Comment by Riaz Haq on October 24, 2015 at 9:08am

#Pakistan Govt considering financing options for Bhasha Dam project https://shar.es/1u9IFI via @sharethis

After reluctance shown by World Bank and Asian Development Bank (ADB) to finance Bhasha Dam, Pakistan is considering different options including seeking multi-billion dollar loan from China and launching bond to attract overseas Pakistanis for investing in it.

“We are considering unbundling Bhasha Dam into construction of hydropower Dam then power turbines will be built into IPPs mode. We had already invested Rs100 billion on acquisition of land for Bhasha Dam,” official sources confirmed to The News here on Sunday.

Federal Minister for Planning Ahsan Iqbal told ‘The News’ that the groundbreaking ceremony of Bhasha Dam would be held during the next calendar year 2016. He said that one Chinese company showed its interest to invest $40 to $50 billion in hydropower projects and currently they were conducting their feasibility studies to select projects.

He said that the government was also actively considering launching international bond to attract overseas Pakistanis for investing into this project. It is our endeavour to complete this project at all costs, he added.

One option is to seek assistance from China inside or outside the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) for which Beijing had committed $46.2 billion for energy and infrastructure projects over medium to long-term basis.

The WB and ADB were not ready to finance Bhasha project owing to different excuses but the main hurdle was objections raised by New Delhi on this project.

So the options are limited as US had also indicated to provide financing but they have not so far delivered their promises in the past few years.

According to the technical feasibility for Diamer-Bhasha Dam Project, prepared by Wapda, the installed capacity would be 4,500MW. There will be 12 units having capacity of 375MW each and the average annual generation of the Dam will be 19,000GWH.

The Diamer-Bhasha Dam project is located on Indus River about 315 km upstream of Tarbela Dam, 165 km downstream of Northern Areas capital Gligit and 40 km downstream of Chilas.

On the main Dam, the type of the Diamer-Bhasha Dam will be Roller Compacted Concrete (RCC). The maximum height of the Dam will be 270 m (highest of its type in the world). On diversion system, there will be 2 number Diversion Tunnel (right side) and 1 number Diversion Tunnel (right side). Regarding main spillways, there will be 14 gates and the size of each gate will be 11.0 x 16.5 m.

On the reservoir side, the maximum operating level of Diamer Bhasha Dam will be EI 1,160m and minimum operating level of EI is 1060m. The Gross Capacity of the Dam will be 9.0 BCM (7.3 Million Acre Feet MAF). The live capacity of the Dam will be 7.9 BCM (6.4 MAF).

Regarding the outlets of the Bhasha Dam, the technical feasibility illustrates that there will be 7 low level outlets and five sluicing.

On sluicing tunnels, the Diamer-Bhasha Dam will have one right bank (through conversion of one diversion tunnel) and on the left bank there will be another tunnel.

Comment by Riaz Haq on October 24, 2015 at 10:14am

Modi must follow Vajpayee’s hand of friendship policy with Pakistan: Farooq Abdullah
Observing that not only Kashmiris but also Muslims in general are feeling whether they are safe in this country, Abdullah said the Government of the day is doing nothing to allay their fears.


Former Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah on Saturday said Prime Minister Narendra Modi should follow Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s policy of friendship with Pakistan to find a solution to Kashmir issue, saying he will not be able to win hearts and minds of Kashmiris merely by doling out packages. Observing that not only Kashmiris but also Muslims in general are feeling whether they are safe in this country, Abdullah said the Government of the day is doing nothing to allay their fears. 

Terming the situation in Kashmir as “very dangerous”, Abdullah said that even if the Prime Minister announces a Rs one lakh crore package, it is not going to win heart and minds of people by only dishing money. “Final solution of the state has to be done with Pakistan. Otherwise we will suffer. The terrorists will keep on coming. What do we have to show other than God’s beauty that we have. And tourists don’t come when there is fear that their life is not safe. Has the Prime Minister tried to remove that fear in the mind of people of India,” Abdullah told Karan Thapar’s ‘Nothing but the Truth’ telecast on India Today. Advocating that talking to Pakistan was must, he said, “it is vital for our survival so that we can progress like other states of India. Other states have reached the moon and we are still on the ground.” And the National Conference leader’s advice for Modi was that he should follow what Vajpayee, a BJP stalwart and a former Prime Minister, did by inviting the then Pakistan President Gen Pervez Musharraf despite the Kargil war as he was clear that if the nation has to progress, then friendly ties with the neighbours are must. “Vajpayee ji said that he will talk about Kashmir within realms of humanity (Insanayaat ke daayre mein) and this is what the present Government should do. “I would tell him that if he wants to be the next Mahatma Gandhi of India, then be strong to fight those forces that are trying to divide this nation, divide religion, divide areas. Fight them and become greater than Mahatma Gandhi,” Abdullah said in a veiled reference to right wing outfits which he blamed for spreading communal hatred in the country. Abdullah said that he was not worried about his state only but the whole nation. “The communal tendencies that are rising in the nation are threatening the very existence of the state and what is happening here is exactly a fall out of that. The young man who was dead in Udhampur (truck conductor) has actually flared up and people are justified. What was his fault? And People are rising against it because the whole nation is in turmoil,” he said. Talking about the beef controversy, Abdullah said what the independent MLA Sheikh Abdul Rashid did by hosting a beef party at MLA hostel was wrong but his beating up by BJP MLAs in the state Assembly was also wrong. He asked all nationalist parties to cut across their party lines and act quickly to defuse the beef row. “Do not underestimate this. The younger mind who are educated are thinking about it. We must take steps urgently. All those who are nationalist, whether they belong to one party or the other, must take action quickly to turn the tide to a different side. Don’t sit on the edge of the disaster,” he said. He said the present communal tension was threatening the existence of the state as well. “I am afraid of another thing, the breaking of the state of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh, Jammu going one way, Leh going other and the Valley going other way. This is more dangerous also. People (politicians) are not waking up to the dangers that are in front of us,” Farooq added. -

See more at: http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-news-india/modi-must-f...

Comment by Riaz Haq on October 25, 2015 at 9:36pm

Declassified US documents reveal #India planned attack on #Pakistan nuclear facilities at #Kahuta in 1985. #nukes http://indianexpress.com/article/explained/in-fact-did-india-plan-a... …

Last week, the US State department declassified its top-secret documents from 1984-85 which focus on the Pakistani nuclear programme. The CIA analysis, and the talking points for the US Ambassador to Islamabad while handing over President Ronald Reagan’s letter to General Zia-ul Haq, show that the US warned Pakistan about an Indian military attack on the Pakistani nuclear reactor at Kahuta. But the Americans were not alone in anticipating an Indian attack. Prof Rajesh Rajagopalan of JNU recently pointed to The End of the Cold War and the Third World: New Perspectives on Regional Conflict, a book by Sergey Radchenko and Artemy M. Kalinovsky based on the declassified documents of the Eastern Block. Radchenko says that documents in the Hungarian archives show that the Soviets had shared with the Hungarians India’s plans to attack Kahuta. It is not clear though, Rajagopalan says, if the Soviets actually had access to any Indian plans or were only reporting widespread rumours. The rumours were indeed widespread, and The Washington Post had run a front-page story on December 20, 1982 headlined, ‘India said to eye raid on Pakistan’s A-plants’. It said military advisers had proposed an attack to prime minister Indira Gandhi in March 1982 but she had rejected it. In his book, India’s Nuclear Policy —1964-98: A Personal Recollection, K Subrahmanyam recollected that the Indian proposal to Pakistan for non-attack on each other’s nuclear facilities, which he suggested to Rajiv Gandhi, was an outcome of such rumours in the Western media. Although the ‘Agreement on the Non-Attack of Nuclear Facilities between Indian and Pakistan’ was first verbally agreed upon in 1985, it was formally signed in 1988 and ratified in 1991. Since 1992, India and Pakistan have been exchanging the list of their nuclear facilities on January 1 every year. - 

But how close was India to attacking Kahuta in the 1980s? The first time India is believed to have considered such an attack is in 1981. The idea obviously originated from the daring Israeli attack of June 7, 1981, that destroyed the under-construction Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak. Eight F-16s of the Israeli Air Force flew more than 600 miles in the skies of three enemy nations to destroy the target and returned unscathed. In 1996, WPS Sidhu, senior fellow for foreign policy at Brookings India, was the first to state that after the induction of Jaguars, Indian Air Force (IAF) had conducted a brief study in June 1981 on the feasibility of attacking Kahuta. The study concluded that India could “attack and neutralise” Kahuta but feared that such an attack would result in a full-blown war between India and Pakistan. This was besides the concerns that an Indian attack will beget an immediate retaliatory — some say, even pre-emptive

Comment by Riaz Haq on October 25, 2015 at 10:45pm

The Hindu Op Ed on Nawaz Sharif visit to Washington:

The visit and its stated outcomes undermine an increasingly fashionable strategic theory that an emerging polarisation is giving shape to two axes in South Asia – Pakistan and China on the one side and the U.S. and India on the other. As a U.S. official who briefed the Indian media put it candidly, the U.S. has global intentions that will not allow it to choose between Pakistan and India, or tilt towards either of them. He went on to clarify that relations with Pakistan and India stand on their individual merits. India should not misread the energy and intensity in its relationship with the U.S., demonstrated most recently during the Strategic and Commercial Dialogue and the meeting between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Obama last month, as U.S. willingness to jettison Pakistan. Pakistan continues to leverage its strategic location at the frontier of Afghanistan and China, and to a lesser extent, India. The U.S. appears clear that its South Asia policy involves a composite approach involving India, Pakistan and Afghanistan in its search for stability and peace, as well as of the fact that Pakistan is an important partner in the fight against global terrorism. The joint statement and the anticipated decisions – which will possibly include the sale of new F-16 fighter aircraft to Pakistan and the continuation of the Coalition Support Fund beyond 2016 – make it clear that the U.S. cannot afford to, and will not, overlook Pakistan’s significance as a regional strategic player. It will be unwise and ill-advised for India to assume it would be so.

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/editorial/on-nawaz-sharifs-visit-to...

Comment by Riaz Haq on October 27, 2015 at 10:48am

Ex Indian Foreign Secretary Kanwal Sibal on US-Pakistan ties:

Ex Foreign Sec of #India Kanwal Sibal: Why is #America siding with #Pakistan on #Kashmir? http://www.dailyo.in/politics/india-pakistan-ties-nato-washington-d... … via @dailyo_

Strategic

Obama and Sharif expressed their "shared interest in strategic stability in South Asia" in their joint statement. This ignores the fact that China's continuing nuclear and missile relationship with Pakistan makes this a triangular China-Pakistan-India affair and not merely an India-Pakistan one. Moreover, India's nuclear programme is under some agreed constraints as part of the India-US nuclear deal, while that of China and Pakistan are not. Why is the US disregarding these realities and equating India and Pakistan?

Obama applauded in the joint statement "Pakistan's role as a key counterterrorism partner". By reiterating "their common resolve to promote peace and stability throughout the region and to counter all forms of extremism and terrorism", Pakistan was made to look good. Worse, Obama made the suppression of extremism and militancy the cooperative responsibility of all South Asian countries, not only that of Pakistan as the source of all these forces. The defining counterterrorism partnership of the 21st century between India and the US is absent from all this.

Credence

Pakistan uses the excuse of Kashmir for its terrorist onslaught against India, which makes it even more necessary not to pander to its Kashmir fixation. But the US is unable to shed its traditional pro-Pakistan slant on Kashmir. Whereas in 2013, during Nawaz Sharif's Washington visit, Obama supported a "sustained dialogue process" for "resolving all outstanding territorial and other disputes through peaceful means", Kashmir was not specifically mentioned. This time, to satisfy Nawaz Sharif who has been determined to internationalise the Kashmir issue, it was. By calling Kashmir a "dispute", the US is preferring the Pakistani term. To top this, the joint statement calls for an "uninterrupted dialogue in support of peaceful resolution of all outstanding disputes", rejecting implicitly the Indian line that dialogue and terror cannot go together.

Most unfortunately, the US has implicitly given credence to Pakistan's outlandish charges against India for supporting terrorism in its territory by emphasising the importance of "working together to address mutual concerns of India and Pakistan regarding terrorism". This equates India and Pakistan on the terrorism issue. Our spokesman has rightly objected to Obama's "support for Pakistan's efforts to secure funding for the Diamer-Bhasha and Dasu dams" in Gilgit-Baltistan, despite calling it "disputed territory".

The US should not legitimise Pakistan's illegal occupation of PoK.

It is important that even as we engage the US as much as possible in our own interest, we must not lose sight of the ambiguities of America's strategic policies towards us in our region.

http://www.dailyo.in/politics/india-pakistan-ties-nato-washington-d...

Comment by Riaz Haq on October 28, 2015 at 8:07pm

University of #California #Davis, #Pakistan launch $17M food,agriculture Center For Advanced Studies at #Faisalabad 

http://www.davisenterprise.com/local-news/ucd/ucd-pakistan-launch-1... …


The launch of a $17 million collaborative project linking UC Davis and Pakistan’s leading agricultural university was celebrated today at UCD, which will receive $10 million of the funds.

The new U.S.-Pakistan Center for Advanced Studies in Agriculture and Food Security, funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, will make it possible for faculty members and graduate students from both countries to study and do research at each other’s campuses. The project also is designed to update curriculum and technical resources at Pakistan’s University of Agriculture, Faisalabad.

Present for today’s ceremonial launch were dignitaries from Pakistan, USAID and UCD.

“UC Davis has been partnering with colleagues in Pakistan since 2009, sharing expertise in agriculture from crop production to post-harvest handling,” said James Hill, associate dean emeritus of International Programs for the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences at UCD.

“Establishment of this new center will allow us to build on those efforts, with a renewed emphasis on an exchange of faculty and graduate students,” he said.

During its first year of funding, the center will plan several workshops to assist the University of Agriculture, Faisalabad, with technology transfer and entrepreneurship to strengthen its connections to the private sector. UCD also will initiate programs in both research and curriculum development to improve graduate studies.

Hill noted that two other Pakistan-focused projects are already underway through the International Programs office, primarily in the area of horticultural crops and agricultural extension activities.

Agriculture is the largest sector of Pakistan’s economy, providing jobs for half of that country’s labor force. Some of the traditionally important crops in Pakistan are wheat, cotton, rice, sugar cane and maize. In recent years, crops like beans, peas, lentils, onions, potatoes, chilies and tomatoes also have increased in importance, along with fruit crops such as citrus and mangoes.


The newly funded center at UCD is the most recent of several partnerships of the U.S.-Pakistan Centers for Advanced Studies, a $127 million investment from USAID, linking universities in the two countries and using applied research to solve Pakistan’s challenges in energy, water and food security.

The overall program includes construction of laboratories, research facilities and libraries in Pakistan. Other participating U.S. universities include the University of Utah and Arizona State University, focusing on water and energy, respectively.

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