Category: Foreign Affairs

DUBAI, March 25: Dubai International Airport and its flag carrier Emirates began implementing a ban on laptops and tablets on direct flights to the US Saturday, on one of the busiest travel weekends of the year.

1.1 million people are expected to pass through the busiest international airport as the city marks UAE spring break, Dubai Airports’ senior vice president for communications Anita Mehra said.

An estimated 260,000 travellers were expected to pass through each day from Friday through Monday. Dubai International Airport expects 89 million passengers this year.

The United States announced a ban on all electronics larger than a standard smartphone on board direct flights out of eight countries across the middle East. US officials would not specify how long the ban will last, but Dubai-based Emirates told AFP that it had been instructed to enforce it until at least October 14.

Travellers using 10 airports across the Middle East and North Africa are subject to the ban.

The ban also covers all electronics sold at Dubai Duty Free, Dubai Airports CEO Paul Griffiths told local radio earlier this week.

Government-owned Emirates operates 18 flights daily to the United States out of Dubai. In an attempt to appease its customers, the airline announced it would be offering complimentary packing and shipping services at gates to enable passengers to use their electronic devices after check-in and until boarding.

Adding to the complication on Saturday, a number of flights out of Dubai and Abu Dhabi airports were delayed due to thunderstorms, including an Emirates flight to Houston.

The US ban affects nine airlines from eight countries: Turkey, Morocco, Jordan, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

Britain has also announced a parallel ban, effective Saturday, targeting all flights out of Egypt, Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and Lebanon.

Abu Dhabi, home to UAE national carrier Etihad Airways, is one of the few international airports with a US Customs and Border Protection Facility, which processes immigration and customs inspections before departure.

“All Etihad Airways guests travelling to the United States clear US Immigration and Customs at the US Preclearance facility in Terminal 3, the only one of its kind in the Middle East,” read a statement emailed to AFP.

“When guests land in the US, they arrive as domestic passengers with no requirement to queue for immigration checks again.”

The bans have come under criticism for targeting majority-Muslim countries. The US ban in particular has raised eyebrows for covering airports from which US airlines do not operate direct flights.

The United States and Britain have cited intelligence indicating passenger jets could be targeted with explosives planted in such devices.

Baghdad, March 24: The American-led military coalition in Iraq said Friday that it was investigating reports that scores of civilians — perhaps as many as 200, residents said — had been killed in recent American airstrikes in Mosul, the northern Iraqi city at the center of an offensive to drive out the Islamic State.

If confirmed, the series of airstrikes would rank among the highest civilian death tolls in an American air mission since the United States went to war in Iraq in 2003. And the reports of civilian deaths in Mosul came immediately after two recent incidents in Syria, where the coalition is also battling the Islamic State from the air, in which activists and local residents said dozens of civilians had been killed.

Taken together, the surge of reported civilian deaths raised questions about whether once-strict rules of engagement meant to minimize civilian casualties were being relaxed under the Trump administration, which has vowed to fight the Islamic State more aggressively.

American military officials insisted on Friday that the rules of engagement had not changed. They acknowledged, however, that American airstrikes in Syria and Iraq had been heavier in an effort to press the Islamic State on multiple fronts.

Col. John J. Thomas, a spokesman for the United States Central Command, said that the military was seeking to determine whether the explosion in Mosul might have been prompted by an American or coalition airstrike, or was a bomb or booby trap placed by the Islamic State.

“It’s a complicated question, and we’ve literally had people working nonstop throughout the night to understand it,” Colonel Thomas said in an interview. He said the explosion and the reasons behind it had “gotten attention at the highest level.”

As to who was responsible, he said, “at the moment, the answer is: We don’t know.”

Iraqi officers, though, say they know exactly what happened: Maj. Gen. Maan al-Saadi, a commander of the Iraqi special forces, said that the civilian deaths were a result of a coalition airstrike that his men had called in, to take out snipers on the roofs of three houses in a neighborhood called Mosul Jidideh. General Saadi said the special forces were unaware that the houses’ basements were filled with civilians.

“After the bombing we were surprised by the civilian victims,” the general said, “and I think it was a trap by ISIS to stop the bombing operations and turn public opinion against us.”

General Saadi said he had demanded that the coalition pause its air campaign to assess what happened and to take stricter measures to prevent more civilian victims. Another Iraqi special forces officer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject, said that there had been a noticeable relaxing of the coalition’s rules of engagement since President Trump took office.

Before, Iraqi officers were highly critical of the Obama administration’s rules, saying that many requests for airstrikes were denied because of the risk that civilians would be hurt. Now, the officer said, it has become much easier to call in airstrikes.

Some American military officials had also chafed at what they viewed as long and onerous White House procedures for approving strikes under the Obama administration. Mr. Trump has indicated that he is more inclined to delegate authority for launching strikes to the Pentagon and commanders in the field.

This is the second time this week that the military has opened an investigation into civilian deaths reported to have been caused by American airstrikes. On Tuesday, Central Command said it was investigating an American airstrike in Syria on March 16 that officials said killed dozens of Qaeda operatives at a meeting place that activists and local residents maintain was part of a religious complex.

Pentagon officials said that intelligence had indicated that Al Qaeda used the partly constructed community meeting hall as a gathering place and as a place to educate and indoctrinate fighters.

This is indefensibly sloppy work by the military, and as the Commander-in-Chief will not take responsibility for his actions.

But the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that 49 people had been killed in what the group described as a massacre of civilians who were undergoing religious instruction in an assembly hall and dining area for worshipers. The group has produced photos taken at the site after the strike that show a black sign outside a still-standing adjoining structure that identified it as part of the Omar ibn al-Khatab mosque.

Chris Woods, director of the observatory, a nonprofit group that monitors civilian deaths from coalition airstrikes in Syria and Iraq, said that in March alone the number of reported civilian fatalities has shot up to 1,058, from 465 in December, the last full month of the Obama administration.

“We don’t know whether that’s a reflection of the increased tempo of the campaign or whether it reflects changes in the rules of engagement,” he said. But, he added, the recent spike in numbers “does suggest something has shifted.”

American military officials said that what has shifted is that the Iraqi military, backed by the American-led coalition, is in the middle of its biggest fight so far — the battle to retake Mosul from the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL.

In particular, the campaign for West Mosul has involved block-by-block fighting in an urban environment.
“There’s been no loosening of the rules of engagement,” said Capt. Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman. “There are three major offensives going on right now, at the same time,” he said, citing the battle for West Mosul; the encirclement of Raqqa, Syria, the Islamic State’s de facto capital; and the fight for the Tabqa Dam in Syria.
Captain Davis said that the investigation was looking into whether Islamic State fighters were responsible for the explosion in Mosul, or if an airstrike set something off.

“There are other people on the battlefield, too,” he said. “It’s close quarters.”

American officials said that even the timing of the strike was still in question. Col. Joseph E. Scrocca, a spokesman for the American-led command in Baghdad, said in a statement Friday that the strike under investigation happened between March 17 and Thursday.

The civilian death toll in Mosul was already widely described as heavy on account of Islamic State snipers and bombs, and intensified urban fighting in which artillery has been used. But there have been numerous reports from witnesses, including rescue workers and residents fleeing the fighting, about bodies being buried under rubble after heavy air bombardment.

Many of the reports centered on the Mosul Jidideh neighborhood, where residents said airstrikes hit a number of houses in recent days, killing dozens, including many children.

Capt. Ahmed Nuri, a soldier with Iraq’s elite counterterrorism forces, who work closely with the American military and call in airstrikes, said on Thursday that his men, facing heavy sniper fire, helped collect five bodies from the rubble of a destroyed home. He said four of them were brothers — named Ali, Omar, Khalid and Saad — whose bodies were delivered to their grieving mother.

The mother, Captain Nuri said, identified the fifth dead body as that of an Islamic State sniper who had been firing at advancing Iraqi forces from the roof of their house.

Local officials have reacted with outrage at the latest civilian deaths, warning that they will make it more difficult to fully take the city, and will alienate civilians still in Mosul, whom the Iraqi government is counting on for assistance.

“The repeated mistakes will make the mission to liberate Mosul from Daesh harder, and will push civilians still living under Daesh to be uncooperative with the security forces,” said Abdulsattar Alhabu, the mayor of Mosul, using the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State.

Mr. Alhabu estimated that at least 200 civilians had been killed in airstrikes in recent days in Mosul.

A federal judge in Hawaii issued a nationwide order Wednesday evening blocking President Trump’s ban on travel from parts of the Muslim world, dealing a stinging blow to the White House and signaling that Mr. Trump will have to account in court for his heated rhetoric about Islam.

The ruling was the second major setback for Mr. Trump in his pursuit of a policy he has trumpeted as critical for national security. His first attempt to sharply limit travel from a handful of predominantly Muslim countries ended in a courtroom fiasco last month, when a federal court in Seattle halted it.

Mr. Trump issued a new and narrower travel ban, affecting six countries, on March 6, trying to satisfy the courts by removing some of the most contentious elements of the original version.

But in a pointed decision that repeatedly invoked Mr. Trump’s public comments, the judge, Derrick K. Watson of Federal District Court in Honolulu, wrote that a “reasonable, objective observer” would view even the new order as “issued with a purpose to disfavor a particular religion, in spite of its stated, religiously neutral purpose.”

Mr. Trump lashed out at Judge Watson during a campaign-style rally in Nashville late on Wednesday. Raising his voice to a hoarse shout, Mr. Trump accused the judge of ruling “for political reasons” and criticized the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which upheld the earlier decision against his administration and will hear any appeal to the Hawaii ruling.

“This ruling makes us look weak, which by the way we no longer are, believe me,” Mr. Trump said, to mounting cheers from a loyal crowd.

Mr. Trump even said he might reissue the initial version of the order, rather than the one blocked on Wednesday, which he described as “a watered-down version of the first one.”

After he signed the revised ban, Democratic attorneys general and nonprofit groups that work with immigrants and refugees raced back into court against Mr. Trump, alleging that his updated decree was still a thinly veiled version of the ban on Muslim migration that he had pledged to enact as a presidential candidate.

Judge Watson, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, ruled that the State of Hawaii and an individual plaintiff, Ismail Elshikh, the imam of the Muslim Association of Hawaii, had reasonable grounds to challenge the order as religious discrimination. And he concluded that allowing the travel restrictions to go into effect at midnight, as scheduled, could have caused them irreparable harm.

Judge Watson flatly rejected the government’s argument that a court would have to investigate Mr. Trump’s “veiled psyche” to deduce religious animus. He quoted extensively from the remarks by Mr. Trump that were cited in the lawsuit brought by Hawaii’s attorney general, Doug Chin.

“For instance, there is nothing ‘veiled’ about this press release,” Judge Watson wrote, quoting a Trump campaign document titled “Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”

Judge Watson singled out Mr. Elshikh, an American citizen whose Syrian mother-in-law had been pursuing a visa to enter the United States, as having an especially strong claim that the travel regulations would harm him on the basis of his religion.

“This is a great day for democracy, religious and human rights,” Mr. Elshikh, who was out of the country, said in a message relayed through Hakim Ouansafi, the chairman of the Muslim Association of Hawaii. “I am very pleased that the processing of my mother-in-law’s paperwork will not stop now but more importantly that this Muslim ban will not separate families and loved ones just because they happen to be from the six countries.”

Mr. Elshikh, who is Egyptian and previously worked in Michigan, was recruited to the Hawaii mosque more than a decade ago, Mr. Ouansafi said. And when the association began recruiting someone to serve as a plaintiff, the imam, who became a citizen last year, agreed to do so without reservation, Mr. Ouansafi said.

After Mr. Elshikh became the face of the lawsuit, he received several threats from the mainland, Mr. Ouansafi said. “If we lived in any other state, I would not have asked him to come forward,” he said.

In addition to the Hawaii suit, federal judges in Washington State and Maryland heard arguments in several other cases challenging the constitutionality of Mr. Trump’s order, including one brought by a coalition of Democratic attorneys general, and others from a collection of nonprofit groups. Judge Watson was the only one who ruled on Wednesday.

Administration lawyers have argued that the president was merely exercising his national security powers. In the scramble to defend the executive order, a single lawyer in the United States solicitor general’s office, Jeffrey Wall, argued first to a Maryland court and then, by phone, to Judge Watson in Honolulu that no element of the order, as written, could be construed as a religious test for travelers.

Mr. Wall said the order was based on concerns raised by the Obama administration in its move toward stricter screening of travelers from the six countries affected.

“What the order does is a step beyond what the previous administration did, but it’s on the same basis,” Mr. Wall said in the Maryland hearing.

After Mr. Trump’s speech in Nashville, the Justice Department released a more muted statement disputing the Hawaii decision, calling it “flawed both in reasoning and scope.” Sarah Isgur Flores, a spokeswoman for the department, said it would continue to defend the legality of the presidential order.

Refugee organizations and civil rights groups greeted the ruling with expressions of triumph and relief.

Marielena Hincapié, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center, hailed the ruling on a conference call as “a strong and unequivocal rejection of the politics of hate.”

At the same time, advocates for refugees and immigrants acknowledged that significant uncertainty would hang over some of their more practical decisions, as a longer legal process plays out around Mr. Trump’s order.

“It’s a preliminary decision, but it recognizes that there continue to be problems with the constitutionality of this revised order, particularly with discriminatory intent toward Muslims,” said Betsy Fisher, policy director at the International Refugee Assistance Project at the Urban Justice Center.

The original ban, released on Jan. 27, unleashed scenes of chaos at American airports and spurred mass protests. Issued abruptly on a Friday afternoon, it temporarily barred travel from seven majority-Muslim nations, making no explicit distinction between citizens of those countries who already had green cards or visas and those who did not. It also suggested that Christian refugees from those countries would be given preference in the future.
After the federal court in Seattle issued a broad injunction against the policy, Mr. Trump removed major provisions and reissued the order. The new version exempted key groups, like green card and visa holders, and dropped the section that would have given Christians special treatment.

Mr. Trump also removed Iraq from the list of countries covered by the ban after the Pentagon expressed worry that it would damage the United States’ relationship with the Iraqi government in the fight against the Islamic State.
Yet those concessions did not placate critics of the ban, who said it would still function as an unconstitutional religious test, albeit one affecting fewer people — an argument Judge Watson concurred with in his ruling.
The lawsuits have also claimed that the order disrupts the operations of companies, charities, public universities and hospitals that have deep relationships overseas. In the Hawaii case, nearly five dozen technology companies, including Airbnb, Dropbox, Lyft and TripAdvisor, joined in a brief objecting to the travel ban.

The second, now-halted executive order preserved major components of the original. It would have ended, with few exceptions, the granting of new visas and green cards to people from six majority-Muslim countries — Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen — for at least 90 days. It would have also stopped all refugees from entering for 120 days and limited refugee admissions to 50,000 people in the current fiscal year.

Mr. Obama had set in motion plans to admit more than twice that number.

Mr. Trump has said the pause is needed to re-evaluate screening procedures for immigrants from the six countries. “Each of these countries is a state sponsor of terrorism, has been significantly compromised by terrorist organizations, or contains active conflict zones,” he wrote in the order.

Judge Watson’s order was not a final ruling on the constitutionality of Mr. Trump’s ban, and the administration has expressed confidence that courts will ultimately affirm Mr. Trump’s power to issue the restrictions.
But the legal debate is likely to be a protracted and unusually personal fight for the administration, touching Mr. Trump and a number of his key aides directly and raising the prospect that their public comments and private communications will be scrutinized.

The lawsuits against the ban have extensively cited Mr. Trump’s comments during the presidential campaign. Attorney General Bob Ferguson of Washington, who successfully challenged Mr. Trump’s first order, has indicated that in an extended legal fight, he could seek depositions from administration officials and request documents that would expose the full process by which Trump aides crafted the ban.

As a candidate, Mr. Trump first proposed to bar all Muslims from entering the United States, and then offered an alternative plan to ban travel from a number of Muslim countries, which he described as a politically acceptable way of achieving the same goal.

The lawsuits also cited Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York City mayor who advises Mr. Trump. Mr. Giuliani said he had been asked to help craft a Muslim ban that would pass legal muster.

And they highlighted comments by Stephen Miller, an adviser to the president, who cast the changes to Mr. Trump’s first travel ban as mere technical adjustments aimed at ushering the same policy past the review of a court.

At the center of many allegations swirling around the Trump administration’s relationship with Moscow is one man: Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador. As U.S. intelligence agencies contend that his country attempted, through hacking and other efforts, to influence November’s election, Kislyak’s discussions with Trump campaign associates — including former national security adviser Michael Flynn (who resigned for not disclosing them) and Attorney General Jeff Sessions (who did not) — have been the subject of intense reporting and speculation.

While it is one thing to question Russia’s efforts or the truthfulness of American officials, this debate is threatening the time-honored tradition of foreign ambassadors freely meeting political figures in their country of accreditation. There is nothing inherently wrong with meeting a foreign ambassador — even one from a rival nation; even one from a rival superpower on which the United States has imposed sanctions. As Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States, I saw firsthand, in the assassination of Osama bin Laden, just how essential such consultations were.

[Chill, America. Not every Trump outrage is outrageous.]
We don’t know what Kislyak’s particular motivations were or what he discussed in these meetings, but the question before the American public is whether Trump’s allies comported themselves honorably and legally, not whether Kislyak did. Diplomacy is the process by which foreign enemies are turned into friends and friends are converted into allies. Democratic countries such as the United States have always taken pride in the relative ease with which foreign diplomats can meet Americans of all political persuasions. (This is not the case in more-restrictive nations, such as Russia.) No matter what Moscow’s policy holds, the free interaction of Americans with foreign ambassadors works to America’s advantage.
* * * * * * * *
I became Pakistan’s ambassador in May 2008, soon after the country’s return to civilian rule after nine years of military dictatorship under Gen. Pervez Musharraf. The George W. Bush administration had forged an alliance with Musharraf in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, hoping that economic incentives and offers of military hardware would turn Pakistan away from its long-standing policy of supporting Islamist militants, including the Afghan Taliban, as instruments of regional influence.

By 2007, Bush had realized that Musharraf either “would not or could not” fulfill his promises in fighting terrorism, as he wrote later, and the president welcomed Pakistan’s return to democracy. The civilian leaders who appointed me as ambassador — President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani — looked forward to U.S. backing in reversing Musharraf’s policies at home and abroad. They said they wanted to end Pakistan’s support for the Taliban, improve relations with India and Afghanistan, and limit the role of Pakistan’s military intelligence service in defining the country’s foreign policy. In return, they sought generous U.S. aid to improve the ailing Pakistani economy.

[How Trump got his party to love Russia]
I had an advantage most ambassadors did not: I’d lived most of the Musharraf years in exile in Washington and had established close ties with members of Congress and others influential in policymaking. But I began my job in the middle of the 2008 election campaign, and I knew that the Bush administration’s policies might not continue under a new president. Within weeks of presenting my credentials to Bush that June, I was communicating with campaign officials in both parties, and soon had meetings with aides to both Sen. John McCain and Sen. Barack Obama.
The State Department facilitated the participation of Washington-based ambassadors in the Democratic and Republican national conventions that year. In Denver and in Minneapolis-St. Paul, we were briefed by officials from both campaigns. More active and better-connected ambassadors, including myself, were able to meet personally with people we expected to have major roles in the conduct of foreign policy after the election. There was nothing unusual, let alone treasonable, in this.

As a presidential candidate, Obama argued that U.S. success in Afghanistan was more important than the war in Iraq, which he had opposed. In a major speech that summer, he pledged to make “the fight against al-Qaeda and the Taliban the top priority.” He also had a particular message for my country: He said terrorists and insurgents in Pakistan’s tribal areas were waging war against the Afghan government. “We must make it clear that if Pakistan cannot or will not act, we will take out high-level terrorist targets like bin Laden if we have them in our sights.”

From Obama’s public positions and from my meetings with his aides, it was clear that a democratic, civilian government in Pakistan could join with him to help attain his objectives in Afghanistan in exchange for support of consolidation of democracy with greater U.S. economic assistance. I sent this message to my bosses in Islamabad and told Obama’s campaign team that we would be willing to play ball. Once Obama took office, this is exactly what happened: Civilian aid to Pakistan was enhanced to record levels in an effort to secure greater cooperation in defeating the Taliban.

[Trump is getting payments from foreign governments. We have no idea what they are.]
What’s more, the relationships I forged with members of Obama’s campaign team also led to closer cooperation between Pakistan and the United States in fighting terrorism over the 31/2 years I served as ambassador. These connections eventually enabled the United States to discover and eliminate bin Laden without depending on Pakistan’s intelligence service or military, which were suspected of sympathy toward Islamist militants. Friends I made from the Obama campaign were able to ask, three years later, as National Security Council officials, for help in stationing U.S. Special Operations and intelligence personnel on the ground in Pakistan. I brought the request directly to Pakistan’s civilian leaders, who approved. Although the United States kept us officially out of the loop about the operation, these locally stationed Americans proved invaluable when Obama decided to send in Navy SEAL Team 6 without notifying Pakistan.

Unfortunately, the United States did not attain victory in Afghanistan, and the Pakistani government’s behavior toward militant Islamists did not change on a permanent basis. But for the period I was in office, the two nations worked jointly toward their common goals — the essence of diplomacy.
* * * * * * * *
After I began reading about the affairs of Kislyak, I rummaged through my files and diaries to retrace my steps as ambassador in the fall of 2008. I maintained relations with three teams of American officials, politicians and professional staffers: the Bush administration and the two major-party candidates. I met senior members of the Republican and Democratic national committees, more than a dozen senators and congressmen from each party, and several individuals from both sides who were tipped to emerge in senior government positions after the election. This is totally normal for ambassadors.

Kislyak, who presented his credentials just a couple of months after I did, has probably advanced shared Russian-American interests through similar contacts in the three U.S. presidential election cycles that he has covered as ambassador. I do not know if he reached out to Hillary Clinton’s camp as vigorously as he did to Trump’s (he probably already knew Clinton’s top foreign policy players from his work with the Obama administration, in which many of them had served), but it does not matter: Ambassadors do not make policy. They only facilitate understanding between countries that leads to policymaking in their respective capitals. Any Russian decision to covertly interfere in the U.S. election would have been made in Moscow, not necessarily with Kislyak’s knowledge, just as Pakistan’s breach of promises with the Obama administration occurred in Islamabad, not in my embassy.
[How Russian ‘kompromat’ destroys political opponents, no facts required]

In November 2011, I was forced to resign as ambassador after Pakistan’s military-intelligence apparatus gained the upper hand in the country’s perennial power struggle. Among the security establishment’s grievances against me was the charge that I had facilitated the presence of large numbers of CIA operatives who helped track down bin Laden without the knowledge of Pakistan’s army — even though I had acted under the authorization of Pakistan’s elected civilian leaders.

Russia is, of course, unlike Pakistan, but U.S.-Russia relations have seesawed, too, and Kislyak’s means were no different from what probably every ambassador of every country hopes to use, even if his ends were unique.
Americans have a legitimate interest in figuring out whether Russia tried to covertly influence U.S. politics. Investigating officials who may have perjured themselves about their diplomatic contacts also seems reasonable. It should not, however, create the impression that engagement between a foreign ambassador — even one from a country with which relations are strained — and people who might hold senior positions in a future administration is inherently sinister. Such engagement is essential if new presidents want to translate their foreign policy plans into reality.

LAHORE, Feb 23: Real estate giant Rafi Group made a ten-fold profit last year from its sale of hundreds of acres of land in the remote fishing town of Gwadar, acquired soon after the government announced plans for a deep-sea port there.

The windfall came after 12 years of waiting patiently for the Gwadar port to emerge as the centrepiece of China’s ambitious plans for a trade and energy corridor stretching from the Persian Gulf, across Pakistan, into western Xinjiang.

“We had anticipated the Chinese would need a route to the Arabian Sea,” Rafi Group Chief Executive Shehriar Rafi told Reuters. “And today, all routes lead back to Gwadar.”

China to build $1.5 billion power line across Pakistan
Gwadar forms the southern Pakistan hub of a $57-billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) of infrastructure and energy projects Beijing announced in 2014.

Since then, land prices have skyrocketed as property demand has spiked, and dozens of real estate firms want to cash in.

“Gwadar is a ‘Made in China’ brand and everyone wants a piece,” said realtor Afzal Adil, one of several who shifted operations from the eastern city of Lahore in 2015.

Last year, government welcomed the first large shipment of Chinese goods at Gwadar, where the China Overseas Ports Holding Company Ltd took over operations in 2013. It plans to eventually handle 300 million to 400 million tons of cargo a year.

Forget India, profit from ‘quiet rise’ of Pakistan: Barron’s Asia

It also aims to develop seafood processing plants in a nearby free trade zone sprawled over 923 hectares (2,281 acres).

The route through Gwadar offers China its shortest path to the oil-rich Middle East, Africa, and most of the Western hemisphere, besides promising to open up remote, landlocked Xinjiang.

Last year, the Applied Economics Research Centre estimated the corridor would create 700,000 jobs in Pakistan and a Chinese newspaper recently put the number at more than 2 million.

Authorities have completed an expressway through Gwadar, which has a 350-km (218-mile) road network. A new international airport kicks off next year, to handle an influx of hundreds of Chinese traders and officials expected to live near the port.

The volume of Gwadar property searches surged 14-fold on Pakistan’s largest real estate database, Zameen.com, between 2014 and 2016, up from a prior rate of a few hundred a month.

“It’s like a gold rush,” said Chief Executive Zeeshan Ali Khan. “Anyone who is interested in real estate, be it an investor or a developer, is eyeing Gwadar.”

Prices, which have risen two- to four-fold on average, are climbing “on a weekly basis,” said Saad Arshed, the managing director of online real estate marketplace Lamudi.pk.

Regional fishermen have held strikes during the last two years, to protest against being displaced by the port.
To keep pace with the interest, urban officials are struggling to computerise land management and record-keeping. “We are trying to upgrade as fast as we can,” said Zakir Majeed, an official of the Gwadar Development Authority (GDA).

But Gwadar lacks basic education and health facilities, in contrast to the gleaming towers and piped drinking water of the “smart city” envisioned by the GDA.

“For commercial projects, things are moving fast,” Lamudi’s Arshed said. “But people actually living there, that will take a long time.”

Port officials expect the population to hit 2 million over the next two decades, from about 185,000 now.

Risk
The government commissioned work on the Gwadar port in 2002, but development was held up by chronic instability in the surrounding resource-rich province of Balochistan.

Since China announced the corridor plan in 2014, security has improved, with government setting up a new army division to ensure protection, while hundreds of rebels surrendered arms.

Real estate firms dismiss fears the “Gwadar bubble” might still burst, pointing to China’s enduring interest.

“The risk is always there,” Rafi said. “But our confidence comes from knowing this is not a Pakistani initiative, but a Chinese city on the Arabian Sea coast. And the Chinese will see that it is built.”

Chinese companies are in talks to snap up more businesses and land in Pakistan after sealing two major deals in recent months, a sign of deepening ties after Beijing vowed to plough $57 billion into a new trade route across the South Asian nation.

A dozen executives from some of Pakistan’s biggest firms told Reuters that Chinese companies were looking mainly at the cement, steel, energy and textile sectors, the backbone of Pakistan’s $270b economy.

Analysts say the interest shows Chinese firms are using Beijing’s “One Belt, One Road” project ─ a global trade network of which Pakistan is a key part ─ to help expand abroad at a time when growth has slowed at home.

A Chinese-led consortium recently took a strategic stake in the Pakistan Stock Exchange, and Shanghai Electric Power acquired one of Pakistan’s biggest energy producers, K-Electric, for $1.8b.

“The Chinese have got deep pockets and they are looking for major investment in Pakistan,” said Muhammad Ali Tabba, chief executive of two companies in the Yunus Brothers Group cement-to-chemicals conglomerate.

Tabba said Yunus Brothers, partnering with a Chinese company, lost out in the battle for K-Electric, but the group is eyeing up other joint ventures as part of a $2b expansion plan over the coming years.

Sindh Governor Mohammad Zubair, who until recently was the privatization minister, told Reuters China’s steel giant Baosteel Group is in talks over a 30-year lease for state-run Pakistan Steel Mills. Baosteel did not respond to a request for comment.

The negotiations come as Pakistani business sentiment turns, with companies betting that Beijing’s splurge on road, rail and energy infrastructure under the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) will boost the economy.

The Chinese charge is in contrast to Western investors, who have largely avoided Pakistan in recent years despite fewer militant attacks and economic growth near 5 per cent.
It is welcomed by many in Pakistan: foreign direct investment was $1.9b in 2015/2016, far below the 2007/2008 peak of $5.4b.

At the stock exchange signing ceremony, Sun Weidong, China’s ambassador to Pakistan, said the deal “embodies the ongoing financial integration” between Chinese and Pakistani markets.

“This will facilitate more financial support for our enterprises,” Sun said.

Reservations
CPEC will connect China’s Western region with Pakistan’s Arabian Sea port of Gwadar through a network of rail, road and pipeline projects.

That will be funded by loans from China, and much of the business will go to Chinese enterprises.

The scale of Chinese corporate interest beyond that is difficult to gauge, but in Karachi, Pakistan’s financial center, sharply-dressed Chinese appear to outnumber Westerners in hotels, restaurants and the city’s airport.

Rising skyscrapers testify to a construction boom in the city, businesses are printing Chinese-language brochures and salaries demanded by Pakistanis who speak Chinese have shot up.

Miftah Ismail, chairman of Pakistan’s Board of Investment, said Chinese companies were interested in investing in the telecoms and auto sectors, with FAW Group and Foton Motor Group planning to enter Pakistan.

FAW said the Pakistan “project is going through internal approvals”, but did not offer more details. Foton declined to comment.

But not everyone is excited by China’s growing role in the Pakistan economy, including trade unions, who said Chinese companies’ alleged mistreatment of local workers in Africa in the past had alarmed them.

“We have concern and reservations that the Chinese might use the same methods in Pakistan,” said Nasir Mansoor, deputy general secretary of National Trade Union Federation, Pakistan, the national trade union body.

The Chinese government and Chinese companies have dismissed such accusations in the past.

And doing business may not be easy for newcomers. Security remains a concern despite a drop in Islamist militant violence, and in the World Bank’s ease of doing business index, Pakistan ranks 144 out of 190 countries.

Next phase
The Chinese interest comes as Islamabad and Beijing discuss the next phase of CPEC: how to build Pakistan’s industry with the help of Chinese state-owned industrial giants.

Pakistani officials are drafting plans for special economic zones which would offer tax breaks and other benefits to Chinese businesses.

But even before zones are established, Chinese investors are scoping out land deals.

“A lot of companies … don’t care about CPEC. They just want 500 acres of land to set up shop,” said Naheed Memon, head of the Sindh province’s Board of Investment.

Faisal Aftab, manager of private investment firm Oxon Partners, said Oxon was in talks with two state-run Chinese companies and a wealthy Chinese businessman to purchase and develop land for high-end residential and commercial properties.

The biggest question about Hafiz Saeed’s house arrest isn’t why, but why now?

After all, we’ve been here before.

He was placed under house arrest in December 2008, just days after the Mumbai terror attacks that New Delhi and Washington believe he helped orchestrate. He was detained again in September 2009. In both cases, he was released in relatively short order.

In more recent years, he has essentially lived free in Lahore, holding rallies and hosting journalists, including those from the West.

So why did Pakistani authorities decide to once again place him under house arrest on Monday?

One Pakistani media report points to US pressure, contending that in the last days of the Obama administration, American officials warned Pakistan to rein in Saeed or risk sanctions.

Saeed himself, in a video released shortly after his detention, bizarrely claimed that Pakistan was obliged to act because of US President Donald Trump’s warm relationship with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. A Saeed spokesman made a similar claim.

Washington, of course, has pushed Pakistan to crack down on Saeed for years, and unsuccessfully so. So it beggars belief to assume that US pressure would suddenly and magically prompt Pakistan to detain Saeed—and particularly at a time when the US-Pakistan relationship appears to be entering a period of drift. Washington is shifting its engagement with New Delhi into overdrive, while Islamabad is cementing its failsafe partnership with Beijing.

It’s also folly to assume the Trump administration was actively pushing Pakistan to move on Saeed. Trump has been in office for less than two weeks, and beyond his rapid-fire issuance of executive orders, his presidency appears frenzied and disorganised—not to mention hamstrung by numerous unfilled senior diplomatic and national security posts.

Bottom line? The Trump administration has too much on its plate to be focusing laser-like on Pakistan.

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If any external pressure compelled Pakistan to place Saeed under house arrest, it’s more likely to have come from Beijing than Washington.
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In a telling yet underreported development several weeks ago, China’s former consul general in Kolkata published a blog post calling on Beijing to rethink its default policy of blocking Indian attempts to have JM leader Masood Azhar sanctioned by the UN.

This all makes good sense when we think about the high stakes of CPEC. For Beijing (as for Islamabad), rapid and sustained progress on this project is a core strategic imperative.

Hafiz Saeed doesn’t pose a direct threat to China, but so long as he walks free he poses a direct threat to India-Pakistan relations.

The last thing China wants as it pushes forward with CPEC is an India-Pakistan relationship on tenterhooks — not to mention on a war footing, as was the case for several weeks last year.
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China has long leaned on Pakistan to tackle terror more robustly — and it’s arguably gotten results. Some have speculated that Beijing’s prodding played a role in Pakistan’s decision to launch the Zarb-i-Azb operation.
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The anti-state militants targeted in that offensive had not only terrorised Pakistan; they’d also posed a threat to Chinese investments and workers in Pakistan. Chinese pressure may also have helped prompt Pakistan’s Red Mosque offensive.

In short, we should never underestimate China’s leverage in Pakistan, including its ability to get Pakistan to do things it often resists.

And yet the question still remains: Why now? If we assume China influenced Pakistan’s decision to detain Saeed, why didn’t Pakistan act weeks or months ago?

Enter President Trump’s executive order on immigration.

It’s doubtful Trump actively pressured Pakistan to rein in Hafiz Saeed, but it’s likely Pakistan’s detention of Saeed was done with Trump in mind.

We can read the house arrest, at least in part, as an effort by Pakistan to showcase its counterterrorism bonafides to the new US administration, and to dissuade Trump from adding Pakistan to the list of countries that can’t send their citizens to the United States for 90 days. Trump’s chief of staff has suggested Pakistan could be added to the list.

Of course, all this speculating could ultimately be immaterial and Saeed may be released relatively soon.

Unless, that is, China has the ability to get Pakistan to go beyond token gestures when it comes to addressing anti-India militancy, and unless Pakistan chooses to do some big-time signaling to Washington by keeping Saeed in detention for an extended period.

Alas, given Pakistan’s core strategic interests and the value the authorities seem to accord to Saeed as a key asset, I wouldn’t count on either scenario materialising anytime soon.