Ashraf Ghani
Tolo News: According to letters by the civil aviation authority, the Presidential Palace has said that COVID-19 tests should be done by the UAE-based G42-Biogenix in collaboration with the City Laboratory based in Kabul that is owned by Rezwanullah Ahmadzai, an adviser to President Ghani. Click here to read more (external link).
AP: A memo from Afghanistan’s education ministry banning girls 12 years old and older from singing at school functions has been causing a stir on social media, prompting the authorities to say it was a mistake and that its authors had misunderstood the objective. Click here to read more (external link).
Radio Free Afghanistan
Abubakar Siddique
March 11, 2021
HERAT, Afghanistan — Jamila Azimi says her hopes of seeing an end to her country’s four-decade war are fading a year after the peace agreement between the Taliban and the United States led many to believe that peace in Afghanistan was around the corner.
“All our hopes have been dashed,” she told Radio Free Afghanistan while reflecting on how during last year’s International Women’s Day celebration on March 8 last year in hometown Herat, a city in western Afghanistan, women were brimming with expectations.
“We had just witnessed the signing of a peace agreement and were very hopeful and there was some enthusiasm to celebrate it,” she added, alluding to the February 29, 2020, agreement that requires Washington to withdraw troops in return for Taliban counterterrorism guarantees, power-sharing talks with the Afghan government, and discussions on a comprehensive cease-fire.
“But once again, we are in a state of war and crisis,” Azimi noted. She vividly remembers life under the hard-line Taliban, which closed schools for girls and severely restricted mobility for Afghan women after overrunning Herat in September 1995.
“I was a fourth grader but had to comply with restrictions imposed on adult women,” she said of life under the Taliban. “When I went to the market with my mother, I was constantly stared at and repeatedly threatened. After several trips, my mother stopped taking me outside the house.”
Like many Afghan women, Azimi was married off as a teenager and soon became a mother. Today, she feels the Taliban’s closure of schools denied her key opportunities in life.
Manizheh Bahareh, another Herat resident, was also deprived of education during the Taliban rule in the late 1990s. But she returned to school soon after the demise of the Taliban regime in late 2001 and never looked back. She now holds a master’s degree in sociology from Turkey and represents the educated middle class that has thrived since the fall of the Taliban thanks to international aid and government support for education and women’s rights.
Bahareh is also worried about the increasing violence against targeted professional women. She hopes the Afghan government and the Taliban can find a way to reduce violence and preserve the achievements of the past two decades.
“The right to education, employment, key freedoms, and other political and social rights of women are part of our red lines that should not be crossed,” she told Radio Free Afghanistan. “We would also like to see more attention to the empowerment and development of women.”
While the Afghan government celebrates women’s empowerment, education, careers, and rights as its key achievements, the Taliban has offered only vague promises of granting women rights in accordance with Islamic injunctions. The hard-line Islamist movement has no female leaders, and no women work at its political office in Qatar or as field commanders. Likewise, its shadow government in Afghanistan and vast network there and in Pakistan — where the movement has largely sheltered since being routed from Afghanistan in late 2001 – solely comprises men.
This deeply troubles Afghan women’s rights advocates who fear their achievements and rights will be sacrificed for the sake of making peace with the Taliban, whose military machine has made large territorial gains since 2014 but has showed little interest in abandoning its ultraconservative worldview.
Maria Bashir, a lawyer and rights defender in Herat, says she is optimistic about the progress Afghan women have made during the past two decades but peace should not come at the cost of abandoning them.
“If a [new] government is formed hastily and does not take into account half of the Afghanistan’s population, it is likely that our achievements will be reversed,” she told Radio Free Afghanistan.
Amid a stalemate in peace talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government, Washington now appears to be pushing to jump-start the peace process. But its new alleged peace proposals, outlined in a reported plan distributed to Afghan leaders and an alleged leaked letter by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken to Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, calls for the formation of an interim power-sharing government with the Taliban, a cease-fire, and a conference of Kabul’s neighbors and regional powers.
Kabul has strongly opposed the proposals while Western diplomats and independent experts have questioned whether they can really help restore peace in Afghanistan or will serve to further complicate the worsening conditions of a possible U.S. military withdrawal by May 1 as stipulated by Washington’s agreement with the Taliban.
Shaharzad Akbar, head of Afghanistan’s Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC), says sustainable peace in Afghanistan will require that women be heard and given a say in the peace process.
“Everything affects women. The economy, politics, the fate of the political system, the proposed cease-fire, and a reintegration of the insurgents all impact the lives of women,” she told a gathering in Kabul on March 8.
One year after the landmark deal, Afghans and women in particular have not seen a respite from violence. In recent months, female journalists, activists, and government workers have become the main target of an insurgent assassination campaign that officials and observers say aims to weaken the media and civil society.
With high-profile diplomatic conferences expected to be held in Turkey and Moscow this month, Afghanistan will be at the center of heightened international diplomacy. The prospects for preserving the rights of Afghan women now loom large over such diplomatic initiatives and the larger peace process aimed at ending the Afghan war.
Abubakar Siddique wrote this story based on reporting by Radio Free Afghanistan correspondents in Herat and Kabul.
Related
Tolo News: The Taliban took control of the center of Almar district in Faryab province on Thursday afternoon at about 1pm, according to local security sources. Naqibullah Fayeq, provincial governor, said that the security forces have retreated from the center of the district to “prevent casualties of civilians and local forces.” Click here to read more (external link).
Related
Ashraf Ghani
Ariana: Seven Civil Society Organizations have jointly slammed government for compromising on democratic values, and went as far as to label government a “dictatorship” and Afghanistan a country its people no longer consider safe to live in. “The government epitomizes dictatorship. Power has not been actually separated; autonomy of the three main powers is questionable; and the judiciary is now working under the command of the President leaving judicial institutions with little to no autonomy.” Click here to read more (external link).
Tolo News: The Ministry of Public Health on Thursday reported 23 new positive cases of COVID-19 out of 1,857 samples tested in the last 24 hours. The ministry reported that the cumulative total of known COVID-19 cases is 55,940, the total number of reported deaths is 2,454, and the total number of recoveries is 49,465. Click here to read more (external link).
Reuters: In 2016 more than one million people, a quarter of them Afghans, applied for asylum in Europe, [Rasool] Rezaie among them. His claim was rejected and he returned to Afghanistan, where he initially worked as a shopkeeper. But the memory of mushroom farming lingered. Click here to read more (external link).
John Sopko
Jeff Seldin
VOA News
March 10, 2021
WASHINGTON – Any hope for a political settlement and peaceful end to two decades of war in Afghanistan remains under significant threat from rising violence, both at the hands of the Taliban and from multiple terrorist and extremist organizations, as well as from the Afghan government’s inability to sustain itself, according to a new U.S. watchdog report.
The assessment is part of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction’s (SIGAR) 2021 High Risk List. It comes as the United States has ramped up pressure on the Afghan government to make a deal with the Taliban, and as the U.S. stares down a May 1 deadline to withdraw its remaining 2,500 troops from the country as part of its own deal with the Taliban.
But despite the increased diplomatic pressure and looming deadlines, the SIGAR report warns a lasting peace in Afghanistan may be no closer to reality now than it was years ago, saying the path forward “has never been more fraught with risk.”
“If the goal of our reconstruction effort was to build a strong, stable, self-reliant Afghan state that could protect our national security interests as well as Afghanistan’s, it is a mission yet to be accomplished and may turn out to be a bridge too far,” Special Inspector General John Sopko said Wednesday during the virtual rollout of the report.
“We’ve got a lot of questions we’ve got to answer and decisions to make in 52 days,” Sopko added, referring to the troop withdrawal deadline.
The overriding obstacle to a peaceful resolution in Afghanistan, according to the SIGAR report, remains the unabated violence. It notes that since signing the deal, the Taliban “have not significantly changed their tactics.”
“Each quarter since the agreement was signed (April–June, July–September and October–December 2020) has seen a higher average number of enemy-initiated attacks compared to the same quarters in 2019,” the report found.
The concern echoes warnings from U.S. and international counterterrorism officials that despite talking about peace and talking about cutting ties with terror groups like al-Qaida, the Taliban have shown few signs they are ready to make good on such commitments.
So, too, the report warns the threats from al-Qaida, Islamic State’s Afghan branch and other terror groups and even criminal networks have not lessened. Instead, SIGAR cautions the danger may increase if groups or factions currently following the Taliban’s lead decide to go rogue if they do not like how current diplomatic efforts are progressing.
Underlying all of this, according to Sopko, is the fact that the Afghan government still cannot sustain itself despite $143 billion in U.S. assistance to help rebuild the country and considerable aid from other donors.
“This has been a horrible waste of [U.S.] taxpayer money, in many regards,” Sopko said. “It may not be an overstatement that if foreign assistance is withdrawn and peace negotiations fail, Taliban forces could be at the gates of Kabul in short order.”
Foreign donors’ contributions
According to SIGAR data, 80% of the Afghan government’s $80 billion in public expenditures in 2018, the last year for which information is available, was covered by money from foreign donors.
The problems appear to be even more dire when it comes to the Afghan government’s security forces. The U.S. believes the government in Kabul is still years away from being able to oversee the $50 million payroll system that has been in development since 2016.
There are also reasons to believe that without sustained support, Afghan security forces will fall apart because of a lack of personnel.
Sopko said as recently as the first quarter of fiscal 2021, 40% of the Afghan military’s logistics, maintenance and training depended upon 18,000 contractors and trainers who supplement the almost 10,000 U.S. and NATO forces in the country.
Under the terms of the U.S. deal with the Taliban, those key personnel are required to either stop work or withdraw along with U.S. forces.
“The Afghan government relies heavily on these foreign contractors and trainers to function,” Sopko said.
“This may be more devastating to the effectiveness of the Afghan security forces than a withdrawal of our remaining troops,” he added, noting that “no Afghan airframe can be sustained as combat effective for more than a few months in the absence of contractor support.”
Other Security News
RFE/RL Gandhara
March 10, 2021
Twenty years after the Taliban blew up two famous Buddha statues, Afghans commemorated the tragic loss of their historical and cultural heritage on March 9 at a ceremony in the central Bamiyan valley.
In a nighttime display, one of the Buddha statues came back to life as a three-dimensional projection in the alcove that hosted it for centuries.
The illumination capped a day of commemorations organized by the Night with the Buddha project, including a lantern-lit procession as hundreds gathered at the base of the sandstone cliff where the statues once stood alongside caves, monasteries, and shrines.
The projection filled the alcove that once housed Solsol, a 55-meter high statue.
Mohammad Tahir Zaheer, acting minister of information and culture, called the destruction of the ancient statues “a great cultural crime of the century” and urged the perpetrators be held to account.
Toward the end of the Taliban’s five-year reign in Afghanistan, the hard-line Islamic group declared the Buddha statues “false idols” and blew up the ancient figures in March 2001, drawing international condemnation.
The commemoration comes as concern mounts that the Taliban could return to power if U.S. troops are withdrawn from the war-torn country in the coming months as outlined in a deal between the militants and the United States.
Talks being held in Qatar between the Afghan government and the Taliban are stalled amid a surge of violence between the warring sides.
With reporting by AFP and Radio Free Afghanistan