Afghan National Security Adviser was summoned and pulled up by US after he accused its special envoy Zalmay Khalilzad of vested interests in the peace process.

New Delhi: US negotiations with the Taliban without official Afghan participation have led to the worst diplomatic spat in years between Kabul and Washington, and the rift has Indian analysts worried about its possible implications for South Asia.

Speaking to a gaggle of reporters in Washington last week, Afghan National Security Adviser (NSA) Hamdullah Mohib lashed out at US special envoy to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad, describing him as a “viceroy”.

Kabul, Mohib said, believed the US’ talks with the Taliban were aimed at installing another interim government in Afghanistan, as happened after the terror group’s ouster in 2001, and accused Afghan-native Khalilzad of angling for the post of president in the administration that takes shape.

Khalilzad, he said, was cutting the Afghans out of the so-called peace talks between the US and the Taliban in Qatar because the Americans wanted to withdraw their troops from Afghanistan as quickly as possible.

“We think either the ambassador doesn’t know what he is doing, or he has something else in mind,” Mohib said, according to American website Daily Beast.

“People in government think perhaps all this talk is to create a caretaker government, of which he will then become the viceroy,” Mohib added.

‘Left high & dry’

India’s top Afghan watchers have expressed concern at the fast-deteriorating relations between the US and Afghanistan, pointing out that Mohib’s national security budget was fully funded by the Americans.

“The faster this rupture is repaired, the better it is for the outcome of the war. Who do you think will be having the last laugh?” asked Amar Sinha, member of the National Security Advisory Board and former ambassador to Afghanistan, pointing to the benefits Pakistan could potentially rake in if the diplomatic spat continued.

An Indian ambassador to Afghanistan who knows Mohib well and spoke to ThePrint on the condition of anonymity pointed out that the Afghan leader was not given to speaking loosely.

“He has served a full term as Afghan’s ambassador to the US without any problem,” he said. “This kind of strong language would have to be sanctioned by the man on the top, none other than President Ashraf Ghani.”

Rakesh Sood, who served as India’s ambassador to Afghanistan from 2005 to early 2008, echoed the view.

“Mohib is reflecting the unhappiness of Afghanistan’s national unity government (NUG, an administration run by a coalition of all the power blocs in a country) as it feels it has been left high and dry in the (peace talks) process, which is supposed to be an intra-Afghan dialogue,” Sood added.

“To that extent, the fact that the Afghans are not involved only diminishes the legitimacy of the NUG.”

Mohib’s use of the word ‘viceroy’, a pejorative that connotes the arrogance of the British Raj and which South Asians understand all too well, as well as his other criticism had a swift impact.

“Mr Mohib’s comments are inaccurate and unhelpful, and we will be responding to them privately,” a US State Department spokesperson said.

Mohib was summoned and given a dressing-down at the US State Department by US Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs David Hale, who also called Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and told him that the US administration would no longer deal with the NSA.

‘Spring in winter’

With Mohib essentially becoming a lame duck, it is unclear how the peace process will unfold from here.

Certainly, the Americans will hardly feel obliged to discuss the matter any further with the Afghans.

In a series of tweets on 12 March, after he concluded 16 days of talks with the Taliban in Qatar, Khalilzad said both sides had made progress on a “withdrawal timeline and effective counter-terrorism measures”.

On 16 March, he met Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale and other dignitaries in Washington DC, noting that despite “a chill in the air, it feels like spring”.

Separate fact from fiction, the real from the fake going viral on social media, on HoaXposed .

source: The Print

In this episode of ‘Hum Bhi Bharat’, Arfa Khanum Sherwani discusses Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s visit to India.

New Delhi: Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on Wednesday offered intelligence sharing and other cooperation with India in fighting extremism and terrorism, as New Delhi tackled rising tensions with Pakistan following a suicide bombing last week on Indian paramilitary soldiers in disputed Kashmir.

Soon after the Pulwama attack in Kashmir, Salman signed a $20 billion-worth pact with Pakistan. In this context, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s enthusiastic reception of the crown prince has been criticised by a section of political parties.

Arfa Khanum Sherwani discuss Modi’s balancing act, in conversation with Tamliz Ahmad, Siddharth Varadarajan and Vivek Katju.

source: The Wire

Pakistan tried hiding the ISI officials from the media glare but India Today Television spotted one as he tried to sneak out of the hotel.

source: India Today

Abrogating the longstanding treaty would globally dent the view that Indian diplomacy upholds the ethical.

Water is meant to douse fires, yet it is the one natural resource that has, time and again, either been a cause for global conflict or been weaponised by enemy states to score victory.

In the case of decades of volatile India-Pakistan relations, the Indus Waters Treaty – brokered by the World Bank and signed in 1960, to allocate waters of six rivers of the Indus River System that originates in Tibet – has safeguarded against such weaponisation on the subcontinent.

This holds especially true when tensions over Kashmir peak, as they have today. The treaty allocated waters from three western rivers – the Indus, Jhelum and Chenab – to Pakistan, and three eastern rivers – the Ravi, Beas and Sutlej – to India.

It also mandated that India and Pakistan meet twice a year, arrange technical visits to project sites and share details of water flow and quantum used – essentially setting up a mechanism to exchange information and manage potential disputes.

In the wake of the Uri attack in 2016, Delhi suspended the bi-annual talks and promised to ‘fast-track’ projects to use hitherto unutilised water of the eastern rivers allocated to India via three national projects (declared in 2009) – the multipurpose Shahpurkandi and Ujh dams, and the Beas-Sutlej river-linking project.

Why was India’s share unused?

Available data suggests that just under 10% of India’s share lies unused and is allowed to flow into Pakistan. However, even in 2016, this announcement begged the question of why water allocated to India was being ‘wasted’ and not used internally for either power generation or agriculture, given that the rivers fall entirely within India’s jurisdiction, and their use-up is at India’s discretion.

After cabinet minister Nitin Gadkari tweeted on Thursday that India would ‘stop our share’ of Indus waters to Pakistan – exactly a week after the Pulwama attack – that question still stands.

Diplomatic sources who have worked closely on India-Pakistan ties, and experts who deal with water-sharing disputes, indicate that a possible reason for not having done so all these years was to avoid an explosion of new water wars within the country.

Jammu and Kashmir, Punjab and Haryana have already locked horns over access to and use of water from these three rivers, internally. It took nearly 40 years and the intervention of the Centre for the governments of Jammu and Kashmir and Punjab to finally sign an agreement on the implementation of the Shahpur Kandi dam project in September 2018.

Under the current agreement and plan, the project has a capacity to produce 206 megawatts of hydroelectricity, to be shared between the two states and irrigate over 37,173 hectares of land, of which 5,000 hectares are in Punjab and the rest in the Kathua region of Jammu. It is expected to become operational in 2020.

The Ujh dam on the Ravi river is also a source of contention for Punjab as are the Beas-Sutlej and Sutlej-Yamuna link canals. The latter are essentially river-linking projects that aim to distribute river waters across Jammu Kashmir, Punjab, Haryana, Himachal and Rajasthan more equitably.

Spinning Gadkari’s tweets as action against Pakistan

To have spun Gadkari’s tweets as action against Pakistan in the aftermath of the Pulwama attack, as several prominent BJP leaders and subsequent media reports did, required a kind of mental gymnastics that defies both research and reason; it also gives those who advocate the abrogation of the Indus Waters Treaty a fresh boost.

It assumes that the Indian public – eager to see a strong response against Pakistan for its support to terror groups like the Jaish-e-Mohammed that claimed responsibility for Pulwama – would be so easily fooled into believing that using ‘our share of water’ more effectively was actually a strong act of retaliation.

In fact, it was nothing but wrapping in a bow and recycling a two-year-old announcement of an even older decision and presenting it as, not only new, but strong international action.

India’s role as a responsible global leader

While Pakistan’s duplicity on fighting terror is proof that it doesn’t honour its own global obligations, calls to abrogate the Indus Waters Treaty are knee-jerk emotional responses that don’t factor in long-term and wide- ranging consequences for India in the world.

For a nation that sees itself as a responsible global leader, an emerging economy and an aspirant for the UN’s highest table, India must honour its treaty commitments over a resource that everyday lives depend on.

This is not the only transboundary water agreement India has signed, but the Indus Waters Treaty between two openly hostile nations is held up as a gold standard globally – an example for other warring nation-states to follow in the interest of civilian populations which suffer the consequences of war.

Sabre-rattling aside, as an upper riparian nation, any move by India towards abrogation would alarm other countries which have rights of use over water from rivers that flow down from India and are already embroiled in longstanding water disputes (54 of Bangladesh’s 230 rivers flow through India).

It would also signal other upper riparian countries that treaties don’t matter and they can continue with projects that arrest water from flowing into lower riparian states without any real consequence (China already has several projects damming the Brahmaputra that India is concerned about).

So, New Delhi must ask itself whether it wants to stand similarly accused and lose a great moral force that it currently enjoys on the world stage.

source: The Wire