8am: More than a year and three months after the floods hit the city of Charikar in Parwan province, no shelter has been provided for the flood victims. Some of Charikar flood victims now live in door-less, wall-less ruins. They have disturbing accounts of their lives. Click here to read more (external link).
Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi
By Radio Mashaal
November 11, 2021
Pakistan’s foreign minister has pushed the international community to urgently provide funding and humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan, which is teetering on the brink of “economic collapse,” as envoys from the United States, Russia, and China met in Islamabad.
“Nobody wishes to see a relapse into civil war, no one wants an economic collapse that will spur instability; everyone wants terrorist elements operating inside Afghanistan to be tackled effectively and we all want to prevent a new refugee crisis,” Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi said in opening remarks at the meeting in the Pakistani capital on November 11.
The so-called “troika plus” meeting included the new U.S. special envoy for Afghanistan, Thomas West.
The Pakistani, American, Russian, and Chinese diplomats were also expected to meet with interim Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi, who is heading a 20-member Taliban delegation to Islamabad.
Humanitarian agencies and human rights groups are increasingly raising the alarm that Afghanistan is slipping into a dire humanitarian crisis following the Taliban takeover of the country in mid-August.
The Afghan economy has ground to a near halt due to a disruption of aid and restrictions on the banking system put in place by the international community, which has not recognized the Taliban regime over human rights issues and a lack of inclusivity in its cabinet.
In a joint statement issued by Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry after the “troika plus” talks, the participants expressed “grave concern at the potential for an economic collapse and significantly worsening humanitarian crisis and a new refugee wave.”
They called for an “inclusive and representative [government] that respects the rights of all Afghans and provides for the equal rights of women and girls to participate in all aspects of Afghan society.”
Regarding Afghanistan’s serious liquidity challenges, the four countries are “committed to continue focusing on measures to ease access to legitimate banking services.”
Meanwhile, the Taliban should “ensure unhindered humanitarian access…for the delivery of humanitarian assistance in Afghanistan to respond to the developing crisis.”
Islamabad has called on the United States and other governments to allow development assistance to flow into Afghanistan to prevent an economic collapse.
It has also called for billions of dollars of assets that Afghanistan’s central bank holds overseas to be unfrozen.
It is “imperative for the international community to buttress provision of humanitarian assistance on an urgent basis,” Qureshi said.
Resuming the flow of funding “will dovetail into our efforts to regenerate economic activities and move the Afghan economy toward stability and sustainability,” he added.
The November 11 meeting is the latest in a series of diplomatic gatherings in the region.
India held a regional security conference on November 10 that called for cooperation to ensure Afghanistan does not again become a safe haven for global terrorism.
It also called for an open and inclusive government in Kabul that would represent all sections of society to achieve reconciliation.
The meeting was attended by representatives from Russia, Iran, and the five Central Asian republics — Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.
With reporting by Reuters and AFP
Related
#Taliban fighters shooting at remnants of buddha sculptures they blew up two decades ago in 2001. #Afghanistan
video via EtilaatRoz pic.twitter.com/2mRyPB8l4H— Sharif Hassan (@MSharif1990) November 1, 2021
Ron Synovitz
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
November 10, 2021
A video recorded recently in Afghanistan shows Taliban gunmen using the remnants of the Bamiyan Buddhas for target practice.
The video is raising serious concerns about a pledge by the Taliban leadership to protect Afghanistan’s cultural and historical treasures.
Posted on social media, it shows members of the Taliban firing rocket-propelled grenades into one of the niches where giant Buddha statues had stood for more than 1,400 years until the Taliban reduced them to rubble in 2001.
At least seven Taliban gunmen can be seen grouped beside two vehicles during the incident.
From a distance, they can be heard reciting Taliban slogans and laughing as the hidden cameraman films them. Five rocket-propelled grenades are fired during the 37-second video clip.
As the camera pans from the shooters to their target, one rocket-propelled grenade can be seen exploding against the back wall of the niche where the head of a giant Buddha had once been — sending out a cloud of fresh debris.
The video is particularly disconcerting because militants under the command of the Taliban-appointed provincial governor in Bamiyan, Mullah Shireen Akhund, have been tasked with guarding the historic site.
Mullah Shireen Akhund was a member of the Taliban negotiating team in Doha that had promised to protect the site.
He also had been the Taliban insurgency’s intelligence chief under the group’s Kandahar-based Southern Command, led by Mullah Mohammad Yaqoob — the son of the late Taliban founder Mullah Mohammad Omar.
Ahmadullah Wasiq, the deputy head of the Taliban-led government’s cultural commission, says the Taliban leadership in Kabul has ordered that there shall be no further destruction at the site of the Bamiyan Buddhas.
“If anyone commits this illegal act, the security organs of the Islamic Emirate will stop them, ” Wasiq told RFE/RL’s Radio Azadi. “They will be handed over and brought to justice. ”
But when questioned about the video that shows Taliban fighters using the Bamiyan niches for target practice, Wasiq would not comment about who was responsible.
He also declined to comment on whether the Taliban has launched an investigation into the fresh destruction at Bamiyan.
In February, before the Taliban seized control across Afghanistan amid the withdrawal of U.S.-led international forces, the Taliban leadership in Doha issued a statement vowing to protect Afghanistan’s cultural heritage.
But most historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists have taken a wait-and-see attitude about how the new Taliban regime will treat Afghanistan’s historic relics.
Some have questioned the ability of the Taliban leadership to control rogue militants across the country who are loyal to various factional leaders.
Critics say the Taliban’s promises are nothing more than an effort to present a public image that is more moderate than its brutal regime was from 1996 to 2001.
That regime horrified the world in 2001 when it used antiaircraft artillery, anti-tank mines, dynamite, and other explosives to destroy Bamiyan’s two giant standing Buddha statues — declaring that they were “un-Islamic. ”
More recently, since the group seized control of Kabul in August, there have been concerns about the appointment of Mohammad Hassan Akhund as the Taliban’s prime minister.
In 2001, when Akhund was deputy prime minister of the Taliban’s first government, he had publicly endorsed the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas.
Blacklisted as a terrorist by the United Nations, he also has been accused of orchestrating the three weeks of demolition work that obliterated the famous Buddha statues.
Ali Olomi, a historian at Penn State Abington University, says Akhund was “one of the architects of the destruction of the Buddha statues.”
Crossroads Of History
Continued abuses at the site of the Bamiyan Buddhas aren’t the only cause for historians and archaeologists to be anxious.
Afghanistan has been at the crossroads of many civilizations that have left their mark over thousands of years — from ancient Greece and Persia to China, India, and Central Asia.
Hinduism is thought to have flourished in the region as long ago as the Bronze Age before the expansion of an ancient Iranian people known as the Medes from the seventh century B.C.
Later, Buddhism and the Zoroastrian faith of the ancient Persians took root there, as well as a Bactrian colony of the ancient Greeks after Alexander the Great’s army marched over the Hindu Kush Mountains in the fourth century B.C.
From the third through seventh centuries, territory in Afghanistan formed part of the Sassanid Empire — the last Persian imperial dynasty before the Muslim conquest of the mid-seventh century.
They were followed by the Abbasid caliphs — the supreme heads of the Islamic world from the eighth to the 13th centuries; the Ghaznavids, a Persianized Muslim dynasty of Central Asian Turkic origin; the Mongols, the Timurids, the Mughals, and the Durrani Empire of the 18th and 19th centuries.
UNESCO has inscribed two locations in Afghanistan on its list of World Heritage sites as important contributions to human history and civilization.
One is the landscape and archaeology of the entire Bamiyan Valley where the great Buddha statues were destroyed.
The other is the Minaret of Jam in the valley of the Hari-rud River some 200 kilometers east of Herat. This “tower of victory” was built in 1194 by the Ghurid sultan.
Before the Taliban seized power in August, four other sites were on Afghanistan’s tentative list for nomination as UNESCO World Heritage sites.
They include Band-e Amir in Bamiyan Province, a natural site and national park in the Hindu Kush Mountains known for its six deep-blue lakes.
The city of Balkh in ancient Bactria near the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e Sharif was a center of the Zoroastrian faith and Buddhism. It later became a political and cultural center after the Muslim conquest in the eighth century.
The western Afghan city of Herat is on the tentative list for its famous citadel, ancient monuments, the mausoleum of the Musalla complex, and the Great Mosque of Herat, which was built in the 13th century.
Bagh-e Babur, also known as Babur’s Gardens, is a 16th-century royal garden from the Timurid era that covers 11 hectares within the city of Kabul. It has attracted more than 400,000 visitors per year after restoration work by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture that began in 2003.
Afghanistan’s intangible heritage has been receiving growing attention with proposed UNESCO nominations for 2022 that include the Behzad style of miniature painting, the Atan-i Milli national dance, and the Afghan rabab — a stringed lute that was played in Afghanistan’s ancient royal courts and is considered a precursor to the Indian sarod.
Ann Williams, an archaeologist and longtime writer for National Geographic magazine, says she also is deeply concerned about the vulnerability of “an astounding Buddhist site” in Logar Province known as Mes Aynak.
“It also happens to be sitting on a copper deposit worth a fortune, ” says Williams, who wrote a chapter about Mes Aynak in her recently published book Lost Cities, Ancient Tombs: 100 Discoveries That Changed the World.
The archaeological sites of Mes Aynak contain a vast complex of fortified ancient Buddhist monasteries, a citadel, a Zoroastrian fire temple, ancient copper works, smelting workshops, a mint, miners’ homes, and market areas.
Artifacts have been recovered there from the Bronze Age, including some dating back more than 3,000 years.
In 2007, the internationally recognized Afghan government granted a 30-year lease to the China Metallurgical Group to mine copper there.
That $3 billion contract in the biggest foreign investment and private business venture in Afghanistan’s history.
Full-scale mining operations would destroy all of the archaeological sites. But that work was put on hold to give archaeologists time to try to save Mes Aynak’s cultural treasures.
It remains unclear whether the Taliban will allow the mining work to proceed in order to receive desperately needed income from China.
But the Taliban has previously denounced the archaeological work there as “promoting Buddhism.”
Williams concludes that Mes Ayak is now “threatened by both looters and commercial copper-mining pressures” under the new Taliban regime.
“Archaeologists have labored to rescue as much as they can, but who knows how much more will be lost,” Williams says. “It breaks my heart.”
Taliban Promises
Critics who doubt the Taliban’s resolve to protect Afghanistan’s pre-Islamic treasures note that the Taliban had made similar promises before it destroy the Bamiyan Buddhas in 2001.
That same year, angry Taliban fighters with hammers also stormed into the National Museum of Afghanistan in Kabul.
They went from room to room, destroying thousands of objects in the collection that they deemed as un-Islamic or idolatrous.
Museum workers spent the next two decades trying to piece those artifacts back together, with the museum’s recovery beginning in earnest in 2004.
The director of the National Museum, Mohammad Fahim Rahimi, saw encouraging signs from the Taliban in August shortly after the group stormed into Kabul.
With no international or Afghan security forces to guard the museum, Rahimi called on the Taliban to guard the priceless ancient treasures from looters.
The Taliban obliged in accordance with the leadership’s February declaration that ancient artifacts and relics “form a part of our country’s history, identity, and rich culture,” and that “all have an obligation to robustly protect, monitor, and preserve these artifacts.”
“All mujahedin must prevent excavation of antiquities and preserve all historic sites to safeguard them from damage, destruction, and decay,” the statement said.
Up to now, that has created an ironic scenario in which the Taliban continues to guard the restored relics that the group destroyed two decades earlier.
But the Taliban has not yet announced its long-term plans for the museum.
The fate of the museum’s collections also is unclear in cities like Ghazni, Herat, Bamiyan, and Mazar-e Sharif.
However, former UNESCO employees already have confirmed that about 1,000 priceless artifacts stored at warehouses in Bamiyan were stolen or destroyed shortly after the Taliban takeover.
Saifurrahman Mohammadi, a Taliban member appointed to the Taliban’s cultural affairs office in Bamiyan, blames that on looting before the Taliban arrived when troops of the previous Afghan government fled and left behind a security vacuum.
Francesco Bandarin, the former director of UNESCO’s World Heritage Center, says it is not difficult to imagine there could be “grave consequences” for the control and conservation of Afghanistan’s most important monuments and archaeological sites.
In an opinion piece published in late August by The Art Newspaper, Bandarin said Afghan heritage “is at serious risk of attacks and destruction as well as the collapse of the management structures built up in recent years to conserve and protect the country’s ancient past.”
“If the more extremist factions of the Taliban were to control Afghanistan’s next government, its notorious history of cultural destruction could be repeated,” Bandarin concluded.
Rahimi says he hopes the Taliban has learned that preserving ancient history is not against Islamic law.
“Nobody is worshipping these objects,” Rahimi says. “Everybody considers these objects as historical items showing our history.”
But if the Taliban shows over time that it has not changed its mentality, Rahimi says all of his museum’s work during the past two decades will be lost — not only the cultural objects, but the cherished values that Afghans have about their history and identity.
Written and reported by Ron Synovitz with reporting by RFE/RL’s Radio Azadi.
Press TV
November 10, 2021
Iran’s security chief says the United States and its coalition allies must be held accountable for the myriad of crises Afghanistan is facing today, adding the “least responsibility” they bear is to compensate for all the damage they have inflicted on the Afghan people over the past two decades.
Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) Ali Shamkhani made the remarks at the third edition of the Delhi Regional Security Dialogue on Afghanistan, a meeting of national security advisers from regional countries, which kicked off in the Indian capital earlier on Wednesday.
“Twenty years ago, the United States occupied Afghanistan under the pretext of confronting the Taliban and al-Qaeda, claiming to be fighting terrorism and preaching that ‘I want to turn Afghanistan into a role model and a source of inspiration,” he said.
However, instead of acting on such a claim, it made the situation in Afghanistan even worse, he said. “Terrorism, poverty and misery, as well as drug cultivation and trafficking and migration, increased while a large number of innocent people in Afghanistan were massacred by American fighter jets at weddings and mourning ceremonies for vague reasons. The state- and nation-building claimed by the United States ground to a halt.”
Shamkhani said the US turned out to be a failure even in its “most basic role, i.e. the establishment of the army and security system,” which quickly collapsed after Washington and its allies left Afghanistan and the Taliban group took over.
Having faced a “humiliating defeat,” the United States was forced to escape from Afghanistan, after inflicting huge damage on the country, most significantly the carnage of thousands of innocent men, women, and children, Shamkhani added.
He said the US eventually “became a lesson to all those who seek their survival in resorting to fake powers like the United States instead of relying on their own resources.”
The Iranian official said the Americans “acted deceitfully” even in the issue of peace in Afghanistan and had no plans to promote peace in the country contrary to its claims. Washington, he added, was only after finding a way out of the crisis of its own making and chose to cause trouble for the region and the entire world due to its “hegemonic nature and superiority complex.”
“That is why the Islamic Republic of Iran did not take part in any so-called peace or dialogue format or process that the United States would create” during the occupation period, Shamkhani said.
On the contrary, he said, Iran “tried, through cooperation with internal and external players in Afghanistan, to move toward plans which would truly serve the interests of our oppressed brothers and sisters in Afghanistan and those of the neighbors and the entire region, as well as [plans] that would establish broad-based, lasting peace and stability in Afghanistan that would meet the common interests of us all.”
Shamkhani also stressed the need for the United Nations to play a role in the consultations and efforts to assist the Afghan people.
“Today, Afghanistan is left with a pile of problems and we are all duty-bound to drive the country to safety,” the top security official said.
“The focus should now be for the United States and its partners in the 20-year-long occupation of Afghanistan to accept responsibility. Compensating for the losses of life and material damage inflicted to the people of Afghanistan is the least responsibility of the occupiers.
He said everyone knows, however, that a great portion of the damage was “irreparable,” adding, “Is it possible to compensate for the lost lives or the damage inflicted to the human body and soul, or to restore the lost time to build a nation and a country? On the contrary, we see that the United States, in a hostile and arrogant act, has banned the Afghan people’s access to their small assets,” referring to the sanctions the US imposed on the country after its exit.
Shamkahni also pointed to the threats posed by the growth of Daesh and other Takfiri terrorist groups in Afghanistan to the country’s neighbors and those states in the region that have no common borders with it.
He further highlighted three issues of concern in Afghanistan that should be resolved through regional cooperation, namely the involvement of some countries in transferring Takfiri terrorists to Afghanistan, the spread of poverty and humanitarian crisis, and the migration crisis.
Shamkhani on duties of regional states
He enumerated the “important duties” that Afghanistan’s neighbors need to fulfill in the process to help settle the crises unfolding in the South Asian state, including efforts “to hold to account the countries behind the current situation in Afghanistan,” “establish an inclusive government comprised of all ethnicities” there, and tackle the humanitarian crisis gripping the war-torn country.
“The Islamic Republic of Iran declares its readiness to offer all the facilities at its disposal, such as roads and ports, to help resolve this [humanitarian] crisis,” the top security official said.
Shamkhani said regional countries should also “exert pressure on the United States to unblock the financial resources of the oppressed Afghan nation so it can benefit from its own resources and facilities.”
Furthermore, he added, the participants in the summit should work to confront Daesh and Takfiri terrorists operating in Afghanistan, identify the channels through which they are financed, and cut those lines.
The neighbors should likewise address the migration crisis and help the countries hosting Afghan refugees, according to him.
Shamkhani elaborated on the case of Iran and said the country had been hosting over three million Afghan migrants and paying around 96 percent of the costs on its own, while international institutions had only provided for four percent only.
He warned that Iran “we will not be able to host a new influx [of refugees] due to the unjust sanctions imposed against our people. In case other countries and relevant international institutions fail to offer assistance with this issue, we won’t be able to manage [the situation] and the Western states, like it or not, will be affected.”
The Iranian official called for broadening the topics on the agenda of the Afghanistan summits and proposed the formation of a permanent secretariat aimed at following up on the resolutions adopted at the events.
He said Tehran could host the proposed secretariat.
India urges close consultations among Afghanistan neighbors
Addressing the meeting, India’s National Security Adviser Ajit Dova expressed hope that the summit will be productive and help bolster “our collective security” in the region.
“This is a time for close consultations amongst us,” he said. “I am confident that our deliberations will be productive, useful and will contribute to help the people in Afghanistan and enhance our collective security,” he added.
India’s security chief said that the recent developments in Afghanistan have important implications, not only for the conflict-ravaged country but also for its neighbors and the entire region.
China did not attend the forum citing “scheduling reasons,” while Pakistan decided to skip it, too.
The first two editions of the event were held in Iran in September 2018 and December 2019.
Initiated by Iran, the third gathering of the Regional Security Dialogue, which had been postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, is held two months after the Taliban took control of Kabul.
Related
Reuters: As many as 4,000-5,000 Afghans have been crossing into Iran daily since the Taliban seized Kabul in August and hundreds of thousands more are expected to arrive in the coming winter, the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) said on Wednesday. Click here to read more (external link).
Reuters: Tajik officials blamed U.S. bureaucracy on Wednesday for a near three-month delay in evacuating U.S.-trained Afghan pilots, who had flown their aircraft to Tajikistan to escape the Taliban takeover of their country in August. Click here to read more (external link).
Related
BBC News: Afghanistan’s ex-finance minister has blamed the government’s fall on corrupt officials who invented “ghost soldiers” and took payments from the Taliban. Khalid Payenda told the BBC that most of the 300,000 troops and police on the government’s books did not exist. Click here to read more (external link).
8am: Locals in Takhar told Hasht-e Subh that Taliban forces had shot dead two former military commanders, Shoaib Aryaei and Sohrab Haqqani. The incident took place on Tuesday morning in the Chahaab district of Takhar province in northern Afghanistan. Click here to read more (external link).
Ariana: The United Nations has paid nearly $8 million in salaries to some 23,500 health workers across Afghanistan over the past month, bypassing the health ministry in a test case to inject much-needed liquidity into a dire Afghan economy. Click here to read more (external link).
Related