Month: July 2017

The U.S. said Monday that for the first time it will sell coal to Ukraine, easing its reliance on Russia and Moscow-back separatists in eastern Ukraine to meet its energy needs.

The accord calls for Xcoal Energy & Resources in the eastern state of Pennsylvania to ship 700,000 tons of thermal coal by the end of the year to Ukraine’s state-owned energy firm Centrenergo to help it heat homes and businesses in the coming winter months. The first shipment, at a cost of $113 a metric ton, is expected to leave the U.S. port of Baltimore in August.

U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry said the transaction was “crucial to the path forward to achieve energy dominance” for the United States. President Donald Trump has vowed to bring back the country’s coal industry, which has lost thousands of jobs as the U.S. has turned sharply toward use of cleaner and cheaper forms of energy, chiefly natural gas, even as demand for coal has risen in Europe and Asia.

Ukraine has struggled to meet its energy needs since March, when it cut off coal deliveries from the eastern part of its country controlled by Russian-backed separatists fighting the Kyiv government for control of the industrialized sector. Ukraine has called for a complete ban on coal imports from Russia, which Kyiv and Western countries have accused of supporting the rebellion in eastern Ukraine that has claimed 10,000 lives in the last three years.

Speaking at the U.S. embassy in Kyiv, Xcoal president Ernie Thrasher called the deal “historic” and said the company was “committed to serving Ukraine’s needs.”
…

U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday abruptly fired Anthony Scaramucci as his communications director, just over a week after the New York financier started work in the key White House post.

Trump ousted the 53-year-old Scaramucci at the request of new White House chief of staff John Kelly, officials told U.S. news outlets.

The White House officially announced that Scaramucci was leaving in order to give Kelly a “clean slate” to run day-to-day operations of the White House staff.

Scaramucci was little known to the American public before arriving on the Washington political scene in mid-July.

He quickly made national headlines with a vulgar, sexually suggestive rant to a correspondent for The New Yorker, which the magazine published last week. Scaramucci railed against two of Trump’s key White House aides: Reince Priebus, whom Trump fired as chief of staff on Friday and replaced with Kelly, and the president’s chief strategist, Stephen Bannon. 

Scaramucci’s firing came just hours after Kelly assumed his new post. Trump praised the retired Marine Corps general’s record during six months running the U.S. Homeland Security Administration, where he pushed for tough enforcement of laws against illegal immigration into the U.S.
…

The U.S. Army soldier took a deep breath before hitting the button that sent the email to more than 200 fellow troops.

“All considered, I am, and have been, traversing what is essentially a personal matter, but is something I must address publicly,” the email stated. “I am transgender.”

The April 13 email officially ended the secret that burned inside Capt. Jennifer Sims, who was known as Jonathan Sims. But the feeling of relief swiftly turned to unease last week after President Donald Trump tweeted that transgender people were no longer welcome in the U.S. military.

“I read the tweets while I was at work and, you know, it was devastating because I still have work to do and here I am reading, basically, what sounds like the president of the United States — who is the commander in chief, he is the ultimate boss of the military — telling me and anybody else that is transgender that we are fired,” Sims said.

Pentagon officials say the policy will remain unchanged without official White House guidance. But for Sims, the uncertainty has been upsetting.

“So in the initial moments after the tweet, I saw myself forced into the state that I was in before I started transitioning — a state of depression, exhaustion and inability to enjoy things,” said Sims, 28, who spoke to The Associated Press on her own behalf and not on that of the Army.

The reversal of the Obama administration policy that allows transgender people to serve openly and receive military medical coverage for transitioning from one gender to another also could affect her physically.

Sims has been on hormone therapy by her military doctor since November. If she interrupts the treatment, her body will revert to being male.

“It would be very difficult to have to go through that,” said Sims, who is based at Hohenfels, a U.S. Army garrison in the German state of Bavaria.

Growing up in Minnesota and Florida, Sims, a high school football player, never felt comfortable being male. The son and grandson of military veterans quietly came to terms with identifying as a woman a year after joining the Army R.O.T.C., but outwardly kept it a secret “because I wanted to continue serving,” Sims said.

Sims stopped socializing, feeling drained over worries about being masculine enough, and instead focused on work, serving in Afghanistan, Indonesia and Germany. Her sister, Natasha Sims, 24, said she saw “emptiness” in her eyes.

After the Defense Department announced in 2015 that it was considering allowing transgender troops to serve openly, Sims told Natasha and their parents. When the policy became official in June 2016, Sims said she felt the meaning of the word freedom personally after spending years fighting for it for her country.

“It was the best day of my life really,” Sims said.

Sims made an appointment with the behavioral health office, was given a diagnosis of gender dysphoria and started hormone therapy in November.

Five months later, she decided to tell fellow troops.

She first told her two closest colleagues, Capt. Brandon Shorter and another infantry officer.

They were at a loss for words.

After Shorter got home, allowing it to sink in, he texted Sims about how that was brave.

“Infantry officers are best described as brutish. So Capt. Sims pulled me and another brute aside face to face. That took a lot of courage and that’s the first thing that went through my mind, mixed in with surprise,” Shorter said.

Sims then announced the “personal change” to more than 200 other troops.

It was not an emotional email. The seasoned military officer wrote how a lifetime of discomfort had peaked three years ago. Sims meticulously explained gender dysphoria, announced she was Capt. Jennifer Sims, not Jonathan, and outlined the steps she would take to fully transition to a woman.

“Officially in DEERS, my gender will remain male until my medical transition is complete, which means I will still comport to male standards and use male facilities,” she wrote, referring to the acronym for the Defense Enrollment Eligibility Reporting System, a kind of HR database for U.S. military personnel.

“While it is my preference for people to refer to me with female pronouns, if you are uncomfortable with this, there is no requirement to do so, I only respectfully request you refer to me by my proper name, Captain Sims,” the email stated.

Sims assured her unit the change “if anything, will only make me more productive and capable, as I no longer have to live two personas.”

Five soldiers sent emails back with words of encouragement. Most didn’t respond. For a few days, there were murmurs of “Hey, did you see the email?”

The force had just undergone training explaining what was expected in regard to transgender soldiers.

Sims is the first transgender person Shorter has known.

The unit is basically full of “young men wanting to chew on nails and prove how tough they are and rightly so since they are infantry men,” Shorter said. There are only about eight women among the 500 soldiers in the battalion.

He had a lot of questions “being naturally curious and wanting to be a good friend because we didn’t really have a personal relationship. He’s, excuse me, she’s — see I still slip up sometimes — a single captain, I’m married with two daughters. Our lives are different.”

Shorter, 32, of Alanson, Michigan, describes himself as conservative. He said he struggles with his beliefs about what’s appropriate. An assistant operations officer for the battalion, Shorter is concerned about how Sims — whom he considers to be the best signal officer he’s seen in the Army — cannot deploy while undergoing medical procedures.

But Shorter, speaking on his own behalf and not that of the Army, said he would be “incredibly disappointed” if Sims were kicked out.

After Trump’s tweet, a few soldiers, including Shorter, asked Sims how she was doing. She didn’t know what to say.

Her pills will run out in three months. Doctors recommend 12 months of hormone therapy before surgery. The cost of her surgery can run close to $50,000, which Sims was expecting the military would help cover.

Army officials told her nothing will change without official guidance.

“I had waited so long just to be able to tell the world this is who I am,” Sims said.
…

America’s top law enforcement officer wandered through a Salvadoran jail, sizing up the tattooed gang members who sat with their backs to him on the concrete floors of their cells. His soft voice was barely audible over the downpour pelting the tin roof as he spoke to the local police.

In the midst of a week when his role — and future — in President Donald Trump’s Cabinet was in serious doubt, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions could be found thousands of miles away from Washington, surrounded by concertina wire and soldiers with rifles. Belittled by his boss back home, he vowed not to loosen his grip on the job that he loves.

For Sessions, leading the Justice Department is an opportunity to make tangible progress on issues he long championed, sometimes in isolation among fellow Republicans, during two decades in the U.S. Senate: hard-line immigration policies and aggressive prosecutions of gangs, drugs and gun crime. His priorities mark a departure for a department that, during the Obama administration, increasingly focused on preventing high-tech attacks from abroad, white-collar crime and the threat of homegrown violent extremism.

Yet Sessions’ policy focus is often overshadowed by the expanding investigation into Trump campaign ties to Russia. Sessions, whose own campaign contacts with Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. have been questioned, has stepped aside from the investigation. That unnerved Trump, who subjected his attorney general to almost daily public humiliation this past week.

Sessions was trying to weather the storm in San Salvador, where on a balmy afternoon his attention turned to the notoriously brutal street gang MS-13, whose violence in the U.S. has become a focal point in the immigration debate. Here was the former Alabama senator, traveling El Salvador’s streets in a motorcade alongside leaders of the Justice Department’s criminal division, buoyed by reassurances from congressional Republicans in Washington after Trump’s tirade.

The trip was planned before the firestorm, but Sessions hoped his work on MS-13 would help mend his tattered relationship with Trump.

“It hasn’t been my best week for my relationship with the president,” Sessions told The Associated Press. “But I believe with great confidence that I understand what’s needed in the Department of Justice and what President Trump wants. I share his agenda.”

Sessions cut his teeth as a federal prosecutor in Mobile, Alabama, at the height of the drug war, an experience that has shaped his approach to running the Justice Department. Allegations of racially charged remarks cost him a federal judgeship, but he went onto become the state’s attorney general.

He was elected to the Senate in 1996 and developed a willingness to break with fellow Republicans in ways that sometimes left him on the sidelines.

He fought against efforts to overhaul the criminal justice system last year, a rare area where conservatives and liberals had found unity. He also was a leading opponent of the 2013 bipartisan bill that sought to ease immigration restrictions.

That issue drew him to Trump. Sessions was the first senator to endorse the businessman-turned-politician. Trump rewarded that support by naming Sessions as attorney general. It was, Sessions has said, a job that “goes beyond anything that I would have ever imagined for myself.”

“In the Senate, you get paid for your words. But in the Department of Justice, every now and then you can actually take action and set priorities and see it actually take effect,” Sessions told AP in an interview from inside the headquarters of Policia Nacional Civil, El Salvador’s police force, where he had gone to build rapport with the commissioner. “It’s kind of a real adjustment. I was a federal prosecutor for 12, 14 years, really. This is coming home to the Department of Justice I so much loved and still do. You can make things happen in the Department of Justice.”

In moving quickly to put his own stamp on the Justice Department, Sessions continues to find himself at odds with both Democrats and members of his own party.

His decision this month to revive a program that lets local American police seize cash and property with federal help prompted rebuke from conservative groups such as the Koch-backed Freedom Partners, which called it “unjust and unconstitutional.”

Sessions told federal prosecutors to pursue the toughest charges against most suspects, a move that critics assailed as a revival of costly drug-fighting policies. He wants a crackdown on marijuana as a growing number of states work to legalize it. His escalating threats to withhold money from cities that refuse to cooperate with immigration authorities have made city leaders only more defiant.

Timothy Heaphy, a former U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia who served under President Barack Obama, said the fast pace of Sessions’ changes is disturbing.

“He came in clearly with an agenda to go back in time to a tough-on-crime and law-and-order approach,” Heaphy said. “He’s ignoring all the progress we made.”

During his final years in the Senate, Sessions began to gain greater notice from the far-right. He was a favorite of Breitbart, the website previously run by Steve Bannon, who now serves as Trump’s senior adviser. Other Sessions’ aides also serve in top administration posts, including Stephen Miller, the architect of several of Trump’s immigration proposals.

Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of Tea Party Patriots, said Sessions has a “warrior spirit” and is working on behalf of people whose voices haven’t always been heard in Congress.

“He has had to take on battles before within his own party and against the opposition party, and he takes those on and he fights them,” she said.

Sessions believes he is making progress.

“A number of things we’ve done are just beginning to ripen,” he told the AP. “I’m pretty happy with the speed with which a lot of it is happening. Sometimes the American people may not know how effective that’s been.”
…

U.S. President Donald Trump is expected to sign into law new sanctions against Russia, Iran, and North Korea. While Washington awaits the president’s signature, Russia is promising retaliation if punitive measures are implemented. VOA’s Michael Bowman reports from Washington
…

U.S. President Donald Trump and key aides pressed lawmakers Sunday to not abandon an overhaul of the country’s health care law in the face of the Senate’s rejection last week of three measures to repeal or replace it.

“Don’t give up Republican Senators, the World is watching: Repeal & Replace,” Trump said in a Twitter comment.

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said it was “time to move on” to other issues after three Republican senators joined all 48 Democrats early Friday to defeat a slimmed-down repeal of Obamacare, former President Barack Obama’s signature domestic legislative achievement, on a 51-49 vote.

Republican leaders viewed the vote as their last best effort to be able to advance the repeal effort and negotiate with the House of Representatives on how to dismantle the law, coming after two other attempts at revamping the law were defeated earlier in the week.

But Trump budget chief Mick Mulvaney told CNN, “In the White House’s view, they can’t move on in the Senate.” He said that senators “need to stay, they need to work, they need to pass something.”

Health care secretary Tom Price, speaking on NBC’s “Meet the Press” show, said lawmakers need to continue to work to replace Obamacare with a law that “actually works for patients … so they’re making the decisions, not Washington.”

Most American workers receive their health insurance coverage through their employers, with poorer and older Americans assisted through long-standing government plans. Aside from those plans, individuals who buy insurance to help cover their medical bills are most affected by Obamacare.

But Price contended that the law is “imploding,” and that as it currently stands, 40 percent of the more than 3,000 counties in the U.S. will have only one insurer or none next year in the individual insurance market.

Senator Susan Collins of Maine, one of the three Republicans who voted against what McConnell and other party leaders characterized as a “skinny bill” repealing only parts of Obamacare and leaving much of it intact, told NBC that new hearings on the law are needed that “would produce way better legislation … on the best path forward.”

Republican lawmakers have tried dozens of times to overturn Obamacare, enacted in 2010 by a Democratic-controlled Congress without a single Republican supporting it. Party leaders and Washington political analysts thought 2017 was their best chance to overhaul the law, with Trump in the White House and Republicans controlling both the Senate and House.

But after extensive debate throughout the first six months of the Trump presidency, Republicans are riven in deciding how to overhaul the law, with conservative lawmakers trying to upend as much of the law as possible and more moderate lawmakers looking to keep as much funding as possible for insurance coverage for poorer Americans.

The third major Senate vote last week on health care ended in dramatic fashion early Friday.

With the outcome hanging in the balance, Republican Senator John McCain, who had returned to Congress just days after being diagnosed with brain cancer, walked to the front of the Senate and turned a thumb down, giving the minority Democrats the extra vote they needed to block passage of the scaled-down repeal of Obamacare.

 
…

Weary Republicans in Washington may be ready to move on from health care, but conservatives across the United States are warning the GOP-led Congress not to abandon its pledge to repeal the Obama-era health law – or risk a political nightmare in next year’s elections.

The Senate’s failure this past week to pass repeal legislation has outraged the Republican base and triggered a new wave of fear. The stunning collapse has exposed a party so paralyzed by ideological division that it could not deliver on its top campaign pledge.

After devoting months to the debate and seven years to promising to kill the Affordable Care Act, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Republican-Kentucky, simply said: “It’s time to move on.”

But that’s simply not an option for a conservative base energized by its opposition to the health law. Local party leaders, activists and political operatives are predicting payback for Republicans lawmakers if they don’t revive the fight.

“This is an epic fail for Republicans,” said Tim Phillips, president of Americans For Prosperity, the political arm of the conservative Koch Brothers’ network. “Their failure to keep their promise will hurt them. It will.”

To the American Conservative Union, the three Republican senators who blocked the stripped-down repeal bill that failed in the wee hours Friday are “sellouts.” A Trump-sanctioned super political action committee did not rule out running ads against uncooperative Republicans, which it did recently against Sen. Dean Heller, Republican-Nevada.

There are limited options for directly punishing the renegade senators – John McCain of Arizona, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine. None of the three is up for re-election next fall. McCain, whose dramatic “no” vote killed the bill, is serving his last term in office, has brain cancer and is hardly moved by electoral threats.

​Failing the ‘moral test’

Still, broad disillusionment among conservative voters could have an impact beyond just a few senators. Primary election challenges or a low turnout could mean trouble for all Republicans. Democrats need to flip 24 seats to take control of the House of Representatives, a shift that would dramatically re-shape the last two years of Trump’s first term.

“If you look at competitive districts, swing districts, or districts where Republicans could face primary challenges, this is something that will be a potent electoral issue,” Republican pollster Chris Wilson said of his party’s health care failure. “I don’t think this is something voters are going to forget.”

One such challenger has emerged. Conservative activist Shak Hill, a former Air Force pilot, plans to run against second-term GOP Rep. Barbara Comstock in a competitive northern Virginia district.

Hill told The Associated Press that Comstock, who voted against a GOP House health care repeal bill in May, “has failed the moral test of her time in Congress.”

The leaders of other groups, such as Women Vote Trump, have begun to court primary challengers to punish those members of Congress deemed insufficiently committed to President Donald Trump’s agenda.

“I expect that we will get involved in primaries,” said the group’s co-founder, Amy Kremer. “You cannot continue to elect the same people over and over again and expect different results.”

On Capitol Hill, some Republicans insist their health care overhaul could be saved in the short term. Yet party leaders – backed by outside groups – are signaling that they would probably move on to taxes. Republicans hoped the issue would bring some party unity, even as realists in Washington view the a tax overhaul – something that hasn’t happened in more than 30 years – as one of the most complex legislative projects possible.

‘You can’t have everything’

The Trump administration has become engulfed in internal drama over personnel and personalities. Trump on Friday ousted his chief of staff, Reince Priebus, replacing him with Home Security Secretary John Kelly. The president did not appear to share conservatives’ outrage about the Senate’s vote, but repeated his promises to remake the health system.

“You can’t have everything,” Trump said, adding: “We’ll get it done. We’re going to get it.”

Around the country, Republican voters continue to support efforts to repeal former President Barack Obama’s health law, even if there is little agreement on an alternative.

A CNN poll released last week found that 83 percent of Republicans favor some form of repeal, while only 11 percent of Republicans want the party to abandon the repeal effort. Among all adults, 52 percent of voters favor some sort of repeal, with 34 percent favored repeal only if replacement could be enacted at the same time.

“The political pressure on something like this is real,” said GOP strategist Mike Shields. “I don’t think this is over.”

Like others Republican operatives, Shields said the party’s ability to enact the rest of Trump’s agenda – taxes, infrastructure and the border wall – could help “mitigate how upset people will be” about health care.

“If this is part of a general trend,” he said of the GOP’s governing struggles, “I think that can be pretty disastrous for 2018.”

Being held to account

Republicans will be held responsible for any negative economic fallout from the current health system’s failure, said Paul Shumaker, a North Carolina Republican pollster and senior adviser to Sen. Richard Burr, Republican-North Carolina.

As early as October, voters are likely to see increased costs as insurance companies notify people about their new rates. By next October, it will be too late to unlink Republicans from the problem, Shumaker said.

For now at least, many Trump supporters blame the Republican Party’s problems on its leaders in Congress.

“They certainly didn’t have their house in order,” said Larry Wood of Waynesboro, Virginia, who voted for Trump only after supporting Ohio Gov. John Kasich in the 2016 GOP primary. The 69-year-old retired homebuilder says the failure falls at the feet of Congress.

Trump seems content to let the current system collapse.

“As I said from the beginning, let ObamaCare implode, then deal. Watch!” he said in a tweet.
…

Silicon Valley is the tech industry’s epicenter, but what is the epicenter of Silicon Valley?

It might just be Coupa Café in downtown Palo Alto, Calif.

For the tech community, this café is a meeting place of the who’s who of Silicon Valley, where the likes of the late Steve Jobs of Apple, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google co-founder Sergey Brin have all been spotted. Up-and-coming startup founders are able to buy their lattes with the digital currency Bitcoin before their pitch sessions with leading industry venture capitalists.

The café is so well known among techies that a cup with the Coupa logo was featured as a prop in the 2010 film The Social Network.

“I remember seeing Mark Zuckerberg sitting here and having meetings and people coming up,” said Eric Sokol, an associate professor of medicine at Stanford University.

While Silicon Valley is famous for companies such as Facebook, Twitter and other billion-dollar empires built in cyberspace, some folks in the valley still believe real-world human connections can make a difference.

Making connections

Just from frequenting the café, Sokol says, he became an adviser to a health care related startup and a new venture capitalist fund. Both came about when other patrons at the café overheard conversations he was having, he said.

That’s the kind of “crazy nest of connections” that can occur at Coupa, he said.

The Venezuelan-born Jean Paul Coupal founded the café with his mother and sister in 2004 with the hopes of bringing a bit of his homeland to Silicon Valley — Venezuelan coffee, crepes and Venezuelan arepas. The family puts its touch on all aspects of the business — Coupal’s sister and mother personally painted each of the eight cafés.

While the beautifully decorated walls and rich cuisine may be what initially attracted the tech community, the café’s tech focus has kept it in the vanguard of this café-saturated region.

In 2013, Coupa Cafe began accepting Bitcoins, a digital payment system, allowing customers to pay for their lattes and arepas with the currency.

“We want to be part of the technology,” Coupal said.

The pre-office

And there’s another perk: The café allows patrons to stay all day, which makes it attractive for entrepreneurs who are in the pre-office-space stage.

“A lot of the startups in the area come and they like to work at Coupa, coding all day,” Coupal said. “We’ve seen a lot of products that got developed at Coupa.”

With Stanford and other colleges nearby, the possibility of a life-changing chance encounter is not lost on local students interested in tech.

“I am currently teaching myself JavaScript here at Coupa right now,” said Katie Kennedy, a local community college student. “If someone happened to look over my shoulder and saw what I was doing, I would definitely not say no to any help.”

Now, there are eight Coupa Cafe locations. This one, the original on Ramona Street, is in a building from the 1930s.

“The food’s good, the coffee’s good,” Sokol said. “I wish I had stock, but I don’t in Coupa. And I don’t know, it just has the right atmosphere, the right mix of people. It’s got an energy about it, I guess.”

Cafe Coupa shows that being at the right place at the right time can change a café’s fate as much as a techie’s life.
…

The Illinois Department of Natural Resources is reintroducing a living fossil into its waterways. The alligator gar is a fish so old, it’s thought to have evolved during the Early Cretaceous period, more than a 100 million years ago.

Alligator gar are the second largest freshwater fish in North America. Illinois fisheries biologist Randy Sauer says they disappeared from the state’s waterways in the 1990s, although they continued to thrive in southern U.S. rivers.

“We want to restore the ecosystem because it is important to have top predators to balance the species below them in order to keep check on some more abundant species,” he said.

Beyond that, alligator gar make for great big game fishing. The diamond-scaled animals, which breathe both air and water, can grow up to 2.7 meters and weigh more than 136 kilograms. In fact, Sauer says, their large size is what did them in originally in the state.

“It was pretty much extirpated out of its range because of misconceptions about it eating sport fish,” he said. “People would target it and put bounties on it.”

Everything is on the menu

The alligator gar is an opportunistic feeder, meaning it will eat whatever it encounters — from an occasional turtle or small duck to invasive species such as Asian and silver carp. Sauer hopes the re-introduction program will help the state’s efforts to control the carp.

Because gar can live up to 60 years, this program is going to take decades to fully expand.

“The (female) alligator gar does not sexually mature until 11 years, and the male not till 6 or 7 years,” Sauer said, “so at the outset of this project we’re probably going to stock more heavily than 10 or 20 years down the road when hopefully these fish will find each other and start doing the job on their own.”

To date, 7,000 alligator gar fingerlings have been fitted with tiny transponder tags so that they can be tracked and then released into Illinois waterways. As it rains and floods, biologists expect some of the fish to follow the rivers all the way down to join other populations in Louisiana and Texas.
…

Days after the Pentagon announced it is withholding $50 million intended for Pakistan as part of its Coalition Support Fund, the South Asian country’s ambassador hinted at potential retaliation, possibly coaxing Washington to renegotiate access to the country’s air corridors, which Islamabad suggests have been taken for granted.

Pakistan is ready to cooperate with the United States, Ambassador Aizaz Ahmad Chaudhry said, though Washington may now end up having to negotiate with Islamabad on the corridors and other tangible assets, he added.

“All that Pakistan has done in the fight against terrorism has not been sufficiently factored” into the U.S. decision to reduce its support funds, Chaudhry lamented during a discussion this week at the Washington office of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies.

Air rights up for negotiation?

Pakistan has facilitated air and ground logistical support for U.S. troops in Afghanistan “like no one else,” Chaudhry said, adding that “since 2001, all air corridors from Pakistan have been available to the United States free of cost.”

The reason Pakistan did so “was because we believed this was a common war,” the ambassador said, but there have been occasions when U.S. actions have left his country’s leaders thinking “that perhaps we are not partners.”

Questions concerning Pakistan’s commitment to bilateral partnership have also been raised by the U.S. A prime example was the discovery in 2011 that al-Qaida leader Osama Bin Laden had been living undisturbed near a key Pakistani military facility.

The Pakistani envoy’s remarks came at a time when U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has been reviewing its overall strategy toward South Asia, including India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran. And his relatively defiant tone may reflect Pakistan’s decreasing dependence on the United States amid an influx of Chinese capital investments and a strengthening political relationship between Islamabad and Beijing.

US-Pakistan vs. China-Pakistan

Washington’s decision on the funding issue dismayed leaders in Islamabad, Chaudhry said. “These and all other issues are always negotiated, because that’s in the nature of the business” between allies, he said. By contrast, he pointed to Pakistan’s “unique” relationship with China, the top strategic rival to the U.S. in Asia.

Islamabad sees Beijing as its closest ally, he added, and the two countries find themselves completely attuned. There is “so much of a meeting of minds,” he noted — with no “policy differences at all” dividing them.

Chaudhry told VOA “the clearest example and manifestation” of Sino-Pakistan ties has come in the form of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, or CPEC, stretching 3,000 kilometers from Kashgar in western China’s Xinjiang region to the port city of Gwadar, at the southwestern end of Pakistan on the edge of the Arabian Sea.

Pakistan’s strategic value to China

Due to the strategic importance China attaches to Gwadar and its financial resources, Beijing agreed to build the port for free. China has publicly justified its investment in Gwadar as an alternate route for oil and other commodities headed for the Chinese mainland, but the port’s potential for military uses has even more significance for strategic thinkers.

Earlier this year, Pakistan announced it has leased operation rights for Gwadar to a Chinese company for 40 years.

Details of the lease are not fully public. Andrew Small, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF), said the formal terms are understood to be purely economic in nature. However, “that doesn’t preclude its being developed for military purposes further down the line, and both sides certainly have that in mind,” he added.

Small is author of The China-Pakistan Axis: Asia’s New Geopolitics.

Pakistan’s role in China’s goals

What appears to be China’s determination to make the Sino-Pakistan partnership a success story, analysts say, may have to do with Beijing’s global ambitions.

“As its need grows for friends who can facilitate the extension of its reach as a global military power,” China is now trying to turn its relationship with Pakistan into a model for other potential security partnerships, Small said.

The question before the United States as it debates its future approach toward Pakistan, in the context of its overall South Asian strategy review, Small said, “is still whether a coherent long-term framework for the relationship can be established, rather than continuing to be dependent on cycles of near-term goals.”

“For various reasons, Pakistan still values a good relationship with Washington,” the analyst said. Among reasons may be what Islamabad perceives as a measure of international prestige gained from its association with Washington.

Rising above the past

The challenge for Pakistan today, analysts said, is whether the country can seize its current opportunities and rise above a past laden with border disputes and domestic instability, so it potentially can be seen as “an emerging market, even a future rising power,” in Small’s words.

“Over time, Pakistan would be better off charting its own course toward better relations with its neighbors, and lessening its dependence on both the United States and China,” said Ambassador Robin Raphel, a former assistant secretary of state for South Asia.

For now, however, Pakistan’s Ambassador Chaudhry told VOA: “Both the United States and China have a global role to play, and Pakistan is a friend of both.”

In his view, the ultimate consideration for Pakistan’s cooperation with China on Gwadar and CPEC, their economic corridor, comes down to the question of “economic empowerment of the people living in Balochistan and the rest of Pakistan.” The southwestern province of Balochistan, which the economic corridor traverses, also is known as a center of Taliban activity in Pakistan.
…

In June of 2016, Mikah Meyer set out on an ambitious journey — to visit all 417 national park sites in America. He estimates it will take him three years to complete his non-stop journey. One-third of the way through his adventure, he shared highlights – and lowlights – with VOA’s Julie Taboh.
…