Month: January 2022

Pakistan this week has marked a full year without detection of wild polio cases, a landmark development in a country where the disease annually paralyzed approximately 20,000 children in the early 1990s.

The South Asian nation of about 220 million people and neighboring Afghanistan are the last two wild polio-endemic countries in the world.

While polio paralyzed 84 children in Pakistan in 2020, the most recent infection of the wild virus, known as WPV1, was recorded on January 27, 2021, the lowest number of reported cases in the country ever.

“Twelve months without detection of WPV1 cases in Pakistan is an encouraging epidemiological signal but must be taken with caution,” Dr. Hamid Jafari, director of polio eradication for the World Health Organization Eastern Mediterranean Region, told VOA. 

“It does not mean that WPV1 has been eradicated from the country or the circulation of virus has stopped in Pakistan,” he said.

“Poliovirus does not follow calendar years – it is a seasonal virus, and right now we are in the low-transmission season when the virus is weakest,” Jafari said.

Surveillance efforts continued to detect the virus in environmental samples as recently as last month, pointing to continued transmission of WPV1 in Pakistan.

Pakistani officials and international partners recognized that challenges to reaching all Pakistani children with vaccines also persist in key areas of the country, including parts of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province bordering Afghanistan.

“The biggest danger we face right now is complacency. This is the time we need to pull out all stops to intensify our surveillance and actively search for the virus — be it in tracking down the remaining chains of transmission, or any remaining affected children,” Jafari said.

He noted that countries in the final stages of their anti-polio efforts, notably India and Nigeria, have shown that low-level transmission can persist for a significant amount of time before the strain is completely eradicated.

Nigeria officially eradicated wild polio in 2020, leaving Pakistan and Afghanistan as the only countries where the disease is still endemic.

Setbacks, skepticism

Pakistan formally launched national anti-polio drives in 1994 and tens of thousands of vaccinators have since been staging regular inoculation campaigns across the country.

Polio vaccination drives in Pakistan have suffered setbacks in recent years due a variety of factors, including attacks on vaccinators and police personnel guarding them.

The latest attack came on Tuesday when gunmen shot and killed a policeman providing security for polio vaccinators in a northwestern town, Kohat. No health workers were harmed in the incident.

Outlawed militant groups, which claim they are fighting for establishing their brand of Islamic law, or Sharia, in Pakistan, see the polio vaccine as an effort to collect intelligence on their activities. Pakistani officials denounce the claims as ridiculous and dismiss the militants as criminals and thugs.

Fundamentalist religious groups in conservative rural parts of the majority-Muslim nation reject the immunization as a Western-led conspiracy to sterilize children.

The false information has triggered attacks during vaccine campaigns, killing scores of health care workers and security forces in the last decade or so.

Pakistani officials insist the attacks on polio teams have particularly increased since 2011, when the CIA arranged a fake vaccination campaign with the help of a local doctor, enabling U.S. forces to locate and kill fugitive al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden deep inside Pakistan.

“The progress that has been made to date is largely thanks to sustained commitment by leaders at all levels, including at the highest levels – and now is the time to ensure commitment and effort must now be sustained and intensified,” Jafari said. 

Only four cases of wild polio were confirmed in Afghanistan in 2021, down from 56 cases a year before. The U.N. said the lowest ever polio transmission in the country has provided an unprecedented opportunity to achieve eradication. The end of the Afghan war has also fueled hopes a polio-free Afghanistan is within reach.

Last year in November and December, U.N. officials say health workers were able to deliver polio vaccinations to 2.6 million Afghan children who had previously been inaccessible due to the conflict.

“Close coordination with Afghanistan is being strengthened to detect poliovirus and improve vaccination among cross border mobile populations,” Jafari said.
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Kazakhstan’s president was voted chairman of the ruling party Friday, replacing his mentor and former head of state Nursultan Nazarbayev, after a bloody crisis exposed a struggle at the top of the leadership.

“By the decision of the extraordinary XXI Party Congress, the President of the Republic of Kazakhstan, Kassym-Jomart (Tokayev), was unanimously elected Chairman of the Nur Otan Party,” his office said on Twitter.

The move came after unprecedented unrest that left 225 people dead earlier in January.

Tokayev this month questioned 81-year-old Nazarbayev’s legacy, in particular widening inequality between the elite and the poor in Central Asia’s richest country.

Nazarbayev ruled ex-Soviet Kazakhstan for close to three decades, brooking no opposition, before hand-picking Tokayev, 68, a career diplomat and then-loyalist, to replace him as president in 2019.

The octogenarian last year announced his decision to hand the party leadership over to Tokayev — a move that seemed to confirm Tokayev would stand for another presidential term even if many thought his predecessor still pulled Kazakhstan’s political strings.

Tokayev said during the congress that his chairmanship of the party could be a temporary affair, citing the need for an “equidistant status of the head of state”.

‘Undoubted successes’

Accepting his new appointment, Tokayev softened his prior criticism of Nazarbayev, by praising his predecessor’s state-building achievements.

“I know that various negative rumours are circulating around the country,” he said. “In this regard, as head of state, I repeat: the first president did a lot to turn our country into a strong state.”

Among the achievements Tokayev credited Nazarbayev with was the decision during the 1990s to transfer Kazakhstan’s capital from its largest city Almaty — the epicentre of violent unrest — to a steppe city 1,000 kilometres north that was renamed “Nur-Sultan” in Nazarbayev’s honour in 2019.

“This decision is recognized as strategic everywhere: both abroad and in our country,” Tokayev told Nur Otan party members at the congress.

“Let us also pay tribute to the historical merits of the first president, highlight his undoubted successes and merits, and leave possible miscalculations as a warning to the future leaders of our country,” Tokayev added. 

Tokayev took over Nazarbayev’s most powerful position — chairmanship of the national security council — on January 5, a day when protests that began over a fuel price hike morphed into deadly clashes and looting.

During a speech to lawmakers and officials on January 11, Tokayev criticised his mentor for failing to share the country’s vast wealth with ordinary people. He said Nazarbayev’s rule had created “a layer of wealthy people, even by international standards”. 

In the days that followed, Nazarbayev’s once-powerful relatives and in-laws were jettisoned from top corporate and political posts.

Appearing for the first time since the crisis began on January 18, Nazarbayev denied any conflict with his successor, referring to himself as “a pensioner”.
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The United States is marching ahead with sending free vaccines to lower-income nations, with the White House on Thursday announcing a donation of nearly 300,000 doses of the two-shot Pfizer vaccine to the landlocked central Asian nation of Tajikistan.

The doses are set to ship Thursday, a White House official told VOA.

Just a day earlier, the White House announced that the U.S. hit the milestone of 400 million donated doses to at least 112 countries. VOA spoke exclusively to Dr. Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to U.S. President Joe Biden, who said that international vaccine donations are part of the U.S. strategy to beat the pandemic.

“It’s absolutely critical,” Fauci told VOA via Zoom. “You address a global outbreak by a global solution and a global effort. And that’s why the United States has been committed to, and will deliver on, vaccine doses to low- and middle-income countries.” 

The latest donation will see the central Asian nation receive 299,520 doses of the Pfizer vaccine. The donation will be handled by COVAX, a global initiative founded to ensure equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines. Scientific, legal and regulatory teams in both nations will ensure the prompt delivery of safe and effective tranches of vaccine, the White House said. These new doses come from the half-billion doses secured by the Biden administration over the summer, according to the White House. 

Critics have said that while the U.S. has done more than any other nation, the world’s wealthiest country can afford to do still more.

Some are pushing for the global adoption of the TRIPS waiver, an agreement that would waive patents and intellectual property rights on COVID-19 tools like vaccines, therapeutics, tests and more.

“I don’t think that that’s really necessarily a part of the puzzle, because it’s very clear that we can get doses that are manufactured in the plants that are already going full-blast to the low- and middle-income countries,” Fauci said, when asked about how the TRIPS waiver fits into the fight against the pandemic. “I mean, obviously, you want to make sure that you have everything you can do to make doses available for the developing world. But I think we can do that on the basis of what’s going on right now.” 

Global aid groups say the waiver is key.

“The U.S. should lead in responding to what low- and middle-income countries are asking for — the ability to manufacture their own doses for their own citizens,” said Robbie Silverman, senior manager of private sector advocacy at Oxfam America. “This starts with adopting the TRIPS waiver, opening the vaccine recipe, sharing the technical know-how, and providing resourcing to qualified manufacturers throughout the world,” he added. 

“The waiver is needed now more than ever,” said Candice Sehoma, South Africa advocacy officer for Doctors Without Boders’ Access Campaign.

VOA asked Fauci whether the U.S. might retool its vaccine donation plans now that booster shots are becoming the norm in the developed world. 

“I think the donation effort is really substantial and will get better and better,” he said. “And I think, ultimately, that will accommodate the need for boosters. But let’s take one step at a time. A very small percentage of some of the countries, particularly in southern Africa, are fully vaccinated. Let’s get that first, and then we’ll worry about the boosters. But we do appreciate the need, ultimately throughout the world, to get people optimally protected. And we know that optimal protection with an mRNA [vaccine] means a third shot. And with [the one-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine] means a second shot.” 

The most recent recipient of American donations, Tajikistan, appears to be moving swiftly on its vaccination campaign. As of the start of the year, nearly 6.9 million vaccine doses have been administered in the nation of 10 million people, according to the World Health Organization.

Tajikistan has seen more than 17,600 confirmed cases of the virus and 125 deaths.

Jorge Agobian contributed to this report.
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This year marks the 30th anniversary of China having established diplomatic ties with five central Asian countries. In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed, and Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan gained independence.

Three decades later, in the first week of January 2022, President Xi Jinping exchanged congratulatory messages with the presidents of the five states.

China’s influence in Central Asia has grown exponentially in recent decades as the five nations seek Chinese financing for everything from infrastructure projects to educational endeavors, according to Samantha Custer, director of policy analysis at AidData, a research lab at the College of William and Mary in Virginia.

She told VOA the main goal of Chinese financial diplomacy in the region is to gain “access to energy supplies and strategic positioning for transit routes.”

Custer said the five countries are of interest to Beijing for two main reasons: First, they offer access to ready supplies of energy via oil, natural gas, or hydropower; and secondly, potential Belt and Road initiative trade routes from China to Europe and the Middle East run through them.

“In keeping with this strategy, most of China’s financial diplomacy has been focused on the energy and transportation sectors,” Custer said.

Last month, in a new report titled Corridors of Power, Custer and her coauthors analyzed how China used massive financial assistance to win friends and allies across Central and South Asia.

According to the report, the Chinese government directed $127 billion in financial assistance across 13 countries in Central and South Asia over nearly two decades. The five countries in Central Asia are among the biggest recipients of Beijing’s financial assistance.

“Kazakhstan alone attracted 26% ($33 billion) of Beijing’s financial assistance dollars,” Custer said, adding these investments were heavily focused on the China-Central Asia Gas Pipeline. “Turkmenistan was the second-largest Central Asian recipient of Chinese financing, worth $9 billion.”

Soft power investments

Even as Beijing emphasizes economics over soft power in Central Asia, it recognizes that these tools are most formidable when employed in concert, according to Custer.

“In this vein, Chinese leaders doubled down on soft power overtures via education, culture, exchange and media to foster people-to-people ties with Central Asian students and professionals over the last two decades,” Custer said, adding these efforts are important avenues to cultivate future markets for Chinese goods, services and capital in Central Asia.

In its bid to become a premier study-abroad destination for students from Central Asia, China offers less burdensome visa requirements than its competitors and financial assistance for education, according to the report.

“Kazakh and Kyrgyz students were top recipients of Chinese state-backed scholarships, and both countries received a large share of Beijing’s language and cultural promotion efforts in the form of Confucius Institutes at the university level and Confucius Classrooms at the primary and secondary school level,” Custer said.

Chinese leaders have also practiced city-level diplomacy to cultivate relationships with public and private sector leaders at the local level, according to the report.

“As a case in point: Turkmenistan’s Mary province received more money from Beijing over two decades than seven of the 13 countries in South and Central Asia,” Custer said. “Kazakhstan’s Atyrau, which received $5 billion, was the second-largest district-level recipient of Chinese state-backed financing in the entire region.”

Investing in security

China has also been investing in security in Central Asia, according to Emil Avdaliani, director of Middle East Studies at the Georgian think tank Geocase.

“Before, Russia was seen as the only and irreplaceable security provider,” Avdaliani said. “China has also penetrated the region. It operates a military base in Tajikistan, funds a new semi-military one there and has increased the number of drills with separate states in the region.”

Avdaliani said that even though China’s position in central Asian countries has evolved quite successfully, China still faces obstacles such as nationalism in the Central Asian states and political elites’ distrust of Beijing.

But the elite also sees that “the five states need China. They need investment, and in the longer run, they need China as a balancer against Russia,” Avdaliani told VOA in an email.

Beijing successfully uses this opportunity, and it is likely to continue in the future, he said. 
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A survey of the Islamic State group’s attacks around the world in 2021 indicates the group killed and injured more people in Afghanistan last year than it did anywhere else, and experts warn the terror group is on the rise following the U.S. military withdrawal from the country.

Widely known as ISIS, the group conducted its most deadly attack in 2021 last August at the Kabul International Airport when a suicide bomber killed 170 Afghan civilians and 13 U.S. military personnel.

During 2021, Islamic State carried out 365 terrorist attacks in Afghanistan that caused 2,210 casualties, a significant increase compared with 2020 when 82 IS attacks that caused 835 casualties were reported, according to an Israeli think tank, the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center.

Globally, IS operatives carried out 2,705 attacks resulting in 8,147 casualties. Iraq stood second to Afghanistan in casualties with 2,083. The Meir Amit group uses Islamic State’s claims of responsibility, as published in public sources, to attribute responsibility for attacks.

“The increase in ISIS activity in Afghanistan (especially in the second half of the year) came in the wake of the pullout of U.S. forces from the country, the disintegration of the old regime and the takeover of the country by the Taliban movement,” the center, which has tracked Islamic State attacks around the world for more than a decade, said in a report published this week.

The United Nations, which tracks civilian casualties in Afghanistan, has not yet released its final report for 2021. During the first half of 2021, the United Nations reported at least 1,659 Afghan civilians were killed and 3,524 were injured. Of those, the U.N. blamed 39 percent on Taliban insurgents and less than 10 percent on Islamic State fighters.

The rise in the number of civilians killed in IS attacks came as Afghanistan was expecting an end to war-related casualties after almost two decades of fighting between the U.S. and Taliban forces.

Thousands of Afghans were killed and wounded during the Taliban’s brutal insurgency, which started immediately after the U.S. military invaded Afghanistan in late 2001 and lasted until the last U.S. soldier left the country in August 2021.

The victims

Even before the U.S. military withdrawal, the United Nations reported rising civilian casualties caused by Islamic State’s offshoot in Afghanistan, the Khorasan Province, which is also known as IS-K.

In the first half of 2021, more than 124 Afghan civilians were killed and 315 were wounded in Islamic State attacks – a 45 percent increase compared with the same period in 2020, the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) reported.

Even while the Taliban claim they have ended the war and restored peace in Afghanistan, IS fighters have continued attacking civilians in different parts of the troubled country.

Last week, the group claimed responsibility for an attack in Herat city, west of Afghanistan, which killed at least six and wounded several other civilians.

Since its emergence in 2015 in eastern Afghanistan, bordering Pakistan, the IS Afghan affiliate has caused more than 7,000 civilian casualties (including over 2,200 deaths) in the country, according to a tally of U.N. totals and other reports.

IS-Khorasan primarily targets Shia communities — mosques, schools and residential areas — in Afghanistan. Shias account for about 12 percent of the country’s estimated 35 million population.

The group has also attacked journalists, civil society activists and health workers.

IS-Khorasan attacks, human rights groups say, amount to crimes against humanity.

There are growing concerns now that in the absence of strong counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan, IS has found a conducive environment in the country to regenerate force and launch even more deadly attacks.

“It’s not difficult to carry out operations targeting civilian targets,” Matthew Levitt, a counterterror expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told VOA, adding that while Islamic State can cause a lot of disruptions in Afghanistan, it appears unable to topple the Taliban regime, at least in the near future.
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Pakistan’s military confirmed Thursday that a militant raid against a security base in southwestern Baluchistan province has killed at least 10 soldiers.

The deadly “terrorist” assault took place late Tuesday in Kech, a remote Pakistani district next to the border with Iran, according to the military’s media wing. It said that security forces in the ensuing intense shootout had killed at least one assailant and injured several others.

“While repulsing terrorists’ fire … 10 soldiers embraced martyrdom,” the statement said, adding that security forces had captured three “terrorists” in “a follow-up clearance operation” underway in the area.

An outlawed militant group known as the Baluchistan Liberation Front (BLF) took credit for what is apparently one of the deadliest attacks against Pakistani security forces in the sparsely populated province in recent months.

Several ethnic Baluch armed separatist organizations, including BLF, are active in natural-resource-rich Baluchistan and routinely claim attacks against government forces.

The banned Pakistani Taliban, known as the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan or TTP, has a presence in the province, which also borders Afghanistan. In recent years, some of the attacks against security forces and civilians in Baluchistan have been claimed by Islamic State terrorists.

Pakistan has experienced an upsurge in militant attacks in its southwestern and northwestern districts, which used to host TTP strongholds until a few years ago, when a military-led offensive dismantled the militant infrastructure, killing thousands of militants and forcing others to flee across the Afghan border.
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