Aboard The Democracy Train

ISLAMKOT, PAKISTAN — As the car speeds along gleaming blacktop highways in Pakistan’s southern desert of Tharparkar, it is clear the new roads were not built to serve the poor herders and nomads who live in cone-shaped straw homes and subsist on herding sheep and cattle.

Indeed, a few decades ago, the Tharparkar desert in Sindh province bordering India was accessible only by crab-shaped vehicles that crawled over sand dunes by day and under star-studded skies at night, to reach the people of a forgotten century.

That changed as international feasibility studies sanctioned by Islamabad found that nearly half the desert covered coal. The turning point came as China offered to excavate and convert the fuel to help Pakistan cover its electricity shortfall of 25,000 megawatts.

So while the world turned away from coal to cleaner fuels, the Sindh Engro Coal Mining Company (SECMC) began digging a layered, rectangular trough near the town of Islamkot.

From above, the mining area looks like Pakistan’s 5,000-year-old archaeological site, Moen Jo Daro (Mound of the Dead). But with Pakistani and Chinese flags fluttering side by side — and the hustle-bustle of dump trucks — the excavation clearly looks to the future.

Across the barren hills, the State Power International Mendong (SPIM) and China Machinery Engineering Corporation’s power plants are poised to convert the coal to energy — reportedly 660 megawatts by the end of 2017.

Just outside the power plants sits a Chinese housing colony for the workers it has imported, a common practice for the country’s foreign projects.

It’s a stark reminder of just how far Pakistan has allowed China’s entry into sensitive border territory.

In April 1965, Pakistan fought a territorial war with India to retake parts of the desert’s marshlands, called Rann of Kutch. Pakistan lost the claim, but it alarmed India sufficiently to fence its Gujarat border and install watch towers to prevent further incursions. New Delhi has so far not objected to the Thar project.

General Pervez Musharraf, the former army chief, gave a militaristic response to India’s enhanced border security. In 2000, his government constructed roads to Tharparkar, instituted border checks and intensified the scrutiny of visitors.

More recently, Washington’s embrace of India — and its rivalry with China — has fostered new regional alliances.

As Pakistan’s friendship with China solidifies, including the multifaceted China-Pakistan Economic Corridor’s projects, power generation is a big part of China’s $62 billion investment.

SECMC Director of Operations Syed Murtaza Azhar Rizvi said China would help extract 19 million tons of coal until 2030, using modern technology to counter the harmful effects of burning coal.

Partners in change
Meanwhile, Engro has a mandate from the Sindh government to ensure that the desert people, sitting atop the world’s seventh-largest coal reserves, become willing partners in the transformation of their habitat.

Already, Engro has created “Khushal Thar” (Prosperous Thar), training 694 people on monthly stipends to be supplied to their Chinese partners.

Armed with a strategy for social change, Engro trains women as dump truck drivers. Recruiter Jehan Ara said the corporation, initially concerned about a backlash, first discussed the community’s response to inducting women into an all-male profession, and only then made the positions official.

Interviewed in Islamkot, Marvi, 35, beamed at the prospect of driving dump trucks. Having six children was apparently no deterrent. Her husband, Ratan Lal, was on hand to cheer her, saying: “She is tough; she climbs trees to gather firewood and gets water from afar.”

Environmental Concerns
But the community has concerns that water from the mining process, discharged into Gorano village 28 kilometers away, could pollute drinking water sources. In Mithi town, people have repeatedly demonstrated to sound the alarm, with the fears echoed by Sindh’s civil society.

Attempting to assuage the community’s environmental fears, Engro has contracted with the Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography to treat the mined water and use it for farming.

In a biosaline farm outside “coal alley,” an oasis has sprouted amidst the desert, boasting grains and fruits.

For generations, the desert people have lived amid peacocks, sheep and camels. Engro plans to compensate and relocate them from their straw homes to model homes, fully equipped with schools and hospitals. Muslims and Hindus are to be resettled side by side, emblematic of the peaceful coexistence within the border community.

China’s coal reserves are declining, so it may get some of Thar’s production, and some of its out-of-work miners and engineers are putting their skills to use again.

But with unemployment also rampant in Pakistan, SECMC maintains it constantly negotiates with the Chinese to hire cheaper Pakistani labor, which has been a sticking point on some projects.

Meanwhile, Pakistan’s sights are firmly set on the future. It expects that sustained coal excavation will eventually help get rid of deliberate power shutdowns aimed at preventing system failures, make electricity affordable and fire up its industries.

The stated goal is to put young people to work — and the nation on the road to prosperity.

https://www.voanews.com/a/coal-project-is-latest-sign-of-growing-pakistan-china-relationship/4125106.html

KABUL, Afghanistan — The labs themselves are simple, tucked into nondescript huts or caves: a couple-dozen empty barrels for mixing, sacks or gallon jugs of precursor chemicals, piles of firewood, a press machine, a generator and a water pump with a long hose to draw from a nearby well.

They are heroin refining operations, and the Afghan police and American Special Forces keep running into them all over Afghanistan this year. Officials and diplomats are increasingly worried that the labs’ proliferation is one of the most troubling turns yet in the long struggle to end the Taliban insurgency.

That the country has consistently produced about 85 percent of the world’s opium, despite more than $8 billion spent by the United States alone to fight it over the years, is accepted with a sense of helplessness among counternarcotics officials.

For years, most of the harvest would be smuggled out in the form of bulky opium syrup that was refined in other countries. But now, Afghan and Western officials estimate that half, if not more, of Afghan opium is getting some level of processing in the country, either into morphine or heroin with varying degrees of purity.

The refining makes the drug much easier to smuggle out into the supply lines to the West. And it is vastly increasing the profits for the Taliban, for whom the drug trade makes up at least 60 percent of their income, according to Afghan and Western officials.
“Without drugs, this war would have been long over,” President Ashraf Ghani of Afghanistan said recently. “The heroin is a very important driver of this war.”

At a time when the Taliban has been aggressively seizing territory from the government, particularly in opium-producing regions, the prospect of even more drug profits cuts to the heart of American commanders’ hopes of urging the Taliban to seek peace with the Afghan government.

“If an illiterate local Taliban commander in Helmand makes a million dollars a month now, what does he gain in time of peace?” one senior Afghan official said.

Another official, Gen. Abdul Khalil Bakhtiar, Afghanistan’s deputy interior minister in charge of the counternarcotics police, said the insurgents had used the growing insecurity of the past two years to establish more refining labs, and move them closer to the opium fields.

General Bakhtiar estimated last year that there were 400 to 500 labs in the country, mostly in regions controlled or contested by the Taliban. His forces have destroyed over 100 of them.

But then he admitted, “They can build a lab like this in one day.”

Zabihullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesman, said the group “had nothing to do” with processing heroin, and denied that major laboratories existed in the areas under its control.

The Taliban have long profited from the opium trade by taxing and providing security for producers and smugglers. But increasingly, the insurgents are directly getting into every stage of the drug business themselves, rivaling some of the major cartels in the region — and in some places becoming indistinguishable from them.

The opium economy in Afghanistan grew to about $3 billion in 2016, almost doubling the previous year’s total and amounting to about 16 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

The increase in processing means the Taliban have been able to take a greater share of the $60 billion that the global trade in the Afghan opium crop is estimated to be worth. Demand remains high in Europe and North America: Ninety percent of the heroin on the streets of Canada, and about 85 percent in Britain, can be traced to Afghanistan, the State Department says.

Despite the size of Afghanistan’s opium problem, not much is being done about it. Opium eradication or interception got little attention in the Trump administration’s new strategy for the Afghan war.

Various police forces bear the brunt of the drug war in Afghanistan, but are often complicit in the opium trade themselves, feeding corrupt networks within the Afghan government, both locally and nationally.

The fight to disrupt the flow of Afghan drugs to Western and regional capitals, and cash to the coffers of the Taliban, has largely fallen on a small police unit, the National Interdiction Unit, of about 450 to 600 commandos who are mentored by American Special Forces.

“We have to merge these two things together — the counterterrorism and the counternarcotics. It has to go hand in hand, because if you destroy one, it is going to destroy the other,” said Javid Qaem, the Afghan deputy minister of counternarcotics.

Mr. Qaem said the situation could improve if opium crop eradication efforts factored more into the planning of security operations. He gave the example of Helmand Province, where eradication operations were attempted, but only started after this year’s crop had been harvested.

“In Helmand, we were targeting to do more than 2,000 to 3,000 hectares of eradication,” Mr. Qaem said. “We couldn’t do anything there, none at all, because Helmand was almost an active battlefield, the entire province.”

At the provincial level, counternarcotics officials have proved far from trustworthy, their directors often appointed by local strongmen or vulnerable to their influence.

A senior counternarcotics official in Kabul, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid reprisals, recounted how the elite unit was painstakingly following a network of money launderers in one opium-rich province who were helping to import the chemicals needed for refining heroin. The officers finally had enough evidence to make a high-level arrest, nabbing one of the network’s leaders — only to lose him when a powerful police commander personally stepped in to set the suspect free. There was no recourse.

In that environment, the small National Interdiction Unit, sequestered in a secure mountainside base in Kabul, has been one of the surest bets in striking against the opium and heroin networks. And even that has not been foolproof: Its top commander was replaced recently for failing a polygraph test and “was probably leaking information to hostile forces,” according to a report by the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. The force also has a one-stop-shop justice center, advised by the British.

A United States Army Special Forces member working with the unit said advisers accompanied the Afghan force on about 30 percent of its operations. Those usually end up as larger-scale raids in Taliban areas, requiring a more complex approach.

“The Taliban derives its funding from the narcotics taxing, sales and trafficking,” said the adviser, who, like other Special Forces members spoke on condition that his name not be used. “It is a priority: We are specifically after denying Taliban their revenue.”

The elite forces and their American advisers, often flying up to six helicopters from Kabul, operate at night. They land miles away from the target to avoid fire, and then make their way by foot.

Still, the raids rarely, if ever, result in arrests; the suspects often flee as soon as they hear the motors. The operations last no more than a few hours, culminating with the torching of the drugs and equipment after a process of documentation.

There are other indicators that more opium is being processed within Afghanistan, officials say, including data from the drug seizures and the amount of chemicals needed for the processing.

In previous years, the amount of opium seized in Afghanistan would far outnumber, by at least five times, the processed morphine and heroin. In 2015, for example, about 30,000 kilograms, or 66,000 pounds, of opium was sized, compared with a little over 5,000 kilograms, or 11,000 pounds, of heroin and morphine combined.

So far in 2017, the seizure numbers seem flipped, officials say: The amount of heroin and morphine, both requiring some level of processing, combined is almost double that of opium.

The Afghan government said that so far this year it had seized about 73 tons of the chemical precursors needed for processing. That number for all of 2015 was just a little over 1.4 tons of solid and close to 5,000 liters, or about 1,300 gallons, of liquid precursors. One recent shipment alone, which cleared customs and was caught being transferred to another vehicle when agents found it, could have made 15 tons of heroin.

If the initial data is any indication, the 2017 poppy harvest was another record year, Afghan officials say. Eradication was abysmal, with security forces unable to even raze fields in Sarobi, just 50 miles from the presidential palace in Kabul.

Mr. Qaem, the deputy minister, said that just as eradication efforts were about to begin in Kabul District, the district’s leadership was changed. And workers were hard to find: They had to be brought in from other provinces, as the local laborers would not destroy their neighbors’ fields.

But the biggest problem was hidden Taliban bombs, he said. Each day, before laborers could destroy the fields, demining teams had to first clear them of explosives.

“It seemed easy — it was Kabul,” Mr. Qaem said. “But it was tough. It was almost a war there, every day.”

ISLAMABAD — Pakistan’s prime minister pledged his country’s cooperation in fighting Islamist militants during talks here Tuesday with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who has insisted that Pakistan do more to curb support for terrorist groups or face U.S. reprisals.

“The U.S. can rest assured that we are strategic partners in the war against terror and that today, Pakistan is fighting the largest war in the world against terror,” Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi told Tillerson just before their closed-door talks began. Pakistan’s army and intelligence chiefs also attended the meeting.

Moments earlier, Tillerson alluded to U.S. concerns that Pakistan is providing safe haven to terrorist groups — a charge Pakistan has repeatedly denied. At the same time, he described Pakistan as having an “important role” in the Trump administration’s strategy and referenced “our joint goals of providing peace and security to the region and providing opportunity for [a] greater economic relationship.”

On Monday, during a brief and unannounced visit to Afghanistan, Tillerson struck a much harsher tone, saying he intended to make clear in his talks Tuesday that Pakistan’s relationship with the United States would suffer — including possible aid cuts — if it did not take specific actions to curb support for militant groups, including the Haqqani network, a Taliban affiliate.

Tillerson’s arrival in Pakistan was low key and heavily secured; he landed at a military air base in Rawalpindi, near the capital, at midafternoon with little official protocol or fanfare, and his only visits were to the U.S. Embassy and the prime minister’s office in Islamabad. Traffic was blocked across the capital during the official convoy’s movements.

Pakistan’s Senate chairman, Raza Rabbani, said Tuesday that Tillerson’s threatening message the day before “seems like that of a viceroy’s before they visit a country.”

Abbasi, though, appeared eager to assure Tillerson that he had heard the message, telling him when they met Tuesday that Pakistan’s government is committed to the war against terrorism. “We have produced results,” he said. “And we are looking forward to moving ahead with the U.S. and building a tremendous relationship.”

Despite the largely cordial tone of their opening remarks, followed by several hours of private talks in the prime minister’s office before Tillerson flew to India for a longer stay, the enormous gap between American and Pakistani concerns and priorities has been evident in comments by numerous Pakistani officials and opinion-makers in the past week.

The Trump administration has focused strictly on the demand for more Pakistani cooperation in curbing terrorism and in ending the 16-year conflict in next-door Afghanistan. Many Afghans view Pakistan — which once backed the Taliban regime in Kabul — as a source of violent Islamist militancy and a permanent threat to their country’s stability.

Pakistanis, on the other hand, are far more worried about the threat from India, their larger rival and neighbor to the east, which is led by a Hindu nationalist government. The two countries have fought four limited wars. Both claim the Himalayan border region of Kashmir, and Pakistan has repeatedly accused Indian troops of abusing protesters in the Indian-controlled portion.

Pakistani officials said they intended to raise the issue of India forcefully Tuesday, especially President Trump’s overture to New Delhi to become more deeply involved in developing Afghanistan. That gesture has been viewed here as a direct U.S. rebuke to Pakistan and an invitation to India to jointly dominate the conflicted region.

“Our job will be to show Tillerson that he is mistaken in thinking that the U.S. can ever defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan by relying only on India,” the editors of the News International newspaper wrote Tuesday. “Pakistan is still needed to negotiate a political end to the war,” they wrote, adding that Washington is “looking for scapegoats” to blame for its failures in Afghanistan.

Pakistani Defense Minister Khurram Dastgir, who participated in the talks with Tillerson, told a TV news show Tuesday night that “we told him the threat of India is very real” and that Pakistan wants “mutual respect and cooperation,” not economic aid, from Washington.

Dastgir said a single meeting was held with Tillerson, including senior civilian and military officials, “to give a united message” to Washington. Pakistan’s military establishment cooperates with U.S. intelligence agencies on terrorism issues but has bristled at suggestions from civilian leaders that it allow U.S. troops to operate in Pakistan.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis is due to visit Pakistan soon and is expected to reinforce Tillerson’s demands; he has told Congress several times that Pakistan is still sheltering the Haqqani network, despite its denials. There has been no specific description of likely sanctions on Pakistan if administration officials decide they are not satisfied.

Ever since Trump accused Pakistan in August of harboring “agents of chaos,” officials here have made numerous efforts to restore American goodwill. Earlier this month, Pakistan’s military unexpectedly announced that its troops had rescued an American woman, her Canadian husband and their three children after five years in Taliban captivity, based on a U.S. intelligence tip. Trump hailed the release as a “positive moment” in the strained relationship.

But observers in both countries doubt that such efforts will do much to resolve the larger tension between the former Cold War allies, which now fear different enemies and seek contradictory solutions to regional conflict. Any smaller signs of cooperation, wrote columnist Huma Yusuf in the Dawn newspaper this week, are only “the piecemeal politics of placation.”

“Washington has now effectively read Pakistan the riot act,” said Michael Kugelman, a Pakistan expert at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington. If the Trump administration decides to take drastic measures, the relationship could “plunge into deep crisis,” he said. For the moment there is a “modest thaw,” as indicated by Tillerson’s visit, Kugelman said, but he added that U.S.-Pakistan relations will soon be “put to the test in a big way.”

Morello reported from Qatar. Shaiq Hussain in Islamabad contributed to this report.