How India’s exploitation of US sanctions hurts Pakistani businesses

Imran Ayub 

December 20, 2024 

DAWN

Technicians produce industrial parts, which are used by automotive, home appliance, and textile manufactures, at Cosmos Engineering’s plant in North Karachi. (Right) Cosmos Engineering CEO Asim Farooqi holds up one of the parts manufactured at the facility.—Fahim Siddiqi / White Star


PAKISTAN’S contention that unilateral US sanctions against companies suspected of having links with its weapons programme could have “dangerous implications for the strategic stability of our region” is not simply rhetoric, but rooted in precedent.

Indeed, these designations have been used as an excuse by arch-rival India to arbitrarily harass Pakistani and Chinese commercial firms engaged in documented trade and industrial activities.


Consider the case of Cosmos Engine­ering, a Karachi-based manufacturer of automobile parts and home appliances.

In March of this year, Indian customs officials had intercepted a Malta-flagged merchant ship, the CMA CGM Attila, which was en route to Karachi. The allegation was that it was carrying a dual-use military-grade cargo, which Indian authorities claimed could be used by Islamabad for its weapons programme.


Cosmos Engineering and its Chinese partner, Taiyuan Mining Import and Export, have yet to be compensated for ‘wrongful’ seizure of their cargo

Indian customs officials claimed to have found an Italian-made computer numerical control (CNC) machine within the consignment, alleging its potential utility in nuclear and ballistic missile programmes, and subsequently confiscated it.

Although New Delhi claimed the interception, and subsequent seizure, of the cargo was made on the basis of “specific intelligence”, no evidence supporting the claim was ever publicly released, and despite the passage of several months, the Indian government has yet to substantiate its allegations.

Chinese exasperation

The Chinese supplier of the machinery, as well as their Pakistani partners, told Dawn earlier this year that they intended to pursue legal action against the Indian government “to return our goods” as well as securing “maximum compensation”.

“I have reported the entire situation to our government departments and am waiting for their reply,” Andy Qiao of China’s Taiyuan Mining Import and Export had told Dawn in March, in response to a written query.

He also mentioned that his firm was enlisting the help of lawyers specialising in international law to gather evidence and prepare legal action against the Indian government.

Andy claimed that the Indian claims were “fabricated”, and normal commercial machinery was being portrayed as being “dual-use technology” for weapons systems. He also accused the Indians of virtually “stealing the equipment” by force without notifying them.

“When we tried to contact them to ask about the basis for the seizure, they didn’t answer our calls. They didn’t respond to our emails,” he said.

Andy maintained that their contract with the Pakistani company and all the products shipped between them met legal export declaration requirements and were fully documented, in line with international trade laws.

“The Indian government’s actions are extremely irresponsible. They always want to play the role of world police, arbitrarily seize other people’s products, and wantonly violate international law and international trade rules,” Andy said.

Diplomatic outrage

Although Pakistan’s Foreign Office had issued a sharp rebuke to the Indian actions at the time, Cosmos Engineering claims that there has been no progress on the issue and their seized shipment, as well as legal efforts to clear their name, remain in limbo.

“Pakistan condemns India’s high-handedness in seizure of commercial goods. This disruption of free trade underscores the dangers inherent in the arbitrary assumption of policing roles by states with dubious credentials,” FO spokesperson Mumtaz Zahra Baloch had said at the time.

Referring to the CNC machine found in the consignment, Ms Baloch clarified that the item in question was “a commercial lathe machine”.

“Specifications of the equipment clearly indicate its purely commercial use. The transaction was being conducted through transparent banking channels with all the relevant documentation,” she said.

Open doors at Cosmos

For most countries, anything related to weapons production is kept a closely guarded secret. But Cosmos Engineering allowed Dawn wide-ranging access to its facility in the North Karachi Industrial Area, where this correspondent was allowed to meet workers and management, as well as inspect the facility to get an idea of the kind of work that went on there.

“We are one of leading manufacturers of the country specialising in parts, tools and dies, jigs and fixtures for a number of reputed industrial organisations,” Cosmos Engineering CEO Asim Farooqi told Dawn.

In a wide-ranging discussion, he rejected the accusations leveled by Indian authorities, saying that the CNC machine was an essential industrial tool, widely utilised across diverse sectors, including automotive, home appliance, and textile industries.

“Cosmos Engineering vehemently asserts its non-involvement in any defense-related activities or missile programmes,” he said.

“We have demanded the immediate release of our CNC machine held by Indian authorities. Any further delay poses a significant risk to our operations and undermines our hard-earned reputation,” he told Dawn.

When asked how far their efforts to secure legal relief had progressed, Mr Farooqi told Dawn on Thursday that his company had approached the Sindh High Court to seek the release of their consignment, and that the court had issued notices to both the shipper and the cargo insurance agent.

“Our Chinese partner has also sought help of the local court in Shanghai,” he said, adding that Chinese customs authorities had sought details of the shipment.

Published in Dawn, December 20th, 2024

PAKISTAN

Decaying delta

Naseer Memon 

Published December 21, 2024 

DAWN



THE Indus delta, once a pristine ecosystem, has lost its glory. Listed amongst the 40 most biologically rich ecoregions in the world, it is also a Ramsar site. Unfortunately, its mangrove forests and fish stock in its estuaries are dwindling and communities are abandoning their abodes due to scarce livelihood resources. Abject poverty, food insecurity and morbidity are rampant. The prosperous past of the area has given way to deprivation over the decades.

Commissioned in 1932, Sukkur Barrage was the first major diversion structure on the Indus river. The last century witnessed a series of dams and barrages being built on the Indus and its tributaries. The Tarbela and Chashma reservoirs on the Indus and Mangla Dam on the Jhelum river are the major storage sites. Since the Sutlej Valley project (1922-30), the rivers of the Indus basin have become entangled with three major dams, 23 barrages, 12 inter-river canals and 45 main canals. This web of canals has sprawled a massive irrigation system that has drastically curtailed flows to the delta area.

The massive upstream diversion that continued over a century has culminated in an ecological disaster in the Indus delta. The Indus delta was spread over an area of 600,000 hectares between Sir Creek to the east and Phitti Creek to the west. It had 17 active creeks, which have now shrunk to just two — Khobar and Khar.


Declined river flows have had a detrimental effect on the delta.

According to Census 2023, three deltaic districts of Sindh (Thatta, Sujawal and Badin) have eight talukas with a population of about two million people. This population is directly affected by the degradation of the delta. Declining fish catch, degraded farmland, increased frequency of cyclones and the malfunctioning Left Bank Outfall Drain have together aggravated poverty, unemployment, malnourishment and migration to other areas.

The declined river flow has had a detrimental effect on the delta. It has curtailed sediment transportation, which is a critical ingredient of the deltaic ecosystem. The silt forms the bed that hinders sea encroachment along its shoreline and also provides fertile soil to grow and sustain the mangrove forests. The mangroves are a breeding ground for several species of fish. The flow data of the last 25 years shows that for 12 years, flows below Kotri Barrage were less than 10 million acre feet (MAF) that was provisionally agreed on in the inter-provincial Water Apportionment Accord of 1991. Consequently, sediment transport to the delta has declined. The Indus delta would receive 400 million tonnes of silt in the pre-Tarbela years, which has declined to about 125Mt per year.

According to a report by the International Panel of Experts, 5,000 cusecs is the minimum flow required below Kotri Barrage to sustain the deltaic ecosystem. However, water flow data reveals that except for the two monsoon months (mid-July to mid-September), the desired quantum of water doesn’t cross the gates of Kotri Barrage. In other words, no silt reaches the coastline for most of the months, paving the way for sea intrusion.

In 2001, the government of Sindh estimated that up to 0.5 million hectares of fertile land in the coastal districts (12 per cent of the total cultivated area in the entire province) was affected by seawater intrusion. The report of the International Panel of Experts in 2005 mentioned that coastal accretion was about 30 metres every year.

A research paper by Dr Altaf Ali Siyal of the US-Pakistan Centre for Advanced Studies in Water mentions that the active delta occupied an area of about 13,900 square kilometres in 1833, which has shrunk to 1,067 sq km, marking a co­­lossal reduction of about 92pc. In 2005, the IUCN reported the area of the active delta as 1,190 sq km. A fresh survey through satellite technology is required to determine the quantum of precious land lost to the sea. The panel of experts recommended that a total volume of 25 MAF every five years should be released to transport the requisite amount of silt.

The research revealed that an area covered with mangrove forests comprised 103,413 hectares or 16pc of the tidal floodplains during 1990, which slowly decreased to 63,296 hectares or 9.81pc of the tidal floodplains in 2005. Recently, the provincial government made efforts to revive the mangrove ecosystem. Its efforts saw an increase in the mangrove cover to 81,324 hectares in 2017. Sustaining the mangrove cover requires regular freshwater flows to the estuaries.

Amid this devastation of a fragile ecosystem, constructing new canals upstream for corporate farming will further suffocate the delta, which is a national asset. The delta’s resuscitation is a national obligation. A moratorium on new upstream diversions is urgently needed for the Indus delta to survive.

The writer is a civil society professional.
nmemon2004@yahoo.com

Published in Dawn, December 21st, 2024

SMOKERS’ CORNER: THE MYTH OF 'WESTERNISATION'

Nadeem F. Paracha 

Published December 22, 2024

DAWN

Illustration by Abro

In the April 1968 edition of a now defunct English daily, Business Post, one Yaqoob Sultan wrote an article in which he described a conversation he had had with a member of an Islamist political party. Sultan identified himself as a progressive student activist who was involved in the time’s protest movement against the Gen Ayub Khan dictatorship.

Sultan wrote that, when he met the Islamist at a wedding reception in Karachi, the Islamist told him that he (Sultan) and his like were ‘puppets of communist forces’ that were being used to destroy Islam in Pakistan. He then went on to admonish the ‘liberals’ as well, who he accused of being navigated by Western powers to promote secularism in the country. Sultan wrote that he retaliated by calling his accuser a hypocrite, because “Islamic [sic] parties were clearly being funded by the US to work against progressive forces.”

I stumbled upon this pithy piece 50 years later, during a research project in 2018. I found it rather interesting because whereas the accusation like the one made by the writer of the article became somewhat common in progressive/leftist circles, most people could not get their heads around it.

After all, how could those who were always raging against ‘Westernisation’ and secularism ever be supported by the US? Yet, there is now enough evidence to suggest that the US (as well as the UK) were doing just that.

The notion that the West has tried to impose Westernisation and secularism in Muslim regions in the past few decades is largely flawed. In fact, the West has done everything it could to ‘Islamise’ and, in some cases, radicalise the populations of these regions for specific geopolitical purposes

During the Cold War, Western powers, led by the US, cultivated Islamist outfits in Muslim-majority regions — especially in nation-states where progressive variants of Muslim nationalism were popular. The ideologues of these variants found more traction in striking strategic partnerships with communist countries, such as the erstwhile Soviet Union and China. Consequently, those helming these nation-states often sidelined and even repressed the Islamists.

As a result, the Islamists were quietly receptive to clandestine gestures of support offered to them by intelligence agencies in the US and UK. Both looked to destabilise Muslim regions that were either in the Soviet orbit or even tilting towards it.

This was before the anti-Soviet insurgency that broke out in Afghanistan in the 1980s, during which the US and UK further evolved the nature of their actions in this regard from being covert to overt. The influence and money of oil-rich Saudi Arabia were used to launch various social and cultural projects to ‘Islamise’ many Muslim-majority countries, as a way to induce perceptions of the Soviet Union as an atheistic force out to destroy Islam.

Additionally, moderate and progressive Muslim nationalists were demonised as ‘fake Muslims’ who were inherently secular and heretical. Ironically, though, Islamist outfits that were benefiting from these manoeuvres, continued to portray themselves as anti-West. But till the early 1990s at least, they were busy launching verbal and armed attacks against left-leaning and so-called ‘fake’ and ‘Westernised’ Muslims, rather than on the West.

The factions of the Islamist organisation Muslim Brotherhood, from which the Islamist Palestinian organisation Hamas emerged in 1987, put more effort attacking ‘secular’ anti-Israeli Palestinian groups than they did Israel. Attacks against Israel came later. In fact, in 1979, the Al-Mujamma al-Islami, the core organisation from which Hamas sprouted, was recognised as a “legitimate Palestinian organisation” by Israel, as opposed to the ‘secular’/left-leaning Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO).

In 2019, the reformist Saudi Prince Muhammad bin Salman was quoted as saying that the Saudi-funded spread of radical and stringent versions of Islam was the result of Western countries asking Riyadh to help counter the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

This became an open secret in 2020 when the British government declassified many secret documents related to the Information Research Department (IRD) — a now defunct division of the UK Foreign Office. According to a February 2020 report in The Middle East Eye, the documents demonstrate that IRD ran covert campaigns in multiple Muslim-majority regions during the height of the Cold War, establishing contacts with Islamist organisations and funding newspapers and radio stations in the Muslim world.

IRD also arranged for articles to be inserted in magazines published by Al-Azhar University in Cairo, to ensure that every student left the university a resolute opponent of communism. Those who were to be influenced through these projects were young people, women, trade unions, teachers’ organisations and the armed forces.

Indeed, such ploys — especially between the late 1960s and late 1980s — by British and American governments (with the help of Saudi Arabia), did succeed in ‘Islamising’ large segments of societies in many Muslim-majority regions, successfully developing a distaste in these societies not only for communism, but even for moderate forms of progressive politics.

It was only a matter of time that even more militant expressions emerged from within these societies. After the Soviet Union’s fall in 1991, these then turned their attention towards destroying the ‘infidel West’ that was once their most trusted ally and had helped them cleanse their societies from communists, ‘fake Muslims’ and secularists.

In 2011, the then US secretary of state Hillary Clinton claimed that the US had learned its lesson after 9/11 and would be more careful in choosing who to support. Yet, from the time of the tragic 9/11 episode, the US and its European allies unleashed hardened Islamist militant groups against ‘old enemies’ in Iraq, Libya and Syria.

It is true that all three were being run by tyrants. However, their departure did not see the entry of fluffy democrats, but Islamist groups with fantasies of establishing totalitarian regimes; fantasies originally stuffed in their heads by conduits of US and UK intelligence agencies during the Cold War. It is interesting to recall that Ahmed Sharaa aka Abu Mohammad al-Julani, the current head of Hayat Tahrir al-Shaam, the group leading the ouster of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, was once part of Al Qaeda and was held in US prisons for five years before being let go and helping establish what would later become ISIS or the so-called ‘Islamic State’.

From the late 1960s onwards, there was no attempt as such made by Western powers to ‘Westernise’ and secularise Muslim countries. Quite the contrary. It is thus largely incorrect and a myth that the West (especially in the last five decades) has tried to impose Westernisation and secularism in Muslim regions. The truth is, it did everything it could to not only ‘Islamise’ the populations of these regions but, on various occasions, to radicalise them for specific geopolitical purposes.

The West was one of the most prominent sources of the theocratic enlightenment that Islamists claim to have, as opposed to those they think are ignorant outcomes of Westernisation.

Published in Dawn, EOS, December 22nd, 2024

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