistani military, General Asim Bajwa, said, Gen. Sharif had a brief stop over at Kabul to meet with the Afghan leadership, apart from attending the change of command ceremony of Resolute Support (RS) mission and US forces for Afghanistan. Gen.…

RAWALPINDI: Chief of the Army Staff (COAS) General Raheel Sharif has asked the Afghan government to stop the entry of terrorists fleeing to Afghanistan due to the ongoing military operation in the Shawal Valley of North Waziristan. General Raheel on his way back from Tajikistan had a brief stopover in Kabul on Wednesday and attended the change of command ceremony of the Resolute Support Mission in Kabul. The COAS, after attending the change of command…

The former Afghan President Hamid Karzai hints at Pakistan following a coordinated attack on Indian consulate in eastern Nangarhar province of Afghanistan, saying the attack is part of a trend of such attacks launched from Pakistan. Karzai is currently in India, participating the Raisina Dialogue in New Delhi. “They are simply attacking India’s presence in Afghanistan, whenever they get the opportunity,” Karzai told The Hindu during an exclusive interview. He said “The whole spectrum of…

WASHINGTON/ISLAMABAD: Sartaj Aziz, Adviser to the PM on Foreign Affairs, has asked India to reduce its nuclear stockpile so that Pakistan can consider reciprocation. He said India, not terrorism, is the biggest threat to the region. He underscored that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is a major deterrent, a fact that the US also recognises. Responding sharply to Secretary John Kerry’s suggestion to cut down nuclear capability, Sartaj Aziz said that it was India that was stockpiling…

BEIJING — Were the characters that read like an acrostic curse on the front page of a major Chinese newspaper the result of an anti-Communist conspiracy, or a thoughtless error? Read separately, the two headlines on Page 1 of the Shenzhen edition ofSouthern Metropolis Daily on Feb. 20 seemed innocent enough. “The party- and government-run media are a propaganda front and must be surnamed ‘party,’ ” a two-line banner headline read. It appeared one day…

(Dennis C. Blair, chairman of Sasakawa Peace Foundation USA, was commander of the U.S. Pacific Command from 1999 to 2002 and director of national intelligence from 2009 to 2010. Jeffrey W. Hornung is a fellow with Sasakawa Peace Foundation USA) China’s deployment of surface-to-air missile launchers to the largest island in the Paracels chain has led to a spike in alarmist analysis. China’s provocative act is being portrayed as a watershed indicator that it is…

NEW DELHI — The chief of the United States Pacific Command, Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr., on Wednesday proposed reviving an informal strategic coalition made up of the navies of Japan, Australia, India and the United States, an experiment that collapsed a decade ago because of diplomatic protests from China. The proposal was the latest in a series of United States overtures to India, a country wary of forming strategic alliances, to become part of…

After hunting corrupt cadres over the past three years, the Communist Party’s much-feared graft busters are switching gears to political policing. In the process, they have emerged with an authority perhaps unparalleled since ancient China. With President Xi Jinping’s blessing, the already-powerful Central Commission for Discipline Inspection is stationing inspectors in all central party and government departments, extending its reach into the top echelons of China’s bureaucracy. In addition to targeting graft and waste, the…

Trying to lure him into the Islamic State group, the would-be recruiter told Pakistani journalist Hasan Abdullah, “Brother, you could be such an asset to the Ummah”— the Islamic community. Abdullah replied that he was enjoying life and had no plans to join the jihadis. “The enjoyment of this life is short-lived. You should work for the Akhira” — the Afterlife, the recruiter pressed. IS had its eye on Abdullah not because he adheres to…