Bangladesh team manager Khaled Mashud said that the team was just “about 50 yards from the mosque”, which was the site of a terror attack in Christchurch on Friday. Following the attack, the third and final Test between New Zealand and Bangladesh was cancelled and Mashud told reporters that the incident they witnessed was “straight out of a movie scene”.

As the attack on the Masjid Al Noor mosque in Hagley Park took place, the team were initially barred from leaving bus but eventually made their way to the team hotel.

Speaking to reporters at the team hotel, Mashud said: “This was a kind of accident that we would never expect nor want in any part of the world. We are very lucky because we had a number of us, about 17 of us, in the bus. Soumya Sarkar was also there, and we were all heading to the mosque for prayers.

“Only two of the players had stayed back in the hotel, and rest of the squad had gone there. We were very close to the mosque, and we could see from the bus. We must have been about 50 yards from the mosque.”

Mashud narrated what took place as the team was heading to the mosque and admitted that they were “really lucky” to not be caught in the crossfire.

“I would say we were really lucky. Had we reached even three or four minutes earlier, we probably would have been inside the mosque. This could then have been a massive incident. We are very thankful that we weren’t caught in the crossfire, but what we saw was straight out of a movie scene.

“We could see bloodstained people staggering out of the mosque. Maybe in about eight-ten minutes, we were all inside the bus and were sitting with our heads bowed, just in case someone fires at us.”

Then the team escaped through the back gate to the ground and in the dressing room before they safely managed to get to the team hotel. He also confirmed that the entire team and support staff are healthy and at the hotel and that their plans to return home are being worked out.

“They have told us and will send an official mail by 6:30 in the evening. Our plan to return has also been chalked out with the people in charge of logistics,” he added.

Mashud also appreciated the New Zealand cricket board for their efforts and admitted that it was unfortunate that the third Test had to be cancelled.

Agencies

External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj on Wednesday said India cannot have dialogue with Pakistan unless the neighbouring country acted against terror outfits on its soil, asserting that “talks and terror cannot go together”.

External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj on Wednesday said India cannot have dialogue with Pakistan unless the neighbouring country acted against terror outfits on its soil, asserting that “talks and terror cannot go together”. Talking on ‘India’s World: Modi Government’s Foreign Policy’, she stated that Pakistan needs to control the ISI and its army who are bent on destroying the bilateral relations time and again.

“We do not want talk on terror, we want action on it. Terror and talks cannot go together,” she said.

Swaraj also questioned Pakistan’s retaliation to the Indian air strikes in Balakot when, she said, India had specifically targeted the terror outfit Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM).

“Why did the Pakistani military attack us on behalf of JeM? You not only keep JeM on your soil, but fund them and when the victim country retaliates, you attack it on the terror outfit’s behalf. “If Imran Khan (Pakistan prime minister) is so generous and a statesman, he should give us Masood Azhar,” she said.

The external affairs minister said India can have a good relationship with Pakistan, provided the neighbouring country “takes action against terror groups on its soil”.

On her invitation to the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) meeting, she said India avenged the humilation meted out to it 50 years ago by becoming the ‘guest of honour’ at the OIC meet this year. “In 1969, India was humiliated when it was not allowed to participate in the meeting even after reaching the venue after Pakistan protested against India’s then foreign minister’s participation. But now, 50 years later, it was India that was on the seat of the guest of honour, while Pakistan’s seat was empty,” she said.

Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi had expressed reservations about the invitation to Swaraj for the OIC meeting, and later decided to boycott the meeting of the 57-member Muslim grouping held earlier this month. Talking about the foreign policy of the current government, Swaraj said it was based upon the two principles of “national interest supreme” and “world is our family”.

“People often ask us what we get by our frequent travel to countries. I want to tell them we do not travel to have fun, we travel to build our relationship with other countries and it is because of our ties with these countries that we were able to rescue 7,000 people from Yemen. The strength of our bilateral ties was also reflected in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) elections,” she said.

“I have seen the strength of this relationship time and again,” the senior BJP leader said, adding that at the ministerial level, Indian leaders have visited 189 out of 193 countries.

Swaraj added that the country’s global profile has improved in the last five years.

Nasheman News : Officials from India and Pakistan on Thursday held “detailed and constructive” discussions on the Kartarpur corridor which will enable pilgrims from India to travel to the Sikh shrine inside Pakistan through a dedicated corridor.

“Both sides held detailed and constructive discussions on various aspects and provisions of the proposed agreement and agreed to work towards expeditiously operationalizing the Kartapur Sahib Corridor,” a joint press statement issued after the meeting on Thursday said.

The United States and India on Wednesday agreed to strengthen security and civil nuclear cooperation, including building six U.S. nuclear power plants in India, the two countries said in a joint statement.

The agreement came after two days of talks in Washington. The United States under President Donald Trump has been looking to sell more energy products to India, the world’s third-biggest buyer of oil.

The talks involved Indian Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale and Andrea Thompson, the U.S. undersecretary of state for arms control and international security.

“They committed to strengthen bilateral security and civil nuclear cooperation, including the establishment of six U.S. nuclear power plants in India,” the joint statement said.

It gave no further details of the nuclear plant project.

The two countries have been discussing the supply of U.S. nuclear reactors to energy-hungry India for more than a decade, but a longstanding obstacle has been the need to bring Indian liability rules in-line with international norms, which require the costs of any accident to be channelled to the operator rather than the maker of a nuclear power station.

Pittsburgh-based Westinghouse has been negotiating to build reactors in India for years, but progress has been slow, partly because of India’s nuclear liability legislation, and the project was thrown into doubt when Westinghouse filed for bankruptcy in 2017 after cost overruns on U.S. reactors.

Canada’s Brookfield Asset Management bought Westinghouse from Toshiba in August 2018. Last April Westinghouse received strong support from U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry for its India project, which envisaged the building of six AP1000 reactors in the state of Andhra Pradesh.

The agreement to build the reactors, announced in 2016, followed on from a U.S.-India civil nuclear agreement signed in 2008.

India plans to triple its nuclear capacity by 2024 to wean Asia’s third-largest economy off polluting fossil fuels.

Last October, India and Russia signed a pact to build six more nuclear reactors at a new site in India following summit talks between their leaders in New Delhi.

Agencies

Nasheman News :Congress on Wednesday said that China blocking designation of Masood Azhar as a global terrorist was a sad day in the global fight against terrorism and slammed Prime Minister Narendra Modi over his foreign policy.

Party’s communications incharge Randeep Singh Surjewala said that China blocking JeM chief Masood Azhar’s designation as global terrorist reaffirms its position of being an inseparable ally of terrorism’s breeding ground-Pakistan.

“A sad day in the global fight against terrorism! China blocking Masood Azhar’s designation as global terrorist reaffirms Chinese position of being an inseparable ally of terrorism’s breeding ground-Pakistan Sadly, Modiji’s foreign policy has been a series of diplomatic disasters,” he said in a tweet.

China kept chief Masood Azhar, the chief of the terrorist organisation Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), under its protective wings, vetoing a fourth attempt to declare him a global terrorist and sanction him.

JeM has claimed responsibility for Pulwama attack.

Nasheman News : India and the US have called on Pakistan to address terrorism, including cross-border terrorism, the Ministry of External Affairs said on Wednesday.

Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale and US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs David Hale held consultations on March 12 in Washington D.C., the Ministry said in a statement. 

They reaffirmed their commitment to an Indo-US strategic partnership, reviewed the progress made since the Ministerial 2+2 meet, and discussed ways to further expand cooperation.

The countries also exchanged views on building convergences in the Indo-Pacific region and agreed to promote inclusivity, stability, peace and prosperity in the region.

The Counter-Terrorism Committee of the UN Security Council held a special meeting on September 28, 2011, to mark the tenth anniversary of the adoption of Security Council Resolution 1373 and urged “all Member States to ensure zero tolerance towards terrorism and take urgent action to combat terrorism in all its forms and manifestations”. As the chair of the committee, I presided over this special session in which the “zero-tolerance” norm was adopted.

Two developments helped change that narrative: reaction to 9/11, and the use of military force in Iraq in 2003 and Libya in 2011.

It became abundantly clear that organised terror outfits or non-state military actors cannot exist without the active arming and funding by some states, or at the very least acquiescence by them. Isalmic State (IS), for example, is the unwanted child of a failed, incompetently handled and neglected occupation (in Iraq).

There is a widespread tendency to underestimate the deep emotional and ideological reasons that prompt young men and women to take up arms and even lay down their lives for a cause they believe in, or have been persuaded to embrace. Radicalisation and violent extremism need to be understood if they are to be countered effectively. Locking up unemployed and radicalised youths only helps incubate Al Qaeda in jails.

Much of the global counterterrorism effort is delusional. It is laying the foundation for deeper polarisation and radicalisation that will make the world less safe than it already is. 

Why do I make this claim? Well a closer look at the two approaches used in the war against terror reveals that they both fit the delusional category.

First, erosion of the rule of law. It is now widely accepted that the American-led invasion of Iraq was illegal. There were no weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), and despite Saddam Hussain’s violently dictatorial regime, many more lives were lost as a result of the US invasion of the country. 

By disregarding international law and without giving due consideration to the international ramifications of such an invasion (the UN Security Council was largely ignored prior to the misadventure) the US and its allies created the monster that we today refer to as the IS. 

My previous book was on this very subject and studied the cases of Libya, Syria, Yemen, Crimea and Sri Lanka. It was aptly titled “Perilous Interventions”.

The second approach, a spectacular failure, is that of arming terror outfits. Often done under the garb of promoting democracy, the real motivation here is regime change for geopolitical gains. 

The American-led support to militant political Islamic organisations is well documented, with its crowning glory being Al Qaeda.

As General William Odom, director of the National Security Agency under President Ronald Reagan, said: “By any measure the US has long used terrorism. In 1978-79 the Senate was trying to pass a law against international terrorism — in every version they produced, the lawyers said the US would be in violation.”

And it is not just Western nations which are complicit. Other countries in the region such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Iran and Turkey have also played their part. Turkey is known to provide a safe haven to the IS fighters, particularly those joining the terror organisation from Europe and the UK. And the rise of Pakistan’s ISI (the mastermind behind terror attacks in India) is predicated on importing Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabism, along with a large helping of financial and technical resources.

Moving forward, violent extremism and terrorism can be better countered if it is approached through the prism of dialogue and discourse, and state responsibility.

The war on global terror can only be won through a process of dialogue among nations where the discourse is focused on the international repercussions of what is an international security threat. Such a discourse, which is anchored in human rights, but not constrained by it, must transcend national interest and look at terrorism for what is — a threat to delicately balanced peace and security architecture, effectively established post the devastation of World War II.

In the absence of an agreement over the definition of “terrorism”, what must be made clear is that there is no such thing as a “good” terrorist, and responsibility for the tragic loss of life and property as a result of this “good” theory must be affixed on states supporting these claims. 

Terror plots only come to fruition with the help of governments/agencies that, under the garb of ‘non-state’ actors, propagate proxy wars and use terror as a tool for achieving their geostrategic goals. Just as no terror plot would be successful without this government support, no Countering Violent Extremism strategy will be successful without state responsibility. 

Name and shame is, in the words of Victor Hugo, an idea whose time has come.

India is no longer the world’s largest importer of weapons, a position it held for over a decade, with Saudi Arabia topping the global share of arms imports between 2014 and 2018, a leading Stockholm-based think tank that measures weapons imports over five-year periods said in a new report on Monday.

Saudi Arabia accounted for 12% of the global share of arms imports in that period, followed by India in second place with a 9.5% share, reveals the new data published by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Sipri). With imports pegged at 4.2% of the global share, China is the world’s sixth-largest buyer of weapons.

Indian arms imports fell 24% between 2009-13 and 2014-18, the report said, adding that this was partly because of delays in deliveries of fighter jets and submarines produced under licence from Russian and French original equipment manufacturers.

While India has been trying to reduce its reliance on imported weapons, experts said the development could be considered noteworthy only if India stopped importing a particular weapon system because it was being manufactured locally under the Make in India initiative.

“The rider that imports may have fallen due to delayed deliveries can’t be ignored. It will be a little premature to start believing that the indigenous defence manufacturing activity has taken off,” said Air Vice Marshal Manmohan Bahadur (retd), additional director general, Centre for Air Power Studies.

Russia’s arms exports to India fell 42% between 2009-13 and 2014-18, the report said. Russia, the country’s top arms supplier, accounted for 58% of India’s arms imports during the last five years, compared to 76% in the previous five-year period (2009-13), according to the report. Russia accounted for 70% of Chinese arms imports in 2014-18.

Russia’s arms sales to India have fallen in recent years with India looking to diversify its arms purchases and also seeking specialised weaponry. India has also started buying more from the US as strategic relationships between the two countries have improved.

Sipri said the US, Israel and France increased their arms exports to India in 2014-18.

Pakistan recorded a 39% dip in arms imports in 2014-18 compared to 2009-13, with the US becoming “increasingly reluctant” to provide military aid or sell arms to Pakistan, the report said. “US arms exports to Pakistan fell 81% between 2009-13 and 2014-18. Pakistan has instead turned to other suppliers. For example, in 2018 it ordered four frigates and 30 combat helicopters from Turkey,” it said, adding that Pakistan was the main recipient (37%) of arms from China during the last five years. China has become the primary exporter of unmanned combat aerial vehicles, it said.

Agencies

[Nasheman news] New Delhi Google on Tuesday celebrated 30 years of World Wide Web (WWW) with a doodle. English scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the WWW in 1989 and wrote the first web browser in 1990.

Working at CERN, Switzerland, Berners-Lee laid out the basic concepts of the WWW in a proposal which included ideas like HTML, URL and HTTP.

In a document titled “Information management: a proposal”, he envisioned the use of hypertext to link documents.

The WWW, commonly known as the Web, is an information space where documents and other web resources are identified by Uniform Resource Locators (URLs).

The first web browser was released in 1991 — first to the research institutions and then to the general public on the Internet in the same year.

The WWW is the primary tool billions of people today use to interact on the Internet.

In addition to text, web pages may contain images, video, audio and software components that are rendered in the user’s web browser as coherent pages of multimedia content.

Before the WWW, remote computers communicated directly for the first time in 1969 and in 1983, TCP/IP standard was adopted.

By Arul Louis (10:06) 

[Nasheman news] New York The US stands with India in fighting terrorism, US Secretary of State Michael Pompeo told Indian Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale during their discussions on the “urgency” of Pakistan taking action against terror groups, according to an official.

In the first high-level face-to-face India-US encounter after the February 14 Pulwama terror attack, Pompeo “affirmed that the US stands with the people and government of India in the fight against terrorism”, State Department deputy spokesman Robert Palladino said on Monday after the talks in Washington.

He said that they discussed “the importance of bringing those responsible for the attack to justice and the urgency of Pakistan taking meaningful action against terrorist groups operating on its soil”.

Gokhale is on a three-day visit to Washington for diplomatic consultations and strategic security dialogue with the US. He is scheduled to meet Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs David Hale and Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Andrea Thompson. He will also hold talks with other US lawmakers.

The Indian Embassy in Washington said in a statement: “Pompeo expressed his understanding of India’s concerns regarding cross-border terrorism. They agreed that Pakistan needs to take concerted action to dismantle the terrorist infrastructure and to deny safe haven to all terrorist groups in its territory.

“They also agreed that those who support or abet terrorism in any form should be held accountable.”

Gokhale “conveyed appreciation to the US government and to Secretary Pompeo personally for the firm support that India received from the US in the aftermath of the terrorist attack in Pulwama”, the statement added.

The two leaders appreciated “the significant progress and the quality of the India-US Strategic Partnership”, following Pompeo’s visit to India last September for the first Ministerial 2+2 Dialogue of the foreign policy and defence leaders. 

External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj, Defence Minister Nirmala Seetharaman and then-US Defence Secretary James Mattis were at the meeting.

He also apprised Pompeo about the recent developments in the region, it said.

Last month, the Pulwama terror attack carried out by the Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) killed 40 CRPF personnel. 

India launched an attack on terrorist camp in Pakistan and an air skirmish between the two neighbours followed during which an Indian MiG-21 was shot down and its pilot, Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman was captured by Pakistan. He was later released after Pompeo’s intense diplomacy.

Through the crisis, US President Donald Trump, Pompeo and US National Security Adviser John Bolton backed India’s opposition to cross-border terrorism.

Later on Monday evening, Pompeo said at a news conference that during their talks he had asked India to join the US-led boycott of Venezuela’s oil.

“I’m confident that they too understand the real threat to the Venezuelan people.

“We’re asking the same thing of India as we are of every country: Do not be the economic lifeline for the Maduro regime,” he said.

He declined to say what Gokhale’s reaction was. “I certainly won’t characterise the conversations; they’re private conversations.”

The US and its allies have derecognised Nicolas Maduro as Venezuela’s President following the nation’s upheaval over last year’s elections that the National Assembly has declare invalid and recognised Juan Guaido, who proclaimed himself as the country’s interim President in Jnauary, as the country’s leader.

Palladino said that Gokhale and Pompeo “noted the strength of our partnership and discussed ways to further enhance cooperation, including on counter-terrorism”.

Gokhale and Pompeo “discussed our complementary visions for the Indo-Pacific, US-India defence cooperation, and the growing US-India economic partnership, including joint efforts to expand bilateral trade in a balanced and reciprocal manner”, he said.

Responding to Pompeo’s reference to bilateral trade matters, Gokhale “underscored the significant reduction in trade deficit in the last three years and conveyed India’s willingness to remain engaged with the US for a meaningful and mutually acceptable package on trade issues” the embassy said.

The Gokhale-Pompeo meeting took place against the backdrop of Trump ending tariff concessions worth $5.6 billion top India last week under the General Scheme of Preferences citing what he called New Delhi’s failure to provide “equitable and reasonable access” for US to its markets.

The embassy said that Afghanistan also figured in their talks.

At the height of the tensions between India and Pakistan last month, Pompeo had spoken by phone with Swaraj and National Security Adviser Ajit Doval and Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi in an effort to tamp down the rising hostility.