Imran Khan
News18: Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan has called Taliban “normal civilians”, not military outfits, and asked how the country is supposed to hunt them down when it has three million Afghan refugees at the border. In an interview with PBS NewsHour aired Tuesday night, Khan stressed that Pakistan hosts three million Aghan refugees of which the majority are Pashtuns, the same ethnic group as the Taliban fighters. Click here to read more (external link).
Tolo News: Fahim Anwari in swimming and Kmimia Yosefi in athletics are the two Afghan athletes who will compete in the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games on Friday. Anwari has been training for the past six months in Russia to prepare. Click here to read more (external link).
Ariana: Over 60 people have been killed and dozens are still missing after a deadly flash flood swept away Mehrdish village in Nuristan province on Wednesday night. Nuristan Governor Haafiz Abdul Qayum said floods swept through the village in Nuristan’s Kamdesh district on Wednesday night, completely destroying the village. Click here to read more (external link).
Ashraf Ghani
Jeff Seldin
VOA News
July 29, 2021
WASHINGTON – The Afghan government in Kabul will be fighting for its life and could well fall to the Taliban after the United States completes its military withdrawal from the country in August, according to a U.S. government watchdog charged with monitoring events on the ground.
Despite a series of cautiously optimistic assessments by high-ranking U.S. military officials and Afghan leaders, a new report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) describes the situation as “bleak” and echoes concerns that Afghan security forces are not ready to mount any meaningful resistance.
“The overall trend is clearly unfavorable to the Afghan government, which could face an existential crisis if it isn’t addressed and reversed,” Special Inspector General John Sopko wrote in the report, released Wednesday.
“The ANDSF (Afghan National Defense and Security Forces) has retaken some districts and the Afghan government still controls all 34 provincial capitals, including Kabul,” he added. “But from public reporting, the ANDSF appeared surprised and unready, and is now on its back foot.”
Ever since U.S. President Joe Biden announced in April that American combat troops would leave Afghanistan, U.S. officials have been careful not to minimize the challenge facing the Afghan government.
Just this past Sunday, the commander of U.S. Central Command, General Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie, told reporters in Kabul that the Afghan government “faces a stern test.”
But he added that despite attempts by the Taliban to create a sense of inevitability, “there is no preordained conclusion to this fight.”
Afghan President Ashraf Ghani has also promised better results as well, saying that the Afghan military will be able to regain momentum by focusing its efforts on defending urban areas.
Help has also come in the form of U.S. airstrikes in support of Afghan forces, despite the U.S. no longer having aircraft based in Afghanistan. Officials have promised the strikes will continue unless the Taliban scale back their military offensive.
The SIGAR report, however, warns the Taliban have provided no reason to believe they will ease off on their attacks.
“Despite continued calls from U.S. officials for the Taliban to reduce its levels of violence in line with their commitments in the U.S.-Taliban agreement … the Taliban have not done so,” the report said. “Each three-month period since the February 29, 2020, U.S.-Taliban agreement has had significantly more EIAs (enemy-initiated attacks) than their corresponding quarters the previous year.”
The report also suggests that the Taliban, beyond having momentum, appear to have a definitive psychological edge.
NATO military officials told SIGAR that Afghan National Army units routinely refused to conduct operations without the presence of Afghan special operations forces.
Additionally, SIGAR said that when special forces have been brought in, “they are misused to perform tasks intended for conventional forces such as route clearance.”
The SIGAR report also repeated earlier warnings that the Afghan air force is “overtaxed” and will not likely be able to sustain its current pace of operation.
“All airframes are flying at least 25% over their recommended scheduled-maintenance intervals,” the report said. “This is exacerbating supply-chain issues and delaying scheduled maintenance and battle-damage repair.”
Four key airframes — the A-29 Super Tucano light attack plane, the C-208 Caravan light airlift plane, the MD 530 Cayuse Warrior light attack helicopter and the UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter — “failed to meet readiness benchmarks,” the SIGAR report added.
The Afghan air force, in particular, has been dependent on U.S. government contractors for maintenance and logistics. But as of last month, SIGAR reported that the number of contractors had been cut in half because of the ongoing U.S. withdrawal.
Ayaz Gul
VOA News
July 28, 2021
ISLAMABAD – Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi reportedly pressed the leaders of Afghanistan’s insurgent Taliban group Wednesday to “make a clean break” from all terrorists, including the anti-China East Turkistan Islamic Movement, or ETIM, during a meeting he hosted.
Officials from both sides said Taliban deputy political chief Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, who heads the group’s office in Qatar, led his nine-member delegation at the talks in the northern city of Tianjin.
The meeting, some analysts said, underscores Beijing’s warming ties with the Islamist insurgent group and the Taliban’s growing clout on the global stage.
“Wang pointed out that the Afghan Taliban is an important military and political force in Afghanistan and is expected to play an important role in the country’s peace, reconciliation and reconstruction process,” according to the Chinese foreign ministry.
The talks came as the United States and NATO have withdrawn almost all of their last remaining troops from Afghanistan. The military exit stems from Washington’s landmark February 2020 agreement with the Taliban.
But the ensuing slow-moving U.S.-brokered peace talks between the insurgents and the Afghan government have failed to deliver any outcome, raising fears the intra-Afghan conflict could turn into a full-blown civil war once all foreign forces are out of the country.
“The hasty withdrawal of the U.S. and NATO troops from Afghanistan actually marks the failure of the U.S. policy toward Afghanistan,” Wang said. Beijing has stressed the need for foreign forces to stage what it called a “responsible withdrawal” to ensure no security vacuum was created.
The Taliban has unleashed a widespread offensive against Afghan security forces and captured vast areas across the country since the U.S.-led coalition forces formally began their exit from the country. The deteriorating security has raised fears transnational terrorist groups could use Afghan soil to plot international attacks.
The Taliban in their deal with the U.S. have pledged to cut ties with all terrorist groups, including al-Qaida, and to prevent Afghan soil from being used to threaten American national security interests. But critics and the latest U.N. reports say the Taliban have not yet severed ties with terrorists.
“We hope the Afghan Taliban will make a clean break with all terrorist organizations, including the ETIM, and resolutely and effectively combat them to remove obstacles, play a positive role and create enabling conditions for security, stability, development and cooperation in the region,” Wang said.
Baradar was quoted as assuring the Chinese hosts the Taliban “will never allow any force to use Afghan territory to engage in acts detrimental to China.”
China and the United Nations have outlawed the ETIM as a global terrorist organization. The militant outfit claims to be representing and fighting for minority Uyghur Muslims in Chinese western Xinjiang region.
Beijing’s crackdown against the militants has led to widespread international allegations of rights abuses in Xinjiang. China denies the charges.
The Taliban’s recent onslaught has taken control of seven border crossings used by landlocked Afghanistan for trade with neighboring countries. Those countries include Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Iran, China and Pakistan, effectively depriving the beleaguered U.S.-backed Afghan government of millions of dollars in customs revenues.
Insurgent leaders have traveled to all of those countries, barring Pakistan, in a bid to assure their respective governments that Taliban advances have remained within the Afghan territory and do not threaten the regional stability.
Wang emphasized the need for warring Afghans to negotiate a peace arrangement to bring security to their war-ravaged country and ensure regional stability.
“The Afghan Taliban has the utmost sincerity to work toward and realize peace. It stands ready to work with other parties to establish a political framework in Afghanistan that is broadly-based, inclusive and accepted by the people and protect human rights, especially rights of women and children,” Baradar said.
While the Afghan government objected to the Taliban’s recent visits to neighboring countries and Russia, the foreign ministry said Wednesday that Beijing informed Kabul in advance on the insurgents’ two-day visit to China.
“With a U.S. exit from Afghanistan and the inability of [Afghan] President Ashraf Ghani to secure the country’s borders, neighbors and regional powers have to hedge their bets regarding the future,” said Torek Farhadi, a former Afghan government adviser.
“While the Taliban give promises of security to Afghanistan’s neighbors, Kabul keeps asking for help. This perception of an embattled President Ghani doesn’t make for good looks,” Farhadi noted.
Related
Abubakar Siddique
RFE/RL’s Radio Azadi
July 28, 2021
Sadaf Siddiqi, a pseudonym for a young Afghan journalist, began her career with great hopes five years ago. She freelanced for local and national media outlets in the northeastern Afghan city of Kunduz, where she soon became a known face after becoming a presenter at a local television station.
But rising insecurity and personal threats forced Siddiqi to give up her television appearances. She turned to local and national radio stations, where she hosted shows on social issues and presented news programs. But as the Taliban advanced across Kunduz, the surrounding province known by the same name as its capital, she stopped presenting and now ekes out a living by writing radio scripts.
In its advances in Kunduz and other parts of northern Afghanistan, the hard-line group imposes its ultra-conservative and often harsh ideology on residents. In many regions, Afghans feel that the Taliban is taking them back to its so-called emirate, when women were mostly barred from work and public life.
“The space for women to work in Kunduz has shrunk,” Siddiqi told Gandhara. “Many women have stopped working altogether. Many families have stopped letting women work for the media because they live on the frontlines or other restive areas,” she added. “Even our male colleagues now spend most of their time at the office to avoid going home” to face concerns or criticism.
Siddiqi says that as a conservative region, Kunduz was always a difficult place for women journalists. “Very few women now work as journalists but all of them now do so by concealing their real names and identity,” she noted. “They work in secret.”
In nearby Mazar-e Sharif, the biggest city in northern Afghanistan, Shakiba Saeedi, a young journalist, covers the region for Hasht-e Subh, a leading daily in Afghanistan.
“Journalism is my passion and it is a major responsibility, so I am continuing working despite the major changes in our environment,” she told Gandhara. “Our major challenge is security as fighting continues in many provinces.”
Saeedi says while the government often has complaints about the work of journalists, Taliban control would be devastating.
“The ideology of the Taliban is clear to everyone,” she said. “The Taliban is the same as it was in power two decades ago when it deprived women of key liberties,” she said. “It deprived women of the right to choose, education, employment, and even the right to go out of their houses,” she added. “We are now seeing that the Taliban is again imposing the same restrictions on women in the areas they control.”
The Taliban denies threatening or pressuring journalists and accuses the Afghan government of using the media against it. But in May Zabihullah Mujahid, a purported Taliban spokesman, warned those Afghan journalists whom he accused of giving one-sided coverage favoring the Afghan government to stop or “face the consequences.”
Mahbuba Muhammadi, a correspondent for Salam Watandar Radio in Mazar-e Sharif, however, quit her job and left Afghanistan in April after what she described as incessant threats from the Taliban.
“I received threats from many [social media] IDs and other forums,” she told Radio Azadi. “I had no option but to flee my homeland,” she added. “Every time I attempted to report the threats to [the Afghan government’s] security officials, they paid little attention and even accused me of looking for making an excuse to leave Afghanistan.”
Crumbling Press Freedom
While Saeedi and Siddiqi are among the handful of women journalists still living in Afghan cities virtually surrounded by the advancing Taliban, scores have left the profession as dozens like Muhammadi have moved abroad in search of security and new opportunities.
Press freedom and security for journalists took a nosedive in Afghanistan after the militants began targeting journalists and civil society leaders late last year. Women journalists were particularly singled out as several were killed in attacks across the country while others were forced to abandon their profession for their safety.
Afghan media watchdogs are already accusing the Taliban of imposing restrictions on journalists. The hard-line Islamist movement has banned 20 radio stations in the rural districts it has recently overrun, according to Nai, a local press freedom watchdog. Other stations in the region now find themselves forced to broadcast Taliban chants and antigovernment propaganda.
In a major recent report on threats to Afghan journalists — women in particular — Human Rights Watch, the global media watchdog, established that the Taliban has engaged in violence, threats, and intimidation in areas it controls as well as in cities still ruled by the Afghan government.
“Those making the threats often have an intimate knowledge of a journalist’s work, family, and movements and use this information to either compel them to self-censor, leave their work altogether, or face violent consequences,” the report noted. “Provincial and district-level Taliban commanders and fighters also make oral and written threats against journalists beyond the areas they control. Journalists say that the widespread nature of the threats has meant that no media workers feel safe.”
Najib Sharifi, president of Afghan Journalists Safety Committee, says some 50 journalists have either stopped working or have left areas now under Taliban control. “We have at least five media stations, private media outlets, that have been taken over by the Taliban, and through these five stations, Taliban broadcast their propaganda,” he told VOA. “They have also stopped broadcasting music and voices of women.”
The Afghan government attracted criticism this week when its intelligence agency arrested four Afghan journalists upon their return from Spin Boldak, a border district recently overrun by the Taliban. The authorities accuse them of spreading enemy propaganda after they interviewed Taliban members in the district, which serves as one of Afghanistan’s main border crossings with Pakistan.
“Illegal detentions of journalists will prevent them from going to war zones and reporting on the situation of those trapped in conflict areas,” Nai said in a July 27 press release. “This is against the principles of freedom of expression and human rights.”
Rising Insecurity
Insecurity in Kandahar has already prompted scores of women journalists to give up their jobs. Months before the Taliban began a major offensive to retake its former stronghold, at least 10 of the province’s 40 journalists had abandoned their profession. They were spurred by the killing of women journalists in the eastern city of Jalalabad where at least four women journalists were killed in targeted attacks in December and March.
“If a female journalist works for radio or television, she faces a lot of abuse and pressure as people call them bad names,” Arya Rehmat, producer of social issues shows for an independent Kandahar radio station, told Radio Azadi. “We are also accused of corrupting society’s thinking.”
Najiba, another Kandahar journalist who goes by one name only, says that working as journalist is increasingly difficult. “The lack of security is the major problem our sisters face,” she told Radio Azadi. “We used to face economic problems because women journalists were not empowered and are prevented from rising up in the hierarchy.”
Marina Fanahi, another journalist in Kandahar, says that for almost all women journalists in the region getting permission to work in the news media is a major hurdle. “They face pressure from society and have to put up with negative behavior from their colleagues,” she told Radio Azadi.
In Mazar-e Sharif, Saeedi hopes that she will not be compelled to leave Afghanistan even if the Taliban returns to power.
“Our homeland is like our mother. No one is able to abandon their mother,” she said. “I hope that I don’t have to see the day when I or another journalist or a common citizen has to abandon our homeland.”
The names of RFE/RL’s Radio Azadi correspondents in Afghanistan are being withheld for their protection.
Baradar
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
July 28, 2021
The Taliban says a nine-member delegation led by Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the co-founder of the militant group, has held talks with Chinese officials in Beijing.
“Politics, the economy and issues related to the security of both countries and the current situation of Afghanistan and the peace process were discussed in the meetings,” Taliban spokesman Mohammad Naeem tweeted on July 28.
The two-day visit comes amid an all-out offensive by the Taliban across Afghanistan, with which China shares a border, as the United States continues an accelerated pullout from the country that is targeted for completion by the end of next month.
The militants have been taking districts and border crossings around the country while peace talks with the Afghan government in Qatar have failed to make any substantive progress.
Taliban representatives and Afghan government officials met for talks in the Qatari capital, Doha, on July 17, but little came out of the meeting besides promises of more talks.
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told the Taliban that Beijing respects Afghanistan’s territorial integrity, the Foreign Ministry in Beijing said.
The Taliban delegation assured China they will not allow Afghanistan to be used as a base by groups plotting against another country, Naeem said.
“The Islamic Emirate assured China that Afghanistan’s soil would not be used against any country’s security,” he said. “They (China) promised not to interfere in Afghanistan’s affairs, but instead help to solve problems and bring peace.”
U.S. President Joe Biden told Afghan President Ashraf Ghani on July 23 that the United States too will continue its support for the Afghan government.
Biden also reaffirmed the U.S. commitment to continue supporting the Afghan security forces to defend themselves. NATO leader Jens Stoltenberg on July 27 issued a similar statement.
With reporting by Reuters and AFP
Imran Khan
Ayaz Gul
VOA News
July 28, 2021
ISLAMABAD – Pakistan’s prime minister says that America’s accelerated troop exit from Afghanistan has left Washington with no “bargaining power” for arranging a peace deal between warring Afghans.
“I think the U.S. has really messed it up in Afghanistan,” Imran Khan said in an interview with PBS NewsHour aired on Tuesday night.
Khan stressed that the United States and NATO allies had about 150,000 troops in Afghanistan and that was the time when they ought to go for a political solution rather than trying to militarily end the war with the Taliban insurgency there.
“But once they had reduced the troops to barely 10,000, and then, when they gave an exit date, the Taliban thought they had won. And so, therefore, it was very difficult for now to get them (the Taliban) to compromise,” he told the American broadcaster.
President Joe Biden said earlier this month that “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.”
The Taliban has captured vast areas across Afghanistan, including key trade routes with neighboring countries, since U.S.-led foreign troops officially began leaving the country in early May.
The international military drawdown has largely been completed and all American as well as allied troops will have left Afghanistan by the end of August under orders from Biden amid fears the Taliban could regain control of the war-ravaged country.
“Here were the U.S. for two decades in Afghanistan trying to force a military solution. The reason why we are in this position now is because the military solution failed,” Khan said.
U.S. and Afghan officials have long accused Pakistan of allowing the Taliban to use sanctuaries in the neighboring country to direct attacks inside Afghanistan, charges Islamabad denies.
Khan’s government maintains it has used whatever leverage Islamabad had over the Taliban to bring them to the table for peace talks with Washington. The negotiations culminated in the February 2020 deal, setting the stage for all American troops to withdraw from the Afghan war after 20 years.
But the ensuing peace talks between the Taliban and the U.S.-backed Afghan government have met with little success and largely stalled.
“Absolutely, there’s nothing more we can do, except push them as much as we can for a political settlement. That’s all,” Khan told the PBS show when asked if Pakistan needs to do more to press the Taliban to end their violent campaign.
Afghan President Ashraf Ghani earlier in the month alleged 10,000 jihadi fighters have recently entered his country from sanctuaries in Pakistan and other areas to join Taliban ranks.
“This is absolute nonsense,” Khan responded. “Why don’t they give us evidence of this? When they say that Pakistan gave safe havens, sanctuaries to (the) Taliban, where are these safe havens?,” he asked.
The prime minister went on to explain insurgents could hide among the refugee camps in Pakistan that still host three million Afghans, saying the Taliban constitute the majority in the refugee population.
“(The) Taliban are not some military outfit. They are normal civilians. And if there are some civilians in these camps, how is Pakistan supposed to hunt these people down? How can you call them sanctuaries?” he asked.
Khan feared a “protracted civil war” would pose security challenges to Pakistan and could trigger a fresh refugee influx that his country could ill-afford due to its economic challenges.
He defended his decision to not allow the U.S. to establish military bases on Pakistani soil for anti-terrorism operations in Afghanistan after all American troops leave the neighboring country.
Khan explained that Pakistan’s decision to join the U.S.-led war on terrorism after the September 11, 2001 strikes against America triggered a domestic militant backlash, killing 70,000 Pakistanis and inflicting an estimated $150 billion in losses to the national economy.
“Now, if there’s a conflict going on in Afghanistan and there are (U.S.) bases in Pakistan, we then become targets,” he said.
“We want to be partners in peace, but not in conflict,” Khan emphasized when asked what kind of relationship Islamabad wants with Washington.
Khan’s interview came while his national security advisor, Moeed Yusuf, is in Washington for official talks with his U.S. counterpart, Jake Sullivan, on how to move a traditionally rollercoaster bilateral relationship. The head of the Pakistani spy agency is also said to be accompanying Yusuf.