Joe Biden
Axios: Leaked notes from a White House Situation Room meeting the day before Kabul fell shed new light on just how unprepared the Biden administration was to evacuate Afghan nationals who’d helped the United States in its 20-year war against the Taliban. Click here to read more (external link).
Taliban Militants in Kabul
NYP: Taliban fighters will no longer be allowed to carry their weapons in amusement parks in Afghanistan, the group’s spokesman said on Wednesday, in what appeared to be another effort by the country’s new rulers to soften their image. Click here to read more (external link).
8am: The Meteorological Department of the country has warned of heavy rains and floods in 19 provinces. According to the department, Herat, Badghis, Faryab, Jowzjan, Balkh, Samangan, Sar-e-Pol, Ghor, Urozgan, Daikundi, Ghazni, Bamiyan, Maidan Wardak, Baghlan, Panjshir, Parwan, Kunduz, Takhar, and Badakhshan provinces, including Salang highways, are witnessing heavy rains and floods. Click here to read more (external link).
Ariana: England reached the Under-19 Cricket World Cup final after beating Afghanistan by 15 runs in Antigua on Wednesday. Afghanistan appeared well placed for victory when James Sales conceded 20 runs in an over, including two no-balls, before Rehan Ahmed (4-41) took three wickets in the penultimate over to swing momentum back England’s way. Click here to read more (external link).
Ariana: The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) on Wednesday said in a statement there was no truth in allegations that Afghanistan was in any way involved in the recent unrest in Kazakhstan. Some media outlets have quoted Russian officials as saying that some individuals from Afghanistan also took part in the protests in Kazakhstan, read the statement. Click here to read more (external link).
Lisa Schlein
VOA News
February 2, 2022
GENEVA — The U.N. human rights office is calling on the Taliban for information about the whereabouts of six women who were abducted two weeks ago in the Afghan capital, Kabul.
The agency says it is extremely concerned about the fate of the six who were abducted in connection with women’s rights protests in Kabul. On Saturday, the de facto Taliban authorities announced they were investigating the disappearance of these individuals.
U.N. rights spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani said no confirmed information on their whereabouts has been received.
“We call on the de facto authorities to publicly report on the findings of their investigation into the abduction and disappearance of these women and their relatives, and to take all possible measures to ensure their safe and immediate release, and to hold those responsible to account,” she said.
Shamdasani said since the women were abducted, there have been worrying reports about searches at the homes of other women who have taken part in demonstrations. She said information about where they’ve been taken, and their well-being is lacking and unclear. All of this, she said, perpetuates a climate of fear and uncertainty.
“These reports have also brought into focus what appears to be a pattern of arbitrary arrests and detentions, as well as torture and ill-treatment, of civil society activists, journalists and media workers, and former government officials and security forces in Afghanistan. We also continue to receive credible allegations of other gross human rights violations,” she said.
Shamdasani said control over dissent appears to be tightening.
Taliban government spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid bristles at criticisms such as this. In response to media questions earlier in the week on the disappearance of the six women, he denied that any were being held. Then he said the authorities had the right “to arrest and detain dissidents or those who break the law.”
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Abdul Baqi Haqqani
Ayaz Gul
VOA News
February 2, 2022
ISLAMABAD — Public universities in warmer provinces of Afghanistan reopened Wednesday to both female and male students for the first time since the Islamist Taliban took control of the war-torn country last August.
Witnesses said university administrations enforced gender segregation in line with directives from the Taliban government, including staggered operating hours and separated classes for boys and girls.
Bibi Hawa, a student at the state university in eastern Nangarhar province, said she was “extremely delighted” at the resumption of their education and so were other fellow female students.
“Our dead hopes have been resurrected and we will now be able to achieve our unfulfilled dreams,” Hawa told VOA in an audio message, adding they returned to a different study environment at the campus.
“There are separate classes for boys and girls. The study timings are different. Female students are required to wear all-covering black dresses and hijabs [headscarves],” Hawa said. “These changes are acceptable to us, and we have no issues with them.”
The head of the United Nations mission to Afghanistan, Deborah Lyons, praised the Taliban’s decision to permit women to resume their education.
“Let’s all support the return of Afghan young female and male students to the universities across Afghanistan. Supporters can consider a range of scholarship programs and ongoing support to female and male professors,” Lyons tweeted Wednesday.
Officials and witnesses said state universities in Laghman, Kandahar, Nimroz, Farah and Helmand provinces also opened Wednesday but attendance was generally thin. No female students showed up at the university in Kandahar, the southern province known as the birthplace of the Taliban. There are around 40 public universities in Afghanistan.
Abdul Baqi Haqqani, the Taliban minister for higher education, while announcing reopening of public universities on Sunday said that universities in the colder areas, including Kabul, will reopen on February 26.
All state-run universities and secondary schools for girls were shuttered when the Taliban took over Afghanistan and banned co-education.
While boys were allowed to rejoin secondary schools in September, most schoolgirls are still waiting for permission to resume class. In mid-September, the Taliban allowed female students to resume classes in some 150 private universities under a strictly gender-segregated classroom system.
The vague measures, however, sparked domestic and international concerns the Islamist movement would again bar women from education, as happened during the previous Taliban rule from 1996 to 2001.
The Taliban have pledged to respect women’s right to education in accordance with Sharia, or Islamic law, and promised to allow all schoolgirls to return to classes in March, when the new education year begins in Afghanistan.
The international community has not yet recognized the Islamist group as the legitimate rulers of the country and made female education a key part of its demands as the Taliban seek increased foreign aid and unfreezing of billions of dollars in Afghanistan’s overseas cash reserves.
The suspension of international aid to Afghanistan after the United States and other Western countries withdrew their troops in late August has worsened a humanitarian crisis in the war-ravaged country.
Donor countries are also pressing the all-male Taliban government to rule the country through a broad-based administration and ensure women participation in public life.
On Tuesday, the radical group’s administration announced first appointments of women to leadership roles.
Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said in a statement that Dr. Malalai Rahim was appointed as director of the specialized maternity hospital in Kabul and Dr. Aryan as director of the capital’s teaching hospital.
The move followed several days of meetings Taliban delegates held in Norway last week with U.S. and envoys from other Western governments on a range of issues, including rights of women to education and public life.
Taliban co-founder Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar (L) and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi pose for a photo during their meeting in Tianjin on July 28, 2021.
Asim Kashgarian
VOA News
February 1, 2022
WASHINGTON — It’s approaching six months since the Taliban took over the Afghan capital, Kabul, on August 15. And in the months since the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, neighboring China has taken a keen interest in the fate of the Central Asian country.
The interest, in fact, predated the Taliban takeover. In late July, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and a nine-member Taliban delegation met in the northern Chinese city of Tianjin. The meeting, some analysts said at the time, underscored Beijing’s warming ties with the Islamist group and the Taliban’s growing clout on the global stage.
In addition, last October, Foreign Minister Wang spoke about China’s expectations for Afghanistan’s future after he had met with the Taliban interim government representatives in Doha, Qatar, where the two parties “decided to establish a working-level mechanism.”
China’s expectations, Wang said, include the following: Build a more inclusive political structure in which all ethnic groups and factions play a part; implement more moderate foreign and domestic policies, including the protection of women’s rights; “make a clear break with all terrorist forces, including the Islamic State and the East Turkestan Islamic Movement”; and pursue a peaceful foreign policy, especially with neighboring countries.
However, since the Taliban regained control of the country — two decades after the U.S. and its allies had toppled it in 2001 — no country, including China, has officially recognized its legitimacy.
Beijing, though, according to experts, has participated in friendly bilateral interaction with Kabul to build a functioning relationship with Taliban authorities.
“What has been surprising has been China’s willingness to be seen so publicly as doing this and being the most forward of Afghanistan’s many neighbors to be doing this,” said Raffaello Pantucci, a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore.
The Taliban’s appointment of a new ambassador to Beijing this month reflects pragmatism by the leaders of the Islamist group, who see China as an important partner, Pantucci told VOA.
After the Taliban had appointed its ambassador to Beijing, the former Afghan ambassador to China, Javid Ahmad Qaem, resigned from his job through a handover note posted on Twitter on January 9.
On January 17, Qaem told VOA Afghan Service that Beijing “agreed” with the new appointment.
“Now that they (the Taliban) introduced someone and China has agreed to it, it is clear that it was the Chinese government’s decision,” Qaem told VOA, adding that it could not be possible without China’s approval.
Beijing has also been speaking up for the Taliban on international stages, Pantucci said.
“Additionally, we have seen Beijing quite actively lobby for the Taliban authorities in international formats like the U.N. as well as more widely in advance of desired Taliban goals.”
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called Wednesday to unfreeze Afghan assets overseas, a move China’s Ambassador Zhang Jun spoke out in support of in front of the Security Council. Imposing sanctions and freezing assets “are no less lethal than military intervention,” Zhang said, according to The Associated Press.
Some $9.5 billion of Afghanistan’s central bank assets have been sanctioned by the U.S. since the Taliban regained control of Kabul last August, overthrowing the internationally recognized former Afghan government.
“We once again call for the unfreezing of Afghanistan’s overseas assets as soon as possible,” Zhang said during last month’s U.N. Security Council meeting. “These assets should be returned to their real owners and cannot be used as a bargaining chip for threats or coercion.”
According to Michael Kugelman, the deputy director of the Asia Program and senior associate for South Asia at the Wilson Center, this “cordiality” between China and the Taliban should not be viewed as a prelude to recognition.
“China is still a long way off from that, and it’s unlikely to take that step unless several other countries do first, or at the same time,” Kugelman told VOA.
“No matter how repressive the Taliban may be,” Kugelman said, Beijing will be comfortable engaging with the Taliban if China concludes it is safe on the ground.
“This means that its interests in Afghanistan are shaped by security conditions and not by considerations about human rights and inclusivity,” Kugelman told VOA. “This is especially the case for China, an authoritarian state that prizes stability above all else.”
The U.S. and other Western countries, as well as rights groups such as Human Rights Watch, have called on the Taliban to respect the rights of women and minorities in Afghanistan and form an inclusive government.
According to Andrew Small, a senior transatlantic fellow with the Asia Program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, China had hoped for a government in Afghanistan that, although Taliban-dominated, could “tick enough boxes with the international community” to achieve diplomatic recognition.
“It means that Beijing faces an operating context there that still seems to be politically provisional and remains constrained by economic sanctions,” Small told VOA.
Although China is willing to give small volumes of humanitarian aid in the short term and provide a little bit more economic support, Beijing is still “uncertain how the Taliban’s dealings with militant groups in the region” will develop, Small said.
China still has “questions about what they (the Taliban) are willing to do with Uyghur fighters.”
The U.N. reported last year that a few hundred Uyghur Muslim militants were in Afghanistan. They call themselves the Turkestan Islamic Party, which is also known as the Eastern Turkestan Islamic Movement, or ETIM, a group founded in the late 1990s in Afghanistan by exiled Uyghurs from China’s Xinjiang region, which shares a border with Afghanistan.
China has asked the Taliban to curb the insurgency of the ETIM members in Afghanistan. In an interview with China state media Global Times in September, a Taliban spokesperson Suhail Shaheen said many Uyghur fighters had left his country on its request.
“I know after the Doha (Qatar) agreement, many have left Afghanistan, because we categorically said that there is no place for anyone to use Afghanistan against other countries, including neighboring countries,” Shaheen told the Global Times.
By supporting and playing the long game with the Taliban, China is building a strong diplomatic foundation with the regime, said Hasan Karrar, who specializes in modern Chinese and Central Asian history at the Lahore University of Management Sciences in Pakistan.
“But also [Beijing is] remaining mindful of why the Taliban remain isolated internationally.” Karrar told VOA. “For example, I do not believe China can ignore the fact that girls can’t go to school in the new Afghanistan.”
Roshan Noorzai from VOA’s Afghan Service contributed to this story.
Ghani
Akmal Dawi
VOA News
February 1, 2022
A former senior Afghan official says he has answered questions in a U.S. inquiry into allegations that former Afghan President Ashraf Ghani took $150 million in cash with him when he abruptly left Kabul last year as the Taliban took control.
Hamdullah Mohib, who served as Ghani’s national security adviser, says he voluntarily met with John Sopko, Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), in December at his office in Arlington, Virginia, to answer questions about corruption in the U.S.-backed Afghan government.
“I also gave [SIGAR] my bank accounts and details of all my assets,” said Mohib, who left Afghanistan in the same plane with Ghani and stayed with him in Abu Dhabi for a while. He told VOA that he would continue to cooperate with SIGAR investigations.
The U.S. was the largest donor to the Afghan government until it collapsed, and SIGAR has been tasked by Congress to investigate allegations that Ghani took millions in cash as he fled Afghanistan last August.
“The fact that we’re looking at those allegations doesn’t mean that they’re true or not,” Sopko said at an Atlantic Council event last week.
In addition to the cash flight allegations, which were first reported by the Russian Embassy in Kabul, Sopko said his investigators were looking into several related issues. “Why did the government of Afghanistan fall so quickly? Why did the military collapse so quickly? What happened? All the weapons? What happened to all the money that we were sending right up to the end — money, fuel, things like that.”
SIGAR is expected to find answers to these questions and present a classified report to Congress in March or April this year. There will also be a public report which will be released later, Sopko said.
Ghani not interviewed
Fazel Fazly, another close aide to Ghani who fled with him in the same convoy and now lives in Sweden, told VOA the former Afghan president has not yet been interviewed by SIGAR. “I’ve been in touch with the president,” said Fazly, adding that he also had not yet received inquiries from SIGAR.
In a video message released three days after he left Afghanistan, Ghani strongly rejected the reports that he took cash with him, and later called on the United Nations to launch an independent investigation into the matter.
Like Mohib, Fazly said he is willing to cooperate with SIGAR to prove he was not involved in any corruption, while at the same time admitting corruption infested all layers of the former Afghan government.
“It’s insane to say there was no corruption,” Fazly said. “We expect SIGAR to do objective, comprehensive and meaningful investigations to uncover the truth about corruption in Afghanistan.”
Mohib and Fazley, widely reported to be closer to Ghani than any other Afghan officials, both said allegations that Ghani fled with sacks of dollars were aimed at maligning the former Afghan president as a corrupt U.S. ally.
“Moscow’s relations with President Ghani were terrible and even some Central Asian leaders called him a Western imperialist,” Fazley said.
The Cash
Fazly and Mohib both said they were unaware ofthe existence of large volumes of cash in the Afghan Presidential Palace.
While Ghani’s predecessor, Hamid Karzai, confirmed that his office received bags of cash from the CIA and from the Iran government, Ghani said on multiple occasions that his office never received cash from the CIA or any other intelligence agency.
Ghani claims he had transferred his executive authority over state funds to a government committee and had no power over U.S. and NATO contracting processes for Afghan military funding, according to Mohib.
Others say the president did not need to personally receive the assistance funds in order to make use of them.
“There was money in the Afghanistan Bank,” said Sayed Ikram Afzali, director of a local corruption watchdog Integrity Watch Afghanistan.
The Afghanistan Bank building — headquarters of the state-run central bank — is adjacent to the Presidential Palace compound in central Kabul where all funds, liquidities and highly valuable items were stored.
“Moving cash from the central bank to the palace was not a hard thing to do, especially when the governor of the bank was a Ghani henchman,” said Afzali, adding that Ghani had kept Ajmal Ahmady, a U.S. citizen, as governor of the central bank even after his nomination to the post was repeatedly rejected by parliament.
Ahmady, now a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School who leads a study group entitled “Afghanistan—What Happened & How to Engage the Taliban,” did not respond to an email inquiry.
“Corruption in Afghanistan did not take place only for one day, and we must not be solely fixated on what happened on August 15. Large amounts of money were taken out of Afghanistan for so many years and those involved in high-level corruption were not waiting until the last day of the republic to move physical currency out of the country,” Afzali said.
Accountability
From 2001 to the end of 2021, the U.S. spent more than $2 trillion on the Afghan war, including some $140 billion spent on development projects, according to the Costs of War project at Brown University’s Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs.
At least $15.5 billion of the U.S. development funds went to “waste, fraud and abuse,” SIGAR’s investigations have found.
“Systemic corruption perpetuated an implosion of the system in Afghanistan,” conceded Hamdullah Mohib.
Like others, Mohib said he was concerned that “truly corrupt” individuals who enriched themselves through the U.S.-bankrolled funding and contracting systems in Afghanistan now roam free in different parts of the world.
Since the fall of the Afghan government, tens of thousands of Afghans, among them former government officials and contractors, have sought refuge outside Afghanistan.
There are now growing calls, even by officials of the former Afghan government, for some sort of accountability by their own former colleagues.
“[Former government officials] must be held accountable and tried,” Naseer Ahmad Faiq, chargé d’affaires of Afghanistan’s mission at the United Nations, told a Security Council meeting last week. “It is not fair that 38 million people [in Afghanistan] are starving and mothers sell their children to survive but these corrupt former government officials live in luxurious houses and villas in different countries in Europe and the U.S.”
SIGAR’s investigations have led to criminal charges and trials of some individuals and companies, both U.S. and Afghan, in U.S. federal courts. It’s unclear whether SIGAR would press criminal charges against former Afghan officials, who were previously commended as U.S. partners, if found guilty of fraud and corruption.
“We’re looking at more people than President Ghani about taking money out of the country at the end,” John Sopko said in response to a VOA question.