SPY EYES

In six months’ time Iranians will go to the polls to elect a new president.

Although the campaign does not officially start until March, there has already been much speculation about who will be competing in the race to succeed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

After a year dominated by infighting between supporters and opponents of Mr Ahmadinejad, the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has warned politicians not to engage in early electioneering.

Despite this, names are beginning to emerge, and parties and factions have quietly started lobbying for their preferred candidate.

Intriguingly, many of the potential contenders so far have one thing in common – they have been involved in the international negotiations over Iran’s nuclear programme.

Hassan Rohani, who was the country’s chief nuclear negotiator from 2003 to 2005, is the latest politician to tacitly acknowledge that he is intending to stand.

He hit the headlines last year when he published an outspoken memoir about his time as nuclear negotiator, which detailed clashes with President Ahmadinejad and eventually forced Mr Rohani to resign.

Claiming to appeal to both conservative and reform-minded voters, Mr Rohani told reporters in early January that it was time for a “new tone” in Iranian nuclear policy and that President Ahmadinejad had been too “confrontational”.

Speculation

Ali Larijani, the current speaker of parliament, is another possible candidate with a nuclear past.

In 2005, he succeeded Mr Rohani as Iran’s nuclear negotiator, but his moderate and pragmatic stand also put him at odds with the president and he resigned after two years.

Now the conservative faction in the Iranian parliament – which controls almost two-thirds of the seats – has given him its backing.

Another name in the hat is Saeed Jalili, Iran’s current chief nuclear envoy.

A tough negotiator who lost a leg during the Iran-Iraq war, Mr Jalili is keeping silent about his intentions.

But there has already been a high-profile and well-organised campaign running in the Iranian blogosphere to support his candidacy, and some members of the influential conservative Islamic Stability Front have gone public to back him.

And lastly there is Ali Akbar Salehi, the current foreign minister and former head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI).

Mr Salehi has so far declined to confirm whether he will be standing for the presidency, but his elusive answers when questioned at news conferences have fuelled speculation that his name will also be in the running.

Inner circle

So why is there such a buzz around these “nuclear candidates”?

Clearly one issue is their relationship with the man who has the final say on Iran’s nuclear policy, Ayatollah Khamenei.

Observers say that being a member of the nuclear policy-makers’ club is seen as a badge of honour in Iranian politics because the supreme leader only lets the most trusted people into this inner circle.

For all of the names currently in the running, involvement in the nuclear talks has resulted in a high-speed train ride to the very top of Iranian politics.

For Mr Salehi, a stint as Iran’s representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was a fast-track to being appointed foreign minister in 2011.

Mr Larijani went from head of the state broadcaster, Voice and Vision of the Islamic Republic of Iran (VVIRI), to speaker of parliament after his two years as nuclear negotiator.

But while they may have Ayatollah Khamenei to thank for their current high-profile roles, it is not clear how popular any of these men really are with ordinary voters.

Mr Larijani, who has the most solid profile among them all, tried his luck in the presidential election in 2005, but only won 4% of the vote.

Iran watchers say that the emergence of the “nuclear candidates” also indicates just how crucial the nuclear issue has now become at all levels of Iranian political life.

For the conservative politicians who came to power after the last presidential election in 2009, the ongoing confrontation with the West over Iran’s nuclear ambitions is becoming so serious they fear it could threaten the very existence of the Islamic Republic.

For the Revolutionary Guards and the business world, while sanctions may have offered the chance to monopolise the economy in the short term, there is a growing awareness that as the economy shrinks, so will their share of the profits.

Earlier this month, one MP confirmed what many had suspected when he announced that Iran’s oil sales had fallen 40% and its income has dropped 45% over the last nine months.

Growing impatience

But most important of all is the stance of the supreme leader.

US President Barack Obama has warned that the window of diplomacy is “shrinking” and Ayatollah Khamenei knows that if he does not negotiate him, there is no guarantee the next interlocutor will be someone with the same degree of patience and persistence.

Ayatollah Khamenei has made no secret of his growing impatience with the tensions between President Ahmadinejad and other officials over the nuclear issue.

It is clear he would welcome a new president who could try to build consensus on the issue and get everyone working in the same direction.

Given the complexities of Iranian politics, observers caution that even if one of the “nuclear candidates” is elected president, there are unlikely to be big changes in the short term.

But it would send an important message to people inside Iran and in the West that solving the nuclear issue is now a top priority for the supreme leader and that Iran is keen to solve the deadlock while there is still time.

By Bozorgmehr Sharafedin

After a decade of U.S. military intervention — and destruction — Afghans still fear the worst for their country

Kabul, Afghanistan — Compromise, conflict, or collapse: ask an Afghan what to expect in 2014 and you’re likely to get a scenario that falls under one of those three headings. 2014, of course, is the year of the double whammy in Afghanistan: the next presidential election coupled with the departure of most American and other foreign forces. Many Afghans fear a turn for the worse, while others are no less afraid that everything will stay the same.  Some even think things will get better when the occupying forces leave.  Most predict a more conservative climate, but everyone is quick to say that it’s anybody’s guess.

Only one thing is certain in 2014: it will be a year of American military defeat.  For more than a decade, U.S. forces have fought many types of wars in Afghanistan, from a low-footprint invasion, to multiple surges, to a flirtation with Vietnam-style counterinsurgency, to a ramped-up, gloves-off air war.  And yet, despite all the experiments in styles of war-making, the American military and its coalition partners have ended up in the same place: stalemate, which in a battle with guerrillas means defeat.  For years, a modest-sized, generally unpopular, ragtag set of insurgents has fought the planet’s most heavily armed, technologically advanced military to a standstill, leaving the country shaken and its citizens anxiously imagining the outcome of unpalatable scenarios.

The first, compromise, suggests the possibility of reaching some sort of almost inconceivable power-sharing agreement with multiple insurgent militias.  While Washington presses for negotiations with its designated enemy, “the Taliban,” representatives of President Hamid Karzai’s High Peace Council, which includes 12 members of the former Taliban government and many sympathizers, are making the rounds to talk disarmament and reconciliation with all the armed insurgent groups that the Afghan intelligence service has identified across the country. There are 1,500 of them.

One member of the Council told me, “It will take a long time before we get to Mullah Omar [the Taliban’s titular leader].  Some of these militias can’t even remember what they’ve been fighting about.”

The second scenario, open conflict, would mean another dreaded round of civil war like the one in the 1990s, after the Soviet Union withdrew in defeat — the one that destroyed the Afghan capital, Kabul, devastated parts of the country, and gave rise to the Taliban.

The third scenario, collapse, sounds so apocalyptic that it’s seldom brought up by Afghans, but it’s implied in the exodus already underway of those citizens who can afford to leave the country.  The departures aren’t dramatic.  There are no helicopters lifting off the roof of the U.S. Embassy with desperate Afghans clamoring to get on board; just a record number of asylum applications in 2011, a year in which, according to official figures, almost 36,000 Afghans were openly looking for a safe place to land, preferably in Europe.  That figure is likely to be at least matched, if not exceeded, when the U.N. releases the complete data for 2012.

In January, I went to Kabul to learn what old friends and current officials are thinking about the critical months ahead.  At the same time, Afghan President Karzai flew to Washington to confer with President Obama.  Their talks seem to have differed radically from the conversations I had with ordinary Afghans. In Kabul, where strange rumors fly, an official reassured me that the future looked bright for the country because Karzai was expected to return from Washington with the promise of American radar systems, presumably for the Afghan Air Force, which is not yet “operational.” (He actually returned with the promise of helicopters, cargo planes, fighter jets, and drones.) Who knew that the fate of the nation and its suffering citizens hinged on that?  In my conversations with ordinary Afghans, one thing that never came up was radar.

Another term that never seems to enter ordinary Afghan conversation, much as it obsesses Americans, is “al-Qaeda.” President Obama, for instance, announced at a joint press conference with President Karzai: “Our core objective — the reason we went to war in the first place — is now within reach: ensuring that al-Qaeda can never again use Afghanistan to launch attacks against America.”  An Afghan journalist asked me, “Why does he worry so much about al-Qaeda in Afghanistan? Doesn’t he know they are everywhere else?”

At the same Washington press conference, Obama said, “The nation we need to rebuild is our own.” Afghans long ago gave up waiting for the U.S. to make good on its promises to rebuild theirs. What’s now striking, however, is the vast gulf between the pronouncements of American officialdom and the hopes of ordinary Afghans.  It’s a gap so wide you would hardly think — as Afghans once did — that we are fighting for them.

To take just one example: the official American view of events in Afghanistan is wonderfully black and white.  The president, for instance, speaks of the way U.S. forces heroically “pushed the Taliban out of their strongholds.” Like other top U.S. officials over the years, he forgets whom we pushed into the Afghan government, our “stronghold” in the years after the 2001 invasion: ex-Taliban and Taliban-like fundamentalists, the most brutal civil warriors, and serial human rights violators.

Afghans, however, haven’t forgotten just whom the U.S. put in place to govern them — exactly the men they feared and hated most in exactly the place where few Afghans wanted them to be.  Early on, between 2002 and 2004, 90% of Afghans surveyed nationwide told the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission that such men should not be allowed to hold public office; 76% wanted them tried as war criminals.

In my recent conversations, many Afghans still cited the first loya jirga, an assembly convened in 2003 to ratify the newly drafted constitution, or the first presidential election in 2004, or the parliamentary election of 2005, all held under international auspices, as the moments when the aspirations of Afghans and the “international community” parted company. In that first parliament, as in the earlier gatherings, most of the men were affiliated with armed militias; every other member was a former jihadi, and nearly half were affiliated with fundamentalist Islamist parties, including the Taliban.

In this way, Afghans were consigned to live under a government of bloodstained warlords and fundamentalists, who turned out to be Washington’s guys.  Many had once battled the Soviets using American money and weapons, and quite a few, like the former warlord, druglord, minister of defense, and current vice-president Muhammad Qasim Fahim, had been very chummy with the CIA.

In the U.S., such details of our Afghan War, now in its 12th year, are long forgotten, but to Afghans who live under the rule of the same old suspects, the memory remains painfully raw.  Worse, Afghans know that it is these very men, rearmed and ready, who will once again compete for power in 2014.

How to Vote Early in Afghanistan

President Karzai is barred by term limits from standing for reelection in 2014, but many Kabulis believe he reached a private agreement with the usual suspects at a meeting late last year. In early January, he seemed to seal the deal by announcing that, for the sake of frugality, the voter cards issued for past elections will be reused in 2014.  Far too many of those cards were issued for the 2004 election, suspiciously more than the number of eligible voters.  During the 2009 campaign, anyone could buy fistfuls of them at bargain basement prices.  So this decision seemed to kill off the last faint hope of an election in which Afghans might actually have a say about the leadership of the country.

Fewer than 35% of voters cast ballots in the last presidential contest, when Karzai’s men were caught on video stuffing ballot boxes.  (Afterward, President Obama phoned to congratulate Karzai on his “victory.”) Only dedicated or paid henchmen are likely to show up for the next “good enough for Afghans” exercise in democracy. Once again, an “election” may be just the elaborate stage set for announcing to a disillusioned public the names of those who will run the show in Kabul for the next few years.

Kabulis might live with that, as they’ve lived with Karzai all these years, but they fear power-hungry Afghan politicians could “compromise” as well with insurgent leaders like that old American favorite from the war against the Soviets, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who recently told a TV audience that he intends to claim his rightful place in government. Such compromises could stick the Afghan people with a shaky power-sharing deal among the most ultra-conservative, self-interested, sociopathic, and corrupt men in the country.  If that deal, in turn, were to fall apart, as most power-sharing agreements worldwide do within a year or two, the big men might well plunge the country back into a 1990s-style civil war, with no regard for the civilians caught in their path.

These worst-case scenarios are everyday Kabuli nightmares.  After all, during decades of war, the savvy citizens of the capital have learned to expect the worst from the men currently characterized in a popular local graffiti this way: “Mujahideen=Criminals. Taliban=Dumbheads.”

Ordinary Kabulis express reasonable fears for the future of the country, but impatient free-marketeering businessmen are voting with their feet right now, or laying plans to leave soon. They’ve made Kabul hum (often with foreign aid funds, which are equivalent to about 90% of the country’s economic activity), but they aren’t about to wait around for the results of election 2014.  Carpe diem has become their version of financial advice.  As a result, they are snatching what they can and packing their bags.

Millions of dollars reportedly take flight from Kabul International Airport every day: officially about $4.6 billion in 2011, or just about the size of Afghanistan’s annual budget. Hordes of businessmen and bankers (like those who, in 2004, set up the Ponzi scheme called the Kabul Bank, from which about a billion dollars went missing) are heading for cushy spots like Dubai, where they have already established residence on prime real estate.

As they take their investments elsewhere and the American effort winds down, the Afghan economy contracts ever more grimly, opportunities dwindle, and jobs disappear.  Housing prices in Kabul are falling for the first time since the start of the occupation as rich Afghans and profiteering private American contractors, who guzzled the money that Washington and the “international community” poured into the country, move on.

At the same time, a money-laundering building boom in Kabul appears to have stalled, leaving tall, half-built office blocks like so many skeletons amid the scalloped Pakistani palaces, vertical malls, and grand madrassas erected in the past four or five years by political and business insiders and well-connected conservative clerics.

Most of the Afghan tycoons seeking asylum elsewhere don’t fear for their lives, just their pocketbooks: they’re not political refugees, but free-market rats abandoning the sinking ship of state.  Joining in the exodus (but not included in the statistics) are countless illegal émigrés seeking jobs or fleeing for their lives, paying human smugglers money they can’t afford as they head for Europe by circuitous and dangerous routes.

Threatened Afghans have fled from every abrupt change of government in the last century, making them the largest population of refugees from a single country on the planet.  Once again, those who can are voting with their feet (or their pocketbooks) — and voting early.

Afghanistan’s historic tragedy is that its violent political shifts — from king to communists to warlords to religious fundamentalists to the Americans — have meant the flight of the very people most capable of rebuilding the country along peaceful and prosperous lines.  And their departure only contributes to the economic and political collapse they themselves seek to avoid.  Left behind are ordinary Afghans — the illiterate and unskilled, but also a tough core of educated, ambitious citizens, including women’s rights activists, unwilling to surrender their dream of living once again in a free and peaceful Afghanistan.

The Military Monster

These days Kabul resounds with the blasts of suicide bombers, IEDs, and sporadic gunfire.  Armed men are everywhere in anonymous uniforms that defy identification.  Any man with money can buy a squad of bodyguards, clad in classy camouflage and wraparound shades, and armed with assault weapons.  Yet Kabulis, trying to carry on normal lives in the relative safety of the capital, seem to maintain a distance from the war going on in the provinces.

Asked that crucial question — do you think American forces should stay or go? — the Kabulis I talked with tended to answer in a theoretical way, very unlike the visceral response one gets in the countryside, where villages are bombed and civilians killed, or in the makeshift camps for internally displaced people that now crowd the outer fringes of Kabul. (By the time U.S. Marines surged into Taliban-controlled Helmand Province in the south in 2010 to bring counterinsurgency-style protection to the residents there, tens of thousands of them had already moved to those camps in Kabul.)  Afghans in the countryside want to be rid of armed men.  All of them.  Kabulis just want to be secure, and if that means keeping some U.S. troops at Bagram Air Base near the capital, as Afghan and American officials are currently discussing, well, it’s nothing to them.

In fact, most Kabulis I spoke to think that’s what’s going to happen.  After all, American officials have been talking for years about keeping permanent bases in Afghanistan (though they avoid the term “permanent” when speaking to the American press), and American military officers now regularly appear on Afghan TV to say, “The United States will never abandon Afghanistan.”  Afghans reason: Americans would not have spent nearly 12 years fighting in this country if it were not the most strategic place on the planet and absolutely essential to their plans to “push on” Iran and China next.  Everybody knows that pushing on other countries is an American specialty.

Besides, Afghans can see with their own eyes that U.S. command centers, including multiple bases in Kabul, and Bagram Air Base, only 30 miles away, are still being expanded and upgraded.  Beyond the high walls of the American Embassy compound, they can also see the tall new apartment blocks going up for an expanding staff, even if Washington now claims that staff will be reduced in the years to come.

Why, then, would President Obama announce the drawdown of U.S. troops to perhaps a few thousand special operations forces and advisors, if Washington didn’t mean to leave?  Afghans have a theory about that, too.  It’s a ruse, many claim, to encourage all other foreign forces to depart so that the Americans can have everything to themselves.  Afghanistan, as they imagine it, is so important that the U.S., which has fought the longest war in its history there, will be satisfied with nothing less.

I was there to listen, but at times I did mention to Afghans that America’s post-9/11 wars and occupations were threatening to break the country.  “We just can’t afford this war anymore,” I said.

Afghans only laugh at that.  They’ve seen the way Americans throw money around.  They’ve seen the way American money corrupted the Afghan government, and many reminded me that American politicians like Afghan ones are bought and sold, and its elections won by money. Americans, they know, are as rich as Croesus and very friendly, though on the whole not very well mannered or honest or smart.

Operation Enduring Presence      

More than 11 years later, the tragedy of the American war in Afghanistan is simple enough: it has proven remarkably irrelevant to the lives of the Afghan people — and to American troops as well.  Washington has long appeared to be fighting its own war in defense of a form of government and a set of long-discredited government officials that ordinary Afghans would never have chosen for themselves and have no power to replace.

In the early years of the war (2001-2005), George W. Bush’s administration was far too distracted planning and launching another war in Iraq to maintain anything but a minimal military presence in Afghanistan — and that mainly outside the capital.  Many journalists (including me) criticized Bush for not finishing the war he started there when he had the chance, but today Kabulis look back on that soldierless period of peace and hope with a certain nostalgia.  In some quarters, the Bush years have even acquired something like the sheen of a lost Golden Age — compared, that is, to the thoroughgoing militarization of American policy that followed.

So commanding did the U.S. military become in Kabul and Washington that, over the years, it ate the State Department, gobbled up the incompetent bureaucracy of the U.S. Agency for International Development, and established Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) in the countryside to carry out maniacal “development” projects and throw bales of cash at all the wrong “leaders.”

Of course, the military also killed a great many people, both “enemies” and civilians.  As in Vietnam, it won the battles, but lost the war.  When I asked Afghans from Mazar-e-Sharif in the north how they accounted for the relative peacefulness and stability of their area, the answer seemed self-evident: “Americans didn’t come here.”

Other consequences, all deleterious, flowed from the militarization of foreign policy.  In Afghanistan and the United States, so intimately ensnarled over all these years, the income gap between the rich and everyone else has grown exponentially, in large part because in both countries the rich have made money off war-making, while ordinary citizens have slipped into poverty for lack of jobs and basic services.

Relying on the military, the U.S. neglected the crucial elements of civil life in Afghanistan that make things bearable — like education and health care.  Yes, I’ve heard the repeated claims that, thanks to us, millions of children are now attending school.  But for how long?  According to UNICEF, in the years 2005-2010, in the whole of Afghanistan only 18% of boys attended high school, and 6% of girls.  What kind of report card is that?  After 11 years of underfunded work on health care in a country the size of Texas, infant mortality still remains the highest in the world.

By 2014, the defense of Afghanistan will have been handed over to the woeful Afghan National Security Force, also known in military-speak as the “Enduring Presence Force.”  In that year, for Washington, the American war will be officially over, whether it’s actually at an end or not, and it will be up to Afghans to do the enduring.

Here’s where that final scenario — collapse — haunts the Kabuli imagination.  Economic collapse means joblessness, poverty, hunger, and a great swelling of the ranks of children cadging a living in the streets.  Already street children are said to number a million strong in Kabul, and 4 million across the country.  Only blocks from the Presidential Palace, they are there in startling numbers selling newspapers, phone cards, toilet paper, or simply begging for small change. Are they the county’s future?

And if the state collapses, too?  Afghans of a certain age remember well the last time the country was left on its own, after the Soviets departed in 1989, and the U.S. also terminated its covert aid.  The mujahideen parties — Islamists all — agreed to take turns ruling the country, but things soon fell apart and they took turns instead lobbing rockets into Kabul, killing tens of thousands of civilians, reducing entire districts to rubble, raiding and raping — until the Taliban came up from the south and put a stop to everything.

Afghan civilians who remember that era hope that this time Karzai will step down as he promises, and that the usual suspects will find ways to maintain traditional power balances, however undemocratic, in something that passes for peace.  Afghan civilians are, however, betting that if a collision comes, one-third of those Afghan Security Forces trained at fabulous expense to protect them will fight for the government (whoever that may be), one-third will fight for the opposition, and one-third will simply desert and go home.  That sounds almost like a plan.

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BY ANN JONES

His Majesty Jigme Namgyel Wangchuck, the King of Bhutan is visiting India and was the chief guest at India’s 64th Republic Day parade on 26 January 2013. This follows an earlier visit (in January 2013) by External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid to Bhutan.

How important is Bhutan to India and vice-versa? What are the contemporary issues between the two countries?

India and Bhutan: Natural Partners

Owing to their geographic location, Bhutan and India are natural partners and their future is inseparable. The economic and political relationship between the two countries however underwent a paradigmatic shift after the visit of Jawaharlal Nehru to Bhutan in 1958 who undertook a strenuous week long trip on a horse back to Bhutan. Infact Nehru in his famous speech at Paro framed the parameters of Indo-Bhutan relations. He said, India and Bhutan “were members of the same Himalayan family and should live as friendly neighbours helping each other.” During the visit, Nehru discussed prospects of Indo-Bhutan bilateral ties including opportunities for Bhutan’s socio-economic development. Nehru’s friendly and candid gesture paved the way for Bhutan’s pro active engagement with India. Bhutan policy choice was further expedited by China’s aggressive posturing on territorial issues particularly during the 1950s (1954, 1958 and 1961) when China published maps showing Bhutan’s territory as part of China.

Although, the trade relations between the Indian states of Assam and West Bengal dates back to colonial period , it witnessed new dimension since 1961 with the launch of first five year plan of Bhutan. Today India stands as Bhutan’s largest development partner. While bilaterally the partnership has broadened over a variety of issue areas, trust and good will between both countries has only deepened. With India being the destination for over 90 per cent of Bhutanese export and source of import for over 70% of total imports, trade relations between both countries are only growing. Given the long and open borders, huge informal trade is also taking place between the two countries.

Domestically, Bhutan has made significant social, political and economic progress during last decade. Its per capita GDP in 2011 was recorded at USD 2590, which makes it join the range of middle income countries. The His Majesty the 4th King of Bhutan initiated a democratic process and first democratic election was held in 2008. During the first election, there were only two registered political parties and five parties are registered for the second election which is expected to be held in mid-2013. His Majesty the 5th King of Bhutan, who is rightly called as people’s king has been working tirelessly to strengthen democracy in Bhutan with strong economic and social foundation. Under the guidance of His Majesty the 5th King, Indo-Bhutan relation will be stronger and the people of Bhutan will enjoy greater prosperity. Within a short period of time, His Majesty the 5th King has not only garnered goodwill from people of Bhutan but from across the world.

Bhutan: India as a Developmental Partner

India is also a major developmental partner of Bhutan and the budgetary assistance from the Indian government has increased many folds (see the figure 1). Indeed, the Indo-Bhutan relation has grown beyond the donor-recipient relation into equal partners with mutually beneficial projects particularly hydropower. Several hydropower projects like Chukha Hydropower (336 MW; construction of project started in 1979), Kurichu Hydropower (60 MW, construction of project started 1998), Tala Hydropower Project (1005 MW, the project started in 1999), have been completed and many are in progress (see the table below). The two countries target to harvest to the tune of 10,000 MW by 2020.

Despite robust economic growth, improvement in Millennium Development Indicators, Bhutan however needs to carefully manage the following economic issues:

• Rupee crisis and its negative impact on poverty, livelihood and socio-economic and political future of Bhutan
• Increasing debt to GDP ratio, which could adversely affect the future of Bhutanese population
• Heavy reliance on hydropower projects
• Close to 70 percent of the Bhutanese population are dependent on Agriculture, which contributes to only 16 percent of GDP.
• Food security in light of climate change and declining agricultural productivity in Bhutan
• Employment and human resource development taking to view the small population

India and Bhutan: Is the nature of bilateral relations transforming?

Notwithstanding these important pointers, the socio-economic development and India-Bhutan relations can be considered a success story in an otherwise turbulent neighbourhood. However, it needs to be highlighted that the nature of bilateral relations are fast changing. Politically, Bhutan has made a transition to democracy. While the King still holds decisive weight in the political and social life of Bhutan, domestic spaces have opened up, whereby variety of stakeholders have increased in Bhutanese politics. Given that India is a major development partner, issues related to development and economic growth will inevitably rope in debates on India’s role in Bhutan. Addressing the sensitivities of various stakeholders, particularly the business community is thus a challenge that India will have to deftly handle.

The China Factor: China has been presented as another issue of contention between both countries. While Bhutan has not made official comments on establishing diplomatic relations with China, the Indian, Bhutanese and Chinese media have been quite vocal on this front. It is inevitable that as the process of democratisation takes roots in Bhutan, there will be certain sections wanting bilateral relations with China. Infact, there are fomenting internal pressures in Bhutan on establishing ‘limited economic ties’ with China. It is argued by certain sections that goods imported from the Calcutta port in India increase transactional costs and that these ‘costs’ could well be reduced, if goods were imported from Bhutan’s North-Western border via Tibet. However, any decision on this front would require tampering with the much protracted Sino-Bhutan boundary dispute. Pressure groups in Bhutan, as the National Assembly debates reveal have also been insisting on resolving the boundary dispute for quite some time now. Thus, given the complexity of the issue, a middle way to resolve the boundary dispute needs to be devised by both countries. Ingenuity on this front could create a win –win situation for both countries in the long term.

India and Bhutan: Building a Common Future

While politically the issues need to be handled through deft diplomacy, there are tremendous opportunities for further strengthening Indo-Bhutan relation through development of premier educational institution, industries along the Indo-Bhutan borders.

Although India has been providing several privileges to Bhutanese citizen, India could provide more privileges to further strengthen the relation further as the population of Bhutan is too small to make any impact to India (less than one million as against 1.2 billion Indian populations). India therefore should harness this demographic advantage. Geographically, as stated before, Bhutan’s destiny lies with South Asia. India assumes strategic importance for Bhutan as its industrial belt lies predominantly in the South.

Bhutan’s interaction with South and South East Asian countries therefore makes strategic relations with India important. While the Bhutanese policy makers have understood this aspect well, common spaces of cooperation for both countries need to be worked upon to further enhance political goodwill. Cooperation on these issues would also ensure the diplomatic future of India-Bhutan relations in the long term.

By Dil Bahadur Rahut & Medha Bisht

Putting aside years of mistrust, the Afghan government indicated on Monday its willingness to consider Pakistan’s longstanding offer of training its armed forces.

This sense was conveyed during Afghan defence delegation’s meeting with Army Chief Gen Ashfaq Pervez Kayani at the military headquarters.

The Afghan delegation led by Defence Minister Gen Bismillah Khan Muhammadi, which is on a five-day visit to Pakistan, included Major General Afzal Aman, Director General of Military Operations; Major General Abdul Manan Farahi, Director General Military Intelligence and Investigation; Major General Payanda Mohammad Nazim, Inspector General of Training; and Major General Aminullah Karim, Commandant of National Defence College, Afghanistan.

The rare visit of the high-level Afghan defence delegation denoted a paradigm shift in Afghanistan’s perceptions about Pakistan.

Because of years of disinformation, Afghan authorities had always sceptically looked towards Pakistan believing that the former ally of Taliban was opposed to the current set-up and was backing Taliban insurgency.

It was this opinion that prevented Afghanistan from considering Pakistani offer to train its troops, which was originally made in 2010 by Gen Kayani. Afghan President Hamid Karzai had at a meeting with journalists last February dismissed the offer as a non-starter till Pakistan rebuilt confidence by addressing Kabul’s concerns about its involvement with Taliban terrorists.

The defence team’s visit, however, suggested that Afghans were finally convinced about the centrality of Pakistan in the reconciliation process.

“Both sides showed understanding for the fact that not only the geography, history and culture, but also the destiny of the two countries was shared. This makes it imperative for the two countries to move forward with a joint approach on important national and regional issues, and have a joint strategy on security issues affecting either of two countries, or both,” a military source said after the meeting at the General Headquarters, while referring to unanimity of views and the cordial atmosphere at the talks.

The Afghan delegation will visit the Combat Training Centre in Lehri (near Jhelum), School of Infantry and Tactics in Quetta, Pakistan Military Academy, Kakul, and Staff College, Quetta, to inspect the training facilities.

At the Tokyo Conference on Afghanistan last July Pakistan had committed $20 million assistance for Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF). The aid was largely to be spent on capacity building and technical assistance for the Afghan forces.

The two sides discussed cross-border attacks from Afghanistan’s Kunar and Nuristan provinces into Pakistan and agreed on better border coordination and control to prevent them in future.

Another important agreement was to make border control mechanism a bilateral affair instead of a trilateral one involving the US-led International Security Assistance Force.

While discussing peace and reconciliation efforts, Gen Kayani reiterated Pakistan’s desire for a peaceful, stable and united Afghanistan, and Gen Mohammadi of complete support to bring normalcy in border regions to make conditions conducive for drawdown of Isaf forces in 2014.
Pakistan as part of its commitment to aiding peace process in Afghanistan had released several senior Afghan Taliban figures.

Afghan defence minister thanked Pakistan for releasing the detained Taliban leaders and noted that move would play a positive role in the peace process.