Commencement of commercial flights between Egypt and Israel

An Egyptair aircraft landed at Ben-Gurion Airport on Sunday in the airline’s first-ever commercial flight to Israel. The Egyptian national carrier will now run four weekly round-trip commercial flights between Tel Aviv and Cairo. 

Sunday’s flight was greeted with the traditional water sprays shot in the air in celebration of the historic event.

Since Israel and Egypt signed a peace deal in 1979, flights between the two countries have been offered by a subsidiary of Egyptair, called Air Sinai, created exclusively for that purpose. Those flights ran with varying frequencies between the two countries, depending on diplomatic conditions, and never showed the company’s logo on the plane.

Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett had met with Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi in Sharm el-Sheikh three weeks ago in the first visit of an Israeli prime minister to Egypt in a decade. Sisi felt comfortable at the time announcing the meeting publicly, whereas in the past, only Israel would publicize such high-level diplomatic events.

The flight followed another “historic first” flight last week, a direct commercial flight to Israel from Bahrain, kicking off Gulf Air’s new biweekly route between Ben-Gurion and Manama, Bahrain’s capital city.

Flights between Israel and Dubai began last November, and a direct route to Abu Dhabi launched in April. In July, El Al and Israir both launched their first flights to Marrakesh, Morocco, following the normalization of ties in December.

Israel has had peace with Egypt since 1979, but while Cairo has remained an important strategic partner throughout, the relationship has had hot and cold periods.

Last month the Taba border crossing between Israel and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula returned to full activity after Israel’s National Security Council lowered the travel alert level of beaches there. Travel to Sinai, a popular tourist destination for Israelis, was severely restricted during the past year due to the corona pandemic.

Wendy Sherman could prove tough bargainer for Pakistan

Wendy Ruth Sherman (born June 7, 1949) is an American professor and diplomat serving as the United States Deputy Secretary of State since April 2021. She is a professor of public leadership and Director of the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School a senior counselor at Albright Stonebridge Group and a senior fellow at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

Sherman, a social worker, served as the director of EMILY's list, the director of Maryland's office of child welfare, and the founding president of the Fannie Mae Foundation. During the Clinton administration, she served as Counselor of the United States Department of State from 1997 to 2001. She was also a Special Advisor to President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and North Korea Policy Coordinator. In the latter role, she was instrumental in negotiations related to North Korea's nuclear weapon and ballistic missile programs.

She served under Hillary Clinton and John Kerry as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs from 2011 to 2015. She was the fourth-ranking official in the US Department of State. In that role, Sherman was the lead negotiator for the Iran nuclear deal. On January 16, 2021, President-elect Joe Biden formally announced Sherman to serve as United States Deputy Secretary of State under Antony Blinken. On March 11, 2021, her nomination was reported out of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Her nomination was approved by the full Senate on April 13, 2021, by a vote of 56 to 42. She is the first woman to hold the position. She was sworn into office on April 14, 2021.

On September 21, 2011, she was appointed to the position of Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs by Secretary Hillary Clinton. In this capacity, Sherman has led the US team during six negotiating rounds between Iran and six world powers about Tehran's nuclear program.

In this position, she was the fourth-highest ranking member of the Department.

She was named part of a special task force by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to implement recommendations to improve protections for Foreign Service personnel, as a result of the 2012 Benghazi attack.

Sherman was critical of Benjamin Netanyahu's commitment towards a two-state solution, suggesting it could impact the United State's veto policy surrounding related resolutions at the United Nations.

 She was criticized by human rights organizations, including Amnesty International for praising Ethiopia for "strengthening its democracy" in wake of the 2015 elections - citing democratic backsliding and suppression of human rights.

She played a role in negotiating the details behind the Syria peace talks of 2016.

Under Secretary Sherman met with Yossi Cohen, National Security Advisor to the Prime Minister of Israel, at the US Department of State in Washington DC on February 18, 2015.

In October 2013, before negotiations began in Geneva between Iran and the so-called "P5+1," she made a comment about the Iranian negotiating strategy in a Senate committee hearing. She said, "We know that deception is part of the DNA." This caused her some trouble when a number of Iranian officials, including some members of the country's parliament, asked her to apologize. She served as the lead negotiator for the United States in the agreement reached with Iran on July 14, 2015 in Vienna.

On February 27, 2015, Sherman told a conference at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, "The Koreans and Chinese have quarreled with Tokyo over so-called comfort women from World War II. There are disagreements about the content of history books and even the names given to various bodies of water. All this is understandable, but it can also be frustrating."

She continued, "Of course, nationalist feelings can still be exploited, and it's not hard for a political leader anywhere to earn cheap applause by vilifying a former enemy. But such provocations produce paralysis, not progress." Her comments were condemned by South Korea, but an analyst at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies said the reaction to Ms Sherman's remarks seemed excessive, and that her comments were in line with US policy.

US asking Pakistan ‘to do more’ once again

The United States has asked Pakistan to take action against all extremist groups ahead of a visit of US Deputy Secretary of State, Wendy Sherman to Islamabad. Sherman will be in Pakistan on 7 and 8 October and meet with Pakistani officials.

Sherman is the highest-ranking career diplomat in the State Department as the Secretary of State, who is equivalent to a foreign minister in other countries, is always a political appointee. She is the highest-ranking US visitor to Pakistan under President Joe Biden and since Taliban’s victory in Kabul.

Sherman will be in India on 6 and 7 October where she will meet officials and civil society leaders and address US-India Business Council annual “ideas summit”.

“We seek a strong partnership with Pakistan on counter terrorism and we expect sustained action against all militant and terrorist groups without distinction,” Sherman told reporters.

“Both of our countries have suffered terribly from the scourge of terrorism and we look forward to cooperative efforts to eliminate all regional and global terrorist threats,” she said from Switzerland, her first stop on a trip that will also take her to India and Uzbekistan.

Pakistani Minister Imran Khan, a longtime critic of US military campaigns, has asked the world to engage Taliban and provide economic support.

Sherman praised Pakistan's calls for an inclusive government in Afghanistan. “We look to Pakistan to play a critical role in enabling that outcome,” she said.

Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi met his US counterpart Antony Blinken in New York on the sidelines of the 76th session of the UN General Assembly. Their talks focused on the current situation in Afghanistan where the Taliban ousted the pro-US Ghani government in mid-August. The takeover followed the withdrawal of US troops from the war-torn country.

The US wants Pakistan to persuade Taliban to include other factions in government, respect human rights, allow women to work and girls to attend school.

Pakistan has assured the international community that it too wants an inclusive government in Kabul and will continue urging Taliban to fulfill the promises they have made to the international community.

Rising suicide trend among US troops

Suicides among US troops rose 15% during 2020 as compared to the earlier year, according to an annual report from the Pentagon released on Thursday. The figures show that 580 US service members died by suicide last year, a nearly 80-person increase from the 504 who committed suicide in 2019.

The figure for 2020 was lower than the 543 suicides in 2018.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin called the new numbers "troubling," and said suicide prevention is "a paramount challenge" for the military.

"Suicide rates among our service members and military families are still too high, and the trends are not going in the right direction," Austin said in a statement Thursday. 

"We must redouble our efforts to provide all of our people with the care and the resources they need, to reduce stigmas and barriers to care, and to ensure that our community uses simple safety measures and precautions to reduce the risk of future tragedies."

He added that the Pentagon will "continue to work swiftly and urgently," in collaboration with the Department of Veterans Affairs.

USA Today was the first to report the new statistics before these were made public.

Alaska has been the site of several suicides, according to USA Today, with six suicides in the first five months of the year. The newspaper reported that the Army has spent more than US$200 million in an attempt to improve the quality of life at its bases in the state.

A study released in June this year uncovered that more than 30,000 active-duty personnel and veterans of wars that followed the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks had committed suicide.

That number, the study noted, was almost three times as many service members who were killed in post-9/11 war operations.

Earlier in September 2021 the Department of Veteran Affairs released a report that said veteran suicides in 2019 dropped to its lowest levels observed over the previous 12 years.

Has the game begun to promote Kamala Harris as next President of United States?

Reportedly poll numbers of Vice President Kamala Harris are rising, while numbers of President Joe Biden are falling. Kamala has rebounded in recent weeks, regaining her footing with approval ratings that now stand higher than Biden.

Harris got off to a rocky start at the beginning of the administration, including a botched response on why she hadn’t traveled to the Mexican border, when she said she hadn’t been to Europe either.

But her allies say Harris, whose difficult start provoked questions about her ability to be a future presidential candidate for the party, “has found her place” in the White House. 

“I think there’s definitely a feeling that things have been smoother,” said one ally. “It seems like they have ironed out some of the initial wrinkles.” 

Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University, said Harris has “started to solidify her position and strengthen the office, gaining a sense — always difficult for a VP — of what her role should be in the administration.”

“The key will be how those numbers hold as policy controversies continue and politics heats up,” he added.

A Gallup poll last week showed 49% approved of Harris’s job as vice president, 6 points higher than Biden’s 43% approval rating. It’s a significant change for both Biden and Harris. The president fell 6 points since August and 13 points since June. Harris’s current approval rating is the same as Biden’s in 2009, when he served as Barack Obama’s vice president.

The September 22, 2021 Gallup poll — conducted earlier in the month — also revealed that the vice president performed better than Biden with independents, a stunning revelation for a man who was catapulted to the White House because of support from that demographic.

It’s unclear why Harris’s numbers have risen higher than Biden’s in some surveys, though Biden in the last two months has gone through the most difficult phase of his presidency so far. Biden has received bipartisan criticism related to the US withdrawal from Afghanistan and has also taken some hits over the prolonged coronavirus pandemic.

The president has also been criticized over his handling of the border and immigration, taking hits from the left and the right over an influx of migrants from Haiti for the last few weeks.

Harris, in contrast, has been more in the background than the foreground on those controversies, though she did win headlines for criticizing the way some Haitian migrants were being treated by border agents.

Most Democratic strategists and observers say Harris hasn’t had a singular moment or two that has boosted her in the public realm. 

“Nothing specific,” said Basil Smikle, the Democratic strategist and former Executive Director of the New York State Democratic Party, when asked if there has been a standout moment for the vice president.

He suggested the White House could actually benefit by doing more with Harris.

Smikle said that while Harris has been accessible, for example by appearing at Howard University’s homecoming, “the White House could bring her in more closely — as other administrations have — but they seem to keep her at a little distance, which may have been helpful to her in the long run.”

Other strategists say Harris has benefitted from Republicans setting their sights on Biden in recent weeks. They have portrayed him as weak on the border and Afghanistan.

“My instinct is to say that so much fire has been aimed at Biden, Harris’s numbers have gone up by sheer virtue of being out of the spotlight,” Democratic strategist Christy Setzer added. “She’s not giving anyone fresh reason to dislike her, so her polling numbers revert to the mean, with the country about evenly divided on the Black woman in the No. 2 spot.”

But Harris has appeared to settle into more of a role in her vice presidency. Last week, she hosted the leaders of Zambia, Ghana and India separately. On Wednesday, she hosted a meeting with five Latino small-business leaders.

Harris has been increasingly active politically too, giving a forceful speech for Calif. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), fundraising for Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe and attending an event at George Mason University for National Voter Registration Day. 

To be sure, Harris’s polling numbers are not spectacular. The same Gallup poll that showed her with a 49% approval rating showed she had a 49% disapproval rating. Other polls in the last month also show her with support in the low or mid-40s, though some polls in August had her hovering in the mid- to high 30s. 

Not everything has gone to plan for Harris either. Aides and allies grew frustrated last week after she was scheduled for an in-studio interview on “The View,” but two of the hosts were pulled from the set after they tested positive for COVID-19. 

Harris conducted the interview virtually as a precaution, even though she had flown from Washington to New York for the program. The hosts subsequently tested negative, and the tests were ruled a false positive. 

The Harris ally called the incident “unfortunate” while saying Harris needs to continue to up her national stature for her own political prospects. 

“I think we’re all happy to see her settle into her role and find her bearings, but I think even she knows she has a long way to go,” the ally said

Countering drug trade in Afghanistan

According to reports, Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) urged President Joe Biden administration on Wednesday to provide a plan on how it will counter the illicit narcotics trade in Afghanistan. 

Jordan asked the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) if the administration has a strategy in place to address Afghanistan's opium and heroin trade in light of the Taliban’s takeover of the country.

“The Taliban takeover of Afghanistan due to President Biden’s reckless and chaotic withdrawal has created a power vacuum that has emboldened terrorist groups and threatened our vital national security interests. It has also led to the Taliban seizing control of the illicit drug trade in Afghanistan that will help to finance its terror activities,” Jordan said.

The Republican congressman cited a July report from the ONDCP that said more than 80 percent of the global heroin supply originates in Afghanistan and that poppy cultivation increased in 2020, following a two-year decline. 

The Taliban said in August it would ban the production of opium poppies after years of profiting from it.

“To date, President Biden has not yet established a comprehensive counternarcotics strategy to tackle our country’s drug crisis. This failure is particularly concerning in light of the Biden border crisis and the surge of illegal alien encounters at the southwest border,” Jordan said.

He also asked if ONDCP meets with the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, the Defense Department, and the Drug Enforcement Administration about drug eradication efforts, seizing illicit narcotics in transit, or deterring access to drug trafficking routes.

He questioned if ONDCP also works with those entities to enhance the capacity to stop the flow of illicit narcotics leaving Afghanistan and if programs the US had with Afghanistan to counter the drug trade have been terminated with the Taliban’s takeover.

Jordan requested answers from Regina LaBelle, acting director of ONDCP, by October 13, 2021. 

The July report from the ONDCP found that 90 percent of heroin seized and tested in the US originates from Mexico, despite the majority of the global supply originating in Afghanistan. The White House released the ONDCP report in July, prior to the fall of Afghanistan, and touted that President Biden’s budget request calls for US$10.7 billion in investments for populations at greatest risk or overdose and substance abuse.

Pakistan facing repercussions of “Absolutely Not”

On Wednesday the benchmark index of Pakistan Stock Exchange lost about 2% (908 points). The fall has been attributed to a bill being moved in the US senate. Foreign Office spokesperson Asim Iftikhar Ahmad said that "unwarranted" references to Pakistan in a bill that was recently introduced in the United States Senate was "inconsistent" with the spirit of cooperation that had existed between the two countries on Afghanistan since 2001.

"We see that a debate is under way in Washington both in the media and on Capitol Hill to reflect on and examine the circumstances leading to the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. The draft legislation introduced in the US Senate by a group of Senate Republicans seems to be a reaction to this debate," he said in a statement.

However, the references to Pakistan in the bill were "completely unwarranted", he said. Terming those references as "inconsistent in spirit" with Pak-US cooperation on Afghanistan since the American invasion in 2001, he recalled that Pakistan had facilitated the Afghan peace process and helped evacuate citizens of the US and other countries from Afghanistan in August.

Ahmad reiterated that Pakistan had always maintained that there was no military solution to the conflict in Afghanistan. It had also stressed that a coercive approach would not work and the only way to achieve sustainable peace in the war-torn country was through engagement and dialogue, he added.

He noted that sustained security cooperation between Pakistan and the US would "remain critical in dealing with any future terrorist threat in the region".

"Such proposed legislative measures are, therefore, uncalled for and counterproductive," the spokesperson said.

Twenty-two US senators moved a bill in the Senate on Monday that seeks to assess Pakistan's alleged role in Afghanistan before and after the fall of Kabul and in the Taliban offensive in Panjshir Valley.

Senator Jim Risch, ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and other Republicans introduced the Afghanistan Counterterrorism, Oversight, and Accountability Act to address outstanding issues related to the Biden administration's "rushed and disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan".

The proposed legislation calls for a comprehensive report on who supported the Taliban during America's 20 years in Afghanistan, helped the group in capturing Kabul in mid-August and supported their offensive on Panjshir Valley.

The first report shall include "an assessment of support by state and non-state actors, including the government of Pakistan, for the Taliban between 2001 and 2020", including the provision of sanctuary space, financial support, intelligence support, logistics and medical support, training, equipping, and tactical, operation or strategic direction, according to the bill.

The legislation also requires "an assessment of support by state and non-state actors, including the government of Pakistan, for the September 2021 offensive of the Taliban against the Panjshir Valley and the Afghan resistance".

The proposed bill also seeks to impose sanctions on the Taliban and others in Afghanistan for terrorism, drug-trafficking, and human rights abuses, as well as on those providing support to the Taliban, including foreign governments.

It states that the US should not recognize any member of the Taliban as the ambassador of Afghanistan to the United States or as the ambassador of Afghanistan to the United Nations, and places restrictions on non-humanitarian foreign assistance to the war-torn country.

It also calls for a comprehensive review of foreign assistance to entities that support the Taliban.