Daily Times

The Centre for Aerospace and Security Studies (CASS) is going to hold the second iteration of its two-day flagship event of Global Strategic Threat and Response (GSTAR-2022) conference to discuss security challenges amid volatile global and regional scenario directly impacting Pakistan.

The CASS organised a curtain raiser media briefing of GSTAR Conference 2022 to held on October 19-20 here with a diverse group of experts and speakers hailing from the academia, think tanks, defence forces, intellectuals, diplomatic corps, and OEMs from Pakistan and abroad. An introductory video highlighting the message of President CASS Air Marshal (R) Farhat Abbas Khan was presented to give an overview of CASS and its endeavours so far.

Adviser to Chief of the Air Staff on CASS Affairs and Director Technologies, CASS Air Marshal (R) M. Ashfaque Arain briefed the media on GSTAR as he was also the media coordinator for the mega event. He informed the journalists that the theme for this year’s GSTAR was Evolving Global Order: Opportunities and Challenges. The theme was decided keeping in view the momentous development taking place at regional and global levels including deepening US-India strategic partnership, Indo-US joint strategies on South Asia and Indo-Pacific, AUKUS and QUAD aimed at containing China will, continued instability in Afghanistan, uncertain situation in the Middle East.

He said these developments were affecting global, regional and Pakistan’s national security environment, intensifying US-China rivalry, growing Sino-India tensions, negatively impacting nuclear non-proliferation regime, leading to polarisation in the region that would create challenges with geo-economic and geopolitical consequences for Pakistan. Air Marshal (R) Arain said the core concept for GSTAR 2022 undertook emerging technologies and their diverse military implications in the international and regional landscape, making security environment far more complex, volatile and delicate that was posing challenges to strategic stability in the region.

The CASS Director Technologies noted that the aim of GSTAR was to foster policy engagement forum involving national and international experts with a view to develop geopolitical, geostrategic and geo-economic synergies for a peaceful environment, highlight Pakistan’s perspective on global and regional issues, enhance outreach for sharing ideas and drawing lessons for formulating strategies, seek expert inputs on core areas of research related to aerospace and national security and highlight Pakistan’s perspective on key issues relating to CASS’ research domains.

He underlined that the role of the forum was to provide a unique and major global forum to regularly review most significant global strategic trends and challenges by bringing together national leadership and leading international experts and academicians.

Moreover, it also gave an opportunity to Pakistan’s national and strategic leadership to internationally share their strategic vision, voice security concerns related to these global and regional trends for Pakistan and contribute towards building a safer world, with support of the international community, he added.

He also urged the print and electronic media to become partners with CASS in its GSTAR Conference and run short campaigns on their channels and write curtain raisers to spread the word over a dynamic moot to be held in the Federal Capital.