Afghanistan news and discussions

[caltrek]

Taliban Militants Enter Kabul's Outskirts; U.S. Embassy Evacuated
by Allen Cone
August 15, 2021

https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News ... 629033017/

Introduction:

Aug. 15 (UPI) -- Taliban militants have taking control of most Afghanistan, including reaching the outskirts of Kabul, as the United States has authorized 5,000 troops to help evacuate U.S. personnel, including from its embassy in the capital.

The Taliban says fighters had been ordered to remain on the edges of the capital with negotiations taking place to ensure a peaceful transition of power. "We assure the people in Afghanistan -- there will be no revenge on anyone," a Taliban spokesman told the BBC.

Earlier Sunday, militants took without a fight control of Jalalabad, a key eastern city, which means roads are secured the roads connecting the country with Pakistan.

The Taliban has regained Bagram airfield and prison, which is about 25 miles north of the city center.

The complex, which was once the largest U.S. military facility in Afghanistan, was evacuated by the U.S. military on July 2.

caltrek's comment: I am a little surprised that even Kabul seems ready to fall. I expected the Taliban to re-exert control over much of rural Afghanistan, but I thought that maybe Kabul would hold out.

I think our policy in Afghanistan was wrong headed from the start. We should have focused just on degrading Al Qaeda and treated the Taliban versus the rest of the country as an internal matter. Once Al Qaeda was more or less neutralized, then we should have left, perhaps taking along a relatively small number who helped with translation, intelligence gathering, etc.

I know it is hard to follow that policy when one hears of human rights abuse, especially against women. Yet, if that were the criteria for intervention, we would be involved in invading half the countries on the planet. There was a time on this forum where it seemed like everybody complained about U.S. neo-imperialism. I guess now the thought is that neo-imperialism is not such a bad thing. At least, now the complaint and the shock is how we could let this catastrophe happen. Unfortunately, we cannot control the world. Hell, we can't even put our own house in order.
So to me, it is a matter of priorities. Things like global climate change are the more important issues upon which we should focus our energy.

[caltrek]

Medea Benjamin goes even one step further.

After 20 Years of Lies and War, U.S. Retreat Underway as Taliban Retake Control of Afghanistan
by Jon Queally
August 15, 2021

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/ ... fghanistan

Extract:

(Common Dreams) In recent days, anti-war voices who opposed the initial invasion in 2001 and have railed against the U.S. occupation ever since have pointed out the inevitability of what is now unfolding, the rapid return of Taliban rule despite twenty years—during which trillions of dollars were spent and hundreds of thousands of innocent lives were lost—of U.S. military leaders claiming that some kind of victory was possible.

"The tragic events unfolding in Afghanistan are yet further proof of the utter failure of our country’s endless wars and the mindset that enables them," said Stephen Miles, executive director of the U.S.-based group Win Without War, on Friday. "Nearly two decades of military intervention and occupation did not build lasting peace. No number of bombs dropped, no length of time occupied, would have."

On Sunday, veteran peace activist Medea Benjamin was among those wondering who—any one in the U.S. military or foreign policy establishment—would ever be held accountable for the deceit or failures in Afghanistan.

"Who is going to be fired for 20 years of horrific failure in Afghanistan?" Benjamin asked on social media. "Who would you suggest?"

In a separate Sunday morning tweet, Benjamin said: "As the blame game for the Afghan crisis heats up, I want to add all who supported this disastrous invasion from the beginning, including those who bashed us at anti-war protests. We were right, you were wrong. We should have never invaded Afghanistan. Period."

[Yuli Ban]

[Yuli Ban]

Taliban to declare Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan

Afghanistan’s embattled president left the country Sunday, joining his fellow citizens and foreigners in a stampede fleeing the advancing Taliban and signaling the end of a 20-year Western experiment aimed at remaking Afghanistan.

The Taliban entered the capital earlier in the day, and an official with the militant group said it would soon announce the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan from the presidential palace — a return rich in symbolism to the name of the country under the Taliban government ousted by U.S.-led forces after the 9/11 attacks. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to brief the media.

The insurgents pushed through a city gripped by panic, where helicopters raced overhead throughout the day to evacuate personnel from the U.S. Embassy. Smoke rose near the compound as staff destroyed important documents, and the American flag was lowered. Several other Western missions also prepared to pull their people out.

Afghans fearing that the Taliban could reimpose the kind of brutal rule that all but eliminated women’s rights rushed to leave the country, lining up at cash machines to withdraw their life savings. The desperately poor — who had left homes in the countryside for the presumed safety of the capital — remained in their thousands in parks and open spaces throughout the city.

[Yuli Ban]

Afghan women fear 'dark' future, loss of rights as Taliban gains ground

Nasreen Sultani, the principal of the Sardar-e-Kabuli Girls High School in Kabul, has spent years fighting for the rights of Afghan girls, but said she now lives in constant fear for the safety of her students.

"I am very sad. When I see all these girls, I get really upset now," she told NBC News last week, her eyes welling up with tears.

"I tried, but we couldn't manage to make sure that women get out of this miserable situation," added Sultani, who has led the school for a decade after a major U.S. Agency for International Development restoration project allowed it to reopen.

Her despair will only have grown on Sunday after Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled the country, leaving the Taliban on the brink of taking power.

She said she had been threatened by the Taliban in the past. Members of the hard-line Islamic militant group had told her “about the color of the car they might blow up," she said. "'You all might die,' they told us."

[wjfox]

[raklian]

Jesus Christ. Look at the second video below.

[Yuli Ban]

[Yuli Ban]

[Yuli Ban]

[wjfox]

[wjfox]

[Time_Traveller]

Taliban seek no ‘revenge’ and all Afghans will be ‘forgiven’

Tue 17 Aug 2021

The Taliban have said they seek no “revenge” on opponents and that everyone would be “forgiven” during the first press conference held by the hardline Islamist group since taking power in Kabul on Sunday.

Saying the group did not seek “internal or external enemies”, the spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told reporters invited to the media centre used by the former Afghan government that the group wanted to “congratulate the [Afghan] nation” for its victory.

“We assure you that nobody will go to their doors to ask why they helped,” he said, despite reports from different parts of the country that Taliban fighters were doing precisely that. He also encouraged those who had fled to the airport with their families to return.
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The Taliban spokesman also added a vaguely worded pledge to honour women’s rights, but within the norms of Islamic law, and said private media would be permitted to “remain independent” if journalists “did not work against national values”.

Despite the Taliban’s apparently emollient tone, in a sign of the dangerous frictions ahead, Nato warned on Tuesday that the alliance retained the military power to strike from a distance should the Taliban host terrorist groups, even as the country’s former vice-president Amrullah Saleh claimed from hiding to be the legitimate caretaker president.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/ ... e-forgiven

[wjfox]

[caltrek]

Taliban to Set Up Non-democratic Afghan Government Based on Sharia Law
by Peter Weber

https://theweek.com/vaccines/1003917/th ... oo-surgeon

Entire Article (less one photo):

(The Week) "Over the course of more than two decades, the Taliban proved that they knew how to wage an insurgency" in Afghanistan, The New York Times reports Thursday. "Over the last five days, ominous signs have emerged that they have yet to learn how to run a country." The Taliban marked Afghanistan's Independence Day on Thursday, a celebration of the country's liberation from British rule in 1919, by cheering their successful "jihadi resistance" against "another arrogant power of the world, the United States."

But protests against Taliban rule that broke out Wednesday in Jalalabad and Khost province, violently suppressed by Taliban forces, spread to Kabul on Thursday, including near the presidential palace. Some opposition figures are converging in the last holdout, the Panjshir Valley, with an eye to reviving the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance for armed resistance.

"With many ATMs out of cash and worries about rising food prices in this nation of 38 million people reliant on imports, the Taliban face all the challenges of the civilian government they dethroned without the level of international aid it enjoyed," The Associated Press reports. The Taliban has so far been unable to access Afghanistan's $9 billion in foreign reserves, most of it effectively frozen by the U.S., and International Monetary Fund aid and development money are off-limits at least until Afghanistan has a new government. The Taliban does have revenue from mining, customs taxes, and narcotics smuggling, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Waheedullah Hashimi, a high-ranking Taliban commander, tells Reuters that Afghanistan will probably be governed by a ruling council that answers to Haibatullah Akhundzada, the Taliban's supreme leader. Taliban leadership will meet to discuss the new government later this week, he added, but "there will be no democratic system at all because it does not have any base in our country," and the new political system "is clear: It is Sharia law and that is it." That system would be similar to the one the Taliban employed when it last ruled Afghanistan, from 1996 to 2001.

A different Taliban leader told Afghan reporters Tuesday that women will have more rights this time around, including access to jobs and education, but Hashimi told Reuters that "our [scholars] will decide whether girls are allowed to go to school or not" and "whether they should wear hijab, burqa, or only [a] veil plus abaya or something, or not. That is up to them."

[Yuli Ban]

[caltrek]

Biden is Right to End the War in Afghanistan
by Peter Certo
August 18, 2021

https://otherwords.org/biden-is-right-t ... ghanistan/

Introduction:

(Other Words) The scenes from Afghanistan are heartrending.

I can’t imagine the desperation of someone who clings to a military airplane as it takes off, as Afghan refugees attempted to in Kabul. Nor is it possible to dismiss the fears of Afghan women, as a faction that once executed them for seeking jobs or education comes back to power.

But in light of the precipitous collapse of the country’s 300,000-man army and political leadership, it’s also impossible to dismiss President Biden’s conclusion that the war was never going to be winnable.

“If Afghanistan is unable to mount any real resistance to the Taliban now,” Biden said, “there is no chance that one more year, five more years, or 20 more years of U.S. military boots on the ground would have made any difference.”

Biden is right. And many of the military and political leaders who’ve prosecuted the war agree. In 2019, the Washington Post reported on interviews with over 400 who said the war was doomed even then — including many who said the opposite publicly.

[caltrek]

Anti-Taliban Protests Spread Across Afghanistan Cities
by Zaheena Rasheed, Tamila Varshalomidze and Usaid Siddiqui
August 19, 2021

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/8/1 ... s-out-live

Introduction:

(Al Jazeera) At least two people have been killed after the Taliban opened fire at a crowd marking independence day in Asadabad leading to a stampede, witnesses told Al Jazeera.

It was not immediately clear if the casualties were the result of the stampede or the shooting. The Taliban made no immediate comment on the incident.

In Jalalabad, Taliban fighters fired at people waving the Afghan flag during independence day celebrations, injuring a man and a teenage boy.

Al Jazeera’s Charlotte Bellis, reporting from Kabul, said: “There were some isolated protests linked to the flag in Kabul as well, with people, including women, walking down the streets past Taliban fighters waving the old flag and saying: ‘Our flag is our identity.'”

US President Joe Biden said on Wednesday he will keep soldiers in Afghanistan until every American is evacuated, even if that means going beyond his August 31 deadline.

People carry the national flag at a protest held during the Afghan independence day in Kabul, Afghanistan August 19, 2021.
Reuters

[caltrek]

...and a similar article from The National:

Bloodshed as Afghans Mark Independence Day with Anti-Taliban Protest
by Ruchi Kumar and Hikmat Noori

https://www.thenationalnews.com/world/a ... n-protest/

Introduction:

(The National) Protests marking Afghanistan’s independence day were the scenes of bloodshed on Thursday as Taliban fighters shot at demonstrators in Kabul.

Eyewitnesses to the shootings in the Wazir Akbar Khan area, a diplomatic district in the Afghan capital, and Zanbaq Square said over 30 civilians were injured.

“They were also beating people up with their weapons. We don’t know how many were injured by that,” one witness said.

Official figures on casualties have not been released but independent witnesses told The National that at least 11 civilians had been killed in anti-Taliban protests across the city. In a similar incident on Wednesday, Taliban fire killed three civilians in the eastern city of Jalalabad during flag-hoisting demonstrations.

The 102nd Independence Day of Afghanistan was the first under Taliban rule in almost 20 years.

[caltrek]

Also from The National:

Can Afghanistan's Trillion-dollar Mineral Wealth Power the Global Drive for EVs?
by Deena Kamel and Jennifer Gnana
August 19, 2021

https://www.thenationalnews.com/busines ... e-for-evs/

Introduction:

(The National) This week the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan for the second time in two decades giving it access to the country's vast mineral deposits worth trillions of dollars, which are in high demand by countries such as China and essential for the production of electric vehicles amid a global pivot to clean energy. But can this wealth transform the country and help with the global pivot to clean energy?

War-scarred Afghanistan's valuable resources remain largely untapped, due to decades of conflict and corruption and any international ventures to extract Afghanistan's mineral wealth are fraught with more risk and uncertainties than rewards, according to economists and industry experts.

"Afghanistan’s mines are significant, valued at over a trillion dollars and if utilised can lift many people from poverty, create jobs and forge opportunities," Said Sabir Ibrahimi, non-resident fellow at the Centre on International Cooperation in New York University, said. "There are opportunities but the uncertainties are greater."

Afghanistan's mineral industry is valued at about $3 trillion and contributes seven to 10 per cent to its gross domestic product, according to the country's Ministry of Mines and Petroleum. Plagued by decades of conflict, Afghanistan could unlock great wealth from mining materials such as lithium, gold and copper, but previous development attempts have stalled due to poor infrastructure, security risks and a lack of transparency.

"Geologically speaking, Afghanistan’s mineral wealth is quite high with a rich mix of traditional precious materials and gemstones as well as metallic minerals such as lithium and the rare earths critical to a wide array of advanced and green technologies," said Rod Schoonover, head of the Ecological Security Programme at the Council on Strategic Risks.