Nordex has shown interest in investing in energy sector in Pakistan to help overcome shortage of emergency in the country. A delegation of the company visited Alternative Energy Development Board (AEDB).
The Nordex Modern Generation Limited, one of the ten top serial producers of the wind turbines in the world, has shown interest in investing in wind energy in Pakistan to help overcome shortage of emergency in the country.
A delegation of Nordex visited Alternative Energy Development Board (AEDB) Headquarters to discuss investment opportunities in the Alternative/ Renewable Energy (ARE) Sector in Pakistan.
Mr. Arif Alauddin, Chief Executive Officer AEDB in a briefing to the delegation apprised them of the immense potential in the ARE Sector in Pakistan. He said that available ARE potential, the current energy shortages in the country and lucrative incentives that the Government of Pakistan offers, provide unique opportunities for investment in Pakistan.
He said that in the wind power sector alone, Pakistan possesses an estimated potential of generating 350,000 MW of electricity. Responding to questions relating to the national ARE policy, Mr. Alauddin said that the Short Term Policy, 2006 encompasses only three technologies i.e. wind farm, solar power and small hydro.
For more on this article, please click on the following link: Nordex interested in Pakistan's wind energy: EVWIND
Monday, March 15, 2010
Nordex interested in Pakistan's wind energy: EVWIND
Afghanistan's new great game: The undeclared wars within the war: DW
Author: Chris Kline
Editor: Rob Mudge
Conventional Western public opinion regards the war in Afghanistan as a struggle between NATO and extremist Islamic militants. Since assuming office Barack Obama has redefined the conflict by calling it the Af-Pak war.
The US president's redefinition is recognition that the Taliban's nerve center, as well as al Qaeda's safe haven are across Afghanistan's border in neighboring Pakistan. In the forbidding tribal territories, Waziristan especially, another dimension of the same fierce conflict is underway with more Pakistani troops thrown into the fray than the whole of NATO deploys on its side of the Northwest Frontier.
But unlike Afghanistan where NATO allows journalists free access to combat operations, the Pakistani military remains media-averse and highly secretive of its own internal counter-insurgency efforts. On the surface of things, however Pakistan is NATO's and particularly Washington's staunch ally in the regional and global campaign against terror. It's a role for which Islamabad in dire economic straits is rewarded handsomely with a massive combined US economic and military aid package it could not do without.
But as British author Moni Mohsin, a lifelong student of Pakistan points out "Pakistan is also the only US ally, America frequently bombs with drone missile strikes, which sometimes kill terrorists and just as often kill civilians."
And While Islamabad is at pains to denounce the Predator missile attacks and adamantly insists it does not authorize them, Mohsin told Deutsche Welle that there is tacit Pakistani government approval for the strikes. Yet when the attacks are publicized it only helps to feed the ever present anti-American propaganda in Pakistan's right wing media "which in turn becomes a pro-Talibanization as far as the public is concerned."
The prevalence of anti-US sentiment in popular culture is something the Pakistani army and the all powerful military intelligence service or ISI, seem to thrive on and encourage although they are ostensible allies of the West, in presumably the same struggle. The underpinning complexity of such duality is at the essence of what routine western analysis of South Asia often fails to pinpoint.
At the core of this double game, is Pakistan's traditional enmity with India, the dominance of the armed forces and its spymasters in Pakistan's national and political life and a long standing rapport with the Taliban and other radical groups which it has not only supported but also created in some cases.
For more on this article, please click on the following link: Afghanistan's new great game: The undeclared wars within the war: DW
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Local bourse breaches 10,000 points barrier: GEO
KARACHI: Bulls grew further strong Friday leading the local equities market beyond the psychological barrier of 10,000 points – a level witnessed by the Karachi Stock Exchange (KSE) after a period of 19 months.
Upbeat activity continued at the share market right from the beginning of the first session and pushed through till the end of the second session on the last trading day of the week.
For more on this article, please click on the following: Local bourse breaches 10,000 points barrier: GEO
Pakistan Army Digs In on Turf of the Taliban: NYT
By JANE PERLEZ and PIR ZUBAIR SHAH
MAKEEN, Pakistan — From a forward base in the bare brown foothills of the soaring mountains of South Waziristan, Pakistani soldiers fired artillery at insurgents sheltering in scrub across the valley. Smoke blotted the sky as the soldiers set ablaze houses once used by the Taliban to hide caches of heavy weapons.
In the Makeen bazaar, where the former leader of the Pakistani militants, Baitullah Mehsud, was once king, the army has flattened the jerry-built stores, including the ice cream parlor, scotching any idea of easy return.
Here in the heartland of the Pakistani Taliban, the army has fought for five months to claw back territory from its indigenous enemy. A rare trip under military escort revealed that the battle had turned into a grinding test of wills with no neat resolution in sight.
The Pakistani Army has, at least for the moment, gained the upper hand by taking the war to the Taliban in these barren mountains rather than retreating behind successive peace deals, as it once did. But it is not claiming victory.
For more on this article, please click on the following link: Pakistan Army Digs In on Turf of the Taliban: NYT
Saturday, March 13, 2010
Saudi Arabia lifts ban on Pakistan seafood: The News
KARACHI: Adviser to Sindh CM Sharmila Faruqui said that Saudi Arabia lifted a ban from import of Pakistani seafood.
Talking to a delegation of seafood exporters at her Sindh Secretariat Office on Friday, she maintained that matters related to export of Pakistani seafood had been finalized with Saudi government officials and Pakistan waters fish and other marine products were being exported to Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states.
The adviser mentioned that several countries had issued health certificates to Pakistan regarding fish, prawn and other marine products. She added that Pakistani seafood were free from cholera microbe or any other epidemic disease while in the past a propaganda was launched that Pakistani seafood were contaminated with cholera microbe but later laboratory tests conducted by Gulf states and other countries had dispelled it and now export of Pakistani seafood was going on to these countries.
For more on this article, please click on the following link: Saudi Arabia lifts ban on Pakistan seafood: The News
Pakistan navy test fires missiles, torpedoes: AFP
ISLAMABAD — Pakistan on Friday successfully test fired new missiles and torpedoes from ships, submarines and aircraft in the Arabian Sea, the navy announced.
"Pakistan navy fleet today tested its fire power in the north Arabian Sea to assess lethality, precision and efficacy of its weapon system," it said.
The navy did not disclose range or technical details but said "this included successful firing of a variety of missiles and torpedoes from the ships."
The tests included anti-surface missiles from an F-22P frigate, acquired recently from China, air-to-surface missiles from P-3C aircraft and sub surface-to-surface missiles from Agosta 90B submarines that originate from France.
"While reassuring Pakistan navy's commitment of defending the motherland, this strike capability would also send a message of deterrence to anyone harbouring nefarious designs against Pakistan," the statement said.
For more on this article, please click on the following link: Pakistan navy test fires missiles, torpedoes: AFP
Friday, March 12, 2010
How the CIA Uses Pakistan as a Launch Pad for Drones: Spiegel.de
By Hasnain Kazim in Islamabad
As so often, the sky is a radiant blue over Mir Ali, a small Pakistani town in the province of North Waziristan near the border with Afghanistan. Alerted by a buzzing sound, a few people come out of their houses. Spotting a small aircraft a few hundred meters away, they panic, and those who can flee into the next village. The craft is a Predator drone, an unmanned plane launched from a secret airbase in Pakistan and controlled remotely by the CIA in Virginia back in the US. "We panic because we live in constant fear of being hit by a rocket," says Haji Gul, one of the inhabitants of Mir Ali.
Almost every day now, Pakistani television shows footage of houses destroyed and villages devastated by drone attacks. One such attack in mid-January killed three people in Mir Ali, all of them allegedly members of an extremist militia.
However the rockets fired by these remote-controlled mini-planes do not only kill terrorists. Drone strikes have an indirect -- and sometimes also direct -- impact on everyone who lives in the affected regions along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. Some of the locals are worried, others are angry. They fear for their lives now that the CIA's drone war is taking on ever greater dimensions and using Pakistan as a launch pad.
For it is here, in hidden airfields in Pakistan, that the drones are primed and launched. And it is mainly here that they carry out attacks, especially in North and South Waziristan, two regions that border Afghanistan and which are a stronghold of an unknown number of militant groups.
Controversial Campaign
Despite its success against the Pakistani Taliban, the use of drones by the Americans remains controversial in Pakistan. According to a Gallup poll, only 9 percent of Pakistanis are in favor of them. Two-thirds reject them outright.
There are several reasons for this. People living along the border with Afghanistan, for example, regularly complain that the rockets also kill civilians who have nothing to do with the insurgents. What's more, the Pakistani government feels the US has put it in a tight spot. Islamabad doesn't like foreign military activity on its territory -- at least officially. It claims America's actions constitute a violation of Pakistani sovereignty.
In a November 2009 interview with SPIEGEL, Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani went so far as to describe the drone attacks as "counterproductive." "The political and the military leadership have been very successful in isolating the militants from the local tribes. But once there is a drone attack in their home region, they get united again," he said. "This is a dangerous trend, and it is my concern and the concern of the army. It is also counterproductive in the sense that it is creating a lot of anti-American sentiment all over the country."
For more on this article, please click on the following link: How the CIA Uses Pakistan as a Launch Pad for Drones: Spiegel.de
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Pakistan proved right in Regi case: The News
By By Amir Mir
LAHORE: The arrest of the Jundallah chief Abdolmalek Regi by Iranian authorities hardly 24 hours after he had left an American military base in Afghanistan has vindicated Islamabad’s October 2009 stance that the anti-Shia renegade leader was no more hiding in Pakistan and was now operating from Afghanistan.
Regi, being Iran’s most wanted terrorist leader, had claimed responsibility for several major terrorist attacks carried out in Iran in the recent past, including the October 18 suicide bombing in Tehran. He was finally arrested along with his deputy after Iranian fighter planes intercepted a commercial flight over Persian Gulf which was travelling from Dubai to Kyrgyzstan and forced it to make an emergency landing at an unknown location. Informed circles in Islamabad say the most vital tip about the travel plans of Regi leading to his arrest actually came from Pakistan.
The Iranians have already recovered from him his Afghan passport, which according to Iranian Intelligence Minister Heydar Moslehi, had been supplied to him by the United States. The recovery of Afghan passport has also refuted the October 2009 Iranian claim that Abdolmalek Regi carries a Pakistani national identity card by the name of Saeed Ahmed, son of Ghulam Haider. Regi comes from the Regi tribe of the Baloch in Iran.
Jundallah, or “Army of God”, which is also known in Iran as the Regi group is a rebel anti-Shia Sunni militant group of Iranian Baloch, who claim to represent their minority’s rights in Iran’s southeast province of Sistan-Balochistan. The dedication of the Regi brothers to the cause of Jundallah can be gauged from the fact that one of them -- Abdolgafoor Regi - opted to sacrifice him by executing a suicide car bombing on December 28, 2008, against the headquarters of Iran’s joint police and anti-narcotics unit in the Saravan city. Before the arrest of the 30-year-old Regi, his hideout was believed to be cross-border, in the Pakistani Balochistan. In the wake of the October 18, 2009 suicide bombing in Tehran, Islamabad came under tremendous pressure from Tehran for the arrest and extradition of Regi. Addressing a press conference in Islamabad on March 20, 2009, the ambassador of Iran to Pakistan Mashallah Shakeri accused Pakistan of allowing its soil to be used against Iran and demanding concrete steps to contain its activities. Pakistan consequently maintained that its security agencies were making frantic efforts to dismantle the Jundallah network from Balochistan, adding Regi has already moved to Afghanistan after the June 15, 2008 extradition of his younger brother, Abdolhamid Regi (from Pakistan to Iran), who is now being tried by an Iranian court on terrorism charges.
For more on this article, please click on the following link: Pakistan proved right in Regi case: The News
Americans Against Freedom of Judiciary in Pakistan: WSJ
Judicial Coup in Pakistan: WSJ
By DAVID B. RIVKIN JR. AND LEE A. CASEY
When U.S. President Barack Obama sharply challenged a recent Supreme Court decision in his State of the Union address, prompting a soto voce rejoinder from Justice Samuel Alito, nobody was concerned that the contretemps would spark a blood feud between the judiciary and the executive. The notion that judges could or would work to undermine a sitting U.S. president is fundamentally alien to America's constitutional system and political culture. Unfortunately, this is not the case in Pakistan.
Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry, the country's erstwhile hero, is the leading culprit in an unfolding constitutional drama. It was Mr. Chaudhry's dismissal by then-President Pervez Musharraf in 2007 that triggered street protests by lawyers and judges under the twin banners of democracy and judicial independence. This effort eventually led to Mr. Musharraf's resignation in 2008. Yet it is now Mr. Chaudhry himself who is violating those principles, having evidently embarked on a campaign to undermine and perhaps even oust President Asif Ali Zardari.
Any involvement in politics by a sitting judge, not to mention a chief justice, is utterly inconsistent with an independent judiciary's proper role. What is even worse, Chief Justice Chaudhry has been using the court to advance his anti-Zardari campaign. Two recent court actions are emblematic of this effort.
The first is a decision by the Supreme Court, announced and effective last December, to overturn the "National Reconciliation Ordinance." The NRO, which was decreed in October 2007, granted amnesty to more than 8,000 members from all political parties who had been accused of corruption in the media and some of whom had pending indictments.
For more on this article, please click on the following link: Americans Against Freedom of Judiciary in Pakistan: WSJ
GORDON DUFF: PAKISTAN’S IMRAN KHAN; LOOKING FOR “AMERICA” IN THE STRANGEST PLACES: Veterans Today
Traveling around Pakistan is a challenge for an American nowadays. It’s not the highways. It isn’t even that our second vehicle was “armed to the teeth” as we weaved through traffic and up and down superhighways and dusty back roads. The difficulty is the landscape itself, a land, at times, very American in appearance and yet strange and wondrous too. It was the similarities that scared us.
We were there as Americans for a series of lectures and meetings to discuss economics and regional politics at universities and “think tanks.” Pakistan, a country of poverty and wealth, a nation threatened like no other was much like looking in a mirror, perhaps a mirror into America’s future.
A couple of nights ago, author and economist Jeff Gates and I along with Editor Raja Mujtaba of Opinion Maker, the controversial open forum where academics, military leaders and political dissidents from that region fight it out daily on the internet, met with Pakistani political leader, Imran Khan.
Meeting Khan was important to us because he is the only political figure in Pakistan that is widely respected in Afghanistan, a nation that could, potentially, bog American down for years in a bizarre and indefinable combination of “counter-terrorism” and traditional tribal warfare. Only Khan is respected on both sides of the border, Khan and General Aslam Beg, former Army Chief of Staff in Pakistan.
That there is suspicion between Pakistan and Afghanistan is an understatement. Millions of Afghanis and Pakistanis are, not only ethnically identical, but members of the same tribes, even families. Today, up to 4 million refugees from Afghanistan live in Pakistan’s tribal areas. These refugees combined with elements of a Pakistani Taliban have created a drain on Pakistan’s resources, a breeding ground for religious extremism and provided safe havens for Taliban sects that are clearly extremist, terrorist and criminal in nature.
With as many as 50 million people considering themselves “Taliban,” most non-extremist, differentiating between good and bad “Taliban” has been difficult and, in the case of American efforts, something approached with questionable intent.
Not that many years ago, the United States and Pakistan trained and armed the Mujahedeen, both Afghan and foreign fighters to overthrow Soviet dominance in Afghanistan. A generation later, our failure to demilitarize and rehabilitate these elements and the region has led to untold instability, world terrorism and a war against Pakistan supported by terrorist elements aided by massive funding and sophisticated weaponry and training whose origin can be traced with little difficulty to India and Israel.
Man or legend.
If a man describes “controversy” it is Imran Khan. Few people define the hopes of Islamic moderates as does Khan. This “Khan’s” empire, a “superstar” athlete of the cricket world, a sport unknown to most Americans, consists of that huge portion of the world our maps used to color pink, the regions we used to call the British Empire, a region covering 40% of the globe. When the British conquered the world they took their most beloved sport with them, cricket.
What if an American baseball pitcher won 30 games a year with an ERA of 2.0 and batted .400? Then surround him with controversy, a Muslim with a Jewish ex-wife, looks and charm and a reputed “way with the ladies” that keeps the tabloids stalking him and, oh, I forgot to mention this, make him the head of a political party. You will now begin to understand the enigma of Imran Khan
It gets worse.
He is Pashtu, a Pashtun, one of the same ethnic group Americans know as the Taliban, a group well out of the mainstream in Pakistani politics. In a country ruled by the “Europeanized” Punjabi and Sindh, a Pashtu political leader makes Barak Hussein Obama seem “mainstream.”
It gets worse still.
Khan is not only a controversial celebrity, but an outspoken reformer fighting government corruption. Khan is a friend of Americans but strong enemy of American influence in Pakistan and very critical for the west for its mistrust of Islam. He believes the west doesn’t know the difference between a Taliban extremist and a moderate Sufi cleric but can pick out a Methodist from a Lutheran in seconds.
Imagine an American sports hero who is an Oxford trained economist, sponsored the nation’s largest cancer center and is now building a university for those who would never otherwise see a higher education.
We had to meet this guy.
His political offices were moderate. We had visited political parties in Pakistan that looked more like Ivy League campuses. Khan’s party was used furniture, peeling paint and the sound of work, footsteps up and down stairs and a lot of noise. It was an election night in Rawalpindi. A seat in the national assembly was up for grabs and charges of election fraud had charged the air.
For more on this article, please click on the following link: GORDON DUFF: PAKISTAN’S IMRAN KHAN; LOOKING FOR “AMERICA” IN THE STRANGEST PLACES: Veterans Today
Pakistan’s nuclear profile: Sun2Surf
PAKISTAN encapsulates some of the key security challenges facing the international community. The presence of al-Qaeda and nuclear weapons on its soil under the overhang of conflict-prone ties with India remain critical geo-political concerns.
Although media coverage related to Pakistan has emphasised the militancy issue in light of the violence in Pakistan and the conflict in Afghanistan, analysing the full dimensions of Pakistan’s nuclear programme is essential to understanding its security profile. Pakistan’s nuclear engagement began in 1955 as part of the Atoms for Peace programme launched by the US. Thirty-seven Pakistani scientists trained at US atomic facilities and a small research facility was established in Pakistan with US assistance.
Yet following Pakistan’s defeat in the 1971 war with India, its nuclear ambitions were weaponised.
In 1972, President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto declared, “if India builds the Bomb, we will eat grass or leaves, even go hungry. But we will get one of our own.”
Two decades later in May 1998, in a series of tit-for-tat nuclear tests, India and Pakistan officially joined the nuclear club. Estimates suggest Pakistan has enough material for sixty to hundred bombs deliverable by attack aircraft and missiles.
To ensure proper command and control over this arsenal, in February 2002, the National Command Authority (NCA) was set up to formulate policy and exercise employment and development control over all strategic nuclear forces and organisations.
Under a presidential ordinance passed by Gen Musharraf in 2007, the president was to chair the NCA that was to include the prime minister as vice-chairman and senior cabinet and military officials. Last November, President Zardari handed his powers in the NCA to the prime minister though real control remains with the military.
Pakistan’s nuclear doctrine is geared toward ensuring a “credible minimum deterrent” against India. As a result of India’s conventional military superiority, Pakistan has refrained from adopting a no-first-use doctrine, ie it retains the right to use nuclear weapons in a conflict even if it has not been attacked with them. Pakistan has not articulated a formal nuclear doctrine; however, in January 2002, Gen Khalid Kidwai who chairs the NCA’s secretariat outlined general conditions of use: if India attacks Pakistan and conquers a large part of its territory; destroys a large part either of its land or air forces; proceeds to the economic strangling of Pakistan; or pushes Pakistan into political destabilisation or creates a large scale internal subversion.
For more on this article, please click on the following link: Pakistan’s nuclear profile: Sun2Surf
Pakistan court blocks Baradar extradition: FT
By Farhan Bokhari in Islamabad
A Pakistani provincial high court yesterday blocked the extradition of captured Afghan Taliban leaders including Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, in an unexpected twist that threatens to undermine Islamabad’s commitment to hunt down islamist militants
Mullah Baradar, the Taliban military chief in Afghanistan, was captured by Pakistan’s intelligence agents assisted by the CIA, from the southern port city of Karachi earlier this month. On Thursday, a statement from the office of Afghan president Hamid Karzai announced an agreement with Pakistan for Mullah Baradar to be handed over to Afganistan.
The government - which has come under intense western pressure, especially from the US, to crackdown on Taliban militants in the country - could appeal to the supreme court to have the decision overturned.
Khalid Khawaja, a pro-islamist campaigner who has actively opposed Pakistan forging closer ties with the US and who filed the petition to the court said; “I feel encouraged as we can’t hand over our people to the US, Afghanistan or any other country”.
Judge Khawaja Mohammad Sharif issued his order in Lahore saying: “They [the Taliban] should not be handed over to any other country” and set March 15 as the next date for hearing the case.
In addition to Mullah Baradar, other Taliban militants named by Mr Khawaja among those arrested recently include Mullah Abdus Salaam, Mullah Kabir, Mullah Mohammad and Mullah Amir Muawiya.
Analysts said, Friday’s development underlined a tendency among islamists to use Pakistan’s increasingly robust civil society, the media and the courts to press their case.
“Whatever you might say otherwise, it is the case that Pakistan’s civil society, courts and the press are all among the freest in the developing world” said one western diplomat in Islamabad. “This is a strength which we may not like in this particular case because the islamists are using it to their advantage, but it is a strength”.
Lieutenant General (retired) Abdul Qayyum, a former Pakistani military commander, warned that handing over Taliban militants to a foreign country would provoke a backlash. “If these people are sent to Afghanistan, it is as good as sending them to America. We can’t hand over these people to an outside power. That will annoy Pakistanis even more so than before” he said.
For more on this article, please click on the following link: Pakistan court blocks Baradar extradition: FT
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