Pakistan’s military chief is sharply criticizing a suspected U.S. drone strike that killed two key Haqqani network commanders in northwestern Pakistan earlier this week.

Pakistani security sources said Tuesday’s pre-dawn missile attack destroyed a suspected militant hideout in the remote district of Hangu.

The strike, witnesses reported, killed two men, including commander Abubakar of the notorious, Taliban-allied network.

A Pentagon spokesman told VOA on Wednesday that the U.S. Department of Defense had not conducted any recent strikes in Pakistan. The CIA typically oversees drone strikes in Pakistan, but the agency does not confirm them under a long-standing arrangement with Pakistan.

In years past, some drone strikes have raised tensions between Islamabad and Washington. Army chief General Qamar Bajwa’s comments Wednesday indicated that the two countries could again be at odds over the operations.  

The chief called for the U.S. to share “actionable intelligence” with Islamabad, saying his forces were capable of moving against the militants. He did not directly refer to the Hangu strike.

“Unilateral actions like drone strikes, et cetera, are counterproductive and against the spirit of ongoing cooperation and intelligence sharing being diligently undertaken by Pakistan,” Bajwa said.

He made the remarks while chairing a meeting of his regional commanders in the provincial capital of Peshawar.

Tuesday’s attack appeared to be the first under the Trump administration that hit a target outside Pakistan’s semiautonomous, militant-dominated tribal areas on the Afghan border.

It came amid repeated assertions by Pakistani leaders that counterterrorism military operations had uprooted Haqqani bases, forcing fighters to flee to Afghanistan.

U.S. officials have long alleged that Taliban insurgents, particularly the Haqqani network, are covertly receiving support from the Pakistani spy agency to plot deadly cross-border attacks.

The Trump administration is reviewing the U.S. Afghan policy. Some American critics, such as Michael Kugelman of the Wilson Center research group, say that ramping up drone strikes against insurgents sheltering on Pakistani side could be a key component of the new strategy.

Under the previous U.S. administration, hundreds of drone strikes killed fugitive Haqqani and Taliban operatives in the Pakistani tribal areas, particularly in North Waziristan. Pakistani officials maintained that the unilateral drone strikes were undermining its counterterrorism operations and fueling militancy in the region.

The pace of the drone operations has significantly reduced in recent years. In the meantime, Pakistani military forces have undertaken major counterterrorism offensives and extended government authority to the volatile tribal belt.

But the operations, U.S.authorities insist, have spared insurgents involved in cross-border attacks and have targeted only those militants who are attacking Pakistan.
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Islamic State militants captured parts of Afghanistan’s Tora Bora region Tuesday night, after days of heavy fighting with Afghan Taliban and pro-government militias.

The remote, mountainous area contains a complex set of caves bordering Pakistan. It became well-known because al-Qaida head Osama bin Laden was cornered there by an American-led team, a few months after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the U.S., but he escaped to Pakistan.

Intense fighting started in the region almost a week ago when IS militants attacked Taliban positions. Initially, the Taliban managed to repel the attack and pushed IS back. Local, pro-Afghan government militias, that would usually be opposed to the Taliban, also fought IS. It was not clear whether they fought with the Taliban or separately, and whether the two sides had a de-facto temporary truce while they fought their common enemy.

IS militants, however, have not just managed to defeat both to capture Tora Bora, they have started an assault against Pachiragam, one of the 22 districts in Nangarhar province. A VOA Pashto service reporter in the area, Zabihullah Ghazi, said the attack was intense and the district may be on the verge of collapse.

Ataullah Khogyani, the Nangarhar governor’s spokesman, said the situation in Pachiragam was tense but refused to share more details.

No confirmation yet

Afghan Ministry of Defense spokesman General Dawlat Waziri, however, did not confirm the capture of Tora Bora.

“We have seen IS activity in Chaprahar and Pachiragam since yesterday, but our forces are aware of situation,” he said, adding that he was confident the Afghan forces would “crush” IS there, just as they had previously done in the Achin district.

Achin is the same district where the United States military dropped its biggest non-nuclear explosive, commonly known as the Mother of All Bombs, in April.

Despite the assurances, local authorities severely criticized the central government, which they said failed to provide extra weapons to local militias despite promises. The VOA reporter said the Afghan government has little control on the ground in Tora Bora.

Local sources say both sides suffered heavy casualties in the fighting last week but journalists could not independently confirm any details due to lack of access caused by security concerns.

Locals flee

Hundreds of residents from Tora Bora had taken refuge in Pachiragam for fear of IS when the fighting started a week ago. With IS approaching Pachiragam, further internal displacement was expected.

The Islamic State Khorasan Province or ISKP, the chapter of Islamic State in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia, initially emerged in early 2015 in eastern Afghanistan. VOA reporting on the origins of IS in eastern Afghanistan disclosed that most of the militants initially came to Afghanistan from the Orakzai Agency of Pakistan’s tribal area of North Waziristan.

Initially they came with their families, pretending to be refugees displaced by a military operation launched by Pakistan in 2014. Locals told VOA they claimed to be from the Tirah Valley of North Waziristan and spoke with an Orakzai dialect.

General John Nicholson, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in February that most militants in ISKP were former Pakistani Taliban who moved into Nangarhar.
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China’s three big Internet-driven companies, Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu, are set to influence a vast section of the country’s business because they control data concerning the consumer and social behavior of millions of people. The awesome power comes from the government’s drive to develop a “big data” industry, which is thriving in China.

Several other players, including utilities like phone companies and retail chains, are also trying to dip into the newly discovered pot of money from buyers who need information to understand buying preferences of potential customers, and design their products and strategies in line with the data flows.

“It [big data] is an improvement to do [a] better job, but unfortunately your [consumer’s] lifeline is more and more dependent on these big three guys,” said Chiang Jeongwen, a professor of marketing at the China Europe International Business School.

Recent studies have shown that nearly 90 percent of China’s 731 million online users have made at least one online purchase, often involving the use of Baidu’s search facilities, e-commerce sites and third-party transactions using mobile phone apps.

Predicting trends

“People are buying things and using their third party payment systems. [That] information [is] also being captured by Tencent and Alibaba. That is huge because now they know both offline and online information of consumers,” said Chiang.

These companies own a wide range of businesses that makes it possible for them to gather both online and offline data that is generated when a customer uses a phone app to make payments at a physical shop.

Alibaba owns Alipay while Tencent runs the highly popular WeChat service which offers mobile payment options. Baidu is China’s biggest internet search engine and holds the kind of influence that Google does in other countries.

“They have diversified the services [that] they offer. Alibaba, they are big in e-commerce. The kind of data they generate comes from anything ranging from what you buy online to your bill payments, travel bookings you do with, for example, the Alipay app,” said Shazeda Ahmed, visiting academic in the technology and economics division of Mercator Institute of Chinese Studies.

“People use the same platforms to make purchases, so there is a sense of extreme power in this situation because you can do all of these on one platform,” she explained.

These companies have a very strong predictive power that comes from a vast store of historical data and real-time data that they are collecting from users of different services. “They kind of able to anticipate the next thing a user might want before the user himself is aware of it,” she said.

Trading in data

The expansion of big data has given rise to serious concerns about the privacy of millions of people, who reveal both their transaction information and facets of social behavior through social media.

China has seen the rise of a black market for data. Data sellers offer a wide range of data on a targeted person, business or community by cracking into official databases and privately run sites.

But Chinese officials insist the government has put in place strong safeguards.

“There is a very strong firewall built before the big data center was established,” Zhang Bin, a senior official of the main big data center established by the Chinese government in Guiyang city. “We also made strict policy to control the data leaks from the government, so these are the two ways to protect information not to be leaked to the private companies for illegal use.”

The government has established a big data exchange center in Guiyang to encourage private and state-run companies to trade in data in a transparent manner, and help the industry find out the real price of the information. The center has come in for some praise by foreign companies who visited it but some questions remain unanswered.

“Having a legitimate place to trade data is an idea, but how does an exchange ensure that the data controllers has to requisite rights to sell data and it’s not breach of privacy?” Gagan Sabharwal, director of the National Association of Software and Service Companies in India, said after a recent visit.
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A suicide bomber targeted a checkpoint run by rival insurgents in Afghanistan’s southern Helmand province Wednesday, killing nine of them, an Afghan official said.

Mohammad Saleem Rohdi, chief of the Gareshk district, said six other militants from a breakaway Taliban faction were wounded in the attack early Wednesday.

Taliban spokesmen could not immediately be reached for comment.

Rival Taliban factions have clashed in the past, with the supporters of Mullah Rasoul, a commander in Helmand, contesting the overall leadership of Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada.

In the eastern Paktika province, a motorbike packed with explosives exploded near a local police commander’s house, killing a woman and four children, said Mohammad Rahman Ayaz, spokesman for the provincial governor. He said another seven people were wounded in the blast, which was likely set off by remote control from a distance.

The police commander was not in the house at the time of the attack. No one has claimed responsibility for the attack, Ayaz said.
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The Australian government has agreed to pay more than $50 million to settle a lawsuit brought by nearly 2,000 asylum-seekers who claim to have suffered psychological and physical abuse while being held at a remote Pacific detention center.

The lawsuit was brought by 1,905 men were held at the Manus Island center in Papua New Guinea between 2012 and 2014.  The group was seeking compensation from Australia and two private contractors who operated the center over the harsh conditions there, as well as false imprisonment after Papua New Guinea’s Supreme Court ruled their detention was unconstitutional.

The Australian government and the contractors have also agreed to pay another $26 million in legal fees, but will not admit to liability. 

Immigration Minister Peter Dutton issued a statement calling the settlement “a prudent outcome for Australian taxpayers.”  Lawyers for the plaintiffs say the money will be distributed according to length of their detention and the nature of their injuries.

Under a strict immigration policy, Australia blocks asylum-seekers from the Middle East, Africa and Asia from reaching its shores by boat, sending them to Manus Island and another center on the Pacific island nation of Nauru.  The policy has come under fire from the United Nations and human rights groups over the indefinite detention of the refugees, who have reportedly suffered abuse and emotional issues.

Australia and the United States reached an agreement late last year, under which most of the detainees would be resettled in the U.S.
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Prosecutors at the trial in Cambodia of the surviving top leaders of the former Khmer Rouge regime have begun summing up their case, declaring that, despite the defendants’ denials, the evidence clearly showed they knew of the suffering and deaths of their countrymen.

Khieu Samphan, the regime’s 85-year-old former head of state, and 90-year-old Nuon Chea, right-hand man to the group’s late leader, Pol Pot, are being tried on charges including genocide, rape and murder. An estimated 1.7 million Cambodians died during communist group’s bloody reign in the late 1970s.

Co-prosecutor Chea Leang on Wednesday described Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge as a “slave state” in which everyone had to work endless hours on massive infrastructure projects or in rice fields, with any attempt at escape punishable by death.
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