The Trump administration is hopeful it can reach a deal on a new North American Free Trade Agreement before the July 1 presidential election in Mexico and U.S. midterm congressional elections in November.

“I’d say I’m hopeful — I think we are making progress. I think that all three parties want to move forward. We have a short window, because of elections and things beyond our control,” U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer told CNBC television Wednesday.

But Canada’s chief negotiator was far less optimistic.

“We have yet to see exactly what the U.S. means by an agreement in principle,” Steve Verheul told reporters Wednesday in Ottawa. There are still “significant gaps,” Verheul said. “We can accomplish quite a bit between now and then, and we’ve made it clear to the U.S. that we will be prepared to negotiate at any time, any place, for as long as they are prepared to negotiate, but so far we haven’t really seen that process get going,” he said.

Officials from the U.S., Canada and Mexico are supposed to meet in the United States next month for the eighth round of talks, although Washington has not announced dates yet.
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Efforts to bolster Afghanistan’s armed forces, along with an increased use of American air power, seem to be doing little to change the country’s reputation as a magnet for foreign fighters and jihadists.

Afghan officials have been warning for months about the flow of 3,000 foreign fighters, many of whom had been coming from Pakistan and Uzbekistan to join the Islamic State terror group’s Afghan affiliate, IS-Khorasan.

Now, officials are warning of a new surge of jihadists, many coming to Afghanistan from places like Iraq and Syria via routes that lead through Pakistan.

“There has been a growth in the number of the foreign fighters in the country,” Afghan National Security Adviser Mohammad Hanif Atmar said during a visit to Washington last week. “We’re talking about hundreds of them coming from the Middle East through Pakistan, and other regional groups.”

Afghan and Western officials say that while precise numbers are hard to come by, unlike before, the fighters are not focused only on joining IS. 

Many are flocking to other terror groups operating within Afghanistan’s borders, including al-Qaida, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement, Lakshar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad.

Afghan officials worry this current influx is helping to create a changing dynamic in which these terror organizations are forging new ties with each other and the Taliban, allowing them to collectively benefit, even as they compete for people and resources.

“They have a symbiotic relationship with the Taliban, and the Haqqani and the drug networks,” Atmar said.

“The foreign fighters need Taliban as their local host and protector,” he added. “And the Taliban need them for their knowledge, their expertise and their resources.”

Pakistan’s counterterror role

Atmar and other officials believe Pakistan could help reduce the problem if officials in Islamabad choose to help.

“There will be no foreign fighters without Taliban in Afghanistan and there will be no Taliban insurgency without sanctuaries in Pakistan,” the Afghan national security adviser said. “So, we need to see some action.”

Pakistan, though, has been pushing back.

“[Nearly] half of the country is a safe haven,” Pakistani Defense Minister Khurram Dastgir said of Afghanistan, in an exclusive interview with VOA this week.

“You don’t control 45 percent of Afghanistan and don’t know what is going on there, who is there, who is moving in and out of that safe haven, but you keep blaming us,” Dastigir said.

U.S. officials say Pakistan has been somewhat more helpful when it comes to terrorism since President Donald Trump unveiled his South Asia strategy, freezing nearly $2 billion in aid unless Islamabad took more decisive action against terrorists operating along the border with Afghanistan.

But U.S. officials say they are still looking for more to be done, especially when it comes to Islamic State-Khorasan.

“These IS-K fighters are primarily Pakistani Pashtun,” General John Nicholson, the commander of U.S. Forces-Afghanistan, said in a statement last week.

Fighters flocking to Jowzjan

One area of ongoing concern for U.S. military officials has been Afghanistan’s northern Jowzjan province, a remote area where IS has been relocating fighters from Pakistan and from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan.

IS fighters from places like Tajikistan and Chechnya, as well as some from as far away as France and Sudan, also have been flocking to the area despite U.S. efforts to disrupt the group’s operations there.

According to Afghan security officials, at least 80 IS foreign fighters are in custody, with discussions underway about whether they should be kept in Afghanistan or returned to their countries of origin.

Making counterterrorism efforts much more difficult have been the deep ties many of the terror groups have forged with drug traffickers.

“They are all drawing on the criminalized economy,” said Afghanistan’s  Atmar. “The drug networks need them. They need the drug income.”

According to U.S. military officials, the Taliban alone are bringing in an estimated $200 million a year from drugs.

Afghan officials also suspect terrorists may be getting help from countries in the region and beyond.

They accuse Russia, in particular, of trying to strengthen some terrorist groups in order to weaken others, while peddling false narratives — allegations Moscow denies.

“We also get concerned when they [Russia] claim there are U.S., NATO, Afghan unmarked helicopters bringing so-called Daesh from the south or even the tribal areas of Pakistan to the north of the country,” Atmar said, using an Arabic acronym for Islamic State.

Ayaz Gul in Islamabad contributed to this report.
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President Donald Trump’s reshuffling of his Cabinet continued Wednesday with the ouster of Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin.

​Dr. Ronny Jackson became a White House physician in 2006, during the George W. Bush administration, and was appointed physician to the president in 2013 under Barack Obama. Trump kept him on when he became president, and it was Jackson who conducted Trump’s most recent physical exam.

Shulkin, also a holdover from the Obama era, served as the head of the nation’s second-largest government agency for little more than a year. He had been locked for months in a power struggle with a group of Trump political appointees among his senior staff who wanted him out. 

Shulkin had pledged the VA would not be privatized on his watch but would provide veterans expanded opportunities to get private-sector care. White House political appointees want a more comprehensive overhaul and even more veteran access to VA-funded care in the private sector.​

Shulkin’s tenure was marked by his implication in a widening ethics scandal. In September 2017, the Veterans Affairs inspector general’s office found that he spent nearly half of a taxpayer-funded 10-day trip to Europe sightseeing with his wife.

Shulkin initially defended the trip, which included shopping, attending the women’s tennis final at Wimbledon, and a river cruise, as “nothing inappropriate.”

The inspector general, however, stated in a report, that Shulkin’s chief of staff had lied to investigators and had forged an email to justify Shulkin’s wife’s presence on the trip.

The report also found that Shulkin had misled investigators about the nature of his relationship with the woman who provided Wimbledon tickets for himself and his wife, describing her as a “friend” of his wife’s instead of as a business contact. The woman, when asked by investigators, could not remember Shulkin’s wife’s first name.
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In the wake of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland Florida, students launch the Never Again movement, demanding far stronger gun laws in the US. Just five weeks after the shooting, they organized the March for Our Lives, attended by an estimated one million people across the globe. As Sama Dizayee reports, the students say it’s just the beginning.
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U.S. and South Korean leaders need to coordinate their now divergent approaches to North Korea before their summit meetings with Kim Jong Un, said experts on North Korea.

South Korean President Moon Jae-in is scheduled to hold a bilateral summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un late next month. U.S. President Donald Trump said he will meet Kim before the end of May. The U.S.-North Korea meeting has yet to be confirmed by Pyongyang.

Moon has been preparing for the upcoming talks as an opportunity to strike what analysts call “a grand bargain,” while Trump intends to open the process of talks by first testing North Korea’s seriousness about denuclearization as the summit opens, experts said.

“U.S. and [South Korean] interests overlap greatly but are not identical. There is a need to coordinate summit planning so that there are few surprises,” said Robert Manning, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.

Seoul and Washington need to agree on “bottom line” issues and setting “boundaries” and pursue the summit with “a common strategy” by reconciling differences in their approach toward the summit, according to Ken Gause, a director at CNA, a research organization in Arlington, Virginia. Gause is an expert on North Korea and its leadership.

“Seoul will be more willing to offer incentives up front in order to get North Korea to buy into a diplomatic process that will conclude in the future with denuclearization,” Gause said. “The U.S., on the other hand, will need to see good faith from Pyongyang on the front end.”

Getting the U.S. and South Korea aligned on approaches is only one of the summit challenges that could doom the talks. For example, the U.S. and North Korea need to reach common ground on the meaning of “denuclearization.”

The “grand” goals and visions that Moon laid out at the second meeting of the Inter-Korea Summit Preparatory Committee held last Wednesday were “to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula, institute permanent system of peace on the Korean Peninsula, normalize the U.S. and North Korean relations, improve inter-Korean relations, and perhaps economic cooperation among South Korea, North Korea, and the U.S.” 

Optimism, sincerity

Moon has voiced optimism about the summit, which Trump agreed to have with the North Korean leader by May.

“The U.S.-North Korea summit that will be held subsequent to the inter-Korea summit is a historical event, … it could be followed by a trilateral summit,” Moon said at the committee meeting.

“Although this is an untrodden path, we have clear plans as well as clear goals and visions to reach an agreement through summits among South Korea, North Korea, and the U.S,” Moon said. 

“If such meetings were to go forward, I think it will only mark the opening of a process by which the U.S. and [North Korea] try to address denuclearization, and it’s unlikely to be the close,” Scott Snyder, director of the U.S.-Korea policy program at the Council on Foreign Relations told VOA Korean.

“[Trump] is going to test the sincerity of the North Korean leader,” said Dennis Wilder, former senior director of National Security Council for East Asian affairs during the George W. Bush administration. “I think that’s exactly why the president agreed to this meeting. He wants to test his sincerity,” 

Any chance for further U.S.-North Korea talks seems to hinge on whether Trump believes North Korea’s sincerity about denuclearization, experts say. Otherwise, the summit could end without a plan for future talks.

“If the president and his team believe that the North Korean leader is showing some sincerity, then things will move on from the summit. If not, then they may not move on,” Wilder told VOA Korean.

Testing North Korea

John Bolton, the incoming national security adviser who is replacing H.R. McMaster, has stated his readiness to test North Korea’s willingness to denuclearize.

“Let’s have this conversation by May, or even before that, and let’s see how serious North Korea really is. … I am skeptical that they’re serious,” said Bolton, who was ambassador to the United Nations during the George W. Bush administration.

“If they’re not prepared to have that kind of serious discussion, it could actually be a very short meeting,” he said.

Bolton’s views largely reflect those of the administration. Earlier this month White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said, “North Korea made several promises, and we hope that they would stick to those promises. And if so, the meeting will go on as planned.” 

On Monday, Kim Jong Un made a trip to Beijing, according to the state news agency Xinhua.

Ahead of the inter-Korea summit, South Korea will hold high-level talks agreed to by the North on March 29 at the Panmunjom, the truce village in their shared border, to discuss the agenda for the summit.

The prospect for the U.S.-North Korea summit opened up when Trump agreed to Kim’s proposal, which South Korean envoys delivered after visiting him in Pyongyang in early March.

This story originated with the VOA Korean Service. ​
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