Sohail Shaheen
Ariana: The Taliban say they don’t want to monopolize power, but insist there will only be peace in Afghanistan once President Ashraf Ghani has been removed from power and a new government is in place. In an interview with The Associated Press, Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen, who is also a member of the group’s negotiating team, laid out the insurgents’ stance on what should come next in the country. Click here to read more (external link).
RFE/RL’s Tajik Service
July 23, 2021
DUSHANBE — Tajikistan has said it is ready to shelter up to 100,000 refugees from neighboring Afghanistan amid increasing security concerns in Central Asia over the fallout of the Taliban’s territorial gains in the northern part of the war-torn country.
Imomali Ibrohimzoda, the first deputy chief of the Committee for Emergency and Civil Defense, said on July 23 that if the number of Afghan refugees exceeds that number, Dushanbe will turn to international groups for help.
Ibrohimzoda added that the construction of two large food depots has started in the southern region of Khatlon as part of preparations for the possible influx of refugees.
According to Ibrohimzoda, 11 flights were organized in recent days to repatriate 1,600 Afghan citizens who entered Tajikistan to flee military clashes between Afghan government forces and Taliban militants.
Earlier this week, Khatlon regional Governor Qurbon Hakimzoda said that a temporary camp for refugees will be set up in the region’s Jaihun district.
Hundreds of Afghans, including police and government troops, have fled the country in recent weeks and entered Tajikistan and neighboring Uzbekistan amid the Taliban offensive. The militants are said to have captured large swaths of the border regions since the start of the international military withdrawal on May 1.
Last week, almost 350 ethnic Kyrgyz shepherds from Afghanistan with their families and some 4,000 livestock entered Tajikistan. They have since been sent back to their village in Afghanistan after Kabul guaranteed their safety.
The United States has announced the withdrawal of all its forces by August 31. Earlier this month, U.S. forces vacated their largest base in Afghanistan at Bagram, north of Kabul.
The rapid withdrawal of U.S. forces, and the Taliban’s battlefield successes, are stoking concerns that the Western-backed government in Kabul may collapse.
Pakistan surrendering what is now Bangladesh to end the Indo-Pakistani War
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
July 22, 2021
A war of words between Pakistan and Afghanistan has escalated dramatically on social media and reverberated up the political ranks, threatening a diplomatic breakdown and highlighting security concerns in the region.
An Afghan vice president taunted Pakistanis on July 22 with an image from a humiliating national defeat a half-century ago and accused “thousands of Pakistani activists” of celebrating Taliban militants’ recent gains in Afghanistan.
Senior Pakistani officials meanwhile accused their Afghan counterparts of being “hyenas” and “spoilers” who issue “idiotic statements” aimed at thwarting peace efforts.
The public drama follows Kabul’s accusations that Pakistan’s military is protecting Taliban fighters who are furiously battling Afghan government forces as international troops withdraw — a charge that Pakistan has rejected.
It also follows both sides’ withdrawal of their ambassadors after an allegation that the daughter of the Afghan envoy to Islamabad was abducted last week and “tortured” before being released, although Pakistani officials have rejected that account.
Afghan Vice President Amrullah Saleh posted a historical photo of Pakistan surrendering what is now Bangladesh to end the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971, vowing that “we don’t have such a picture in our history and won’t ever have.”
“Talibn [sic] & terrorism won’t heal the trauma of this picture,” Saleh tweeted. “Find other ways.”
Pakistani national-security adviser Moeed Yusuf in turn accused senior Afghan officials of “embarrassing” their country with “idiotic statements” and “vitriolic and delusional statements” intended to divert attention “from their own failures.”
Yusuf insisted Pakistan was “committed” to encouraging an inclusive political settlement in Afghanistan.
Afghanistan has long accused Pakistan of supporting armed Taliban elements, and the United States in 2018 suspended military aid to Islamabad amid reports of frustration that Pakistan was providing safe havens for fighters and cross-border attacks.
Pakistani authorities pledged to fully investigate the alleged kidnapping of Afghan Ambassador Najib Alikhil’s daughter while she was riding in a taxi in Islamabad on July 16. But Pakistani Interior Minister Sheikh Rashid said that after reviewing closed-circuit footage and searching 200 taxi cabs the authorities concluded “There is no case of kidnapping.”
Taliban Surge
Pakistani and Afghan officials have sparred publicly for decades over the ongoing threat from cross-border violence by Pakistani-based Taliban and other militants.
But the recent accusations take on added gravity with Taliban militants overtaking dozens of districts since U.S.-led international forces officially began withdrawing after two decades in Afghanistan.
Saleh last week accused Pakistan’s air force of radioing a threat to Afghan warplanes “trying to conduct an air strike on the Taliban and their Pakistani militias,” in the words of a spokesman.
Rezwan Murad, the spokesman for Saleh, told RFE/RL’s Radio Azadi on July 16 that the threats in question were “recorded voices and the messages are saved.”
After Saleh taunted Pakistan with the 1971 image of surrender to pro-Bangladeshi militants on July 22, Pakistani Information Minister Fawad Chaudhry responded bluntly via Twitter.
“Afghanistan belongs to brave people of Afghanistan unlike hyena’s [sic] like you, a bunch of you have little interest in Afghanistan or even this region you are just a scavenger will fly to safe heavens when the time [will] be up,” Chaudhry tweeted.
Intra-Afghan talks begun last year in Doha between government and Taliban representatives have mostly stalled.
Meanwhile, the Taliban has waged major offensives all over the country and taken control of sparsely populated districts, including areas on Afghanistan’s borders with Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.
Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan said during a regional conference last week that Afghan President Ashraf Ghani had “unfairly” accused Islamabad of playing a “negative role” in the Afghan peace process.
He said his country “will be most affected by turmoil in Afghanistan,” adding, “The last thing Pakistan wants is more conflict.”
Khan also suggested that waiting to negotiate seriously with the Taliban until after international troops’ withdrawal was announced was a mistake.
“[W]hy would they listen to us when they are sensing victory?” Khan asked.
Based on reporting by RFE/RL’s Radio Mashaal, RFE/RL’s Radio Azadi, Dawn, and The Diplomat.
Nafees Takar
VOA News
July 22, 2021
Editor’s note: The U.S. departure from Afghanistan marks another major turning point for the Taliban, the militant group with a long history in Afghanistan and a complex relationship with Pakistan. VOA reporters are looking back at the Taliban’s rise to power and the group’s previous tenure as Afghanistan’s rulers.
In late September 1996, after four years of civil war in Afghanistan, the Taliban succeeded in capturing Kabul and then tortured and killed former President Mohammad Najibullah before hanging his body from a traffic post.
Shocking images of the executed president sent a signal to Afghans and the world that the Taliban had taken charge and would be imposing what they called a “complete Islamic system” for Afghanistan. Taliban flags began flying over government offices in Kabul, and their military rivals fled to their strongholds in the north.
I arrived in Kabul on October 29, the start of the Taliban’s second month in power in the war-torn city. The so-called “moral police” of the Taliban government agency known as the Promotion of Virtue and Elimination of Vice were the most feared squads in the capital. The armed guards in traditional Afghan dress had, in a single month, forced quick changes on urban Afghan women and men. Every man had to wear a cap or turban and sport a beard long enough to be grabbed by a fist. During prayer times, all businesses were required to close.
The old-fashioned burqa, a mostly blue shuttlecock-shaped covering, was imposed on women. They were beaten with batons in public by the Virtue and Vice squads, sometimes for unknown reasons. Later they would find out that their ankles had been visible to men, or that they had been seen talking to a stranger. The Taliban would beat a woman if she was not accompanied by a mahram, a male member of the family with whom marital relations are considered haram (forbidden). Seeing Taliban beating women on Kabul streets became the new normal.
Schools closed, televisions were smashed, ancient relics at the Kabul Museum went missing, pictures and portraits of humans and animals in official buildings were torn into pieces.
Music was banned, so the sounds of chirping birds replaced the traditional instrumental music of Afghan drums and rabab (a local variant of guitar). Local music was replaced by the Taliban’s jihadi taranas (anthems) and sermons, heard on Radio Sharia, the new name of Afghanistan’s national radio and television.
Imposing official
The Taliban intensified the public’s fear by appointing the radical madrassa graduate Mullah Qalamuddin as deputy minister of the Virtue and Vice ministry. A graduate of the Darul Uloom Haqqania madrassa in Akora Khatak, Pakistan, where many Taliban leaders studied, Mullah Qalamuddin was an imposing official who had a reputation for personally leading the group’s fear campaign. He was over 6 feet (1.8 meters) tall, and when I met him at his ministry’s building, he used a love seat as his office chair as he directed his subordinates. He had only contempt for those who expressed concerns over women rights, saying that a woman has two abodes: a home and a grave.
Kabul’s landmarks at the time bore signs of the Taliban’s harsh views. At the city’s multistory Intercontinental Hotel, staff told visiting journalists about Mullah Qalamuddin getting angry when he had seen a small statue of Buddha in one of the halls of the hotel. He used an ax to smash it to pieces.
At the Afghan national bank building in downtown Kabul, where many women had worked, the top floor had been converted into a child care facility. But the bank was now closed, and the women had all been banished once the Taliban took power, leaving a floor strewn with empty cradles, pacifiers and toddlers’ toys. The bank’s civilian guardians, during a Taliban-escorted visit to the building, said they had no plan in place to reopen. Many other businesses and nongovernment organizations ended up losing all their female staffers, who had been banned from working under the Taliban’s puritan Sharia.
At the time, the Taliban’s founding leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, was running Kabul remotely from his southern stronghold Kandahar, then an 18-hour drive away. There was not much of an administrative state. His six-member high council led by Mullah Mohammad Rabbani, a former leader from Kandahar, had little say in making decisions.
Broadcast messages
For locals trying to understand their new leaders’ rapid changes, the international Pashto-language broadcasters VOA and BBC and the Taliban’s Radio Sharia were the main sources of information.
Radio Sharia taught them how to tailor themselves under the new Islamist laws of Taliban. The mullahs, graduates from Pakistani madrassas, were offering a menu of punishments in their sermons during primetime evening broadcasts.
Some of the messages warned people of the new social restrictions: “Satan urinates on the head of a woman who is not covering her head.” “God will pour hot lead into the ears of those who listen to music.” “Walking or driving on the left side of the road is un-Islamic.” “A man looking at a woman or vice versa is the fornication of eyes.”
Kabul was more tense at night. In the evenings, new warnings were broadcast via Radio Sharia, and Taliban fighters enforced a daily dusk-to-dawn curfew, patrolling the streets in pickup trucks. These nighttime patrols led to rumors of mass arrests or Taliban troop movements for northern battle lines. Some Kabul locals thought the Taliban were bringing in Pakistani fighters under the cover of night. At the start of the Taliban’s reign in Afghanistan, people in Kabul were already angry with Islamabad, believing that Pakistan’s support for the Taliban was undermining Afghans.
Pakistani officials at the time encouraged this perception. In Pakistan, the then interior minister and former army general, Naseerullah Babar, was not shy of being called the “architect of Taliban” in Afghanistan. He would take credit for helping to create the Afghan Taliban throughout his retired life.
Pakistan’s perceived role
I left Kabul for Kandahar, along with a Western journalist, on November 5, 1996. At the time, the drive was rough and around 480 kilometers long, and the needle on the speedometer rarely crossed 30 kilometers per hour. On the way, a radio bulletin brought news from Pakistan, saying the president had dismissed Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and dissolved her elected government over corruption allegations. That marked the second time that her government had been dismissed by a sitting president in Pakistan.
Bhutto’s first term ended over a costly military miscalculation in Afghanistan. In early 1989, her government directed pro-Pakistan Afghan fighters to try to take over Afghanistan’s eastern city of Jalalabad from the country’s Soviet-backed government. The operation was a debacle, and the plot was exposed, becoming a political liability for her government and contributing to the perception that Pakistan backs militants in Afghanistan as part of its foreign policy strategy.
Pakistan’s next government, that of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, solidified that perception in 1997 by becoming the first to officially recognize the Afghan Taliban government. Twenty-four years later, despite years of denials from Islamabad, most Afghans still see the Taliban as an arm of the Pakistani state.
Liam Scott, Nike Ching, Jeff Seldin
VOA News
July 22, 2021
WASHINGTON – A coalition of more than two dozen U.S. news outlets and press freedom organizations is calling on the U.S. government to help protect Afghans who worked with foreign media and may face risks from the Taliban as a result.
Letters to President Joe Biden and top House and Senate leaders called on the United States to establish a visa program for local journalists and stringers who worked with American news outlets.
Many of these media workers fear retaliation from the Taliban as a result of their association with the U.S. media, the letter said.
Afghanistan has long been one of the most dangerous countries for the media, but threats and risks have increased since the start of peace talks between the Afghan government and Taliban in September 2020, and the U.S. troop withdrawal.
At least 10 journalists and media workers have been killed since peace negotiations began, and dozens are fleeing areas in Afghanistan’s north, where the Taliban have seized territory. About half of the country’s district centers are in Taliban hands, the chair of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff said Wednesday.
“The Taliban has long conducted a campaign of threatening and killing journalists,” the letter to Congress said.
The signatories urged the U.S. to provide assistance to around 1,000 media workers and their families in the same way that it helped protect those who assisted the U.S. military. The letter notes that the U.S. established a similar program in 2008 to help Iraqis who worked with U.S. media.
“This is not a political issue. This is a human rights and a human safety issue. There are people whose lives are at risk every moment of every day, and the U.S. government has an obligation, in my view, to help solve their problems,” said Dan Shelley, executive director of the Radio Television Digital News Association, which is a signatory to the letter.
The Taliban deny targeting independent media, telling VOA they have taken over only government-owned outlets and told journalists to work normally.
The significance of the contributions that these media workers made to U.S. coverage of Afghanistan over the past two decades cannot be understated, says Laura King, a Washington-based correspondent for the Los Angeles Times who served as that outlet’s Kabul bureau chief from 2008-2012.
VICE News Washington bureau chief Sebastian Walker, who reported from Afghanistan on several occasions, echoed that view.
Both the Los Angeles Times and VICE Media Group are signatories to the letter.
Support staff or “fixers” perform a variety of roles for journalists in conflict zones. They act as translators or drivers, help find sources, analyze cultural nuances, advise on safety assessments and help find food and shelter, King and Walker explained. Many tell only their spouses what their job is due to the risks involved with working for foreign media.
“We couldn’t do our jobs without those people — it’s as simple as that. They are absolutely essential to any kind of reporting that you see,” Walker told VOA. “Those Afghans on the ground make it possible for international journalists like myself to come into the country, to get to places, to make their way around, to speak to people and get an understanding of what’s really going on, on the ground. That just would not be possible without this group of people.”
A senior State Department official speaking on background confirmed to VOA Wednesday it had seen the letter and would respond “in due course.”
The State Department is in the process of relocating as many as 2,500 Afghans to the U.S. later this month under a special immigrant visa, or SIV. The group includes about 700 interpreters and others who aided U.S. forces, as well as their families.
“In terms of other people in Afghanistan who have helped the United States or helped U.S. organizations — whether it’s NGOs or media organizations — we are looking at other options for providing safe options for them,” the senior official said.
All Afghan media workers — whether they work for the foreign or domestic press — face severe risks due to their work. But according to King, working for the international press presents distinct threats.
“As far as the Taliban is concerned, people who work with us [the foreign media] are just as much traitors as people who worked with the military,” she said. “In the case of people who work for Western organizations, there might be more of a sense of obligation to them — practical and moral obligation — to make sure that they don’t face retribution for the work that they did with us.”
With risks and threats increasing, fewer may be willing to do the job, which in turn could reduce news coverage of Afghanistan, according to Walker.
King said she agreed but added that foreign news outlets will likely reduce coverage of Afghanistan in any case once the U.S. completes its exit.
Both journalists said they supported the calls for the U.S. government to protect these media workers and their families, adding that the Afghan media workers just wanted to help tell the world what was happening.
“From our side, it’s complete trust. We are completely in the hands of our local staff,” Walker said. “We have complete trust and faith in the people that we work with.” And now, Walker said, it’s time for reciprocity.
“Your life is in their hands,” King said. “It’s really on us to protect these people who helped us to tell the story of what was going on in Afghanistan, because it would not have been possible without them.”
Related
Bruce Pannier
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
July 22, 2021
Central Asia has long advertised itself as the crossroads of the Eurasian continent — a region that, with development, could be an important transit hub for shipping goods from east to west and from north to south.
The Asian Development Bank’s Central Asia Regional Economic Cooperation (CAREC) trade corridors and China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) have helped extend Central Asia’s east-west connectivity.
The CAREC maps also envision trade corridors to the south via Afghanistan. But such links remain tenuous.
Nevertheless, calls for trade routes via Afghanistan that would connect Central Asia to Pakistani and Indian ports on the Arabian Sea are not forgotten.
Judging by the attendance at a July 15-16 conference in Tashkent, regional players still see potential in the proposed routes.
Although the conference was independent of CAREC and BRI, some infrastructure initiatives overlap with both projects.
New Optimism?
The major obstacle hindering the projects is instability in Afghanistan.
With Taliban fighters recently seizing control over large swaths of territory, linking Central Asia and South Asia via Afghanistan appears less likely than ever.
Still, other factors that have changed amid the ongoing fighting have given some reason for new optimism.
The venue of the July conference, the capital of Uzbekistan, was symbolic of one of those changes.
During the years Islam Karimov was president, Uzbekistan became increasingly isolationist.
While Uzbek officials lamented being in one of only two the world’s double-landlocked countries, they still cut back ties with their immediate neighbors in Central Asia.
President Shavkat Mirziyoev pledged to improve relations with other countries after Karimov died in 2016. He said he would start with the other Central Asian nations.
According to an article sponsored by Uzbekistan’s embassy in Japan ahead of the recent conference, circulation of goods nearly doubled among Central Asian countries during the period from 2017 to 2019 — rising from $2.7 billion to $5.2 billion.
That change is not surprising when one considers that Uzbekistan borders all other Central Asian countries, as well as Afghanistan.
A closed Uzbekistan had hurt many countries in the region. Now, the opening of Uzbekistan by Mirziyoev already has benefited regional trade.
The same article also argued about the importance “for the states of Central Asia to ensure that they take politically coordinated steps aimed not only at intensifying regional economic cooperation, but also reaching a new, interregional level of interconnectivity.”
That is an important distinction as it suggests trade routes south from Uzbekistan could be a conduit for Central Asian trade with South Asia.
Such regional cooperation makes Central Asia more attractive to potential trade partners not only in South Asia but also in the Middle East, Africa, and Southeast Asia. That’s because they could use the links between Arabian Sea ports and Central Asia.
A Central Asia-South Asia trade network also could connect to other networks much farther afield.
The Importance Of Khan
Meanwhile, another development at the Tashkent conference is being seen as an encouraging sign for Central Asia-South Asia connectivity — the attendance at the event of Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan.
Khan, the first foreign leader to arrive at the event, met with President Mirziyoev before the conference. By all accounts, he was warmly greeted by Uzbek officials.
That marks a sharp contrast to the late 1990s.
In May 1997, during an Economic Cooperation Organization meeting in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, Karimov called for then-Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to publicly declare Islamabad would no longer support the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Sharif, as head of one of the only countries in the world at the time that recognized the Taliban as Afghanistan’s official government, refused to do so.
In August 1998, when Pakistan’s then-Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Muhammed Kanju visited Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, neither Karimov nor Tajik President Emomali Rahmon would meet with him.
Uzbek-Pakistani ties have slowly warmed since then. But Khan’s visit marks a high point in bilateral relations between the two countries. And since Pakistani ports are the closest southern ports to Central Asia, it is important that Uzbek-Pakistani ties be solid.
The Pakistani newspaper The Express Tribune predicted that agreements during Khan’s visit should “open doors for increasing Pakistan’s exports to Uzbekistan, while harnessing the potential of a $90 billion market in Central Asia.”
A statement by the Uzbek Embassy in Japan ahead of the Tashkent conference noted the planned attendance by “more than 250 participants from over 40 countries and international organizations.”
In addition to Pakistan’s prime minister, they included Afghanistan’s president, as well as the foreign ministers of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, China, Russia, India, Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Turkey, the Maldives, and other countries.
They also included UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, and a delegation from the U.S. State Department.
A Central Asia-South Asia Network
There is no doubt that reliable Central Asia-South Asia connectivity would benefit many countries.
A report from UzDaily.com notes that Russia has been moving forward with its north-south transport corridor.
Part of that corridor would connect the Baltic countries and Russia to India via railway lines and ports in Iran and Pakistan — less than half the distance of the sea routes from northeastern Europe to India.
Russia’s north-south trade corridor also would avoid the increasingly congested Suez Canal.
The Iranian port of Bandar Abbas is currently the quickest option for businesses in Central Asia to trade with partners in the Indian Ocean region.
A modest amount of goods to and from Central Asia also is currently transported through Iran by rail through Turkmenistan or by ship via Kazakhstan’s Caspian ports.
The UzDaily notes that the construction of a railway line from Mazar-e Sharif thru Kabul to Peshawar in Pakistan would reduce Russia’s north-south route by up to 600 kilometers.
That proposed railway was a key topic in the recent talks between Pakistan’s prime minister and Uzbekistan’s president — even though, under the current security situation, construction of such a route seems impossible.
Similar reductions in distance and shipping times apply to China’s trade with South Asia and East Africa.
Again, Afghanistan is the major obstacle to this Central Asia-South Asia network.
Other concerns include the lack of unified railway track and the absence of unified standards for shipping documents.
Still, the Tashkent conference showed that great interest remains in realizing a Central Asia-South Asia trade corridor network.
That provides added incentive for countries in both regions to work on bringing stability to Afghanistan and reaping the benefits of trade connectivity.
The Conversation: During the Taliban’s five-year rule – which was almost universally shunned by other governments but supported militarily and politically by Pakistan – women were prohibited from working, attending school or leaving home without a male relative. Men were forced to grow beards and wear a cap or turban. Music and other entertainment was banned. Click here to read more (external link).
Mark Milley
Ariana: The Taliban appear to have “strategic momentum” in the fight for control of Afghanistan as they put increasing pressure on key cities, setting the stage for a decisive period in coming weeks, the top U.S. military officer General Mark Milley said Wednesday. “This is going to be a test now of the will and leadership of the Afghan people — the Afghan security forces and the government of Afghanistan,” Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a Pentagon press conference. Click here to read more (external link).
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With Afghanistan facing a wave of coronavirus infections, oxygen is in short supply at the country’s underfunded hospitals. To help meet the demand, faculty and students at Kabul Medical University have built an oxygen-concentrating machine that pulls the vital gas from the air