Pakistan Refuses to Host Additional Afghan Refugees

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Ayesha Tanzeem
VOA News
July 13, 2021

ISLAMABAD – Pakistan’s government said it has reached its limit and cannot accept more Afghan refugees as the threat of violence looms in Afghanistan.

Pakistani officials are demanding that the world make arrangements for the refugees inside Afghanistan, amid fears that millions of Afghans may be forced to flee into neighboring countries if fighting between Taliban and Afghan government forces intensified or deteriorated into a civil war.

“As a matter of fact, we are not in position to accept any more refugees,” Pakistan’s National Security Adviser Moeed Yusuf told VOA in a one-on-one interview.

Almost 3 million Afghan refugees, half of them unregistered, have been living in Pakistan since the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s and subsequent waves of violence and later a civil war, according to the U.N.

“We are willing to help but we are in no position to take in new refugees this time around. The international forces and the U.N. should make arrangements for them inside Afghanistan,” Yusuf said.

Yusuf said there needs to be an effort to prepare for the refugees, highlighting his government’s policy.

“If such a situation arises, then the United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, should set up camps for the refugees on the Afghan side of the border,” he said.

At present, there are two key border crossings between Pakistan and Afghanistan — Chaman in Balochistan and Torkham in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa — apart from several small trading points.

Of the 2,640-kilometer boundary with Afghanistan, Pakistan has fenced nearly 90% and deployed the army and the Frontier Constabulary, a militia under the federal interior ministry, to man it.

Yusuf said that because the countries share a long border and the terrain allows crossings on foot or mules, Pakistan cannot begin to enumerate the threats and fallout of a civil war in Afghanistan.

“There are fears that members of the banned terror outfits like the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (the TTP or Pakistani Taliban) might enter Pakistan from Afghanistan in the guise of refugees and create unrest in the country,” he said. The Pakistani Taliban are based in Afghanistan but differ from the Afghan Taliban.

He also expressed concern that India, Pakistan’s eastern neighbor with whom it has a hostile relationship, might use this opportunity against his country.

“We have evidence about the involvement of India in terrorist activities in Pakistan by using the Afghan soil,” he said. “Movement of such a large number of refugees could provide the Indian agencies a chance to infiltrate into Pakistan.”

Pakistan’s army chief, General Qamar Javed Bajwa, and the head of the intelligence agency Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Lieutenant General Faiz Hameed, told the national security committee of the parliament earlier this month that Pakistan feared a new civil war in Afghanistan.

They said that Pakistan estimated it would receive as many as 700,000 new refugees in the first year alone, a parliament member present in the briefing told VOA on the condition of anonymity because the briefing was private.

Last month, in an interview with The New York Times, Prime Minister Imran Khan said Pakistan would not open its borders to refugees if the situation deteriorated in Afghanistan.

In a worst-case scenario, Pakistan plans to settle the refugees in camps along the border with Afghanistan to prevent them from settling in Pakistan, a senior official of the Interior Ministry who wasn’t authorized to speak to the media told VOA on condition of anonymity.

UNHCR Pakistan spokesperson Qaiser Khan Afridi said the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan was concerning and added that the government of Pakistan has not yet shared with the agency its policy regarding a new influx of Afghan refugees.

“The UNHCR is constantly in consultation with the government of Pakistan and would devise it’s strategy according to the policy of the Pakistan government,” Afridi said.

Afridi didn’t predict the number of refugees but said if refugees came in large numbers, it would be difficult for Pakistan to handle them without the support of the international community.

He said that UNHCR was ready to assist the government of Pakistan in the process of registration, providing them shelter and basic necessities.

Pakistani authorities say they have been hosting millions of refugees even though they are not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention or the 1967 Optional Protocol for refugees.

U.S. President Joe Biden on Friday announced that the U.S. would complete the troop withdrawal in Afghanistan by August 31, nearly 20 years after the U.S. led an invasion of the country following al-Qaida’s attack on the U.S., September 11, 2001.

Al-Qaida’s top leadership was based in Afghanistan under the protection of the Taliban who refused to give them up, leading to the invasion.

Biden also said it was up to the people and the leadership of Afghanistan to decide their future.

The Taliban have intensified violence in Afghanistan in the last few months, especially since the start of the withdrawal of foreign forces two months ago.

This story originated from VOA’s Urdu service. Ayesha Tanzeem contributed to the report.

Why The Taliban Is Sweeping Northern Afghanistan

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Taliban (file photo)

Abubakar Siddique
Radio Azadi
July 13, 2021

The lightning speed with which the Taliban has overrun large swathes of rural territories in Afghanistan’s north has shocked locals and surprised foreign observers with some worrying whether the internationally recognized government in Kabul can weather the storm.

But the speed of the Taliban’s advances has everyone asking how a group composed of ragtag militants could overrun dozens of districts in eight strategic provinces that share borders with Afghanistan’s neighbors: Pakistan, China, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Iran.

“People are asking how so many districts can fall [into the hands of the Taliban] without a fight and all the [government] resources and equipment left intact,” said Abdul Hafeez Faroozan, a government employee in the northeastern province of Badakhshan, which was feared to become the first province to fall into Taliban hands last week. “People are terrified.”

The fighting escalated in northern Afghanistan after the final withdrawal of some 10,000 international troops began on May 1. In the past three weeks alone, the Taliban has overrun scores of districts and has virtually overtaken most trade routes, border crossings, and major roads in the region, prompting Afghanistan’s neighbors to assemble troops and turn to regional powers for help. The Taliban now claims to control some 100 districts in northern Afghanistan in addition to 85 districts elsewhere.

The militants’ success in the north is even more surprising considering the region offered some of the toughest resistance to the Taliban after its emergence as a student militia in the southern province of Kandahar in the mid-1990s that went on to sweep southern and southeastern Afghanistan.

The Northern Alliance, a coalition of various factions primarily comprising ethnic Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazars, fought the Taliban in the 1990s. It prevented the group from overrunning Badakhshan, Takhar, and Panjshir provinces, where a rival government mainly backed by India, Russia, and Iran fought hard against the Taliban, which was supported by Pakistan.

The Taliban regime quickly collapsed following the U.S.-led invasion in late 2001, but the group reemerged as an insurgency in 2003. In the following years, most of its attacks were limited to southern and eastern provinces along the country’s border with Pakistan.

By 2010, the militants had returned to northern Afghanistan and were carrying out attacks in the region, gaining some rural territories.

Tamim Asey, a former Afghan deputy defense minister, says the Taliban is now concentrating on northern Afghanistan to prevent the reemergence of the resistance it faced there in the 1990s.

Asey says the Taliban also wants to choke Kabul by depriving it of important revenues, trade routes, and resources in the north, which is connected to central and eastern Afghanistan by a Soviet-built road and tunnel network that is a key trade artery for trade with Central Asia. The northwestern province of Herat connects Afghanistan to Iran and Turkmenistan through vital border crossings.

“The Taliban concentrated on this strategic region because it generates vital revenues,” he told Radio Free Afghanistan, adding that divisions among the region’s strongmen paved the way for the Taliban’s advances.

Conspiracy And Civil War
Marshal Abdul Rashid Dostum, a former vice president and communist-era ethnic Uzbek military strongmen, has long competed for influence with Atta Mohammad Noor, a former Tajik commander of the Jamiat-e Islami political party. In recent weeks, the two have mobilized armed supporters to fight the Taliban.

“There is a real possibility of a civil war. This is a very dangerous possibility,” Noor said in an interview with the Associated Press last week.

Dostum, who is currently undergoing medical treatment in Turkey, says there’s a conspiracy behind the quick fall of northern territories.

“All districts [and] tanks were handed over to the Taliban without resistance. I don’t know what the plan is,” he was quoted as saying by Afghanistan’s Tolo TV late last month. He has vowed to return to the battlefield. “We will return to the north. It is our home. I was raised there…I would be proud to be killed and martyred there,” he said.

Like elsewhere in Afghanistan, however, the region is rife with rivalries, vendettas, and disputes, some of which the Taliban exploited to attract volunteers to its cause of fighting the international military presence and overthrowing the Western-backed government in Kabul.

Amrullah Aman, a former Afghan Army general, says the popular uprising that has seen saw civilians and former combatants take up arms against the Taliban prompted the group to hasten its offensive in the region. He also criticized Afghanistan’s neighbors for trying to cut separate deals with the Taliban to protect their countries from the possible fallout of Taliban victories along their borders.

“I want to warn the regional countries of disastrous consequences if they remain indifferent to [our plight] here,” he told Radio Azadi. “The region could face instability for a long time.”

Sher Mohammad Karimi, a former commander-in-chief for the Afghan Army, says the Taliban is pursuing a strategy to win.

“The militants are increasing the tempo of their attacks wherever they see success,” he told Radio Azadi. “Fighting is going on everywhere in Afghanistan, but it is more pronounced in the north because the Taliban is focused on this region.”

Hamdullah Mohib, Afghanistan’s national security adviser, however, is refusing to concede that the Taliban has overrun dozens of rural districts in northern Afghanistan. He told journalists last week that a lack of timely reinforcements and supplies prompted some units to abandon their places, which encouraged the Taliban to capture posts and offices — which does not equal capturing entire districts.

“Our forces are on the offensive in many districts, and we have recaptured some 14 districts during the past few weeks,” he said.

The Taliban has been quick to claim victory. Zabihullah Mujahid, a purported Taliban spokesman, said the group’s forces are advancing everywhere.

The Taliban appears confident in its ability to claim the victory that some Afghans say was handed to the militants by the departure of international forces. The movement’s military gains in Afghanistan are also bolstered by the apparent willingness of regional countries to engage them in an effort to protect themselves from the turmoil in Afghanistan.

Copyright (c) 2021. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Ste 400, Washington DC 20036.

Related

Forces Led by Ex-Jihadi Positioned in Herat to Fight Taliban

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Ismail Khan

Tolo News: People’s Resistance Front’ forces led by Mohammad Ismail Khan, an ex-Jihadi leader, have been deployed alongside security forces in some parts of Herat city to prevent the Taliban from entering the city. Armed with light and heavy weapons, the forces warn the Taliban that they will be killed if they get closer to the city of Herat. Click here to read more (external link).

Four Killed In Kabul Blast As UN Warns Afghanistan ‘On Brink Of Humanitarian Crisis’

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Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
July 13, 2021

At least four civilians were killed and five others were wounded in an explosion in Kabul on July 13, police said, as the United Nations warned that Afghanistan was “on the brink” of a new humanitarian crisis as violence intensified amid a hasty withdrawal of U.S.-led forces from the war-torn country.

No group has claimed responsibility so far for the blast, which came amid an ongoing offensive by the Taliban militants who have captured around one-third of Afghanistan’s districts since the start of the foreign forces’ pullout, raising fears that the government in Kabul could collapse.

The type of explosion and the target were not immediately clear, police said in a statement.

The blast occurred “in the center of Kabul” at rush hour, police spokesman Ferdaws Faramurz told journalists separately, adding that an investigation was under way.

The attack came as a senior Taliban leader on July 13 said that despite their military advances, the militants do not want to battle government forces inside Afghanistan’s cities and urged them to surrender.

“It is better…to use any possible channel to get in touch with our invitation and guidance commission,” said Amir Khan Muttaqi in a message tweeted by a Taliban spokesman, adding this would “prevent their cities from getting damaged.”

Muttaqi is the head of a Taliban commission that oversees government troops who surrender to the militants.

His call came the same day as a video emerged that CNN said it had verified showing a team of Afghan commandos being shot dead by the Taliban last month after surrendering.

Meanwhile, the UN refugee agency warned on July 13 that more Afghans are likely to flee their homes due to escalating violence.

“Afghanistan is on the brink of another humanitarian crisis. This can be avoided. This should be avoided,” Babar Baloch, spokesman of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), told a Geneva news briefing.

“A failure to reach a peace agreement in Afghanistan and stem the current violence will lead to further displacement within the country, as well as to neighboring countries and beyond.”

According to the UNHCR, some 270,000 Afghans had been newly displaced inside the country since January, bringing the total population forced from their homes to more than 3.5 million.

The number of civilian casualties has gone up 29 percent during the first quarter compared with last year, the UNHCR said, citing figures from the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan.

“We urge the international community to step up support to the government and people of Afghanistan and its neighbors at this critical moment,” Baloch said.

With reporting by CNN, AFP, Reuters, and TOLO News

Copyright (c) 2021. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Ste 400, Washington DC 20036.

Taliban Threaten Turkish Troops with ‘Jihad’ if They Stay in Afghanistan

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Taliban fighters (file photo)

Ayaz Gul
VOA News
July 13, 2021

ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN – The Taliban warned Tuesday that if Turkey extends its military presence in Afghanistan the Islamist group will view Turkish troops as “occupiers” and wage “jihad” against them.

The warning came amid fresh battlefield moves that critics say show the Taliban are planning a military takeover of Afghanistan in defiance of their peace pledges, raising the prospects of a full-blown civil war.

The United States has asked Turkey to secure Kabul’s airport after all American and NATO allied troops withdraw from the country by the end of next month.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Friday without elaborating that he had agreed with Washington on the “scope” of how to secure and manage the airport.

The Taliban condemned the deal as “reprehensible” and demanded Turkey review its decision.

“We consider stay of foreign forces in our homeland by any country under whatever pretext as occupation,” the group said in a media release. “The extension of occupation will arouse emotions of resentment and hostility inside our country towards Turkish officials and will damage bilateral ties.”

The security and smooth running of the Hamid Karzai international airport in the Afghan capital is crucial for preserving diplomatic missions and foreign organizations operating out of Kabul, where a bomb explosion Tuesday killed at least four people. Hostilities elsewhere in Afghanistan also have escalated to record levels.

Turkish Defense Minister Hulusi Akar told reporters after a cabinet meeting on Monday evening that Turkey agreed to some points with U.S. counterparts on running the airport.  He said work towards a deal continues.

“If the airport does not operate, the countries will have to withdraw their diplomatic missions there,” Akar said.

Hundreds of American troops are expected to stay in the Afghan capital, guarding the sprawling U.S. embassy compound there.

Taliban forces have dramatically extended their territorial control across Afghanistan by overrunning scores of districts without any resistance since U.S. troops formally started withdrawing from the country in early May.

In most cases, government forces either retreated to safety or surrendered to the advancing insurgents.

The battlefield gains have enabled the Taliban to effectively encircle major Afghan cities, including provincial capitals.

In Washington, Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby on Monday also voiced concern that the Taliban are planning to militarily take control of the country.

“It is clear from what they are doing that they have governance designs certainly of a national scale. It is clear from what they are doing that they believe there is a military solution to the end of this conflict,” Kirby told reporters.

“We continue to believe that the most sustainable and the most responsible end and solution to this war is a political one, one through negotiated diplomacy,” Kirby stressed.

Afghan authorities have vowed to defend and keep the Taliban from major cities, saying security forces have killed hundreds of insurgents in recent days.

Kabul has also protested and criticized regional countries for stepping up their diplomatic engagements with the Taliban in pursuit of a peaceful settlement to the war.

“The Taliban delegation is traveling to the regional countries at a time when its brutal attacks have killed more than 3,500 people, displaced more than 200,000 of our compatriots, disrupted public order and life, and economic activities in tens of districts,” ministry said.

The Taliban took control of Afghanistan after emerging victorious in the civil war of the 1990s and introduced harsh Islamic laws to govern the conflict-torn country before they were ousted by the U.S.-led foreign invasion in late 2001.

The Islamist movement has since been waging a violent insurgency against the U.S.-backed government in Kabul.

Washington negotiated and signed a troop withdrawal deal with the Taliban in February 2020 in return for security assurances and pledges the insurgents would negotiate a peace arrangement with Afghan rivals for a sustainable peace in the country.

However, the slow-moving U.S.-brokered intra-Afghan negotiations, which started in Qatar last September, have failed to produce a peace deal and remain deadlocked.

Some information in this report was provided by Reuters.

Afghanistan: 754 New Cases of COVID-19, 72 Deaths Reported

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Tolo News: The Ministry of Public Health on Tuesday reported 754 new cases of COVID-19 out of 3,135 samples tested in the last 24 hours. The ministry also reported 72 deaths and 1,263 recoveries from COVID-19 in the same period. The number of total recorded cases is 136,643 and the total number of deaths is 5,921, according to figures by the Public Health Ministry. Click here to read more (external link).

How Afghanistan’s President Helped His Brother and a U.S. Contractor Secure a Lucrative Mineral Processing Permit

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Ghani

occrp.org: In late 2019, SOS International (SOSi), a Virginia-based company with links to the U.S. military and intelligence apparati, obtained exclusive access to various mines across Afghanistan. As part of the deal, Ghani’s family got a little something on the side. Click here to read more (external link).

How Americans invaded, destroyed and abandoned Afghanistan

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Press TV
July 12, 2021

Syed Zafar Mehdi

After 20 long years of costly and futile military adventurism, Americans are retreating from war-ravaged Afghanistan, the ‘graveyard of empires’, as the Taliban make rapid gains across the country.

Militaristic meddling in developing nations – or in other words ‘foreign military invasions’ – has been a defining feature of American foreign policy from the late 1940s.

Vietnam, Guatemala, El Salvador, Panama, Cuba, Nicaragua, Congo, Haiti, Grenada, Greece, Cambodia, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan et cetera – the marauding US mercenaries have left a trail of destruction and death in virtually every corner of the world.

As American author Noam Chomsky writes in ‘Western State Terrorism’, “The guiding principle, it appears, is that the US is a lawless terrorist state and this is right and just, whatever the world may think, whatever the international institutions may declare.”

That the US miserably lost the plot in Afghanistan is no secret, but to come back after 20 years of bloody mayhem and say there is no ‘military solution’ to the protracted crisis is an affront to humanity.

To understand reasons behind America’s crushing defeat in its longest war, it’s imperative to wind back to 2001, after the cataclysmic events of 9/11.

A few weeks after the attacks, George Bush administration launched the so-called ‘global war on terror’. Afghanistan, ruled then by the Taliban, was chosen as the first battleground.

On the afternoon of Oct. 7, 2001, as the US and its allies started the deadly bombing campaign in Afghanistan, then-US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the objective was to decimate the Taliban and al-Qaeda hideouts in the country. Bush vowed to “crush” them.

Twenty years down the line, the US is beating the hasty retreat, having faced a disgraceful defeat, while the Taliban have overrun about one-third of the country, marching with force and ferocity.

After the 9/11 attacks, the Taliban had reportedly offered to hand over Osama bin Laden, the alleged mastermind of the devastating attacks, to a third country to be tried, dropping the demand for evidence of his guilt. But the US administration rejected the offer and launched deadly air raids.

It was the same Bin Laden, a Saudi-born former CIA ally used as a mercenary fighter against the Soviet forces in Afghanistan during the Cold War. And 9/11 hijackers were all Saudi citizens, a key US ally.

Anand Gopal, a long-time journalist and author of ‘No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War through Afghan Eyes’, in a 2015 interview told me that the top Taliban leadership had indeed tried to surrender soon after the US invasion.

“The mood at the time was that, like Bush said, “You are either with us or against us.” America’s goal was to wage a war on terror, and the fact that its enemies were trying to switch sides was something that did not mesh easily with the ideology of counterterrorism,” he said.

Some reports from that time suggest that the Taliban had written to then Afghan President Hamid Karzai, offering to lay down arms and recognize his government. The move was blocked by Gul Agha Sherzai, an influential tribal leader from eastern Afghanistan and one of the blue-eyed boys of the US.

Sherzai got them imprisoned and tortured by the CIA-created Afghan spy agency in the months after the US invasion. Some of these jailed insurgents later ended up in the dreaded Guantanamo Bay prison.

Occupation and oppression

The dogged insistence on carpet bombing the country was clearly evident as the hawks in Washington and their mercenaries in Afghanistan snubbed all calls to resolve the issues without fighting.

Over the years, the US so-called “counterterrorism” operations in Afghanistan spawned horrible human rights abuses: killing of innocent civilians in drone strikes, summary executions during night raids, illegal detentions, custodial torture, and patronage of former warlords and militia commanders.

Airstrikes, in particular, have been a constant feature of the US industrial military complex’s engagement in Afghanistan, starting from Dec. 23, 2001, barely two months after the US forces invaded the country, when 65 tribal elders travelling to Kabul for Hamid Karzai’s inauguration as the president were mowed to death in an American airstrike.

US officials claimed that the victims were al-Qaeda members, but the evidence suggested otherwise. It was the first of many US-orchestrated massacres over the years, which were swiftly brushed under the carpet, both by the US officials and their Afghan partners, whose salaries came from US coffers.

In one of the devastating US airstrikes in August 2008, at least 90 Afghan civilians, mostly children, were killed in western Afghanistan. The destruction from aerial bombardment, the UN said at that time, was evident with some seven to eight houses having been totally destroyed. No heads rolled over it.

A few months later, in May 2009, at least 150 civilians were massacred, many of them children, in western Farah province. Some of them were blown into “unrecognizable pieces.” In its report on the incident, the New York Times wrote that “it is bombings like this one that have turned many Afghans against the American-backed government and the foreign military presence.” No heads rolled.

In September 2015, a US gunship attacked a hospital in northern Kunduz province run by Doctors Without Borders, leaving at least 42 doctors, patients and other medical staff dead. No heads rolled.

During Donald Trump’s presidential tenure, civilian casualties in US airstrikes in the war-torn country touched a new high as the occupation forces went berserk. Trump administration removed directives prohibiting strikes on residential buildings, which virtually gave US troops a license to kill.

According to conservative estimates, between 2016 and 2020, 40 percent of all civilian casualties from US airstrikes in Afghanistan – almost 1,600 – were children, even surpassing those resulting from attacks by the Taliban and Daesh. That is how American ‘war on terror’ has looked like in Afghanistan.

Naturally, the justice was never done. The move by the International Criminal Court (ICC) seeking a probe into US war crimes in Afghanistan was blocked by the US. No one objected.

The US also enabled some of the most horrendous crimes in Afghanistan through its local allies – notorious warlords, strongmen, and militia commanders.

The ruthless human rights abuses by US-backed warlords only created more insecurity and undermined efforts of the government to promote good governance. Worse, it helped the Taliban recruit more insurgents and make greater gains in its war against the foreign occupation.

Some of these allies included Gul Agha Sherzai, the powerful tribal leader from eastern Nangarhar province; Abdul Rashid Dostum, the Uzbek warlord and former vice president; Asadullah Khalid, a hugely influential CIA contractor; and Abdul Raziq, the notorious former police chief from southern Kandahar province, who was killed by the Taliban in 2018.

Doomed to fail

Last week, US President Joe Biden declared that the US military mission in Afghanistan will come to an end on Aug. 31, ahead of his previous deadline of Sept. 11. “Speed is safety,” he remarked.

“We did not go to Afghanistan to nation-build,” Biden said, adding, “Afghan leaders have to come together and drive toward a future.”

The talk of military withdrawal from Afghanistan began during the Trump administration. The former US President even sidestepped the democratically-elected Afghan government and signed a secret deal with the Taliban on February 29, 2020.

It was a deal to allow US safe passage out of the war and eliminated all prospects of result-oriented negotiations between the Afghan government and the militant group. The US actions essentially weakened the position of state actors and strengthened that of non-state actors.

The withdrawal is now more than 90 percent complete. The US troops also vacated the Bagram Air Base last week, its largest military base in the country that once hosted around 100,000 US and NATO troops.

Strangely, it took 20 years, trillions of dollars and tens of thousands of civilian and military lives for Washington to understand that its longest war in history will not end on the battlefield.

As Noam Chomsky told me in an interview in 2014, America owes huge reparations to Afghans for the damage it has caused to their country without achieving anything. They cannot get away with it.

Asking Afghans to put their house in order is refusing to clean the mess it created in the first place. It is the Americans that created insecurity and chaos in the country. They invaded the country, occupied it for two decades, destroyed it, and are now abandoning it without any accountability.

The future looks bleak for the war-weary people in Afghanistan. Taliban now hold twice as much of the country as they did two months ago, including in northern provinces, which once represented the bastion of resistance against the group.

On the other hand, the US-backed government in Kabul is losing the grip, abandoned by its international allies and challenged by the militant group.

As former Afghan president Karzai said recently, US’ legacy in Afghanistan is a “war-ravaged nation in total disgrace and disaster.” That is what it will be remembered for, long after the empire is gone.

Syed Zafar Mehdi is a Tehran-based journalist editor and blogger with over 10 years of experience. He has reported extensively from Kashmir, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran for leading publications worldwide.

(The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of Press TV.)

Regional Actors Boost Diplomatic Engagement with Taliban as US Exits Afghanistan

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Ayaz Gul
VOA News
July 12, 2021

ISLAMABAD – As the American military withdrawal from Afghanistan nears completion, regional countries are stepping up diplomatic efforts aimed at pressing warring Afghans to resume the stalled U.S.-brokered peace talks and prevent the conflict from escalating into a full-blown civil war.

The fears of further bloodshed stem from the Taliban’s rapid territorial gains since U.S. and NATO allied troops formally began leaving the country in early May under orders by President Joe Biden.  The withdrawal is due to be completed by August 31.

Fighting has escalated between the insurgent group and Afghan security forces in provinces next to the country’s long border with Pakistan.
Last week, Tajikistan ordered 20,000 reservists to bolster border security following the Taliban battlefield advances. Iranian and Turkmen authorities also have taken additional border security measures, fearing the violence could spill over into their territories.

The Islamist group has downplayed the prospect of a civil war erupting in Afghanistan after the exit of all foreign troops and sought to reassure anxious neighbors that they pose no threat to regional stability.

Intra-Afghan peace talks have been mostly stalled. Beijing, Tehran, Moscow and Islamabad have all tried to engage the Taliban in an effort to press the Afghan warring sides to negotiate a political settlement before the U.S. drawdown creates a security vacuum and the situation spirals out of control.

Foreign ministers of the China-led Shanghai Cooperation Organization, or SCO, are scheduled to meet this week in Tajikistan to discuss the Afghan crisis. The SCO brings together Russia, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, India, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan.

Analysts say all of Afghanistan’s immediate neighbors and regional countries look at the Taliban as legitimate political stakeholders and a possible firewall against militants linked to Islamic State terrorists who operate out of Afghan bases.

“The region is more amenable to engaging with the Taliban now than it was in the 1990s, because it sees the group as a more legitimate actor,” said Michael Kugelman, deputy Asia program director at Washington’s Wilson Center.

“The Taliban agreement with the U.S. last year conferred the group with a degree of international recognition that it had long sought, and that makes regional players see it as less of a pariah,” noted Kugelman in his written remarks he sent to VOA.

Influential Pakistani Senator Mushahid Hussain, who heads the Defense Affairs committee of the upper house of parliament, says China, Iran and Russia apparently “are reconciled to a Taliban-dominated Afghanistan.”

“China, Iran and Russia have a certain comfort level with the Taliban and they are willing to cooperate with them and give them legitimacy, unlike 1990s, when only Pakistan, UAE and Saudi Arabia recognized them,” Hussain told VOA.

Hussain noted, however, prevailing concerns in his country that the Islamist movement’s battlefield advances in Afghanistan would embolden extremist forces in Pakistan and could threaten years of domestic gains against terrorism.

“Ironically, for Pakistan there is growing realization, a lesson learned the hard way, that the foes they’ve been fighting in our own inland war on terror may end up being friends of the incoming Taliban regime in Afghanistan,” cautioned Hussain.

Both Iran and Russia hosted Taliban leaders over the past week to discuss concerns arising out the militia’s military advances. Observers say this points to a growing political synergy between the Taliban and their regional supporters.

Washington has warned the Taliban against any military takeover and continued to call for finding a negotiated settlement to the long Afghan conflict, emphasizing that “legitimacy and assistance” for any government in Afghanistan “can only be possible if that government has a basic respect for human rights”.

A total Taliban takeover of Afghanistan has raised the prospects of a prolonged civil war like that of the 1990s, which erupted shortly after the withdrawal of Soviet occupation forces.

The ensuing intra-Afghan fighting paved the way for the Islamist Taliban to seize power in Kabul in September 1996 before they were ousted by the U.S.-led international military invasion in late 2001 for harboring leaders of the al-Qaida terrorist network.

Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia were the only three countries in the world that had recognized the Taliban regime at the time.

The rest of the global community refused to recognize Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, citing controversial harsh Islamic laws the group introduced to govern the country and allowing safe haven for leaders of the al-Qaida terror network whom the U.S. accused of plotting the September 11, 2001 attacks on America.

On Sunday, a Taliban delegation held talks with Foreign Ministry officials in the Turkmen capital, Ashgabat. A spokesman for the group, Suhail Shaheen, said two sides discussed “political, economic and security issues of mutual interests.”

On Friday, a group of senior Taliban members concluded a two-day visit to Russia, where they met Zamir Kabulov, the Russian presidential envoy for Afghanistan.

“The situation in Afghanistan today is worrisome because it can spillover into our neighbors’ territory,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told reporters on Friday after his meeting with the visiting Indian counterpart.

Lavrov downplayed the Taliban’s advances, however, and reiterated Moscow’s call for the two warring sides to find a political solution to the Afghan conflict.

Last week, Shiite Iran also hosted a meeting between the rival Afghan parties, calling on both to end hostilities.

Tehran’s tensions had dangerously escalated with Kabul in 1998 when the Sunni-based Taliban were ruling the country. The tensions stemmed from the killings of seven Iranian diplomats in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif in factional fighting.

Beijing, which maintains diplomatic ties with Kabul and developed close contacts with the Taliban in recent years, has cautioned “the future of the Afghan conflict is a practical challenge” to China and Pakistan.

“We call on parties to the peace negotiation to put the interests of the country and people first, sustain the momentum for intra-Afghan talks, work for the return of the Afghan Taliban in a moderate way to the political mainstream,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin told reporters on Thursday.

Critics, however, anticipate Afghan hostilities will intensify once all U.S. and NATO allied troops are out of the country.

Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. special envoy for Afghan reconciliation returned to the region this week to “engage in determined diplomacy and the pursuit of a peace agreement between the Islamic Republic [Afghan government] and the Taliban,” according to the State Department.

Khalilzad, who negotiated the troop withdrawal deal with the Taliban in February 2020 under then-President Donald Trump, is scheduled to travel to Pakistan, Uzbekistan after concluding meetings in Qatar, where he signed the deal with the Taliban.

The Qatari capital of Doha, which houses the Taliban’s political office, has also been hosting slow-moving peace talks between insurgent leaders and Afghan government negotiators since last September, but the so-called intra-Afghan negotiations have seen little success.

Analysts say there is still a “narrow, but fast-closing window to collectively push forward the peace process.

“Let it not be said that diplomacy failed the people of Afghanistan who have already suffered so much through decades of war, turmoil and strife. And let history not judge that Afghanistan and the region all lost the peace,” Maleeha Lodhi, former Pakistani ambassador to the U.S. and the United Nations, wrote an opinion article published by the Dawn newspaper Monday.