American commanders worked with the Taliban to facilitate the evacuation of more than 124,000 people from Afghanistan in recent weeks. Both the United States and the Taliban share a common threat in the Islamic State, which was responsible for an attack outside Kabul airport last week that killed 13 U.S. service members and more than 170 civilians.
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In rare public display, dozens of women in Afghanistan protest Taliban rule and gender-based violence
Despite the dangers, dozens of Afghan women took to the streets in western Afghanistan on Thursday in a rare public demonstration against Taliban restrictions on their right to work and get an education.
“After weeks of trying to engage with the Taliban at all levels, the women decided to make their voices heard publicly,” Mariam Ebram, a 24-year-old attendee at the protest in Herat, the largest city in western Afghanistan, told Al Jazeera.
Ebram said she and other women were fed up with being told to stay home or being turned away from their offices in the weeks since the Taliban regained control of the country.
“All we are asking for is rights,” she said. “A government without women will never last,” she added, referring to worries that the government the Taliban is in the process of forming is unlikely to include women in leadership positions.
The United States, United Nations and European Union, among others, have called on the Taliban to form an inclusive government that includes women and respects the rights of all Afghan citizens.
The Taliban has officially pledged to respect women’s rights and rule on behalf of all Afghans. But many inside and outside the country do not trust the militant group, given its record of repressive rule and gender-based violence when it was last in power from 1996 to 2001.
In one of the Taliban’s first news conferences since taking power, a representative asked women to stay home for now while its fighters become more acclimated to their presence in public.
House panel calls for accounting on Afghanistan, after partisan breakdown over Biden ‘no confidence’ vote
The House Armed Services Committee approved its version of the annual defense bill last night after loading it up with bipartisan-backed demands for a reckoning over Afghanistan — but not before descending into a bitter partisan fight about whether to condemn President Biden personally for mistakes made during the withdrawal.
In the wee hours of Thursday morning, near the end of a markup that began at 10 a.m. the day before, lawmakers lost their composure as they debated a proposal from Rep. Michael Waltz (R-Fla.) to express that Congress no longer had confidence in Biden to be commander in chief after the Afghanistan pullout.
“This commander in chief has failed in leading this withdrawal,” Waltz said, challenging Democrats to join him in expressing “the outrage behind the scenes” in public. Instead, they directed it at him.
“Outlandish and despicable,” Rep. Anthony G. Brown (D-Md.) called it. “What do you think our adversaries are thinking when Congress is saying a vote of no confidence? … Oh, I know who’s jumping for joy right now — the Taliban, the remnants of al-Qaeda, China!”
Republicans began the 16-hour-long session promising to hold Biden accountable for what ranking Republican Rep. Mike D. Rogers (Ala.) called a series of “disastrous decisions” — and to make sure the president shared plans for how to counter future terrorist threats from Afghanistan.
In the end, the vote of no confidence never made it onto the House’s version of the defense bill, which has yet to receive a floor vote. But the measure was amended to include several other requirements for an accounting from Afghanistan, including what military equipment was left behind and what was destroyed; how much access the Taliban now has to financial, natural and U.S. military resources in the country; and whether the group should be treated as a foreign terrorist organization.
Measures were also added requiring the administration to report to Congress about how it plans to conduct counterterrorism without a military footprint in the country, and its plans for evacuating U.S. citizens and Afghans approved to come to the United States.
The panel also approved creating a 12-member independent commission to study the failures in Afghanistan over the past 20 years — though panel chairman Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) promised that the House Armed Services Committee would continue to do its own oversight as well.
An American Marine dies in Afghanistan, and her community back home loses its ‘light’
Amid the dozens of yellowing pages Jineyda Tapia kept from her time as a teacher at Lawrence High School was a heartfelt essay by Johanny Rosario.
When Rosario’s name appeared among the 13 U.S. service members killed last week in the terrorist attack at Kabul’s international airport, Tapia went back to her vault of memories — boxes and folders holding precious photos of her students, essays they wrote for their college applications and assignments from the English course she taught from 2006 to 2015.
Written when Rosario was still a senior, Tapia said, the document captures the essence of a girl who was “a light” in Lawrence, Mass. — a predominantly Hispanic community and one of the state’s poorest cities.
For Afghan evacuees arriving in U.S., a tenuous legal status and little financial support
The Biden administration is preparing to screen and resettle tens of thousands of Afghan evacuees in the United States over the coming weeks and months, but the majority will arrive without visas as “humanitarian parolees,” lacking a path to legal U.S. residency and the benefits and services offered to traditional refugees, according to U.S. officials and worried aid groups working closely with the government.
Afghan parolees who have arrived at U.S. military bases will be eligible for an ad hoc State Department program that provides limited assistance for up to 90 days, including a one-time $1,250 stipend. But they will not have the full range of medical, counseling and resettlement services available to immigrants who arrive through the U.S. refugee program.
The nonprofit organizations that work with the government to resettle refugees and that are assisting with Afghan evacuees say Congress will need to provide billions in emergency funding to help the Afghans start over and ensure they can be successfully and safely integrated into the United States.
Tajikistan says it cannot afford to take in Afghan refugees
The poorest Central Asian country bordering Afghanistan, Tajikistan, warned Thursday that it cannot afford to take in the large numbers of Afghan refugees it had pledged to do this summer.
The ex-Soviet state, which is closely allied with Russia, said in July that it could host around 100,000 Afghans if it built additional infrastructure to absorb them.
But following the Taliban’s swift takeover of Afghanistan last month — which happened in days rather than months, as U.S. officials had predicted — Tajikistan’s interior minister said Thursday that his country remained unprepared.
“Tajikistan does not have the capacity to accommodate a large number of refugees and asylum seekers,” Interior Minister Ramazon Rakhimzoda said in comments circulated by the ministry, Reuters reported.
Tajikistan and Afghanistan share many linguistic and ethnic ties, as well as an 835-mile border that for decades Afghans have crisscrossed to escape waves of violence and war at home.
Rakhimzoda said Thursday that Dushanbe had allocated some 70 hectares of land along the border to receive Afghan refugees, Reuters reported. But Tajikistan remains wary of permanently taking in large numbers of Afghans and has put limits on where they can live and work.
Dushanbe has also repeatedly called on the international community to provide further assistance.
“Not a single international organization in 20 years has provided practical help in creating infrastructure to take in refugees and asylum seekers,” Rakhimzoda said in the statement Thursday.
Following the Soviet Union’s dissolution, Tajikistan was the only Central Asian state to face a civil war, which for five years pitted Russian-allied forces against an Islamist opposition. Tajik President Emomali Rahmon, who has ruled the country since, has frequently used the specter of terrorism, including militants coming over from Afghanistan, as a justification for his restrictions of religious and political freedoms.
‘We need to adjust to the new reality,’ U.K.’s top diplomat says of Taliban rule
Britain will have to engage with the Islamist militants who now control Afghanistan even if it does not intend to recognize the Taliban for now, its top diplomat said Thursday.
“We need to adjust to the new reality,” British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab told reporters in a news conference with his counterpart in Qatar. “We will not be recognizing the Taliban in the foreseeable future, but there is an important scope for engagement and dialogue.”
“I think there are some early tests for the Taliban,” he added. One of those tests, he said, will be whether the Taliban upholds its assurance that foreigners and Afghans wishing to leave will be allowed safe passage out of the country, now that the last U.S. troops who held the Kabul airport have left.
More than 120,000 people boarded U.S., British and other evacuation flights out of the city after the Taliban’s swift advance. But more people awaiting rescue remain — including Afghans who guarded the British Embassy and a few hundred British nationals.
The Biden administration has faced criticism for the chaotic evacuation and withdrawal after nearly two decades of war in Afghanistan. So have British officials, chief among them Raab, who was vacationing on a Greek island when the Afghan capital fell.
The British minister said Thursday that governments must engage directly with the Taliban to make sure aid workers could still operate there to avoid “a humanitarian disaster,” as well as to pressure the militants to stick to their promise that their rule will be less repressive this time around.
After meeting with the British diplomat, Qatar’s foreign minister said the Persian Gulf state was talking to the Taliban and Turkey about reopening Kabul’s airport, although it remained unclear when that would happen. “We will remain hopeful that we will be able to operate it as soon as possible,” he said.
Afghan national girls’ soccer team is seeking to leave amid fears of persecution by the Taliban
A former U.S. official, international soccer players, U.S. allies and a military veteran have joined forces to try to evacuate young female Afghan soccer players, their coaching staff and their families from Afghanistan.
The group of 133 Afghans, which includes infants, has been seeking to escape the country out of fear of Taliban persecution, according to the Associated Press. The Taliban has banned women from playing sports in the past, although the militants now insist that women’s rights will be ensured within an Islamic framework. The players are between 14 and 16 years old.
The group has failed to escape Afghanistan at least five times, including when an Islamic State bombing attack outside Kabul’s airport last week prevented the Afghans from boarding a plane, the AP reported. Now, they are moving from location to location, to avoid the Taliban. Their lack of passports or other documentation has hampered their efforts to leave the country.
Robert McCreary, a former White House official during the George W. Bush administration who is working to extract the group, said he hopes to create a “protective bubble” around the Afghans. He said he has urged the Taliban to help them leave. Australia, France and Qatar have offered to help as well.
Farkhunda Muhtaj, the Afghan women’s soccer team captain now residing in Canada; Kat Khosrowyar, an Iranian American who coached Tehran’s U-19 women’s team; and Julie Foudy, former captain of the U.S. women’s national soccer team, have signed up for the effort.
The Biden administration has pledged to persuade the Taliban to provide safe passage to stranded American citizens and vulnerable Afghans hoping to leave.
“The only thing that they had done wrong in the eyes of the Taliban … is the fact that they were born girls and … had the audacity to dream,” said Nic McKinley, a CIA and Air Force veteran who is also involved.
Analysis: The precedent problem in the U.S. leaving Afghans behind
Over the past 24 hours, it has become increasingly clear that the effort to evacuate U.S. Afghan allies has come up well short.
President Biden said Aug. 20 that “any American who wants to come home, we will get you home.” When pressed on whether that held for Afghan allies, he said it did: “We’re making the same commitment.”
The numbers coming out in the aftermath of the final evacuations this week, though, indicate that most — if not the vast majority — have been left behind after the full U.S. withdrawal. NBC News reported Tuesday that, of the more than 120,000 people the Biden administration says it evacuated, initial estimates suggest that only about 8,500 were Afghans. That’s out of the more than 70,000 whom refugee advocacy groups say were in the Special Immigrant Visa pool — i.e. those who worked with the United States and their family members.
Taliban fighters flaunt seized weapons — including a helicopter — in Kandahar parade
Taliban militants driving American Humvees showcased a lineup of weapons they captured during their blitz across the country at a parade in Kandahar celebrating the withdrawal of U.S. troops.
A helicopter with a black-and-white Taliban flag hanging from its side cruised over scores of supporters in the country’s second biggest city. A man waved to them from the sky.
Fighters with heavy machine guns stood atop military vehicles left behind after 20 years of war. Dozens of men watched on both sides of the road, some saluting the militants as they passed by.
Photos from Agence France-Presse show a fleet of armored SUVs driving single file on a highway outside Kandahar on Wednesday from Afghanistan’s south, the Taliban’s traditional heartland.
The parade comes after Taliban fighters entered a hangar at the Kabul airport on Monday night, posing with helicopters minutes after the last U.S. troops took off from the tarmac.
In the weeks since their conquests, Taliban fighters have flaunted the millions of dollars worth of U.S. weaponry they captured, though experts say it’s not clear whether they can maintain and use equipment such as helicopters.
Celebratory gunfire erupted in the sky over the capital after the final aircraft left, ending a chaotic evacuation of more than 110,000 people.
In the days after the U.S. pullout, videos on social media showed Taliban fans carrying coffins wrapped in American, British and French flags at a mock funeral in the eastern city of Khost.
Large crowds were out in the streets for Wednesday’s show of force in Kandahar province, where the Taliban formed in 1994 before later ruling the country for five years until 2001.
Now that they are back in power, the militants must contend with governing a country of 39 million facing a wave of displacement and cut off from key sources of funding.
Facebook helps Afghan journalists and their families flee
Facebook helped a group of Afghan journalists — along with its employees — flee to Mexico before the last U.S. troops pulled out of Afghanistan this week.
The Afghans — 175 Facebook employees, activists, journalists and their families, including 75 children — landed in Mexico City on Tuesday, according to Mexico’s Foreign Ministry.
“In the process of assisting Facebook employees and close partners leave Afghanistan, we joined an effort to help a group of journalists and their families who were in grave danger,” a Facebook spokesman said Thursday. “The journalists have been welcomed in Mexico.”
Facebook declined to give further details on the evacuation effort, citing security reasons.
As Taliban militants took over cities across Afghanistan last month, including the capital, Kabul, many Afghans closed down their social media accounts and deleted messages amid fears of reprisals. Facebook has an official ban on Taliban content from its platforms because it considers the group to be a terrorist organization, although new Taliban accounts still surface, according to numerous reports.
The social media company said on Aug. 20 it had added several security features for Afghan users to “help protect [them] from being targeted” — a candid admission from Facebook’s security policy chief on the risks of having personal information available on social networks.
Mexico has emerged as something of a haven for media workers in Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover. The group of evacuees that landed in Mexico on Tuesday was the latest of four such humanitarian efforts involving Mexico. They traveled with help from Mexican Embassy officials in Iran, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt, the Foreign Ministry said.
“In keeping with Mexico’s principles of solidarity with asylum seekers, refugees and those seeking humanitarian protection in our country, additional groups of Afghan citizens are expected to arrive in the coming days,” the ministry said, adding that the arrivals will be provided for by “private sponsors and civil society organizations.”
As some countries welcome Afghan refugees, others are trying to keep them out
Countries where people leaving Afghanistan probably will wind up are bracing for a full-scale migration crisis in the wake of the Taliban’s rapid return to power and the hurried withdrawal of the United States and its allies. Warnings from aid groups have given credence to those fears.
The United States and about 100 other countries said Sunday that they would continue to accept fleeing Afghans, and that the Taliban has pledged to allow safe passage. But it’s unclear whether the Taliban will stay true to its word.
Neighboring countries are bracing to bear the brunt of any surge — and warning that they are not prepared. Asylum seekers who continue on the long and arduous path to Europe will encounter anti-refugee sentiment and roadblocks in countries wary of a repeat of the Syrian migration crisis of 2015.
Taliban’s central banker tries to charm financial institutions
Afghanistan’s new Taliban-appointed central bank chief has reportedly told bankers the Islamist group wants a functioning financial system, but did not elaborate on how such a banking infrastructure could be sustained.
The acting central bank governor, Haji Mohammad Idris, met members of the Afghanistan Banks Association and other bankers this week, telling them the Taliban considered the bank sector “imperative,” Reuters reported, citing two unidentified people.
Idris, a Taliban loyalist who has no formal financial training, was appointed to head the central bank last week.
When the Taliban was last in power from 1996 to 2001, a handful of commercial banks retained licenses, but none were in operation and few loans were made, according to Reuters.
Following its swift takeover of the country last month, the Taliban has inherited an economy crippled by a severe drought and the coronavirus, compounding the fallout from nearly two decades of conflict. Afghanistan’s economy is forecast to contract by 9.7 percent this fiscal year, according to Fitch Solutions.
International aid flows represented roughly 43 percent of Afghanistan’s economy in 2020, according to the World Bank. There is uncertainty over whether the international community will recognize a new Taliban government and release assets held offshore.
The Biden administration last month froze Afghan government reserves held in U.S. bank accounts, blocking the Taliban from accessing billions of dollars. The Afghanistan central bank held $9.4 billion in reserve assets as of April, according to the International Monetary Fund. That amounts to roughly one-third of the country’s annual economic output, The Washington Post has reported. The vast majority of those reserves are not held in the country.
The Taliban was working to find solutions for liquidity and rising inflation, Idris reportedly said.
A key priority for the central bank was now to have its international accounts “unblocked” and get access to its reserves, to allow it to keep enough money circulating, Reuters reported.
Analysis: George W. Bush and the worst predictions about the Afghanistan war
After 20 long years, the U.S. war in Afghanistan is officially over, with the full withdrawal of troops having taken place ahead of the Tuesday deadline.
And while the focus is presently on how the Biden administration prosecuted the chaotic withdrawal after offering false assurances about it, those false assurances are merely the latest in the long series that has marked America’s longest war.
With the war now over, it’s worth taking stock of just how it was sold to the American people — and just how much the outcome belies that sales job. The big upshot of the present situation is that the Taliban, which the United States went to war to uproot, is back in charge in the country immediately upon the withdrawal.
Afghan economy set to shrink sharply after ‘highly disruptive’ U.S. withdrawal
Afghanistan’s economy is set to contract by 9.7 percent this fiscal year, according to a Fitch Solutions forecast, in a reversal of an earlier estimate that the central Asian country would grow by 0.4 percent.
The country’s economy is estimated to shrink by another 5.2 percent in the fiscal year ending in 2022, and its long term growth rate is expected to be far slower than in recent years, the research group said.
“The highly disruptive manner in which the U.S.’s security forces left … and the Taliban takeover will mean that the economic pains for the country will be felt acutely over the short term,” researchers said, according to Reuters.
The report comes as the United States and its allies have frozen assets and withheld billions of dollars in aid money after the Islamist militant group toppled the Western-backed government last month.
Washington and its partners have said they would condition economic support to the country on whether vulnerable Afghans are allowed to leave and basic human rights are maintained under the new Taliban regime.
The United Nations has reported widespread hunger and millions of displaced people due to ongoing violence. Around 14 million people — or about a third of the country’s population — are food insecure.
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