A month-and-a-half after a countrywide students’ movement sparked deadly clashes and led to the ouster of Sheikh Hasina from power in Bangladesh, a 17-member team of senior American officials, including those drawn from the State, Defence and Treasury departments, besides the Pentagon, will reach Dhaka mid-September.
The US officials will arrive in two teams. The first team will be led by Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs Donald Lu and will also include Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for South and Southeast Asia Lindsey W Ford and Deputy Under Secretary/Assistant Secretary for International Finance Brent Neiman, Northeast News has reliably learnt.
The two team’s forthcoming visit is being viewed as a critical milestone in the emerging Bangladesh-US relations which for several years was lukewarm at best and frosty at worst.
There is no official word on the agenda for the meetings that the visitors will hold with senior Bangladeshi officials and the advisors on the interim government, but sources in Dhaka disclosed that Lu, who is often seen as a “regime change specialist” and is no stranger to South Asia, will provide the overall roadmap for the interim authority’s foreign and security goals.
Lu’s sojourn in Dhaka will be shorter than that of his other colleagues. “He will provide the broad framework for the meetings that Ford and Neiman will adopt to persuade Bangladesh officials to follow new policy directions in the backdrop of the changes that they expect in this part of South Asia, from a security/military perspective and a roadmap for pulling the country out of the economic/financial mess,” a Dhaka-based source said.
New Delhi will be watching the US officials’ visit with keenness and a degree of trepidation. The Indian security establishment, which virtually held sway over Bangladesh affairs, especially potential security hazards in that country and the region, including Myanmar, will have to recalibrate its policies related to Dhaka, the wider Bay of Bengal maritime zone and the Indo Pacific.
Ford “serves as the principal advisor to senior leadership within the Department of Defense for all policy matters pertaining to development and implementation of defense strategies and plans for the region. Her area of responsibility includes bilateral security relations with India and all other South Asian countries, excepting Afghanistan; and with the nations of Southeast Asia”.
On the other hand, Neiman “engages in a broad variety of international economic priorities, including our response to Russia’s brutal war in Ukraine, cross-border debt issues, IMF governance and programs, global financial regulation and supervision, digital assets and cross-border payments, and key bilateral issues with various countries”.
ALSO READ: A ‘new’ Bangladesh: Where is the roadmap for taking a deeply divided country out of the woods?
Bangladeshi officials said Neiman will likely hold meetings in Dhaka with newly appointed Bangladesh Bank Governor Ahsan H Mansur who is a noted economist and had a chequered career at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) which he joined in 1981. Mansur has worked on Middle Eastern, Asian, African and Central American countries.
He has had stints with “important functional departments” such as the Fiscal Affairs and Policy Review and Development and area departments (Middle East and Central Asia and Asian departments) of the IMF. He also served as the IMF Senior Resident Representative to Pakistan during 1998-2001 and as the Fiscal Advisor to Bangladesh’s finance minister between 1989 and 1991.
