Hamid Karzai
Tolo News: “If the Taliban continue to oppose that–this would be confronted but I want this confrontation to be political, not military,” Karzai said in an interview with Russia’s RTA. “They must agree to that or they will be defeated. The Afghan people will rise against them.” Karzai said the Afghan people are giving the Taliban an opportunity. Click here to read more (external link).
Jamie Dettmer
VOA News
August 2, 2021
Every day sees more Afghan refugees reach Turkey after a grueling trek across Iran. As far as they’re concerned their journey is far from over — they want to get to the countries of the European Union — for them the Promised Land.
But it is a land that is unwilling to accept them and is making plans to deter them from arriving.
Around 2,000 Afghans a day are entering Turkey, and migration experts expect the numbers to surge as the Taliban seizes control of more of Afghanistan.
The Taliban is currently besieging three major cities in south and west Afghanistan to add to the rapid rural gains it has made in recent weeks in the wake of the decision by the Biden administration to withdraw US troops from the country. Almost all NATO troops will be gone by September. Few observers believe the Afghan government will be able to hold out and last week a Pentagon watchdog warned that the country’s government will likely face an “existential crisis.”
The Afghans making their way through Iran to Turkey are voting with their feet, fearful of what a Taliban future of strict Islamic rule will hold for them. Most arriving at the Turkish borders are single men, and many are uneducated, but hope to secure settlement in Europe and for their families to join them later, say migration groups.
Turkey the Gatekeeper
European leaders are preparing for a new migration crisis and are negotiating another multi-year migration deal with Turkey to get Ankara to block Afghan and other asylum-seekers from heading their way. It would be a renewal of a five-year deal struck in 2016 that saw the EU pay Ankara billions of dollars to curb irregular migration towards Europe, improve the living conditions of refugees in Turkey, and foster legal migration through official resettlement schemes.
“The 2016 agreement had a significant impact on limiting the number of arrivals” in the EU, according to Daniele Albanese of Caritas Italiana, a non-profit and the charitable arm of the Italian Bishops Conference. “While nearly 861.630 people reached Greece in 2015, that number dropped to 36, 310 the following year,” she noted in a commentary for the Italian Institute for International Political Studies, a think tank.
But she warns that a “political approach that does not take into consideration the needs of the refugee population deserving a better life is far from a long-term, durable solution.”
No repeat of 2015
For now, though, European governments are focused on the short-terms and are in no mood to see a return to the open-doors migration policy of 2015, one that in its wake roiled the continent’s politics and fueled the rise of populist nationalist parties. “Post-U.S. Afghanistan poses a severe migration problem, and we expect a rising number of people attempting to flee the Taliban,” a senior EU diplomat told VOA.
Around a million asylum-seekers from the Mideast, most of them Syrians, Afghanistan and sub-Saharan Africa arrived and settled in Europe in 2015-2016.
Asked last month at a press conference whether Germany should welcome Afghan refugees, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the architect of the 2015 open-doors policy, replied: “We cannot solve all of these problems by taking everyone in.” She called instead for political negotiations so “people can live as peacefully as possible in the country.”
Greek authorities are reporting that Afghans now make up the largest share of asylum-seekers who manage to navigate the Aegean from Turkey. Austria last week announced it is to deploy additional soldiers to its borders with Slovenia and Hungary so as to increase the number of border guards by 40 percent. The country’s interior minister Karl Nehammer said at a news conference that EU migration policies have proven ineffective against irregular migrants, and he said Austrian immigration authorities have already apprehended 15,768 migrants attempting to cross illegally the Austrian border this year, compared to 21,700 for the whole of 2020.
“In Austria we have one of the biggest Afghan communities in the whole of Europe,” Nehammer said. “It cannot be the case that Austria and Germany have to solve the Afghanistan problem for the EU,” Nehammer added.
Despite the advance of the Taliban, European countries have been continuing with deportations of Afghan asylum-seekers — only Finland, Sweden and Norway have announced temporary suspensions of forced returns to Afghanistan.
Turkey is already hosting anywhere from an estimated 200,000 to 600,000 Afghans and – unlike the more than three million Syrian refugees living in Turkey – they have few legal rights of protection and no access to public services. Turkish opposition parties have been seizing on migration as an issue to try to outmaneuver President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and last month jumped on remarks by Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz that Turkey is “a more suitable place” for Afghans than his or other western European countries.
On Sunday, Devlet Bahçeli, chairman of the Nationalist Movement Party, MHP, told the Türkgün newspaper “there should be a limit on asylum seekers from going and settling wherever they want without the control [of authorities].”
“It’s understood that an influx of refugees will reach our borders in the risky and dangerous period ahead. We must be on the alert,” he added.
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Khalilzad
Ayaz Gul
VOA News
August 2, 2021
ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN – The U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan reconciliation, Zalmay Khalilzad, says the United States remains committed to promoting a political settlement between warring Afghans, stressing that neither side to the conflict can win militarily.
In an interview with VOA that comes as the United States works to complete its withdrawal from Afghanistan by the end of August, Khalilzad spoke about what responsibility Washington has for Afghanistan following its troop departure and whether the Taliban are already violating their February agreement with the United States.
The Afghan-born American envoy stressed that if the Taliban take over the country by force, they will not win international recognition and “they will become a pariah state.” Khalilzad spoke via Zoom with VOA reporter Ayaz Gul in Islamabad.
VOA: Do you think the U.S. has a moral and political responsibility to ensure that Afghanistan does not slide into another civil war, after U.S. military departure, as it happened following the Soviet army exit in 1989?
Khalilzad: Well, you raise a very important point, it is a point that we have kept in mind that what happened in the 90s should not be repeated and that working with the Afghans we did something big, a huge sacrifice on the part of the Afghans with our support to get the Soviets out, and then we abandon Afghanistan, and a terrible war took place and it produced challenges particularly in 9/11. So, we do not want to repeat that mistake. That’s why although we could have left Afghanistan we didn’t need to, we have an agreement with the Taliban in principle to depart. But we engaged the Taliban as part of a strategy a plan to have safe withdrawal of US forces, but also as a package to start a peace process in Afghanistan that brings the Afghan war, a long very, very long war, where there has been a lot of suffering, to an end. The agreement with the Taliban provided the opportunity for Afghans to sit across the table from each other, a historic development, to reach an agreement to agree on a formula that would have broad support in Afghanistan and international support as well. And unfortunately, the two sides have not taken advantage of that opportunity as quickly as we would have liked, as the Afghan people would have liked because they are yearning the people are yearning for peace. We are always looking for ways and means to help accelerate the negotiations because we don’t see a military solution to the war in Afghanistan. There must be a political solution, a political agreement for a lasting peace, and we will stay with it, we are committed to staying with it until that that goal is achieved.
VOA: Aren’t the Taliban violating the letter and spirit of the Doha Accord by their brazen attempt to militarily conquer Afghanistan and their use of violence and targeted assassinations in their quest for absolute power?
Khalilzad: Well, the agreement necessitated, committed the Taliban to negotiations for a new Islamic government in Afghanistan and a comprehensive cease fire, and there is this agreement that the government also has had challenges or difficulties in terms of agreeing to or embracing the idea of a new Islamic government and the Taliban have used force to see if it could coerce the government into agreeing to a formula for a new Islamic government, a new constitution as they see it as well. And that there has got to be a political formula. The government cannot get rid of the Taliban, it’s our assessment and the Taliban cannot conquer Afghanistan and have a government and that has the support of the overwhelming majority of the Afghans and international support. Maybe some Taliban think there is a military solution to the conflict although they tell us otherwise when they speak to us the Taliban says there is no military solution. But if some commanders or some military leaders think that they are miscalculating because there will be resistance and even if they take over the country, there will be resistance and there will be international opposition that they won’t be recognized that they will not receive international assistance and they will become a pariah state which they say they don’t want. And the wise thing is for both sides to engage seriously and quickly, urgently to respond to the wishes of the people of Afghanistan for a political agreement. No one side the history of Afghanistan over the last almost 45, 50 years indicates that an effort by one side, one party to impose its will, its formula on others leads to war and intervention. I hope that the leaders of Afghanistan have learned that lesson and that they need to find a formula agreed to a formula that has broad support, accepts that all Afghans have legitimate rights, that those rights have to be respected and the people have to have a say ultimately in how they are governed. I hope that that’s the lesson they have learned, although the current situation is discouraging, it’s heartbreaking given the level of violence and the suffering, the pictures one sees coming out of places like Lashkar Gah.
VOA: Afghan officials and even some in the U.S. have been critical of you for negotiating what they argue is a bad deal with the Taliban that has surely paved the way for the American military withdrawal but at the same time fueled the violence, and which effectively has stalled progress in the intra-Afghan negotiations?
Khalilzad: I can see that there are differences of view but the U.S. president, starting with (former) President (Barack) Obama, decided that there was no military solution to the problem of Afghanistan and that there has to be a political solution. And also the U.S. wanted to adjust to the circumstances in which they world is in now and the issue of terrorism and that given that there was no military solution and that new challenges have arisen, such as a great power competition, that the terrorism problem has changed that Afghanistan is not the center of the al-Qaida terrorism threatening the world and that it has diffused that the U.S. needed to adjust And the adjustment was in order to get the Taliban to negotiate with the government which it wasn’t willing to do until there was an agreement on U.S. withdrawal. And that agreement as you know was signed over a year ago, 15, 16 months ago, and the Afghan government knew that, of course, and the withdrawal timeline was clear, and the Biden administration added some time because we were supposed to be out of there by May but now the president has decided it should be by the end of August. The agreement was to give peace a chance and to make adjustments on behalf of the United States in terms of the security situation worldwide. So, it is now the obligation of the Afghan leaders, Taliban. The government has to also recognize that there is no military solution and their engagement with each other that one side will not be able to conquer Afghanistan and not to lose this opportunity not to repeat the mistakes of the past.
VOA: How much blame does the Afghan government share for bringing the situation to where it is today and what is your response to the way Afghan security forces behaved on the battlefield, enabling Taliban to make rapid territorial gains?
Khalilzad: As you know the Afghan security forces are numerically far superior than the Taliban. They have over three hundred thousand troops, it has an Air Force and it has special forces, It has heavy equipment and both proper leadership, political and military and proper military strategy and plan and execution, that the government forces should have done a lot better than they are doing. We continue to support Afghan security forces and we are committed to supporting those forces well into the future. The president is asking his budget for next year, three point three billion dollars for the support of the Afghan security forces. So, it is a question of leadership, political and military, uniting the Afghan leaders and motivating the forces that they are fighting for a just cause, then having the right plan the right tactics and the right execution. I know that the Afghan leadership has been taking a look at how to adjust their approach in the light of the experience and that you alluded to.
VOA: Do you feel let down by both the Afghan warring sides?
Khalilzad: Well, I am concerned very much by the lack of progress. I know that the gap has been large, continues to be a big gap between the two sides, but they need to put the leader or the interests of the Country first, rather than their own interest or their factional interest. There cannot be peace without a compromise, without give and take, without respect for the fundamental rights of all Afghans men and women and the Afghans having a say, ultimately the people and in terms of what happens to them. But for the short term although those are things that in the long term will really be determinative. It is the responsibility of the leaders because the people are there, in a sense, at their mercy and they both argue that they are they are people of God and they and that they are fighting for a righteous cause. Well, there is nothing worse, morally and otherwise than innocent people getting killed and killing innocent people. And innocent people are getting killed every day unfortunately, and it is the responsibility of leaders to accommodate each other accept each other as Afghans as fellow Afghans or citizens of the same country that has suffered for so long and the eyes of the Afghan people are really focused on their leaders on both sides and the eyes of the international community is also focused. And the question really is, ‘will these leaders rise to the occasion and put country first or will they go down in history as people who put their own interests or the interests of their faction first’ and to be judged and evaluated harshly therefore, for what the people are striving for it.
VOA: Pakistani leaders say that short of military action, they have done all they could and that they are still determined to keep trying to diplomatically encourage the Taliban to seek a negotiated settlement with Afghan rivals. Do you support and agree with what Pakistanis are saying? Does Islamabad still have sway over the Taliban?
Khalilzad: Well, I think Pakistan as the Pakistani leaders say and we agree with them that what happens in Afghanistan, that continuing war there will have negative implications for Pakistan because a neighbor at war can only produce problems, refugees, for example, violence, lost economic opportunities for trade, lost opportunity from connectivity of linking Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia together. There are vast opportunities for regional cooperation that the war puts at risk. So, Pakistan has a special role and responsibility, given also that many Taliban leaders are in Pakistan located there to do what it can to encourage peace and a political settlement as soon as possible, for it will be judged internationally also as to whether it has done all that it can or it could to promote a political settlement. But I believe that a political settlement and that’s broadly accepted that ends the war and make sure Afghanistan is not a threat to any country in the region and the world that it doesn’t return to being a sanctuary for terrorists and that that’s Afghanistan that type of Afghanistan is very much in Pakistan’s interest and many Pakistani leaders do tell me that that’s exactly right and that that’s what they want and that’s what they are working for. But Pakistan has a special role and responsibility with regard to the conflict in Afghanistan.
Ashraf Ghani
Ayesha Tanzeem
VOA News
August 2, 2021
ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN – Afghanistan’s President Ashraf Ghani announced Monday that he finally has a clear plan to counter Taliban offensives across the country after his government was heavily criticized for its seeming lack of strategy in the last three months.
The militants have made unexpectedly swift territorial gains, including taking over several key international border crossings as foreign forces withdraw from the country.
“I want to tell you that a clear plan is prepared for reaching stability in six months and the implementation of the plan has started,” Ghani said in his address to a special joint session of the Afghan parliament. This was the first time since the withdrawal announcement that he was addressing lawmakers.
Without sharing specifics, Ghani said the military will be responsible for defending strategic targets while the police, under the Interior Ministry, will defend cities and strategic district centers. The National Directorate of Security (NDS), Afghanistan’s intelligence agency, will coordinate the people’s militias called the anti-Taliban uprising forces.
“The reality is that we have faced an unexpected situation in the last three months. . …We are facing an influx of domestic and foreign propaganda,” said President Ghani, calling on all parliamentarians to help mobilize the population in support of Afghan security forces.
He blamed the deterioration in the country’s security to a “sudden decision” by the United States and NATO forces to leave but said it was now up to Afghans to manage the fallout.
For many years, the U.S. has publicly expressed its desire to leave Afghanistan, with multiple statements by former President Donald Trump and the campaign promises of President Joe Biden.
There was an expectation, however, that President Biden, unlike his predecessor, would listen to his Pentagon advisers who wanted to keep a small military footprint on the ground.
“We did not go to Afghanistan to nation-build. And it’s the right and the responsibility of the Afghan people alone to decide their future and how they want to run their country,” Biden said last month about the U.S. drawdown.
The U.S. and Taliban signed a deal in 2020 that would see the U.S. leave Afghanistan in exchange for the insurgents reducing violence and finding a negotiated end to the long-running war with the government in Kabul. Violence, however, has increased since then. The United States blames the Taliban for the unrest.
Ghani has ruled out repeated rumors that Taliban advances were caused by a secret deal. Instead, he acknowledged that lack of preparation and weakness in mid-level leadership caused district after district to fall to the militants, often without resistance.
Ghani accused the Taliban of oppression as well as strengthening their relations with international terrorist groups rather than cutting them as per the deal they made with the Americans in Doha in February 2020.
“Reports of Taliban atrocities are spreading across Afghanistan. I follow all these reports closely,” he said.
The Afghan president made it clear that he thought the Taliban would not partake in meaningful peace negotiations until the situation on the battlefield changed.
In a joint statement following Ghani’s address, parliament reiterated its support for the country’s democracy, human rights, including women’s rights, and freedom of speech.
Ghani’s former political rival and the head of Afghanistan’s High Council for National Reconciliation (HCNR) lauded the statement, followed by the senior most U.S. official in Afghanistan.
“Today alongside other leaders of the country I attended the extraordinary joint session of the AFG National Assembly. They declared their unanimous support for the republic, the #ANDSF & a just & durable peace in the country. I thank & commend them for their historic decision,” Abdullah Abdullah tweeted.
“As friends and allies of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, we support you, the Afghan people,” tweeted the U.S. chargé d’affaires, Ross Wilson.
Ghani’s address comes at a time when the Taliban have increased attacks on Afghan cities, besieging several of them simultaneously. At least three cities, Kandahar, Herat, and Lashkar Gah have seen intense fighting over the last few days.
“In Lashkar Gah, #Helmand province, fighting in the city has brought life to a standstill. People are trapped in their homes and there are many casualties due to airstrikes, bullets and mortars. The @MSF supported Boost hospital treated 70 war wounded patients from 29-31 July,” said a statement from Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) on Twitter.
The international non-profit aid group said it performed an unprecedented 10 surgeries in one day in Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand province.
The Afghan Defense Ministry confirmed that the U.S. Air Force helped push back Taliban advances. Most of Helmand’s districts are under Taliban control.
“#US Air Forces targeted #Taliban terrorist in #Lashkargah city today morning. 7 terrorists were killed and a large amount of their weapons and ammunition were destroyed as a result of the #airstrike,” Defense Ministry spokesman Fawad Aman said. He later revised the Taliban death toll to 18.
The Taliban issued a statement in Pashto blaming “American drones” and Afghan “gunship helicopters” for bombing and injuring civilians in Lashkar Gah, including women and children.
On Sunday, the Afghan government boosted Herat city’s defenses with hundreds of special forces troops. The city had seen intense fighting on its outskirts and many credited 70-year-old former warlord Ismail Khan and his militia for saving the city from falling under a Taliban onslaught.
Late Saturday, Taliban rockets hit Kandahar airport, partially damaging a runway and forcing authorities to temporarily shut down the airport.
Related
Taliban fighters (file photo)
TNN: While Islamabad has been denying that “jihadis” from Pakistan are going to Afghanistan, the country has been receiving dead bodies of its citizens from across the border on the Chaman-Spin Boldak and Torkhum border crossings. Click here to read more (external link).
Ghani
By RFE/RL’s Radio Azadi
August 2, 2021
Afghan President Ashraf Ghani on August 2 blamed Washington’s “sudden” decision about its troop withdrawal for the current insecurity in his country, as government troops battled Taliban militants for control of a southern provincial capital following weekend assaults on urban centers in a major escalation.
Fighting raged in Lashkar Gah, Helmand Province’s capital, where the Taliban launched a coordinated offensive on the city center just hours after the government announced the deployment of hundreds of special forces to the area.
Taliban fighters also continued attacks on least two other provincial capitals overnight — Kandahar, also in the south, and Herat in western Afghanistan — after a weekend of heavy fighting that saw thousands of civilians flee the violence.
“The reason for our current situation is that the decision was taken abruptly,” Ghani told a joint session of parliament.
He blamed “a sudden decision on the withdrawal of the international troops” and said he had warned Washington of such “consequences.”
But he said his government had a plan to bring conditions under control within six months and that the United States supported the scheme.
Fighting has intensified since early May amid an accelerated withdrawal of U.S. forces scheduled to be completed by the end of August and an ongoing stalemate in intra-Afghan talks between Kabul and the Taliban.
Taliban militants have captured dozens of districts and border regions as government forces said they were focusing their efforts on more populated areas.
The United States agreed with the Taliban in early 2020 to withdraw its troops earlier this year in exchange for assurances against allowing Afghan territory to be used for terrorism, but U.S. President Joe Biden pushed back the deadline for a pullout after he was inaugurated in January.
Helmand Province was one of the major focal points of the waning U.S. and British military campaign in Afghanistan.
“Afghan forces on the ground and by air strikes repelled the attack,” the military in Helmand said of the offensive on Lashkar Gah.
Helmand, with its vast poppy fields, provides most of the opium for the international heroin trade — making it a lucrative source of tax and cash for the Taliban’s war chest.
The loss of the Helmand capital would also be a massive strategic and psychological blow for the Kabul government, which has already lost much of the rural countryside to the Taliban over the summer.
Fighting has also been raging in Herat, where a spokesman for the provincial governor told RFE/RL that ground operations and air strikes continue against the militants.
Jailani Farhad, said the militants suffered heavy casualties during the operations, which were joined by hundreds of Afghan commandos.
“As a result of the clearance operation by the Afghan joint forces, 100 Taliban militants were killed and several others injured,” Farhad said.
Aref Jalali, the head doctor of Herat Central Hospital, says 19 bodies, including four civilians, and 78 wounded, including 48 civilians, were transferred to the hospital on August 1.
Heavy fighting was also reported in some districts of Kandahar and on the outskirts of the provincial capital, Kandahar City.
Kandahar’s airport came under a Taliban rocket attack that damaged the runway overnight on July 31, leading to the suspension of flights for several hours.
The airport is vital to maintaining the logistics and air support needed to keep the Taliban from overrunning the city, while also providing aerial cover for large tracts of southern Afghanistan — including Lashkar Gah.
Kabul has repeatedly dismissed the militants’ steady gains over the summer as lacking strategic value but has largely failed to reverse their momentum. The loss of government control included several border crossings into neighboring Central Asian states to the north and Pakistan to the south.
Hundreds of Afghans, including police and government troops, have fled the country in recent weeks and taken refuge in Tajikistan and neighboring Uzbekistan amid the Taliban offensive.
Russia has announced joint military drills from August 5-10 at Tajikistan’s and Uzbekistan’s borders with Afghanistan. In a last-minute announcement, Moscow said on August 2 that it will send 1,800 soldiers to the drills, instead of 1,000 as initially planned. More than 2,500 troops would be involved in total.
Russia will also use twice as much military hardware in the drills as originally planned, Interfax news agency reported on August 2, citing the Defense Ministry.
Ghani told lawmakers in Kabul on August 2, one day after calling for a “countrywide mobilization,” that “we have had an unexpected situation in the last three months.”
The Taliban will not return to substantive peace talks unless the worsening security situation is curbed, Ghani warned.
Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid on August 2 dismissed Ghani’s statements as “nonsense, an attempt to control his fears” in the face of the government’s “dire situation.”
“Declarations of war, accusations, and lies cannot prolong Ghani’s government’s life; his time has run out, God willing,” the spokesman said via Twitter.
This story is based on reporting by Radio Azadi correspondents on the ground in Afghanistan. Their names are being withheld for their protection.
With reporting by AFP and tolonews.com
Roya Rahmani
Washington Post: The 43-year-old Kabul native departs under a cloud, indicted in Kabul alongside two other Afghan officials on embezzlement charges – which she has denied and attempted to refute – that she says have more to do with gender and her country’s highly personalized and insular politics than any wrongdoing. Click here to read more (external link).
Related
Tolo News: The Ministry of Public Health on Monday reported 587 new positive cases of COVID-19 out of 2,642 samples tested in the last 24 hours. Data by the ministry shows that the total number of cases is 148,572 and the total number of reported deaths is 6,804. Click here to read more (external link).
VOA News
August 2, 2021
The United States announced Monday it is expanding eligibility for resettling refugees from Afghanistan who may be at risk of Taliban retaliation due to affiliation with U.S. entities.
The State Department said thousands of Afghans and their immediate family members who worked for the U.S. government, a U.S.-funded project, the NATO-led military mission, or a U.S.-based media or nongovernmental organization are now eligible.
A State Department statement said access to the U.S. refugee admissions program “is a critical mechanism to provide protection for these individuals.”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken is due to speak about the action later Monday.
The move comes as the United States winds down its military presence in Afghanistan after nearly 20 years. A more limited group of Afghans was already eligible for resettlement under the State Department’s Special Immigrant Visa program.
The United States and NATO allies announced May 1 they were beginning to withdraw their last remaining troops from the country, and the Pentagon said in early July its withdrawal was 90% complete. The process is due to be complete by August 31.
Since international troops started leaving, Taliban insurgents have unleashed a widespread onslaught against Afghan forces, capturing nearly half of the country’s roughly 420 districts.