The leader of Afghanistan’s Taliban says the United States will be “making a mistake” by increasing its troop numbers to combat the insurgents, who have vowed to fight until the end of the “illegitimate [foreign] occupation” of the country. 

Maulavi Haibatullah Akhunzadah made the remarks Friday in a message ahead of the annual Muslim festival of Eid ul Fitr that marks the end of the holy month of Ramadan.

“If you think that you may break our determination with your military presence and surge of troops, you are making a mistake! This is not the solution of the issue to continue your occupation on the request of the inept administration of Kabul,” said the fugitive insurgent chief, who also warned that the U.S. troop surge would further destabilize the country. 

He went on to blame foreign forces for being “the main obstacle in the way of peace in Afghanistan.” The Taliban wants NATO forces to leave the country before it engages in any peace talks. 

President Donald Trump recently authorized his defense secretary, Jim Mattis, to add several thousand more U.S. troops to the 8,400 currently deployed to Afghanistan, primarily tasked to train and advise Afghan forces, which are struggling to halt Taliban battlefield advances. 

The U.S. military estimates that the government in Kabul controls only 60 percent of Afghanistan. 

Suicide blast kills dozens

Akhunzadah’s message came a day after a Taliban suicide car bomber killed at least 34 people and wounded dozens of others in the southern province of Helmand. 

The expected U.S. troop surge and the Taliban’s determination to continue its violent campaign, analysts say, are bound to escalate Afghan hostilities in the coming weeks and months. 

The chief Afghan government peace negotiator Friday called on all sides to find a solution to the war through peaceful means and urged the international community to assist those efforts. 

“I have said it in the past and say it again that war is not the option for any side to resolve the conflict; neither for the Afghan government nor for the armed opposition. The only way to achieve peace is to promote the peace process,” said Karim Khalili while addressing a gathering in Kabul. 

Khalili is the head of Afghanistan’s High Peace Council, which is tasked with engaging insurgents in a political reconciliation process. 

While the Taliban has long maintained it has been waging the insurgency to free Afghanistan of U.S.-led NATO forces, Friday’s statement by its top leader indicates the Taliban expects to regain power to re-impose its brand of harsh Islamic rule in the country. 

“Whenever your illegitimate occupation of Afghanistan comes to an end, the Islamic Emirate [the Taliban] has a comprehensive policy to maintain constructive and good relations with you and the world including the neighbors as per the principles,” said the insurgent leader. 

In an apparent reference to growing contacts that Russia, Iran and China lately have established with his group, Akhunzadah said, “The mainstream entities of the world admit its [Taliban’s] effectiveness, legitimacy and success.”

Moscow, Tehran and Beijing have expressed concern that deteriorating security is creating “ungoverned areas” in Afghanistan, where loyalists of Islamic State could set up bases to threaten their regional and national security interests. 
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One of the two surviving leaders of Cambodia’s infamous Khmer Rouge has denied he had anything to do with the group’s atrocities. 

Former president Khieu Samphan, who is 85, delivered his final statement Friday to the U.N.-backed tribunal in Cambodia. 

He is charged with crimes against humanity and genocide.

“The term ‘murder,’ I categorically reject it,” Khieu Samphan said.He said the “idea of Cambodian genocide” was invented by Vietnam to justify its invasion of Cambodia. 

Nuon Chea, who is 90, faces the same charges as Khieu, but was not in court Friday because of his poor health. Instead, he watched the proceedings from a holding cell. 

The pair are the two most senior living members of Khmer Rouge.

Both maintain Vietnam was responsible for killing nearly two million people through a variety of measures, including starvation, torture, and the sheer exhaustion of labor camps.Others were bludgeoned to death in mass executions in what has become known as “killing fields.”

It was not immediately clear when a verdict willbe handed down in the case. 
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Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi heads to the United States for his first meeting with President Donald Trump amid anxiety in New Delhi about whether India will be able to build on the bilateral gains of the last three years.

Indian officials have expressed optimism Modi’s two-day visit starting Sunday will lay the groundwork for an expansion in ties. 

“It is a very robust relationship, it is an expanding relationship,” said foreign ministry spokesman Gopal Baglay.

Discord before visit

But some discordant notes have emerged with Trump, who wants to restrict work visas used by many Indian professionals in the United States and who irked New Delhi by accusing it of making its participation in the Paris climate accord “contingent on receiving billions and billions and billions of dollars in foreign aid.”

“There are many mixed signals coming. Some things have made India very happy, some things have made India very uncomfortable,” said Harsh Pant, a fellow at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi. “For a long time the argument was that India’s rise is good for America. That argument no longer apparently holds, because this administration, this presidency is very transactional.”

Modi set aside decades of mistrust to cement closer ties with Washington, but analysts in New Delhi warn India may be low on Trump’s diplomatic priorities, of which he has made clear no relationship can be taken for granted.

With the U.S. president focused on foreign policy issues such as Russia and Syria, “India has indeed been left in the lurch,” according to Michael Kugelman, South Asia expert at the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson Center.

That is why Modi’s first meeting with Trump is being called a “testing of waters,” or a “get-to-know each other visit.”

Agreement likely on terrorism

The strongest convergence between the two leaders is expected to be on terrorism. Both leaders have a strong commitment to root out Islamic terror groups.

An expected announcement that the United States plans to supply 22 Guardian drones to India, a deal worth more than $2 billion, will also please New Delhi and be seen as a signal of Washington’s commitment to count India as a major defense partner and continue ties developed under the Obama administration.

But analysts say there is less clarity on how strongly the Trump administration will invest in a strategic partnership that deepened between the two countries in the last two years based on common perceptions about the need to balance China’s growing assertiveness in the region.

Indian foreign ministry spokesperson Baglay said, “One of the areas of focus is how to further push and develop economic cooperation for mutual benefit.”

Questions on trade

However there are questions whether Trump’s views on trade could jeopardize commitments made between the two world’s largest democracies for a five-fold jump in trade to $500 billion.

India is buying billions of dollars worth of arms from the United States, which is among the top weapons suppliers to New Delhi, the world’s biggest arms purchaser. But India has been pressing for technology transfers and local manufacturing that could run counter to Trump’s pledge to revive manufacturing in the U.S.

“Now when Donald Trump talks about ‘America First’ and Narendra Modi about ‘Make in India’ then there are people worried whether there is contradiction in these two policies or not,” said Chintamani Mahapatra, professor of international studies at the Center for Canadian, U.S. and Latin American Studies at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University.

Officials say Modi will raise India’s concerns on the issue of the H1B visa program used heavily by technology companies to hire skilled Indian workers in the United States. Trump has ordered stricter enforcement and review of the program over concerns that it takes away American jobs.

But even though India’s information technology sector worries that the visa curbs could setback their huge business in the United States, Modi is not expected to press too hard on an issue that has bipartisan support in Washington.

Personal rapport

According to observers, the biggest takeaway from the talks could be just a good meeting between the two leaders. 

“It is important that Mr. Modi develops a personal rapport, which might go some way in alleviating some concerns that some in India might have,” Harsh Pant said.

But few doubt the path ahead is less certain than with the Obama administration.

“Every country, friend or foe, partner or adversary is worried about the future of the relationship. So that is why even in India we do not know what is going to happen,” Mahapatra said. “That does not mean that we are really concerned that Indo-U.S. relationship is going to change so much that we don’t know how to handle it.”
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The North’s official Korean Central News Agency on Friday denied that North Korea cruelly treated or tortured Otto Warmbier and accused the United States and South Korea of a smear campaign that insulted what it called its “humanitarian’’ treatment of him. 

It also called itself the “biggest victim” in the death of an American student who was detained for more than a year and died days after being released in a coma.

The article published by KCNA Friday was Pyongyang’s first reaction to the death of Warmbier. North Korea released him last week for what it described as humanitarian reasons and he died Monday in a U.S. hospital. His family and others have blamed North Korea for his condition.

Doctors in the United States who examined Warmbier after his release said he had suffered a severe neurological injury from an unknown cause. Relatives say they were told the 22-year-old University of Virginia student had been in a coma since shortly after he was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor in North Korea in March 2016.

KCNA says the North dealt with Warmbier according to domestic law and international standards. He had been accused of stealing a propaganda poster and was serving a sentence of hard labor.

 
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Indonesia’s eye-catching moves to secure its fisheries under President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo are, on one hand, an extension of the resource nationalism that has touched nearly every industry, from mining to palm oil, in the island nation.

But the fisheries battle is not just about natural resources. It’s also about human resources, namely trafficking and labor abuse of fishermen from Indonesia and neighboring countries.

Because the fishing industry in Southeast Asia is lightly regulated, exact numbers of victims are hard to come by. But there are signs that it is huge.

A single 2016 investigation by the Associated Press discovered 4,000 fishermen, from Myanmar, Cambodia and Thailand, who were being trafficked in Indonesia’s Maluku islands. A different investigation, also from 2016, by the International Organization for Migration, spoke to more than 1,100 trafficking victims in Indonesia.

“The men labor under conditions more reminiscent of the 11th century than the 21st,” said Paul Dillon, an IOM project manager. “They are beaten with gaffs and stingray tails, starved and deprived of sleep, and close to 80 percent of those we interviewed said they worked more than 16 hours every day.”

Aggressive crackdown

“The vessels themselves [where human trafficking occurs] are engaged in illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing,” Dillon said. “Many are simply vacuuming the seas and destabilizing fish stocks, which is putting legitimate enterprises out of business and ruining coastal economies that support tens of millions of ordinary Indonesians.”

Indonesia’s fisheries ministry estimates illegal fishing costs 30 trillion rupiah (about $3.1 billion) per year, while the People’s Coalition for Fisheries Justice, or KIARA, pegs it higher, at 50 trillion rupiah or $5.2 billion, not including lost tax income or environmental damage.

In 2016, the fisheries ministry announced a human rights audit related to human trafficking on the seas, but the results are not yet published.

In a report, fisheries Minister Susi Pudjiastuti estimated there are “approximately 250,000 Indonesian crews on foreign vessels operating across continents that remain unprotected.”

Widespread regional problem

The fisheries ministry and IOM’s report details a culture of “deceptive recruitment, abuse, non-payment of wages and even murder” in the fishing industry.

It is not easy to delineate the problem along national lines. Most of the migrant workers in the Associated Press investigation were from Myanmar, and were reported to have been kept in cages and tortured.

In 2015, five Thais and three Indonesians were jointly tried for human trafficking in the seafood industry. One Myanmar man came forward with his story of a decade of slavery on a Thai fishing boat.

It is impossible to know how many trafficked individuals are still trapped in the industry, Dillon said. A Jokowi administration task force against illegal fishing, which includes Marine Police, Coast Guard and Navy, has likely deterred some new offenders, but the task force leader admitted to VOA last week that they still had limited resources.

So far, the task force has investigated 186 vessels on human trafficking violations, its leader, Mas Achmad Santosa, told VOA. It has also collaborated with IOM Indonesia and the Ministry of Manpower to repatriate 1,342 victims of trafficking to their home countries: Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia and Thailand.

Prevention and rehabilitation

With regards to domestic labor, “the lack of both national and international regulations to protect Indonesian workers in foreign fishing vessels makes them more vulnerable to exploitation and abuse,” Santosa said. Indonesia has regulated its migrant workers’ activities since 2004, he said, but that regulation (Law No. 39) focused on “land-based workers,” leaving sea-based workers’ rights unclear.

He added, “Officers at ports are mostly unaware of the forms of human rights violations taking place within their jurisdiction, especially trafficking.”

There are government initiatives to assist returning trafficking victims, like through Indonesia’s 2007 Anti-Trafficking Law, which provides a right to health care, psychological support and counseling, temporary shelter and legal aid, according to a 2016 NEXUS Institute report. But returning victims don’t have sufficient access to general social services, i.e. those not directly targeted at trafficking victims, according to that same report.

The very big picture behind illegal and unsustainable fishing practices is skyrocketing global demand for seafood. For that, Dillon said, “only sustained consumer demand, that the sale of slave-caught seafood in local supermarkets and restaurants cease, is going to hold those parties accountable and turn the ship around.”
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