LAHORE – Afghan intelligence has planned to increase its offensive operations at Durand Line, using TTP groups to engage Pakistan in an aggressive covert warfare to fail the border management arrangement, security agencies’ officials told The Nation yesterday. National Directorate of Security (NDS), the premier security service of Afghanistan, has the aid and assistance of Indian secret service, RAW, for launching covert offensive on Pakistani soil, they added. Intelligence inputs strongly suggest that NDS would…
Posts published in “Day: June 21, 2016”
KABUL: Deputy foreign minister Hekmat Khalil Karzai is to visit Islamabad today (Monday), for talks to remove differences over the Torkham border crossing issues with Pakistani officials. He would visit Pakistan based on an official invitation. After tensions escalated between Afghan border guards and Pakistani paramilitary forces at Torkham crossing, advisor to the Pakistan prime minister on foreign affairs Sartaj Aziz invited Afghan National Security Advisor Hanif Atmar and Foreign Minister Salahuddin Rabbani to pay…
ISLAMABAD: Pakistani and Afghan officials are scheduled to discuss last week’s border skirmishes today (Monday) but Islamabad is unlikely to budge on a new border management mechanism it is putting in place to ensure terrorists do not sneak in from Afghanistan. An Afghan delegation, led by Deputy Foreign Minister Hekmat Khalil Karzai, will be visiting Islamabad at the invitation of the prime minister’s foreign policy adviser Sartaj Aziz to discuss a nearly week-long standoff at…
WASHINGTON – A number of Afghan senators on Sunday have declared that the United States is not honest in U.S.–Afghanistan Strategic Partnership Agreement. The senators say if US is committed to cooperate with the Afghan government, it should prevent Pakistan’s interventions in Afghanistan’s internal affairs. “The United States has a strategic partnership agreement with Afghanistan. One of the articles of the agreement is that the US will press any country which violate the privacy and…
WASHINGTON: The United States has ruled out mediating between Pakistan and Afghanistan, saying that it wants the neighbouring countries to work through their differences bilaterally. At a Thursday afternoon news briefing, State Department spokesman John Kirby said that Pakistan and Afghanistan were quite capable of doing so because they had resolved their differences in the past as well. Weeks of tensions on the Torkham border crossing led to clashes recently between Pakistani and Afghan troops,…
ISLAMABAD: Adviser to Prime Minister on Foreign Affairs Sartaj Aziz on Sunday said the United States wants Pakistan to act against the Afghan Taliban but “Pakistan cannot fight Afghanistan’s war on its own soil”. In an interview with the state-owned Pakistan Television (PTV), Aziz maintained that US authorities have the “misconception” that Pakistan is backing certain Taliban groups or the Haqqani network, while in reality Pakistan has effectively demolished their whole infrastructure during Operation Zarb-i-Azb.…
Karachi: Hindu community leaders have expressed their anger over shopkeepers in different town and cities of Sindh selling shoes inscribed with symbol of ‘Om’, a sacred syllable in Hinduism, and urged the authorities to take action against their sale and the manufacturer. Engineer Hotchand Karmani, the president of the Pakistan Hindu Council, a representative body of the community, said making shoes with ‘Om’ inscribed on them was extremely disrespectful. “This is not for the first…
A slow-motion tragedy is occurring in Hong Kong, where China is squeezing the freedoms it promised to allow the city for 50 years. The latest evidence comes from a bookseller who has bravely described eight months under the screws of China’s security services. Back in Hong Kong last week, Lam Wing Kee said 11 men seized him on Oct. 24 as he tried to visit his girlfriend in Shenzhen, China. He was blindfolded and dispatched…
The touching story of a down-on-her-luck mother who shoplifted small gifts for her sick child prompted thousands of people to donate money online, but also highlighted the flaws in China’s social security system. On May 31, Liu Jinxia, a 36-year-old single mother with two daughters from a village in Dezhou, East China’s Shandong Province, was caught stealing a chicken drumstick and a children’s book from a supermarket in Nanjing, capital of East China’s Jiangsu Province.…
There have been recurring doubts about the reliability of China’s government statistics, with the latest suspicion raised by a Chinese economist who blamed the country’s top statistical bureau for significantly contributing to greatly divergent views surrounding the country’s macroeconomic situation. In fairness, attempts to take the overall temperature of the Chinese economy are plagued by data discrepancies. While the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) may have unfairly borne the brunt of the blame, it is…
BEIJING — The latest was Kenya. Before that: Lesotho, Vanuatu and Afghanistan. The list of countries backing Beijing’s stance in the South China Sea just keeps growing — China’s Foreign Ministry boasted last week that nearly 60 had swung behind the country’s rejection of international arbitration in a case brought by the Philippines. The numbers are questionable, and the idea of gaining the support of distant, landlocked Niger in a dispute about the South China…