Afghanistan

[kmaherali]

We Cannot Stand By and Watch Afghanistan Collapse



The past few months in Afghanistan, even by the standards set by two decades of war, have been especially calamitous.

Since April, when President Biden announced the withdrawal of United States forces from the country, violence has escalated at a terrifying rate. Emboldened, the Taliban have advanced across the country and now surround major cities, including Kandahar, the second largest. The toll has been terrible: Vital infrastructure has been destroyed, hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced, and the number of people killed or injured has reached record levels. As the United States and its allies complete their withdrawal, Afghanistan, so long devastated by conflict, could be on the brink of something much worse.

It doesn’t have to be this way: Peace is still a possibility. For too long, there was a belief that the conflict could be resolved militarily. Throughout that time, the United Nations was too hesitant to step in. We should know: Between 2008 and 2020, across six years, we served as U.N. envoys to Afghanistan. In those years, the U.N. endeavored to create openings for the peace process but could not get one underway. Though last year’s agreement between the United States and the Taliban made possible the withdrawal of international forces, it sadly did not create conditions conducive to peace.

The U.N. must now step up and guide Afghanistan away from catastrophe. The alternative, as all-out civil war beckons, is too grim to contemplate.

The organization needs to do more. Though two U.N. envoys are currently assigned to Afghanistan, neither is sufficiently empowered to make a difference. The U.N.’s humanitarian appeal to support the basic needs of Afghans — nearly half of whom urgently need material assistance — remains woefully underfunded. At the diplomatic level, the Security Council has looked on blankly as peace talks, held in Doha, Qatar, have failed to make any serious headway.

Fortunately, by contrast to times in the past when disagreements among members hobbled effective responses to global crises, the U.N. is in a good position to act. The United States, Russia and China — three of the five permanent members of the Security Council — all have a stake in Afghanistan’s stability. Along with Pakistan, they issued statements in recent months calling for a reduction in violence and a negotiated political settlement that protects the rights of women and minorities. They also encouraged the U.N. to play “a positive and constructive role in the Afghan peace and reconciliation process.” Taken together, the statements demonstrate a hopeful amount of political will.

But there has not been a unified effort to hold the peace process together. The Taliban, resisting talks with the government, have focused instead on taking as much territory as possible, spreading violence across the country. Faced with a fight for its survival, the Afghan government has encouraged local warlords and leaders to take up arms. In the absence of international mediation, the two sides are raging against each other on the battlefield rather than engaging at the negotiating table. It’s a situation that revives dark memories of the 1990s, when the country descended into civil war.

Yet no single country involved in Afghanistan is well placed to help. For its part in the conflict, the United States is now viewed with suspicion. Russia and China, which have different allies among Afghanistan’s neighbors, aren’t seen as neutral either. Pakistan, regarded with hostility by the Afghan government for its ties to the Taliban, doesn’t want the involvement of India, which has opened its own channels of communication with the Taliban. Turkey, Iran and the Central Asian states are all important, but cannot act alone.

The U.N. must step into this vacuum. In the first instance, the secretary general must immediately convene the Security Council and seek a clear mandate to empower the U.N., both inside the country and at the negotiating table. That would mean the United States, Russia, China and other members of the council coming together to authorize a special representative to act as a mediator. With the pivotal support of member states, this would put pressure on both sides to halt the fighting and reach a settlement.

The U.N. mission inside the country, whose mandate comes up for renewal in September, will also need support. The rapidly deteriorating security and humanitarian situation means that Afghans across the country will need more lifesaving assistance. The U.N. must also be able to continue its crucial work of reporting human rights violations, protecting children in conflict and supporting women and girls.

The U.N. is often criticized for failing to deliver on its original purpose: to maintain international peace and security. This is an opportunity to show its worth. In the past, international diplomacy has helped bring an end to conflicts in places as varied as Cambodia, Mozambique, El Salvador and Guatemala. The organization now needs to summon the same spirit, courage and energy. It cannot stand by and watch Afghanistan collapse.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/02/opin ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

Biden Could Still Be Proved Right in Afghanistan



For years, U.S. officials used a shorthand phrase to describe America’s mission in Afghanistan. It always bothered me: We are there to train the Afghan Army to fight for its own government.

That turned out to be shorthand for everything that was wrong with our mission — the idea that Afghans didn’t know how to fight and that just one more course in counterinsurgency would do the trick. Really? Thinking you need to train Afghans how to fight is like thinking you need to train Pacific Islanders how to fish. Afghan men know how to fight. They’ve been fighting one another, the British, the Soviets or the Americans for a long, long time.

It was never about the way our Afghan allies fought. It was always about their will to fight for the corrupt pro-American, pro-Western governments we helped stand up in Kabul. And from the beginning, the smaller Taliban forces — which no superpower was training — had the stronger will, as well as the advantage of being seen as fighting for the tenets of Afghan nationalism: independence from the foreigner and the preservation of fundamentalist Islam as the basis of religion, culture, law and politics.

In oft-occupied countries like Afghanistan, many people will actually prefer their own people as rulers (however awful) over foreigners (however well intentioned).

“We learn again from Afghanistan that although America can stop bad things from happening abroad, it cannot make good things happen. That has to come from within a country,” said Michael Mandelbaum, a U.S. foreign policy expert and the author of “Mission Failure: America and the World in the Post-Cold War Era.”

All of which leads to a fundamental and painful question: Was the U.S. mission there a total failure? Here I’d invoke one of my ironclad rules about covering the Middle East: When big events happen, always distinguish between the morning after and the morning after the morning after. Everything really important happens the morning after the morning after — when the full weight of history and the merciless balances of power assert themselves.

And so it will be in Afghanistan — for both the Taliban and President Biden.

Let’s start with the Taliban. Today, they are having a great morning-after celebration. They are telling themselves they defeated yet another superpower.

But will the Taliban simply resume where they left off 20 years ago — harboring Al Qaeda, zealously imposing their puritanical Islam and subjugating and abusing women and girls? Will the Taliban go into the business of trying to attack U.S. and European targets on their soil?

I don’t know. I do know they just inherited responsibility for all of Afghanistan. They will soon face huge pressure to deliver order and jobs for Afghans. And that will require foreign aid and investment from countries that America has a lot of influence with — Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the members of the European Union.

And with the United States gone, the Taliban will also have to navigate their survival while swimming alone with some real sharks — Pakistan, India, China, Russia and Iran. They might want to keep the White House phone number on speed dial.

“The post-2001 Taliban have proved to be a learning, more political organization that is more open to the influence of external factors,” said Thomas Ruttig in a paper for the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, The Washington Post noted.

We’ll see. The early signs — all sorts of Taliban abuses — are not promising. But we need to watch how, and if, they fully establish control. The Taliban’s main beef with America is that we were in their country. Let’s see what happens when we’re gone.

And let’s also remember: When the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001, iPhones, Facebook and Twitter didn’t even exist. Flash forward to today: Afghanistan is not only much more connected to the world, but it’s connected internally as well. It will not be nearly as easy for the Taliban to hide their abuses from the world or from fellow Afghans.

In 2001, virtually no one in Afghanistan owned a mobile phone. Today, more than 70 percent of Afghans do, and many of them have internet-enabled smartphones. While there is nothing inherently liberalizing about owning a phone, according to a 2017 study by Internews, Afghanistan’s social media “is already propagating change as it has become a platform for denouncing cases of corruption and injustice, bringing attention to causes that have not yet been addressed on traditional media and seemingly letting any social media user voice a public opinion.’’

Maybe the Taliban will just shut it all down. And maybe they won’t be able to.

At the same time, a July 7 report in Time magazine on Afghanistan observed: “When U.S.-backed forces ousted the Taliban from power, in 2001, there were almost no girls in school across the country. Today, there are millions, and tens of thousands of women attending university, studying everything from medicine to miniature painting.’’

Maybe on the morning after the morning after, the Taliban will just order them all back under burqas and shut their schoolrooms. But maybe they will also encounter pushback from wives and daughters that they’ve never encountered before — precisely because of the social, educational and technological seeds of change planted by the United States over the last 20 years. I don’t know.

And what if all of the most educated Afghans try to emigrate — including civil servants, plumbers, electricians, computer repair experts and car mechanics — and the morning after the morning after, the country is left with a bunch of barely literate Taliban thugs to run the place? What will they do then? Especially since this is a much more environmentally stressed Afghanistan than the one the Taliban ruled 20 years ago?

According to a report published last year by National Geographic, “Afghanistan is one of the most vulnerable countries in the world to climate change, and one of the least equipped to handle what’s to come” — including drought, flooding, avalanches, landslides, extreme weather and mass displacement.

As for the Biden team, it is hard to imagine a worse morning after for it in Kabul. Its failure to create a proper security perimeter and transition process, in which Afghans who risked their lives to work with us these past two decades could be assured of a safe removal to America — not to mention an orderly exit for foreign diplomats, human rights activists and aid workers — is appalling and inexplicable.

But ultimately, the Biden team will be judged by how it handles the morning after the morning after. Biden made a claim — one that was shared by the Trump team — that America would be more secure and better able to deal with any terrorist threats if we were out of Afghanistan than if we stayed embedded there, with all the costs of people, energy and focus. He again suggested as much in his address to the nation Monday afternoon.

The Biden team essentially said that the old way of trying to secure America from Middle East terrorists through occupation and nation-building doesn’t work and that there is a better way. It needs to tell us what that way is and prove it out the morning after the morning after.

We’re at the start of one of the biggest geopolitical challenges the modern world has ever faced. Because there’s now a whole slew of countries — Libya, Lebanon, Yemen, Afghanistan, Somalia — that have evicted the colonial great powers that once controlled them (and that brought both order and disorder) but have now also manifestly failed at governing themselves. What to do?

When the French president, Emmanuel Macron, visited Lebanon in July 2020, he was presented on his arrival with a petition signed by some 50,000 Lebanese calling for France to take control of Lebanon because of the Lebanese government’s “total inability to secure and manage the country.”

I doubt that is the last such petition we will see.

For the last 20 years, America tried to defend itself from terrorism emanating from Afghanistan by trying to nurture it to stability and prosperity through the promotion of gender pluralism, religious pluralism, education pluralism, media pluralism and, ultimately, political pluralism.

That theory was not wrong. We are entering an unprecedented era in human history, two simultaneous and hugely challenging climate changes at once: one in the climate of technology and one in the climate of the climate. Without such pluralism, neither Afghanistan nor any of these other failing states (or America, but that’s for another column) will be able to adapt to the 21st century.

But the theory relied on there being enough Afghans willing to sign on for more such pluralism. Many were. But too many were not. So Biden determined that we needed to stop this effort, leave Afghanistan and readjust our defense strategy. I pray that he is right. But he will be judged by what happens the morning after the morning after.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/16/opin ... 778d3e6de3

[swamidada]

By Vijayta Lalwani
Published August 20, 2021
On Aug. 16, Wali Salek was resting in his two-storey home in District 11 in Khair Khana, a neighbourhood in the northwest of Kabul. His daughters were cooking and his two sons were asleep. Suddenly, a loud thud from above jolted the family awake.

“It sounded like a bomb blast,” Salek told Scroll.in over a video call on Tuesday afternoon. The 47-year-old works as a security guard in the main city nearly 9km away from his home.

Plaster began to crumble down from the walls and ceiling. Hearing the crash, his neighbours came out of their homes, Salek said. He climbed up to the roof of his house to see what had happened.

He was greeted by a horrific scene, he said: blood splattered across his roof and two bodies, badly damaged. “Their stomachs and their heads had cracked open,” Salek said. “Their brains had come out.”

But where had the bodies dropped from? Salek lives about 8 km away from the Hamid Karzai International Airport and his neighbours told him they watched as two men holding on to the wheel of a plane had fallen off.

News of the tragedy spread quickly—and it wasn’t long before Salek’s relative Shapoor Zarifi in Delhi’s Lajpat Nagar heard about it. The 27-year-old Zarifi, who runs a travel agency and a property company, put Scroll.in in touch with Salek. As Salek described the dramatic events in Pashto, Zarifi translated the video call into Hindi.

Salek sent photographs and videos of the bodies, which Scroll.in has chosen not to publish.

VIJAYTA LALWANI
Wali Salek, over a video call, with Shapoor Zarifi and this reporter.
By Aug. 15, the Taliban had taken full control of the capital leaving several residents scrambling at the airport to find a way out of the country.

On Aug. 16, videos emerged from Kabul showed chaotic scenes of thousands gathered at the airport. Some were trying to desperately cling on to a US Air Force plane as it was gearing to take off from the runway

“When I saw them [on the roof], I first thought they were Taliban men who were thrown off the plane but we [the neighbours] checked the bodies,” Salek said.

Salek sent a photo of the plaster on his ceiling that had cracked and crumbled after the bodies fell on his roof.
His wife, Zakia Salek, had followed him up to the roof but fainted after she saw the bodies, he said. He took her down to the bedroom and then gathered 10 to 12 of his neighbours. They wrapped the bodies in cloth and blankets, and took them to Amir Hamza Mosque at 1 pm, Salek said.


Salek sent a photo of the blood splattered across his roof.
Salek’s neighbour confirmed to Scroll.in that two men fell onto his roof around noon on Monday. “I thought it was an explosion but when I came out there was no explosion,” said Abdul Wajid, a 20-year old who lives with his family in the area.

“Two young people fell from the aeroplane…on the roof of Wali Salek,” Wajid said. “When I saw them they were dead.” The young man, who graduated from Mohammad Anwar Bismil High School located 2 km away from his home, is currently unemployed.

The bodies of the two men were then taken to the mosque located 300 metres away, he said. The maulana of the mosque found the identity card of both the men from the pockets of their clothes after which their families were contacted, Wajid said.

Salek identified one of the men as Shafiullah Hotak after he found his birth certificate in the zipped pocket of the coat he wore over a shirt. Hotak appeared to be aged between 25 and 27 years, he said. The other man appeared to be barely 20 years old and Salek claimed that he did not find any identity markers for this man, or other markers such as rings, wristwatch, bracelets, or chains on either of them.

Wajid said the mosque authorities had identified the second man as Fida Mohammad who hailed from Paghman, a town near Kabul.

After Salek dropped the bodies at the mosque, he said he returned home and washed away the remnants of flesh from his roof. He then took a taxi to the city to start his six-hour-long shift at 6 pm.

When he returned home that night, his neighbours told him that the families of the men had come to claim them at the mosque. Hotak, he claimed, was a doctor who hailed from Hotkhil village in Kabul, and the other man hailed from Qargha, also located within the capital.

Living close to the airport, Salek and his family had become used to the harsh sounds of military aircraft moving about. But he had never imagined anything thundering from the sky and onto the roof of his house.

“I thought maybe the plane would drop some dollars but never bodies,” Salek said.

But the whole incident has left the family harrowed and fearful about their safety in the city. His wife has been unable to eat or sleep. In his family, including his six children, he is the only one with a passport, so leaving the country would not be possible. For now, the family was trying to relocate to a safer province.

By Aug. 17, his wife had left Kabul with one of their daughters to travel to Panjshir province, situated north of the country. “We are in shock and we are not feeling safe,” Salek said.

VIJAYTA LALWANI
Shapoor Zarifi in South Delhi and Salek in Kabul over a video call.
“So much desperation”
Salek’s relative in Delhi, Shapoor Zarifi, also hails from Panjshir province. He came to Delhi in 2014.

As the Taliban have taken charge of most of the country, Zarifi has been inundated with phone calls from Afghanistan with desperate pleas for help. Afghans with passports, birth certificates and financial resources asked for his help in filling out their visa applications to India.

But none of that would matter until flights start again from Kabul. Zarifi said that his family including his mother, three brothers and two sisters, have been granted visas to India but are now stuck in Afghanistan.

“I can tell you that 90% of the people do not want the Taliban government or its rule,” Zarifi said. “Nobody can trust them and it does not matter if you are Hindu, Muslim or Sikh. There is so much desperation that is why people are risking their lives to leave.”

This piece was originally published on Scroll.ihttps://qz.com/india/2049994/two-men-fell-from-a-flying-plane-and-on-this-mans-roof-in-kabul/?utm_source=YPL

[swamidada]

The Afghan all-girls robotics team have been offered scholarships at 'incredible universities,' says Oklahoma mother who helped them escape the Taliban
Sophia Ankel
Sun, August 22, 2021, 12:03 PM

A mother from Oklahoma helped rescue members of the all-girl robotics team from Afghanistan.

Allyson Reneau previously met the girls at a conference in 2019 and wanted to help them escape.

Reneau told Insider the girls, who landed in Qatar this week, seem "safe, well, and happy."

See more stories on Insider's business page.

A 60-year-old Oklahoma mother who helped several members of an internationally recognized all-girl robotics team from Afghanistan escape the country said they are feeling "so grateful" to be out.

On Tuesday, 10 of the so-called "Afghan Dreamers," aged 16 to 18, were able to leave Kabul on a commercial flight to Doha, Qatar, after several failed attempts to flee the country.

One of the people who helped them get out was Allyson Reneau, a mother-of-11 from Oklahoma, who first met the girls at a Humans to Mars summit in Washington DC in May 2019.

Read more: The images of Afghans falling from the sky close the book on America's tragic and futile response to 9/11

"They left everything behind to pursue their dreams and to be free and educated," Reneau told Insider. "They now seem to be safe, well, and happy."

Reneau, who graduated from Harvard in 2016, said she kept in touch with the team since meeting them at the conference.

"Being a mother of nine biological daughters, I felt immediately drawn to them and I think it was it was mutual," she said.

The 60-year-old said that for weeks the girls had been texting her about the situation in Afghanistan and that one morning early in August, she woke up with an "overwhelming dreadful feeling that something was really wrong."

"I somehow felt that they were in great danger. And I couldn't shake it," she said. "It was so pronounced that I had to take action."

For days, Reneau was trying to speak to her senator and other local officials to find a way to get the team out.

But after hitting many roadblocks, she decided to take matters into her own hands and travel to Qatar herself. Shortly before her flight, she contacted an old roommate who lived in Qatar and worked for the embassy.

This friend was able to file all the paperwork, and with the help of the embassy, started the process of getting the girls out of Kabul. Reneau herself decided to stay and help from afar.

Four Afghan members of a robotics team make repairs on a robot.
Members of the Afghanistan team make a repair to their robot after their first round competing in the FIRST Global Robotics Challenge, Monday, July 17, 2017, in Washington. AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin
When she got the news that some of the girls got out safely earlier this week, Reneau said she "broke down."

"I got a text from one of the girls that just said: 'We did it.' All the emotion from two weeks of work and running into a wall constantly, and burying your feelings, and bearing your feelings for the girls, it just hit me all at once."

The all-girl Afghan robotics team made headlines back in 2017 when they traveled to Washington DC for an international robotics competition.

They were initially not able to obtain their visas to travel, but an intervention by former President Donald Trump allowed them to fly to DC and compete.

Reneau said that the girls are now figuring out where to go from Qatar but that they've already had an "abundance of scholarship offers from incredible universities" in the US.

"For the first time in their life, I really believe they have the freedom to choose and to be the architects of their own destiny and their own future," she said. "It's the freeing feeling to me to know that they will be able to go somewhere and get educated wherever they want."

Read the original article on Business Insider

https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/af ... 23654.html

[swamidada]

Founder of all-girls school in Afghanistan escapes with students and burns records
Barnini Chakraborty
Tue, August 24, 2021, 2:14 PM

The co-founder of the only all-girls private boarding school in Afghanistan said Tuesday that nearly 250 students, faculty, staff, and family members had made it out of the war-torn country and will temporarily resettle in Rwanda for a "semester abroad" for the entire study body.

"SOLA (School of Leadership, Afghanistan) is resettling, but our resettlement is not permanent," Shabana Basij-Rasikh tweeted. "A semester abroad is exactly what we're planning. When circumstances on the ground permit, we hope to return home to Afghanistan."

Basij-Rasikh also thanked the governments of Qatar, Rwanda, and the United States for helping the girls escape.

"My heart breaks for my country," she added. "I've stood in Kabul, and I've seen the fear, and the anger, and the ferocious bravery of the Afghan people. I look at my students, and I see the faces of the millions of Afghan girls, just like them, who remain behind."

Basij-Rasikh tweeted videos of herself Friday burning the academic records and files of the young women at her school amid the terror of what a return to Taliban rule could mean for women. Basij-Rasikh said she burned the documents to protect students and their families from the terror group.

"In March 2002, after the fall of Taliban, thousands of Afghan girls were invited to go to the nearest public school to participate in a placement test because the Taliban had burned all female students' records to erase their existence. I was one of those girls," Basij-Rasikh said. "Nearly 20 years later, as the founder of the only all-girls boarding school in Afghanistan, I'm burning my students' records not to erase them, but to protect them and their families."

Since seizing control of Afghanistan, the Taliban have attempted to reshape their image and portray themselves to Western reporters as a kinder, gentler extremist group that will respect women's rights within the limits of Shariah, though they provided no details of their new reading of Islamic law. When the Taliban were last in power in the 1990s, their hard-line stance led to the severe mistreatment of women. Women had become second-class citizens with very few, if any, rights. Girls were yanked out of school. And if that weren't enough, nearly all of the schools were either blown up or bullet-ridden.

Basij-Rasikh, who was born and raised in Kabul, was only 6 years old when the Taliban forbade girls from receiving an education.

Rather than giving in to their demands, her family dressed her and her sister up as boys and sent them to a secret school for girls in Kabul. They knew the stakes were high, and if caught, they could be killed. But they also knew the importance of education.

Basij-Rasikh attended high school in the United States through the YES exchange program and graduated magna cum laude in 2010 from Middlebury College in Vermont. After graduating, she returned to her homeland and co-founded SOLA, the first-of-its-kind Afghan-led private boarding school for girls.

Since the Taliban takeover, she has been pleading with the outside world to keep the girls stuck in Afghanistan in their minds.

"Those girls cannot leave, and you cannot look away. If there's one thing I ask of the world, it is this: Do not avert your eyes from Afg. Don't let your attention wander as the weeks pass. See those girls, & in doing so you will hold those holding power over them to account," she said.

https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/fo ... 00457.html