Shuja Nawaz, director of the Atlantic Council’s South Asia Center, was interviewed on ABC Radio Australia where he discussed Pakistan’s new prime minister and the emerging political situation.

Listen to the interview on RadioAustralia.Net

 Vice President of the India-Pakistan Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Syed Yawar Ali provided an overview of the current trade flow between India and Pakistan, highlight mutually beneficial opportunities of bilateral and regional agreements, and emphasize the need for new infrastructure to increase cooperation.

Shuja Nawaz, director of the Council’s South Asia Center, moderated the discussion.

Trade between India and Pakistan amounts to only $2 billion, but has the potential to reach multiples of that amount in the next few years provided the barriers to trade are removed. Political tensions coupled with tariff and non-tariff barriers enforced in both countries have prevented India and Pakistan from benefitting from each other’s diverse markets and from their respective comparative advantage. This year, India and Pakistan began moving toward a more open trade relationship with Pakistan’s promise to accord India Most Favored Nation status. Commerce and industry ministers from both countries have met to discuss customs agreements, new trade routes, and enhancing people-to-people business ties. Joint business conferences have been held and mechanisms to deal with business-related grievances have also been setup.

Syed Yawar Ali joined the family business, Packages Limited, and then became managing director of Milk Pak Limited. After three years of the joint venture with Nestlé, he was promoted to chairman of the board. He is currently the vice president of the India-Pakistan Chamber of Commerce and Industry and facilitates PBC’s work in Aman Ki Asha to promote trade between India and Pakistan.

Mr. Ali also currently serves as chairman of Nestlé Pakistan Limited, Wazir Ali Industries Limited, and was the former chairman of the Pakistan Dairy Association. He has also served on the Board of Directors of the State Bank of Pakistan, Pakistan International Airlines, Agricultural Development Bank of Pakistan and Lahore Electric Supply Company.

After graduating from Aitchison College in Lahore, and receiving a bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering, Mr. Ali attained a master’s degree in Management Science from Stevens Institute of Technology, New Jersey.

Aman Ki Asha is an initiative launched in 2010 by Pakistan-based Jang Group and the Times of India. For more information on this campaign, please click here.

Now that the dust has settled on the Chicago Summit, it might be time to see what truly emerged from all the noise and celebration about the cooperation among NATO allies and with Afghanistan. One issue got lost in that hoopla: Afghanistan’s regional context.

As NATO troops come home, a diplomatic strategy for the region must be put into place. It isn’t a stable Afghanistan that is key to generating regional stability and prosperity — rather, the opposite is true: if the region cooperates to maintain wider stability, then Afghanistan stands a better chance of becoming stable and prosperous.

Interestingly, even the Chinese seem to have understood this issue. According to a Reuters report out of the recent Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit, President Hu Jintao told the official People’s Daily, “We will continue to manage regional affairs by ourselves, guarding against shocks from turbulence outside the region, and will play a bigger role in Afghanistan’s peaceful reconstruction.” He added: “We’ll strengthen communication, coordination and cooperation in dealing with major international and regional issues.”

The best path to Afghan self-sufficiency is to work with Afghanistan’s neighbors near and far to ensure that Afghanistan’s economy can develop via trade and investment. That is the most effective and sustainable method of weaning Afghanistan away from U.S. and European assistance beyond 2014. Last week’s regional “Heart of Asia” conference, hosted by President Hamid Karzai in Kabul, was a modest step forward in the process.

U.S. support for such efforts would advance what is now a regional trend. Already India has invested more than $1.2 billion in Afghanistan. Pakistan, too, has sent economic aid and supplies, as has Iran. China and India have both invested in the mineral sector. Trade between South Asia and Afghanistan, and through Afghanistan with Central Asia and Iran, would provide much-needed revenue and facilitate direct investment in Afghanistan.

Pakistan remains key to these endeavors. A stable Pakistan that has normalized its relationship with India would find common ground in Afghanistan rather than fear being bracketed by a hostile India in Afghanistan. It could partner with India in opening up gas and hydroelectricity links to Central Asia and even invest in joint exploitation of the Kabul River gorge for producing electricity that both Afghanistan and Pakistan badly need. A secure western border with Afghanistan would allow Pakistan to combat the so-called U-turn trade with Afghanistan that deprives it of some $2 billion in taxes each year, where duty-free goods imported into Afghanistan are smuggled back into Pakistan.

The United States need not take the lead in underwriting Afghan stability post-2014. But it can achieve that objective by acting as a facilitator, bringing neighboring countries of the region together and using its clout in the international financial institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, to direct aid to support regional trade and development efforts.

Revival of the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) oil-and-gas pipeline could also be a boon to the region. The Asian Development Bank has already done much of the groundwork on the TAPI pipeline. And, as the United States brings Iran into talks on Afghanistan’s future, it might find it possible to ease up on sanctions enough to allow India and Pakistan to benefit from Iranian gas and oil rather than making it a hindrance to relations with these important South Asian partners.

Crafting a sustainable policy toward Afghanistan and its surrounding region requires less emphasis on “architecture” and more on longer-term relationships. With elections looming in the United States, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and India, and a changing of the Politburo in China later this year, the danger is that short-term actions fueled by domestic considerations could derail long-term actions and relationships. The United States must remain engaged with all countries in the region surrounding Afghanistan and bring its powerful business community into its efforts to create a network of investments in the region as a whole. This approach would tie the economies of South Asia with Afghanistan and Central Asia and thus help create stability over the longer run.

Shuja Nawaz is director of the South Asia Center at the Atlantic Council in Washington, D.C. Abigail Friedman is former Director for Afghanistan at the National Security Council in the White House and a Foreign Service Officer with the Department of State. This post originally appeared in The Hill. Photo Credit: Getty Images

Pakistan is at a precarious point in its faltering return to democratic order, after yet another extended period of military-dominated rule that has left its bureaucratic system and civilian institutions stunted. Its polity and society have undergone rapid change, with countervailing forces emerging to counter the military’s overwhelming power. Though political parties remain weak and divided, the democratic impulse appears to be taking hold in civil society, as illustrated by the emergence of active media and social networks combined with an increasingly assertive judiciary. Although elements in the intelligence services still occasionally attempt to control the media and political actors, the military has neither the will nor the capacity to mount a coup, nor the ability to effect major political change.

Public opinion in the U.S. and views on the Hill are heavily biased against a cordial relationship with Pakistan, reflecting years of mistrust of Pakistan’s role in the Afghan war. Pakistan’s two-handed approach to the Afghan Taliban, taking U.S. assistance and payments for military operations in the borderlands while allowing selected groups of Afghans free movement to and from Afghanistan, hinders the Administration’s ability to provide more military aid to Pakistan. On the Pakistani side, suspicions that the U.S. has shifted its stance away from Pakistan and towards India, with the ultimate goal of defanging Pakistan’s nuclear weapons capability, make it nearly impossible for U.S. officials and aid representatives to operate freely inside the country. Public denunciation of the drone campaign by government and civil society actors fuels antipathy toward the U.S. Pakistan’s Parliament has echoed these fears in its calls for protection of national sovereignty and for greater controls and taxes on coalition supplies going through Pakistan to Afghanistan.

In such an environment, cutting our losses and walking away from the region, and specifically from Pakistan, might seem an obvious —and popular—choice. But such a decision would entail significant longer-term costs. Not only will the withdrawal of forces from Afghanistan require ground and air lines of communications via Pakistan, our Afghan allies will continue to require supplies and air support via Pakistan. Cutbacks in air and military support would be disruptive at a critical stage when their security forces are being prepared to take on more ground operations. Without air support, those might be jeopardized and Afghan morale would plummet.

What happens inside Pakistan affects its immediate neighbors— India, China, Iran, and Afghanistan—instantly, and more distant countries over time. A precipitous U.S. withdrawal could lead to heightened conflict in the borderlands of Pakistan, allowing the Pakistani Taliban and their Punjabi allies to use the Federally Administered Tribal Areas as well as contiguous Afghan territory as sanctuaries in fighting the Pakistani army and state. It would give extremist elements inside Pakistan greater voice and control over public discourse in civil society and the military.

Latent anti-U.S. sentiment in the military, especially among younger officers and perhaps the soldiery, is indicated by the fact that some of the attacks against General Pervez Musharraf and military headquarters included lower-level personnel from both the army and air force.

Large portions of public opinion in Pakistan view the U.S. civil nuclear deal with India as an anti-Pakistan move, and the absence of any attempt to engage Pakistan in a similar dialogue as proof of an entrenched anti-Pakistan bias. A shift toward India, if this were to accompany U.S. withdrawal, would strengthen conspiracy theorists inside Pakistan in their belief that the U.S. always intended to compromise and weaken Pakistan.

The U.S. has been and remains the largest supplier of assistance to Pakistan, both civil and military, and via the International Financial Institutions (the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, in particular). But our aid program has been sporadic and tied to regional or global aims in a manner that has led Pakistanis to become wary of U.S. ties, understandably regarding their relations with China more kindly. The U.S. has an opportunity now to change that dialogue and move toward a longer-term relationship with Pakistan as the center of gravity of U.S. engagement in the region, rather than as an after-thought relative to emerging regional crises or changing global policies.

What needs to be done?

Firstly, the U.S. should expand its approach to Pakistan by working with regional partners, many of them Pakistan‘s friends, to ensure a stable Pakistan and a steady U.S.-Pakistan relationship. Building on the Pew Global Attitudes Poll results that regularly indicate that six out of 10 Pakistanis polled want better relations with the U.S., we can create a steady, longer-term relationship that is not tied to short-term goals.

Helping Pakistan to help itself should be the key to this new relationship. If Pakistan’s people and government want to improve governance and provide jobs and education to their growing population of nearly 200 million, then the U.S. should make that its aim too.

Combining our resources with those of the United Kingdom in the education sector, as has been done recently, offers a good model. Working with China in building infrastructure and the energy sector could bolster Pakistan’s ability to get out of its economic hole. Open borders with India for trade and the movement of people would help to remove decades of fear and hostility on Pakistan’s eastern border. Our new strategic relationship with India enables us to use moral suasion on India to show “strategic altruism” and give Pakistan the breathing room for its economic and political development. A moratorium on active Indian and U.S. intelligence operations inside Pakistan would most likely win Pakistan’s trust in this endeavor.

Secondly, the U.S. should review and rebalance its policies on aid to Pakistan. Specifically, U.S. assistance to Pakistan can gain from the multiplier effect of aid from IFIs that Pakistan sorely needs and is more willing to accept. U.S. support in the boards of these institutions can help Pakistan to garner the resources it needs to restructure its economy. The U.S. can also help in persuading Pakistan’s government and bureaucracy to move faster on the reform path.

An Aid to Pakistan Club may be one way of doing this. The U.S. Congress may be able to help the Pakistani Parliament, via direct parliamentary contacts, to allow Pakistani parliamentarians better understand economic issues and the value of a reform agenda that has been crafted inside Pakistan but still lacks support from its politicians. Congress could thus come to be seen as a partner of Pakistan, rather than the hectoring controller of the U.S. aid purse that it is often perceived to be.

A greater role for civil society

Thirdly, U.S. aid and a strengthened relationship with Pakistan should be made contingent on actions by Pakistan to allow civil society and business to play a greater role in setting it on the path to economic and political stability. The civilian government needs to show a desire and ability to re-establish its control over government, instead of outsourcing decision-making to the military. Once the military recedes into the background, relinquishing its role as default drafter of policy on India, nuclear policy, Afghanistan, and U.S. relations, the U.S. could commit, under an agreed military aid program, to improve Pakistan’s ability to combat insurgency and defend its borders with a more mobile and better-equipped army and an improved and integrated police force.

Pakistan is both a strategic ally and a potential bulwark of stability. If its people and government are prepared to align and commit themselves to fulfilling that potential, the United States must be willing to help them. 

Shuja Nawaz is director of the South Asia Center at the Atlantic Council. He is the author of Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its Army, and the Wars Within. This piece is taken from the Atlantic Council publication The Task Ahead: Memos for the Winner of the 2012 Presidential Election.

On May 31st, Shuja Nawaz, director of the Council’s South Asia Center, appeared on WAMU 88.5 The Diane Rehm Show to discuss the legal and ethical issues over US drone attacks.

Listen to the program on TheDianeRehmShow.org

(Photo credit: Reuters)

On May 30, the Atlantic Council’s South Asia Center held a public discussion on “India-US Strategic Dialogue: Expanding Horizons of Bilateral Partnership,” with H.E. Nirupama Rao, ambassador of India to the United States.

 Shuja Nawaz, director of the South Asia Center, Atlantic Council welcomed H.E. Nirupama Rao and Nelson W. Cunningham, managing partner and co-founder of McLarty Associates, who moderated the session.

The fundamental interests of the United States and India converge on most matters of strategic importance, placing the India-US partnership on a positive trajectory. This sustained, productive strategic partnership is based on shared prosperity, democratic values, and solving global and regional problems in an interconnected world. What are the key drivers of an expanding and multi-dimensional India-US partnership? Can the United States and India build on their partnership through increased trade, development initiatives, and security cooperation in the Asia-Pacific region? Ambassador Rao answered these questions among others, and addressed how this strategic partnership can be taken to a new level.

MEDIA MENTIONS

• Post withdrawal blues – Pakistan Today
• Ambassador Rao speaks to Atlantic Council – IndUS Business Journal
• India fears for Afghanistan after NATO pullout – Shaun Tandon, AFP
• ‘Attempt to paint India in negative colour on Iran’ – Hindustan Times/PTI
• India seeks more talks with US on Afghan withdrawal – Arun Kumar, IANS
• India voices concern over curbs on US business visas – IANS
• India for coordination with US on developments in Afghanistan post 2014 – The Economic Times

Mrs. Nirupama Rao assumed her responsibilities as ambassador of India to the United States in September 2011.

On completion of her University studies, and with a MA in English literature, she joined the Indian Foreign Service in 1973. In a diplomatic career spanning over three decades, she served in various world capitals, including Washington, Beijing and Moscow. She acquired extensive experience in India-China relations, having served in the East Asia Division of the Ministry at policy level capacities for several years, and later served as India’s first woman ambassador to China from 2006 to 2009. Her other ambassadorial assignments include Peru and Bolivia, and Sri Lanka (where she was India’s first woman high commissioner).

Mrs. Rao served in Washington as minister for press and cultural affairs at the Indian Embassy from 1993 to 1995. Shortly after, she also served in Moscow as deputy chief of mission from the Embassy of India. On return to New Delhi in 2001, she became the first women Indian foreign service officer to hold the post of spokesperson of the Ministry of External Affairs.

On completion of her tenures in Sri Lanka and in China, she was appointed foreign secretary, the highest office in the Indian Foreign Service, where she served a two-year term until July 2011.

Ambassador Rao was a fellow at the Centre for International Affairs (now the Weatherhead Centre) at Harvard University in the early 1990s. She was also a distinguished international executive in residence at the University of Maryland in 1999-2000.

Ambassador Rao is married to Sudhakar Rao, a distinguished civil servant and former member of the Indian Administrative Service who retired as the chief secretary of the State Government of Karnataka. They have two sons, Nikhilesh and Kartikeya.

On May 29, the Atlantic Council’s Iran Task Force hosted an in-depth review of the Iran nuclear talks that took place in Baghdad on May 23.

These talks follow on discussions in Istanbul April 13-14, between Iran and the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Germany (P5+1) that were relatively positive. Nevertheless, there are concerns whether a “step-by-step approach” to de-escalating the nuclear crisis with Iran can be achieved. Iran is looking to the international community to ease draconian sanctions, but US flexibility is limited, especially in a presidential election year. Additionally, Israel has a more restrictive view of the Iranian nuclear program than some in the United States and Europe. Panelists analyzed the converging and conflicting interest of the P5+1, Iran, Israel, as well as explore repercussions should negotiations fail.

A discussion with

David Albright
Founder and President
Institute for Science and International Security

Moderated by

Barbara Slavin
Senior Fellow, South Asia Center
Atlantic Council

Introduced by

Shuja Nawaz
Director, South Asia Center
Atlantic Council

David Albright is founder and president of the Institute for Science and International Security (ISSI) in Washington, DC. A physicist and former UN arms inspector, Albright has written numerous assessments of nuclear weapons programs throughout the world. He has co authored five books, including the 1992 and 1996 versions of World Inventory of Plutonium and Highly Enriched Uranium, (SIPRI and Oxford University Press); Challenges of Fissile Material Control (ISSI Press, 1999); Solving the North Korean Nuclear Puzzle (ISIS Press, 2000); and Peddling Peril: How the Secret Nuclear Trade Arms America’s Enemies (Free Press, 2010).

Barbara Slavin is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s South Asia Center and Washington correspondent for Al-Monitor.com, a new website devoted to news from and about the Middle East. The author of a 2007 book, Bitter Friends, Bosom Enemies: Iran, the US and the Twisted Path to Confrontation, she is a regular commentator on US foreign policy and Iran on NPR, PBS, and C-SPAN. A career journalist, Slavin previously served as assistant managing editor for world and national security of The Washington Times, senior diplomatic reporter for USA Today, Cairo correspondent for The Economist, and as an editor at The New York Times Week in Review.

The Iran Task Force, co-chaired by Atlantic Council Chairman Senator Chuck Hagel and Ambassador Stuart E. Eizenstat, seeks to perform a comprehensive analysis of Iran’s internal political landscape, its role in the region and globally, and any basis for an improved relationship with the West. Please click here for more information about the Iran Task Force.

The Iran Task Force is generously sponsored by the Ploughshares Fund.

The Atlantic Council’s South Asia Center held a discussion about “Afghanistan in Transition: Power Dynamics” with Nick Dowling and Mariam Atash Nawabi on May 16.

South Asia Center director Shuja Nawaz moderated the discussion.

“Afghanistan in Transition” focused on the importance of incorporating regional players, strengthening civil society, and increasing economic development to ensure a stable Afghanistan. Speakers discussed progress and challenges for US engagement in Afghanistan and the dynamics of US-Afghan relations for the next ten years.

Nick Dowling is a former National Security Council official under the Clinton Administration and the current president of IDS International (www.idsinternational.net), a “smart power” national security firm that trains US Army and Marines on complex operations. He leads an IDS team with a wide range of stability operations, interagency, reconstruction and regional expertise. Mr. Dowling is a lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a member of the Army Education Advisory Council.

Mariam Atash Nawabi is an attorney and adjunct professor of Law at the University of La Verne College of Law and president of AMDi International. She has been a television anchor and host of Pul, a show produced by American Abroad Media broadcast in Afghanistan. Prior to these roles, she was senior advisor to the Afghan-American Chamber of Commerce and Commercial Counsel to the Embassy of Afghanistan in Washington, DC where she worked on policy issues, private sector development, women’s entrepreneurship, commercial law reform, and training and capacity building programs. 

The Atlantic Council’s South Asia Center and the Muslim Public Affairs Council, held a discussion with Mehdi Hasan, senior editor (politics) at the New Statesman and author of Ed: The Milibands and the Making of a Labour Leader. The session was moderated by Shuja Nawaz, director of the South Asia Center.

Mr. Mehdi Hasan, a prominent UK political writer, focused on the complex dynamic that exists between Muslim communities in Europe and the United States and the foreign policies related to their countries of origin.

Prior to joining the New Statesman, Mr. Hasan was with Channel 4 as editor, in the news and current affairs department. He was also the deputy executive producer for Sky TV’s Sunrise, as well as being a producer for BBC1’s the Politics Show.

What a difference a year makes! Today school children play cricket on the ground where a year ago Osama Bin Laden lived…and died. The sun is shining in Abbottabad. But clouds fill the horizon for the United States-Pakistan relationship.

It will take a bold move by President Barack Obama to restore that once promising partnership. Nothing less will assuage the hurt that Pakistan felt after the cumulative effects of events of 2011 that took its relations with the United States into a downward spiral. An apology for the November 26 attack on two Pakistani border posts is a risky venture in an election year but so is the possibility of a rupture in relations with Pakistan at a key stage in the Afghan war.

No matter what Obama does, the onus is also on Pakistan if it wishes to move forward. It is fighting a costly war inside its own borders and is inextricably linked to the war next door in Afghanistan. It has already paid a heavy price in terms of lives lost and the economic costs of being a partner in the Afghanistan conflict. Al Qaeda still likely has its headquarters inside Pakistan proper. Meanwhile the Tehreek-e-Taliban of Pakistan (TTP) continues to fight the state. It would do well for Pakistan’s military and civil intelligence services to begin to work together to find and capture Ayman Al Zawahiri before the Americans do. For if the US gets to him first, there will be a reprise of the Abbottabad raid. Pakistan has the resources, if properly employed, to track down the leadership of the TTP and decapitate that organization. Why have they not shown results? For their own sake?

In the hinterland, a more serious threat remains from the Punjabi Taliban, which is neither controlled nor controllable and a constant obstacle to improved relations with neighboring India and now the United States. Legal authorities in Pakistan suggest that changes in regulations need to be made to allow the government to apprehend and proceed against the leaders of the Lashkar-e-Taiba and other militant organizations. Changes in laws may take longer but are also necessary. The army reportedly sought such legal advice in the past year or two. Is the government also doing so and can the army and the government act in unison on this issue?

Meanwhile the National Counter Terrorism Authority still lies in limbo, inside the files of the Ministry of Interior. It is an opportunity that is being missed. A civilian-led and coordinated effort under the prime minister affords the best chance of establishing leadership in the battle for Pakistan that is going on in the streets and countryside of that embattled nation. It may also be time now to re-establish the National Security Council under strong leadership and supported by adequate staff and other resources so the government may benefit from its advice. And establish ownership of security matters. The streets of Karachi and Quetta are a daily battle ground this week. Tomorrow, it may be Lahore, Peshawar, or Islamabad. Will Pakistan continue to blame external forces for its inability to protect its citizens and serving as a safe haven for domestic and foreign criminals operating in the name of Islam?

Osama Bin Laden may be dead but the seeds of terror that he and misguided government policies of the past helped plant are sprouting all over Pakistan today. Who will lead the charge? 

Shuja Nawaz is director of the South Asia Center at the Atlantic Council.