Members of Afghan Robotics Team Reach Mexico

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VOA News
August 25, 2021

Five members of an Afghan girls robotics team have arrived in Mexico after evacuating from their home country.

The girls landed in Mexico City on Tuesday night and were welcomed at the airport by Mexican Foreign Secretary Marcelo Ebrard.

“We received the first applicants for humanitarian status in Mexico from Afghanistan,” Ebrard tweeted late Tuesday. “They are part of a robotics team from that country and uphold a dream: a world with gender equality.”

The robotics team made up of girls and women as young as 14 years old gained attention in 2017 when they traveled to the United States to take part in an international competition.

Last year, they worked to develop an open-source, low-cost ventilator as hospitals in many countries faced shortages of equipment to help coronavirus patients.

The Associated Press quoted one team member Tuesday saying the team was grateful to Mexico “for saving our lives.” She said that thanks to Mexico’s actions, “our story will not end in a sad way” because of the Taliban.

Some information for this report came from the Associated Press and Reuters.

Related

Afghan Women Report Some Harassment as Taliban Promise Security

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Ayesha Tanzeem
VOA News
August 24, 2021

ISLAMABAD – Female schoolteachers and other employed women in two provinces of Afghanistan are reporting harassment by Taliban fighters even as a Taliban spokesman Tuesday promised that the group is forming a policy to keep women secure.

Women in Takhar province, in the country’s northeast, and Kabul province tell VOA that there are new restrictions concerning how they dress and work.

“Taliban are very aggressive with women here. They want women to wear chadari,” a female teacher in Takhar told VOA. A chadari is a full body covering that has small holes to see through.

The teacher explained that the Taliban in the province were so strict that they did not even allow women to wear a black burqa, a long black gown with a scarf that covers the head and face. In addition, they want women to go out of the house with a “mahram,” a man from whom a woman does not need to hide her face. In conservative Islamic thought, mahram can include a limited number of close male relatives such as fathers, husbands or brothers.

“Women have a lot of problems here. Everyone needs to go outside for something, and you cannot have a mahram (close male relative) with you at all times,” she said.

She said Taliban have already barred teachers from teaching students of the opposite sex.

“They also ordered that the male and female students must be separated. And they changed the education curriculum,” she said.

The changes in curriculum removed cultural and sports-related subjects and added more Islamist teachings, such as the study of the Quran and the life of the Prophet Muhammad, even though those subjects were already part of the curriculum prior to the Taliban takeover.

In Kabul, the Taliban told the female staff of at least one hospital to separate their workplaces from men or stay at home.

A female VOA reporter who went out of the house wearing a burqa was told by Taliban to cover her face as well.

On Tuesday in Kabul, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said the group’s fighters were “not trained to talk to women.”

“That is why we are asking women to stay home for the time being, but they will keep receiving salaries. As soon as we have a full system in place, women can return to work,” he said. He was speaking in particular about women working in government offices and ministries.

When pressed by a female journalist who was worried about her safety, Mujahid said she need not worry.

“You are civilians. There is no crime being a journalist. You have nothing to fear. You can go back to your province and work,” he said.

He acknowledged that there may have been sporadic incidents of violence or harassment and promised to investigate them.

The Taliban have been trying to present a relatively moderate face to the world to gain international legitimacy. Women, and especially younger women, say they have heard their families’ stories about the Taliban’s last government in the 1990s — when women were beaten for not covering themselves properly, and girls were not allowed to go to school — making it difficult for them to take the Taliban’s words at face value.

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Kabul Mayor Keeps City Running After Taliban Takeover

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Shaista Lami
VOA News
August 24, 2021

WASHINGTON – Mohammad Daoud Sultanzoy is the mayor of Kabul, Afghanistan’s sprawling capital city. And while the Taliban have kept him in office, he has a word of caution for the militant group.

Sultanzoy said in a Monday interview with VOA’s Afghanistan Service: “If the Taliban don’t pay heed to people’s aspirations, they, too, will be seen” as one of the groups that promoted religious, ethnic and regional interests. “And their reputation will be damaged.”

A prominent politician with no ties to the Taliban, Sultanzoy was among a handful of senior officials who were allowed to keep their jobs after Taliban took charge in Kabul on August 15, capping their swift takeover of the country. Most other leaders quit or fled the country.

Sultanzoy said the Taliban had called him the day after entering the capital, a city of nearly 5 million residents, and asked him to continue to do his job.

“So I went to work,” he said. “Until I’m told otherwise, I’ll continue to work. This is my country. I don’t work for any individual or group. I serve my city’s residents. I’m from Kabul, and I’ll live in Kabul.”

A commercial pilot by training, Sultanzoy served as a member of the Afghan parliament from 2005 to 2010 and unsuccessfully ran for president in 2014. Ashraf Ghani, the winner of the 2014 election, later appointed Sultanzoy as a top adviser before putting him in charge of the capital city in March 2020.

Like many other erstwhile Ghani allies, Sultanzoy criticized the former president for fleeing the country without informing members of his own government.

“As members of the Cabinet, we should have been informed,” Sultanzoy said. “At least we should have had a meeting.”

In an August 18 video message from the United Arab Emirates, where he is now living, Ghani defended his decision, saying he was “forced to leave” Afghanistan to avoid bloodshed.

As much of the world fixates on the evacuation of thousands of Americans and Afghans from Kabul, and as Afghanistan still lacks a new national government, city officials have continued to provide basic services, Sultanzoy said.

“Just today and yesterday, we started removing (street and sidewalk) barriers,” he said. “Once security is restored, all these barriers should be removed.”

Speaking at a press conference in Kabul on Tuesday, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said the municipality has also resumed trash collection.

There are problems, however. Taking advantage of the security vacuum, some city residents have recently started building illegal housing at night, Sultanzoy said.

While the Taliban have yet to form a new government, they’ve started hiring new police officers to replace the thousands that quit their jobs after the militants captured the city, he said. And Mujahid said the former head of Kabul’s traffic police force has been reappointed to his post.

“Kabul has a city government. This government should be allowed to function,” Sultanzoy said. “That’s why I didn’t quit my job, because if I had quit my job, it would have been very irresponsible. It would have been an act of treason.”

How Much Will Afghanistan Change Central Asia’s Relations With Russia, China, And The United States?

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Bruce Pannier
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
August 24, 2021

There has been a good deal of speculation about how the withdrawal of foreign forces from Afghanistan and the dramatic change of power there will affect Central Asia’s relations with the big powers.

Some say Russia’s presence in the region will be strengthened, or perhaps China’s, and U.S. influence will be on the wane in the coming years.

It is arguably more likely that little about Central Asia’s relationships with the big powers, as they currently stand, will change at all.

The United States

Some have said the final U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan is a blow to Washington’s reputation in Central Asia and the beginning of an ebb in relations between the United States and those five post-Soviet republics.

But Central Asian governments are unlikely to forget how much 20 years of the U.S.-led military operation in Afghanistan meant to them.

Especially now, with the Taliban seemingly resurgent in Afghanistan, one could argue that no countries benefited more from the U.S. presence in Afghanistan than the states of Central Asia.

After the Taliban reached Central Asian borders in the late 1990s, the governments of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan were on the verge of panicking.

Only Turkmenistan, with its official policy of neutrality, managed to reach an understanding with the Afghan militant group.

After the United States and its allies started military operations in Afghanistan in late 2001, those threats were removed from Central Asia’s borders and northern Afghanistan was a relatively peaceful area until 2013.

During those years, Central Asia was allowed to develop while remaining shielded from Afghan instability thanks to the efforts of the United States, its foreign allies, and Afghan government forces.

While the results of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan might have been unexpected, the pullout itself had been announced 10 years earlier by then-U.S. President Barack Obama; so Central Asia’s leaders knew foreign forces were leaving Afghanistan and had 10 years to prepare for it.

Between 2001 and 2021, the United States helped Central Asia increase its capacity to identify and neutralize threats from Afghanistan through joint training, funding and equipment for border security, and military vehicles including quad bikes, trucks, and (for Uzbekistan) MRAPs (mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles).

The United States provided and still provides aid to Central Asia, recently including COVID-19 vaccines, has attempted to boost trade with the region’s individual states where possible, and has supported efforts by those states to join international organizations like the World Trade Organization (WTO).

And the United States provides a counterweight to Russia and China, allowing Central Asia to avoid falling too much under the influence of either Moscow or Beijing.

Russia

Some feel Russian influence in Central Asia will be significantly enhanced now that the United States and its allies have departed Afghanistan.

In terms of security in Central Asia, Russia has long had a presence there. That began long before U.S. and allied troops were deployed to bases in Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan to support the operations in Afghanistan.

Russia’s 201st Division has been based in Tajikistan since the 1940s, and under the terms of an agreement signed in 2012 will remain there until at least 2042.

Russia opened a military base at Kant, in Kyrgyzstan, in 2003, after U.S. forces were already stationed in Kyrgyzstan, and, under the terms of an agreement signed in 2012, Russian forces will stay there until at least 2027, with an option to extend that deal by another five years after that.

Technically, the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), which allies Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan, runs the base at Kant. But nearly all the troops and military equipment currently there come from Russia.

There has been no sign that Russia plans to increase its military presence in Kyrgyzstan or Tajikistan and, so far, no word that Russia is seeking to use bases in other Central Asian countries.

Russia has recently conducted joint military exercises with Tajikistan and Uzbekistan near the Afghan border, and CSTO exercises in Kyrgyzstan started on August 24.

But Russia did the same thing in the late 1990s and has regularly conducted such exercises with Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan throughout the years the United States was in Afghanistan. And after Shavkat Mirziyoev became Uzbekistan’s president in 2016, Moscow also renewed military drills with Uzbekistan.

Certainly, Moscow could play on Central Asian fears of threats from Afghanistan — most of which the Kremlin has stoked for 25 years — and use its new clout in the region to pressure Central Asian states into moving closer to Russia and further from the West, or even from China.

Russia might also convince Uzbekistan to rejoin the CSTO, which Tashkent has joined and left twice already (1992-1999 and 2006-2012), or even pry Turkmenistan out of isolation and firmly under Russian influence, a process already under way in recent years.

But Moscow has been sending mixed messages lately about the threat from Afghanistan.

Russian officials are now downplaying the dangers of the Taliban, with some suggesting a Taliban government will be easier to cooperate with than the UN-backed government that has now mostly fled, which is not what the Central Asians were hearing from Moscow for the last quarter of a century.

Russian officials now contend that the threat out of Afghanistan comes from the non-Afghan Islamic extremists in that country, some of whom are citizens of Central Asian countries, who could cross the border into Central Asia and create instability.

The Central Asian governments might well agree with that assessment.

But even if that’s the case, how much could Russia help them?

Unless such groups were foolish enough to try to cross en masse, there is little that Russian firepower could do to help Central Asians.

Small groups of extremists or individuals crossing into Central Asia to carry out terrorist attacks are difficult to repel and, in the end, would represent an internal threat to any country in question.

Bilateral or multilateral defense treaties are based on foreign or external threats, and partners are not bound to come to the aid of an individual country facing a threat from domestic enemies. Moreover, to date in Central Asia, none has ever done so.

China

There have been suggestions that Beijing might take advantage of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan to expand its influence in Central Asia.

But Chinese sway in the region is mainly economic, although it has undoubtedly helped Central Asian states contend with perceived security threats (mainly so such threats don’t spill over into China).

China sells weapons in Central Asia, and has conducted joint military exercises and drills both bilaterally and within the framework of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) that also includes Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, as well as Russia, Pakistan, and India.

Beijing also operates a small military base in a remote area of eastern Tajikistan guarding the high mountain gateway to China.

Some think China could send troops to help Central Asia if the region were being destabilized from elements coming out of Afghanistan.

This is unlikely to happen.

Deploying Chinese forces to prop up a government in a predominantly Muslim country could compound any security problems a Central Asian state might have, potentially making it a magnet for jihadists.

The brutal campaign Beijing has launched against its own Muslims — Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and Hue — has already blackened China’s reputation and angered many outsiders.

Furthermore, although China has built up a formidable army in the last 25 years, its history of foreign military ventures since the communists came to power does not engender much confidence.

Chinese troops took appalling losses in Korea in the early 1950s and during the brief Ussuri River battle with Soviet forces in 1969, as well as during the incursion into Vietnam in 1979. Beijing has not sent its military to fight in another country in more than 40 years.

In 2016, two Chinese peacekeepers were killed in South Sudan — news that shocked the Chinese public. Explaining the loss of dozens more Chinese soldiers in another foreign venture could prove problematic for Beijing.

That said, China has invested a large amount of money and been able to extract huge amounts of raw materials — including oil, natural gas, uranium, iron, and more — over the course of more than two decades in Central Asia.

The region’s governments have seemingly profited from those ventures, and some of their citizens have found jobs working on Chinese projects.

But the days of the huge Chinese projects in Central Asia — the oil and gas pipelines, the new railways and roads, oil refineries, and other infrastructure — are coming to an end, if they are not over already.

China will continue to invest in Central Asia and extract valuable resources. But Beijing will not be spending the amounts of money it did 10 and 20 years ago. And the bills for loans that Central Asian governments took from China during those years are coming due, leaving many of those countries hard-pressed to make payments.

Anti-Chinese sentiment is on the rise in Central Asia and could increase as citizens increasingly view their governments as having sold out to Beijing.

Does Central Asia Need Help?

Central Asian governments’ fears regarding Afghanistan could lead them to make rash decisions about foreign partnerships in the coming months.

But, in truth, they might not need much outside help at all.

The first time the Taliban showed up at their doorstep, all five Central Asian states had been independent for a mere five years and the civil war in Tajikistan was still raging.

There was good reason at the time for their respective leaders to be concerned about their future in a region of rising instability.

Now, these countries have been independent for 30 years, the Tajik civil war is almost 25 years in the past, Central Asia is generally seen as a stable region, and regional ties are better than they have been since the early years of independence.

Their militaries are larger and better equipped.

Their borders with Afghanistan are better defended.

And they are all more familiar with the Taliban now than they were when that militant group first swept through Afghanistan in the second half of the 1990s.

Their best defense could be their own unity.

Copyright (c) 2021. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Ste 400, Washington DC 20036.

Official: Biden to Stick to Aug 31 Deadline to Withdraw US Forces from Afghanistan

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Joe Biden

Steve Herman, Jeff Seldin
VOA News
August 24, 2021

WHITE HOUSE – President Joe Biden plans to stick to his August 31 deadline for U.S. troops to leave Afghanistan, an administration official said Tuesday.

Earlier, Biden and other G-7 leaders met virtually to discuss the situation in Afghanistan, with several pushing for him to keep U.S. troops in the country beyond next week’s  deadline to facilitate the ongoing evacuation effort.

The Taliban have rejected any extension of the deadline.

“I will ask our friends and allies to stand by the Afghan people and step-up support for refugees and humanitarian aid,” British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said ahead of the virtual meeting.

With a week to go until Biden’s deadline, tens of thousands of Western citizens and Afghans who supported U.S. efforts have pushed toward Hamid Karzai International Airport hoping to make it through the gates and to the safety of outgoing flights.

The White House said early Tuesday that in the last 24 hours, another 21,600 people have been evacuated, but thousands more remain in Afghanistan who want to leave.

Many Afghans have said it has been difficult, if not impossible, to get past Taliban checkpoints lining the airport’s perimeter. And Taliban officials seem unwilling to give the United States much leeway, calling the upcoming deadline a “red line.”

“We are in talks with the Taliban on a daily basis through political and security channels” concerning “every aspect of what’s happening in Kabul right now,” national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters Monday at the White House.

Central Intelligence Agency Director William Burns was in Kabul Monday to meet with the Taliban’s top political leader, Abdul Ghani Baradar, U.S. officials said.

Biden is “taking this day by day and will make his determinations as we go,” Sullivan said, defending the White House’s handling of the withdrawal, which has seen most of the U.S.-backed Afghan security forces melt away as the Taliban claimed control of the country.

“We are overperforming in terms of the evacuation numbers,” Sullivan said.

But U.S. lawmakers, Republicans and Democrats alike, former military officials and some American allies have criticized the chaotic withdrawal since Taliban forces entered the Afghan capital on August 15. “The situation in Afghanistan is worsening by the day,” Republican Senator Mike Rounds said Monday. “The Biden administration must make the safe evacuation of Americans still stuck in Afghanistan its top priority.”

But after a slow start to the evacuation, efforts to get people out of the country have picked up. Some military officials Monday expressed optimism they will be able to sustain the heightened pace of evacuations. “I assure you that we will not rest until the mission is complete, and we have evacuated Americans who are seeking to be evacuated and as many Afghan partners as humanly possible,” General Stephen Lyons, commander of U.S. Transportation Command, told Pentagon reporters late Monday.

“We are clearly laser focused on clearing the Kabul international airport of every evacuee that can move,” he said. “For me, like all of our veterans who served in Afghanistan, this mission is very personal.”

At a separate briefing earlier in the day, Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said despite the surge in evacuation numbers, “We’re not taking anything for granted.”

“There’s a lot of factors that go into being able to reach that output capacity, to include temporary safe havens that you can bring these individuals to as they complete their screening,” he said, noting the goal has been to evacuate between 5,000 and 9,000 people a day.

A growing number of U.S. officials, however, have started warning that despite the increased flow of evacuees out of Afghanistan, more time will be needed.

Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff told reporters the evacuation could be completed by the end of the month. “I think it’s possible,” he said, “but I think it’s very unlikely given the number of Americans who still need to be evacuated.”

A senior State Department official said the August 31 deadline only refers to the “military retrograde out of Afghanistan.”

“Our commitment to at-risk Afghans doesn’t end on August 31,” the official added.

But whether the Taliban will give the United States and its allies more time is questionable.

Related

What a Taliban Government Will Look Like

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Baradar

Foreign Policy: Early indications suggest Afghanistan will be led by a 12-man council of criminals, terrorists, and the more pliant members of the former government. The three most powerful men in the leadership council will be Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, co-founder of the Taliban; Mullah Mohammad Yaqoob, son of the group’s founder, Mullah Mohammad Omar, and the man behind the victorious military strategy; and Khalil Haqqani, a senior figure in the Haqqani network, responsible for some of the most vicious terrorist attacks of the past 20 years… Click here to read more (external link).

Can Taliban Turn From Insurgency to Governing?

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Taliban Militant Leadership

Jamie Dettmer
VOA News
August 24, 2021

The Taliban may discover that retaking Afghanistan may prove an easier task than ruling it.

That will depend, though, on how pragmatic and inclusive the Islamist militants are willing to be, say current and former diplomats, because they will need to compromise to secure buy-in from local power brokers, tribal elders and ethnic-minority leaders to maintain order.

Most of the attention now on Afghanistan is focused on the high-stakes and poignant drama playing out at Kabul airport, where thousands of desperate Afghans are seeking to flee the country fearing what Taliban rule will mean for them.

But after the final withdrawal of U.S.-led Western forces likely August 31, the date earmarked by President Joe Biden, the Afghans will be left alone and the Taliban will have their second shot at governing the notoriously fractious country, which since 1973 has known little but strife and civil war. “One way or another, the Taliban are likely to find governing Afghanistan to be far more difficult than conquering it,” according to Carter Malkasian, a former senior Pentagon adviser.

Writing in Foreign Affairs magazine, Malkasian says the Taliban’s victory doesn’t mean “an end to Afghanistan’s 40 years of war, uncertainty, and trauma.” He adds: “The Taliban face the poverty, internal strife, illicit crops, meddlesome neighbors, and threat of insurrections that are endemic to their country—and have proven the bane of all its rulers.”

Challenges ahead

The militants face the challenge of turning from insurgency to governing and will have to set up national governing institutions virtually from scratch. And they will have to revamp a disintegrated bureaucracy to oversee a country comprising at least 14 different ethnic groups with a total population of 38 million.

And their opponents say it will be a tall order for the Taliban to maintain control, pointing out that the militant’s movement only has a small fighting force of 75,000 to impose its will.

That was a sufficient number to retake the country, except for the Panjshir Valley, thanks to a host of surrender pacts the Taliban struck with others and a stealthy infiltration military strategy that allowed them to seize control of towns and cities, including the Afghan capital Kabul. At the start of the revolutionary year of 1917 in Russia, the Bolsheviks only had 24,000 party members, but that did not stop them seizing power and ruling a much larger Russia until the Soviet hammer and sickle flag was lowered for the final time over the Kremlin in 1991.

“We don’t know what to expect,” says Vali Nasr, a professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, a research institution in Washington. “First of all, there is a question whether this is the same Taliban,” he said during an online discussion hosted last week by the Asia Society, a global non-profit.

Nasr, a former senior advisor to the U.S. State Department on Afghanistan, suspects it might be a different Taliban. “I think there are big differences,” he added.

He highlighted how the Taliban moved through the country swiftly with few major battles because they engaged politically with others in ways they did not when conquering Afghanistan in the 1990s, which was accompanied by massacres and unrestrained ferocity. That engagement started in earnest more than two years ago, note other Afghanistan country experts, with behind-the-scenes outreach to ethnic minorities by the group led by the Taliban’s network of “shadow” governors.

In 1998 after occupying the city of Mazar-e-Sharif Afghanistan’s fourth largest city, the Taliban slaughtered at least 2,000 civilians, most of them ethnic Hazaras, who are Shi’ite Muslims and are considered by the Sunni-favoring Taliban as not true Muslims. The newly installed governor threatened Hazaras with death unless they converted to Sunni Islam and hundreds fled the city along with Shi’ite militiamen under bombardment.

A kinder, gentler Taliban?

Last week, in a notable difference, the Taliban did not interfere with Afghan Shiites observing Ashura, which is celebrated by all Muslims but for Shiites is a major religious commemoration of the martyrdom of Hussein ibn Ali, a grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. The killing of Hussein in 680 AD led to the split in Islam between Sunnis and Shias.

Several Taliban officials visited an Hazara neighborhood in Kabul to attend the Shiites’ celebration. And last week Taliban leaders held talks with Hazara leaders about how to form an inclusive government to govern Afghanistan.

Since arriving in Kabul, the Taliban has been holding meetings with politicians and others, including former President Hamid Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah, chairman of Afghanistan’s National Reconciliation Council, a body of notables and elders, over the makeup of a new government.

But is this all for show? Some Taliban opponents and country experts believe the Taliban are biding their time until they have consolidated power and are eager to keep foreign aid flowing and to secure the $9.5 billion in Afghanistan reserves currently lodged overseas.

The Taliban leadership has dialed down its criticism of the West. “Anti-international rhetoric has been a rallying call in the past, but the Taliban leadership knows its chance of making any success of government depends on international donors. Despite a stunning success in one of the most sophisticated resurgent insurgencies in the world, and morale being high among Taliban fighters and field commanders, Afghanistan’s economic woes are extensive,” notes Chatham House’s Hameed Hakimi in a recent commentary.

Ali Nazari, a spokesman for Ahmad Massoud, who is leading a nascent anti-Taliban resistance movement in the Panjshir Valley, believes the political negotiations are a ruse — as are Taliban pledges to allow girls an education and women to work.

“The Taliban might be more sophisticated now and slicker in how they present themselves to the world, but they are even more radical than before,” he told VOA. “Their reign of terror hasn’t started. They’re waiting for Americans and Europeans to leave Afghanistan,” he told VOA in a phone call from an undisclosed location.

Nazari and other Taliban opponents fear it won’t be long before the Taliban start up tribunals to apportion revolutionary justice and punish those who worked with Western security forces.

Reported abuses 

Others point to the mounting allegations of brutality and killings across the country and of Taliban manhunts in Kabul and elsewhere for Afghans who worked alongside Western security forces the past two decades. A Norway-based private intelligence group that provides information to the U.N. said this week it had obtained evidence that the Taliban have rounded up Afghans on a blacklist of people they believe worked in key roles with the previous Afghan administration or with U.S.-led forces.

And while Taliban leaders have been formally courting Hazara elders, Amnesty International has reported that Taliban fighters massacred nine ethnic Hazara men after taking control of Afghanistan’s Ghazni province last month.

The rights group says the killings took place in early July in the village of Mundarakht, Malistan district. Basing its report on eyewitness accounts, Amnesty says six of the men were shot and three were tortured to death, including one man who was strangled with his own scarf and had his arm muscles sliced off.

Amnesty fears the slaughter may represent a tiny fraction of the total death toll inflicted by the Taliban to date, as the group has cut mobile phone service in many places they control, preventing photographs and videos to be shared. “The cold-blooded brutality of these killings is a reminder of the Taliban’s past record, and a horrifying indicator of what Taliban rule may bring,” says Agnes Callamard, the secretary general of Amnesty International.

The U.N. human rights chief Michelle Bachelet warned Tuesday that she had received credible reports of severe abuses in areas under Taliban control in Afghanistan, including “summary executions” of civilians and security forces who had laid down their arms and restrictions on women.

Whether the reports of killings and manhunts as well as beatings of youngsters who offend Taliban fighters because of how they’re dressed are all signs of the direction of Taliban travel or should be put down as the actions of especially fervent individual fighters or commanders is unclear. Taliban promises of inclusivity and of a softer rule and offers of concession aren’t persuading some observers.

“Over time, Taliban leaders will have little reason not to use their military power to consolidate and monopolize control,” reckons former Pentagon adviser Malkasian. And that risks pushback from tribes and minority groups.

Some information for this report came from the Associated Press.

Related

Women Soccer Players Leave Afghanistan on Evacuation Flight

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AP: Players from Afghanistan women’s national soccer team had an “important victory” on Tuesday when they were among a group of more than 75 people evacuated on a flight from Kabul. “The last few days have been extremely stressful but today we have achieved an important victory,” former team captain Khalida Popal said. Click here to read more (external link).