Russia upgrades presence in Pakistan

The presence of proxies, including Iranian and Russian has long been known and published, among others by Pakistani Major (r( Agha H. Amin Map plottings, Major (r) Agha Humayum Amin

 

Russian-language signposts have been erected in several regions of Pakistan, and Russia has appointed an honorary consul for the Pakistani city of Peshawar, following up on the bolstering of bilateral relations and the increased Russian presence in Pakistan.

During the Soviet Union’s decade-long occupation of Afghanistan from 1979-89, Pakistan helped the United States funnel weapons and fighters to help the internationally-backed mujahedin battling Soviet forces.

Turkey’s Wrong Bet on Syria

• Today, instead of the free movement of labor and capital, there is, around the border area, the free movement of bombs and bullets.
• Ankara considers the real security threat from Syria as not the jihadists, but the secular Kurds who fight the jihadists.
• Turkey has worked so hard to create a “Peshawar” (Afghanistan) across its border with Syria — hoping instead to create a Muslim Brotherhood zone.

It was supposed to be Turkish gambit: Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s days in power were numbered; the Nusayri (Alawite) man would be toppled by Syria’s Sunni majority in a popular revolt. The Sunni majority would set up in Damascus a Muslim Brotherhood type of regime that would be subservient to Ankara, and Turkey’s southern border with Syria would be now be a borderless Sunni “Schengen” zone; cross border trade would flourish with the free movement of labor and capital. Peace would prevail along the 900-km border, and Turkish and Syrian Sunni supremacists would advance their agenda in the not-always-so-Sunni lands of the Middle East.