Minister denies threatening Afghanistan, says Pakistan will ‘engage’ militants planning attacks
Minister denies threatening Afghanistan, says Pakistan will ‘engage’ militants planning attacks/node/2226711/pakistan
Minister denies threatening Afghanistan, says Pakistan will ‘engage’ militants planning attacks
Pakistan Interior Minister Rana Sanaullah (right) gestures during a press briefing along with the Inspector General of Islamabad Police Dr. Akbar Nasir Khan in Islamabad on January 04, 2023. (Photo courtesy: Twitter/ICT_Police)
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s interior minister Rana Sanaullah said on Wednesday he did not threaten Afghanistan with an attack, though he maintained that his country would be within its right to take action on credible intelligence against militant factions planning to launch an attack against it.
Relations between the two neighboring states have been strained since a proscribed militant network, Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), intensified attacks on Pakistani security forces after unilaterally calling off a cease-fire with the government in November.
Officials in Islamabad have maintained the top TTP leaders have found sanctuary in Afghanistan while urging the administration in Kabul not to allow armed groups to use its soil to launch attacks against other countries.
Pakistan’s interior minister said last month Islamabad could target TTP hideouts if Afghanistan, if the government in Kabul failed to dismantle the group or hand over its leadership to his country.
Reacting to the development, the Taliban administration said no country had the right to attack another nation since no law allowed such transgression. The Afghan Taliban chief spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid also noted his country wanted “peaceful relations” with neighboring states while regretting that Pakistani officials had been making “false statements” about Afghanistan.
“In my comment, I never said that we wanted to attack Afghanistan or anyone living there,” Sanaullah said while responding to a question about the recent statements issued by officials in Kabul in a news conference. “I said — and I stand by my words — that if we learn about a terrorist taking a position anywhere to launch an attack against us, Pakistan will and must engage [him] under international law.”
He added Pakistan’s national security committee (NSC) had decided in its last meeting on Monday the country would directly talk to the Afghan government to resolve the issue, instead of taking it up with anyone else.
Discussing the overall security situation of the country in the wake of a suicide attack in Islamabad on December 23 and a hostage situation created by TTP militants at a counterterrorism department (CTD) facility in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province, Sanaullah said the NSC meeting also decided to restructure the CTD across the country.
“The CTD in all provinces, especially in Balochistan and KP, will receive assistance from the federation,” he continued. “It will get training opportunities to perform its functions more efficiently and be able to counter terrorism in a better way.”
Sanaullah informed the government was also thinking of creating a national counterterrorism department.
“We have discussed the creation of a national CTD to coordinate with all four provinces as well as GB [Gilgit Baltistan] and Azad Kashmir,” he added.
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s Foreign Office said on Thursday it was reviewing a proposal from the business community to resume trade with India.
Pakistan downgraded its diplomatic relations and suspended bilateral trade with India after New Delhi’s revocation of the special constitutional status of Jammu and Kashmir in August 2019.
The geopolitical rift between the two countries has since impacted businesses on both sides who previously benefited from cross-border trade in textiles, agricultural products and medical supplies.
Speaking at a weekly press briefing, Foreign Office spokesperson referred to a statement by Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar and said the business community had expressed in review of trade with India.
“Examination of such proposals is a regular exercise in the Government of Pakistan, including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where we continue to consider all such requests and assess our policy,” she said.
Baloch, however, clarified that there was no change in Pakistan’s position at present.
The Muslim-majority Himalayan region of Kashmir has been a flashpoint between Pakistan and India since their independence from the British rule in 1947.
Both countries rule parts of the Himalayan territory, but claim it in full and have fought three wars over the disputed region.
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said on Thursday his government was working to modernize the country’s revenue collection system to revive the frail $350 billion South Asian economy, describing it as “top priority” of his administration.
Pakistan, which has been facing an economic meltdown, is making efforts to introduce structural reforms under a $3 billion International Monetary Fund (IMF) program that helped it avert a sovereign default last year.
The country this month cleared second and final review of its $3 billion International Monetary Fund (IMF) program which would pave the way for the release of $1.1 billion after helping Islamabad avert a default in last June.
Islamabad has expressed its interest in securing a new loan under the Extended Fund Facility (EFF) program with the IMF, which is expected to come with fiscal tightening measures, including an increase in revenue.
“A plan is underway to modernize revenue collection system,” PM Sharif was quoted as saying by the state-run Radio Pakistan broadcaster.
“The Federal Board of Revenue is being fully digitized and efforts are afoot to increase the tax base.”
He said a “whole-of-government approach” was being adopted to check power theft that was worth billions of rupees, according to the report.
Privatization of government-owned enterprises, institutional reforms, internal and external investment and austerity were also the government’s priorities in this regard, he added.
LAHORE: For Saad Mehmood, it was a routine visit to a mosque in the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore for Friday prayers in 2017 when the then 22-year-old stumbled upon a store room with sheaves of paper stored carefully on a shelf.
The worn pages were fragments from everyday copies of the Qur’an, which were awaiting ritual disposal. In Pakistan, pages of the holy book that are disposed are often called shaheed, or martyred, copies.
In Islam, widely accepted methods of disposing worn pages of the holy book are to wrap them in a cloth and bury them, ideally in a mosque, or to burn them respectfully.
But Mehmood, at the time a final year student of fine arts at the Beaconhouse National University (BNU), was inspired by the worn copies and decided to restore them as part of his thesis.
“Saad asked for some of these pages that were torn or worn out, and started to restore the ordinary, mass-printed sheets with gold paper and the finest ink — bringing that which was ‘martyred’ back to life,” the artist’s statement accompanying an ongoing exhibition of his works in Lahore reads.
The effort is “an act of artistic devotion,” Mehmood told Arab News at the exhibition last week, saying all his work now revolved around restoring the holy pages and turning them into artforms.
“This work started in 2017,” Mehmood, now a 28-year-old visual artist, said. “I collect the pages of the Qur’an that are shaheed, then there’s an entire process to their restoration, I fill in the damaged parts so that the pages are readable again.”
Mehmood said he had done extensive research on damaged Qur’anic pages and what happened to them and where they went from storerooms of mosques and homes.
“I saw that they’re buried in graveyards, or floated in clean and flowing water. Sometimes, I even saw the pages being burned and their ashes buried in some corner of a graveyard,” he explained.
This got Mehmood thinking: instead of disposing of the sacred texts, he could restore them.
The process of restoration was a difficult one, as many Qur’an pages Mehmood came across had no references.
“When we open these [Qur’anic] collections… there are [some] smaller pages which don’t have any references [which ayat, surah, what page number],” he said. “So, this was a conundrum… how do I restore them when there’s no reference to work with?“
Mehmood decided to make a collage of such pages.
“So, at least they are still visible, still accessible,” he said. “So, we don’t accidentally disrespect the words, they will remain in front of our eyes, and then turn them into art to be appreciated.”
Mehmood has also visited multiple religious scholars to present his idea and his work.
“There are a lot of organizations in Pakistan like Tahaffuz-e-Auraq [who dispose of pages in the prescribed manner],” Mehmood said. “I restored them and then I started showing people that basically this is the work I’m doing.”
The idea found wide acceptability, he said. “GOLD LEAF”
The ongoing exhibition in Lahore, organized by the Pakistan Art Forum, includes collages of restored Qur’anic fragments, concentric circles around Islamic calligraphy, decorative additions like gold leaves, and paintings with Arabic diacritics on Vasli and white paper. And this is all by design.
Mehmood said he wants to further explore this Islamic art form and create something new, like his painting of the diacritics without any words, or of punctuation marks without any sentences.
“The Qur’an came to us from Arabia, and the diacritics were added later, so that non-native Arabic speakers [Ajmi] could understand the text,” he said. “[Helping] in how to pronounce and enunciate it, zeir, zabr, that is also something I’ve worked on, and will continue to work on.”
There is also a reason why Mehmood uses gold leaf so often.
“When you look at my work… I have used gold leaf on the shaheed [damaged] Qur’anic pages,” he said.
“I used that gold leaf specifically and consciously, because gold is considered a divine material. And where the words are missing, pages torn, I’ve also used gold leaf to show the preciousness of the lost words, using a precious material.” “EXPAND WAYS TO EXPERIENCE QUR’AN”
The visual artist has held a number of group exhibitions at the Alhamra Arts Center in Lahore and Sanat Gallery in the southern port city of Karachi. Last week, he held his second solo show in Lahore, titled Al-Qadr, referring to the night when Muslims believe the Qur’an was first revealed.
While most of the visitors to the Lahore exhibition said they had come out of curiosity, they left with admiration for the intricate work and beautiful calligraphy or collage technique that Mehmood uses.
“Calligraphy is a part of [what I do], but this is something else [entirely],” he explained. “You can call it a collage. You can call it an installation. You can call it painting, you can call it artwork.”
Shahid Rassam, a famous Pakistani painter and sculptor, described Mehmood work as “positive,” saying he had seen other works, though rare, in which worn Qur’an pages were restored as a form of art.
Rassam, who has himself made contemporary forms of the Qur’an, including one in which he used metal engravings, said it was “vital to expand the ways in which we experience the sacred text, even as art installations.”
“I think what this young man [Saad Mehmood] is doing is objectively a positive thing,” the artist said. “He’s taking sacred pages and giving them their rightful respect, instead of just letting them lie in poorly-kept stores and boxes.”
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s Foreign Office said on Thursday that a suicide attack that killed five Chinese nationals this week would not impact the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and other projects.
Five Chinese nationals and their Pakistan driver were killed on Tuesday in Shangla, located in the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, when a bomber rammed his explosive-laden car into their vehicle.
The attack occurred in an area vital to CPEC, which encompasses various mega projects crucial for Pakistan’s economy, and the victims were en route to Dasu Dam, Pakistan’s largest hydropower project.
Speaking at a weekly briefing in Islamabad, Foreign Office spokesperson Mumtaz Zahra Baloch said Pakistan would not let anyone sabotage Pakistan-China cooperation and such attempts would never succeed.
“Pakistan and China are close friends and brothers and we will continue to work together to develop CPEC and to promote our cooperation,” she said.
Beijing is investing over $65 billion in energy and infrastructure projects in Pakistan as part of CPEC, a major segment of Beijing’s Belt and Road infrastructure initiative, which will connect China to the Arabian Sea and help Islamabad expand and modernize its economy through a network of roads, railways, pipelines and ports in Pakistan.
Hundreds of Chinese engineers and technicians have been working on these projects, primarily in Pakistan’s northwest and southwest.
Tuesday’s attack came less than a week after Pakistani security forces killed eight Balochistan Liberation Army separatists who opened fire on a convoy carrying Chinese citizens outside the Chinese-funded Gwadar port in the volatile southwestern Balochistan province.
Baloch referred to a statement of the Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson in which they said that no attempts to sabotage Pakistan-China cooperation would ever succeed.
“This is a reflection of the depth of this relationship and the understanding both countries have that those entities which could be behind such a dastardly attack are attempting to sabotage CPEC and target the symbols of Pakistan-China cooperation,” she said.
“Our message to them is they will not succeed and we will work together to bring the culprits of this attack to justice and to ensure that CPEC and all projects of Pakistan-China cooperation, including the hydropower projects in Pakistan, will continue forward without hindrance.”
Also on Thursday, Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Lin Jian said his government believed Islamabad would hold accountable the perpetrators of the deadly attack, vowing that Beijing was ready to step up cooperation with the international community against militancy.
“The Pakistani side is working intensively to investigate and handle the aftermath and has taken concrete steps to enhance security for Chinese personnel, projects and institutions,” Lin told reporters during a press briefing.
“We believe Pakistan will get to the bottom of the attack and bring the perpetrators to justice as soon as possible.”
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal and Iran’s Ambassador to Pakistan Dr. Raza Amiri Moghaddam on Thursday agreed to strengthen bilateral relations between their countries to reduce militancy in the region, state-run media reported.
Pakistan and Iran are often at odds with each other over instability on their shared border. Both countries have routinely blamed each other for not rooting out militancy. Small separatist groups in Pakistan have been behind a long-running insurgency, calling for gas and oil-rich Balochistan’s independence from the central government in Islamabad.
Pakistani anti-Iran militants have also targeted the Iranian border in recent years, increasing friction between the countries.
“Pakistan and Iran have agreed to strengthen bilateral relations to reduce tendencies of terrorism and extremism in the region,” the state-run Radio Pakistan said.
Radio Pakistan said the agreement to bolster bilateral ties was reached between Moghaddam and Iqbal during a meeting in Islamabad.
“The Planning Minister emphasized the importance of enhancing connectivity through trade routes, considering the 900-kilometer shared land and maritime border,” he said.
Tensions reached a head in January between Pakistan and Iran after they exchanged airstrikes against alleged militant targets in each other’s territories. Both countries since then have made efforts to ease tensions and promote bilateral trade with each other.