Afghanistan

Recent history (19th-21st Century)
kmaherali
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Are We Losing Afghanistan Again?

“ALLAH has promised us victory and America has promised us defeat,” Mullah Muhammad Omar, the first head of the Taliban, once said, “so we shall see which of the two promises will be fulfilled.” When his colleagues admitted this summer that Mullah Omar had died, Al Qaeda and affiliated groups around the globe remembered those words — victory is a divine certainty — in their eulogies. And in Afghanistan today, though the majority of Afghans still do not identify with the Taliban or Al Qaeda, Mullah Omar’s bold defiance in the face of a superpower is beginning to look prescient.

Since early September, the Taliban have swept through Afghanistan’s north, seizing numerous districts and even, briefly, the provincial capital Kunduz. The United Nations has determined that the Taliban threat to approximately half of the country’s 398 districts is either “high” or “extreme.” Indeed, by our count, more than 30 districts are already under Taliban control. And the insurgents are currently threatening provincial capitals in both northern and southern Afghanistan.

Confronted with this grim reality, President Obama has decided to keep 9,800 American troops in the country through much of 2016 and 5,500 thereafter. The president was right to change course, but it is difficult to see how much of a difference this small force can make. The United States troops currently in Afghanistan have not been able to thwart the Taliban’s advance. They were able to help push them out of Kunduz, but only after the Taliban’s two-week reign of terror. This suggests that additional troops are needed, not fewer.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/21/opini ... 87722&_r=0
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Flawed Justice After a Mob Killed an Afghan Woman

KABUL, Afghanistan — Farkhunda had one chance to escape the mob that wanted to kill her. Two Afghan police officers pulled her onto the roof of a low shed, above the angry crowd.

But then the enraged men below her picked up poles and planks of wood, and hit at her until she lost her grip and tumbled down.

Her face bloodied, she struggled to stand. Holding her hands to her hair, she looked horrified to find that her attackers had yanked off her black hijab as she fell. The mob closed in, kicking and jumping on her slight frame.

The tormented final hours of Farkhunda Malikzada, a 27-year-old aspiring student of Islam who was accused of burning a Quran in a Muslim shrine, shocked Afghans across the country. That is because many of her killers filmed one another beating her and posted clips of her broken body on social media. Hundreds of other men watched, holding their phones aloft to try to get a glimpse of the violence, but never making a move to intervene. Those standing by included several police officers.

Unlike so many abuses against Afghan women that unfold in private, this killing in March prompted a national outcry. For Farkhunda had not burned a Quran. Instead, an investigation found, she had confronted men who were themselves dishonoring the shrine by trafficking in amulets and, more clandestinely, Viagra and condoms.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/27/world ... 87722&_r=0
kmaherali
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Afghan Woman’s Nose Is Cut Off by Her Husband, Officials Say

KABUL, Afghanistan — A young woman has been hospitalized in northern Afghanistan and is hoping to travel to Turkey for reconstructive surgery after her husband cut off her nose, the police and the woman’s family said on Tuesday.

The woman, Reza Gul, 20, was attacked by her husband with a knife on Sunday in Shar-Shar, a village in an impoverished and Taliban-controlled part of Faryab Province. Reza Gul was in stable condition on Tuesday in a hospital in Maimana, the provincial capital, according to a spokesman for the Faryab police, Sayed Massoud Yaqubi.

Maroof Samar, a doctor who is the acting director of public health in Faryab, said Reza Gul had been in “very critical condition when she was brought in — she had lost much blood.”

Throughout the six years Reza Gul and her husband, Muhammad Khan, 25, have been married, he and members of his family have regularly abused her, beating her and binding her in chains, said Reza Gul’s mother, Zarghona. Mr. Khan regularly went to Iran for work, returned for a few months during which he abused his wife, then left her with his family, she said.

“This infidel cut off my daughter’s nose,” Zarghona said. “If I catch him, I’ll tear him to pieces.”

Though Reza Gul took her severed nose to the hospital, the facility was not equipped to handle the complicated surgery needed to reattach it. Dr. Samar said the governor of Faryab had enlisted the Turkish Embassy in Kabul to help arrange travel to Turkey for surgery and treatment. Reza Gul received a national identity card on Tuesday, he said, which she will use to apply for a passport to get to Turkey as soon as possible.

Her plight has again brought attention to endemic violence against women in Afghanistan, which the United Nations Development Program rated one of the worst countries in the world to be born female. Despite more than a decade of efforts to enact an Afghan legal system that protects women, and more than $1 billion in legal aid from the United States alone, Afghan women remain particularly vulnerable to abuse. And their attackers, for the most part, are only rarely punished.

On Sunday afternoon, Zarghona said, Reza Gul and Mr. Khan got into an argument over his having taken his uncle’s 6- or 7-year-old daughter as his fiancée, with the intention of making her his second wife this year. During the dispute, Mr. Khan erupted into a rage, took a knife and cut off his wife’s nose, said Zarghona, who goes by a single name.

Mr. Khan and one of his brothers then threw Reza Gul on the back of a motorcycle with the intention of taking her away to kill her, Zarghona said. But news of the attack spread quickly in the village, causing an uproar, and Mr. Khan fled for his life.

“I went to the Taliban,” Zarghona said. “I asked them: ‘Is this the Islam we are following? My daughter’s nose chopped off? But you are doing nothing about it. I want justice.’ ”

“They got really angry, and now they are searching for the boy,” she said. “I hope they find him before the police do.”

Mr. Yaqubi, the police official, said the authorities had heard that “the Taliban has already arrested Muhammad Khan, and he is presently in their custody.”

“We don’t know what they plan to do with him, but we will follow the case and bring him to justice.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/20/world ... d=71987722
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Afghan Troops Retreat Under Pressure From Taliban

LASHKAR GAH, Afghanistan — The last of the Afghan forces have pulled out of the strategic district of Musa Qala in southern Helmand Province, officials said on Saturday, months after the Taliban overran most of the district and kept them holed up in desert outposts.

The retreat, which had many politicians here mystified, was the latest blow to a province that had been teetering for months. Now, the resurgent Taliban insurgents either control or are contesting 10 of its 14 districts, extending the fighting to Babaji, a suburb so close to the provincial capital that residents of the city could hear the clashes at night.

Col. Mohammad Rasoul Zazai, a spokesman for the Afghan Army’s 215th Maiwand Corps in Helmand, said the military leadership had decided that it was more effective to pull out the remaining troops and reinforce bases elsewhere in the province.

“We don’t have troops in Musa Qala anymore,” Colonel Zazai said.

Other officials said the decision was made to avoid further casualties to a reeling force because the army units were under severe pressure from the Taliban, making reinforcement and resupply difficult.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/21/world ... world/asia
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Greed, Corruption and Danger: A Tarnished Afghan Gem Trade

KABUL, Afghanistan — The local people called the militia’s takeover of the giant lapis mine in northeastern Badakhshan Province a white coup — easy and bloodless. Perhaps, but the seizure has become a lesson in how the lack of accountability and rule of law in Afghanistan can turn bounty into ruin.

Riding waves of excitement after a 2010 report by the United States military that Afghanistan’s mineral wealth could be worth as much as $1 trillion, the Lajwardeen Mining Company won a 15-year contract in 2013 to extract lapis lazuli in Badakhshan. For thousands of years, Afghanistan has been one of the chief sources of lapis lazuli, a prized blue gemstone associated with love and purity and admired by poets as well as jewelers.

Valued at about $125 million a year in 2014, the lapis trade had the potential to be worth at least double that, and Lajwardeen, owned by an Afghan family in the import-export business for three generations, saw a great opportunity.

Yet within 21 days of officially beginning its work, the company lost the mine to a local militia supported by the Afghan political elite.

In the two years since, according to interviews with company employees, Afghan officials and militia commanders, the government has done little to restore the mine to the company. Lapis is still being mined, with the rent split between the militia and the Taliban, who have established a strong foothold in a province long resistant to them.

With the plunge in global commodity prices deflating some of the enthusiasm for Afghanistan’s mineral wealth, the initial excitement has faded into broader — and, among Afghans, all-too-familiar — concerns over mismanagement, impunity and corruption. The country has failed to make even the most basic legal and regulatory changes, and even President Ashraf Ghani recently expressed fear that “we are faced with the curse of natural resources.”

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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/06/world ... d=45305309
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Afghan Women Take on Farming

Small-scale agricultural ventures are changing attitudes as well as boosting incomes.

Peaches, apricots and apples have transformed life for Nadia, a 32-year-old from the village of Tajikan in the northern province of Baghlan.

Six years ago she planted an orchard with the aim of becoming a small-scale fruit producer.

“The orchard became productive three years later,” she told IWPR. “Now I make over 1,000 US dollars from the fruit each year, as well as from growing vegetables and selling wood.”

It has not been easy. As well as obstacles in marketing her produce, Nadia worries about security and has to contend with prejudice because she is a woman.

“It really irritates me when I meet shopkeepers to talk about the selling my fruit and they tell me, ‘Go and send a man from your family because you are a woman.’”

Agriculture, a central pillar of Afghanistan’s economy, has traditionally been dominated by men. Women are sometimes recruited to work the fields or tend livestock, but have no say in any of the profits.

A number of schemes, however, have had considerable success supporting women who want to start small-scale agricultural enterprises.

Nadia is one of those who have benefited from the aid of the National Solidarity Programme (NSP), a flagship scheme set up to help local communities in Afghanistan run their own development projects.

Created by the Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development in 2003, its Community Development Councils (CDCs) in villages across Afghanistan are funded to implement infrastructure or agriculture projects.

As well as receiving government money, the NSP is supported by the World Bank, the Aga Khan Foundation, the United States development agency USAID and the Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund.

Zia Jan Noori, a 28-year-old from Pulkhumri city, is another beneficiary of the NSP programme.

“When I got married, I faced a very difficult and hard future because my husband was jobless and we were so poor,” she said. “But then someone told me to go to the NSP and seek their help. My husband was against it, but I went to their office despite his opposition. They provided me with 30 egg-laying chickens.”

That was all she needed to get started, Noori continued. “Now I have 100 chickens and I earn about 200 dollars a month from selling eggs. My husband also helps me in my work and our lives have changed dramatically.”

Nasratullah Shaheer, the NSP head in Baghlan, said, “We have been working over the last ten years to provide funding to women and our foundation has so far supported about 1,000 women.”

He continued, “We work in different sectors; for example, agriculture, livestock, making handicrafts, handbags and purses, embroidery and sewing. At first our helps is limited, but women who develop their projects are guaranteed under our constant and continuous support.”

“We are working across various sectors to improve women’s working capacity,” added She Beg Talibi, head of human resources at the Agha Khan’s office in Baghlan province. “For example, as part of development in the villages we help women in education, agriculture and handicrafts.

“We help women to be independent and stand on their own feet,” he continued, adding, “We have also built a health care institute for women in Baghlan from which many midwives and nurses graduate each year.”

Once the women’s schemes are up and running, they can expect additional support in terms of marketing and tax breaks.

“We help provide opportunities for women to sell their products in Afghanistan and internationally,” said Shah Hussain Hussaini, director of Baghlan’s chamber of commerce.

“With the help of the Agha Khan’s office, we have exhibited many products produced by women at Bibi Sabri Garden [a women-only park] to showcase and boost women’s agricultural efforts in Baghlan.

“We’ve also conducted many seminars with the help of other agencies to develop women’s business enterprises, and provide advice to women in various sectors,” he continued, adding that women running small businesses did not have to pay tax until their enterprise reached a certain size.

Khadija Yaqin, director of women’s affairs in Baghlan, agreed that agriculture and livestock farming were great ways for local women to boost their incomes.

“We know many women who led very difficult lives before starting their farming projects, but now they are busy in agricultural work which has changed everything for the better. In fact, they’re really happy with their work.

“Various organisations have held lots of useful workshops and seminars for these women,” she continued. “Customers who buy their products said they are of high quality and appreciate the honesty with which these women do business.”

Pulkhumri resident Gul Ahmad Yakta, who runs an ice cream shop, said, “I have contract with one of the businesswoman who has a dairy farm. For three years now I have bought milk from Bibi Bibi Sidiqa. She provides me with 20-30 litres of milk every day. Her milk is very pure and she is very trustworthy.”

She added, “In the past I had a milk contract with another businessman, but the quality was not good.”

Even some of those who were at first opposed to women starting farming projects have now been won over.

“Before my wife started the agricultural work with the help of the NSP, our life was not so good,” said Nasim Gul, a farmer himself. “Although I had five hectares of land in the Doosh district of Baghlan, they weren’t enough to support our daily needs.”

“At first, when my wife told me that she was going to start agricultural work, I was against it because I thought it would be difficult for her and that people would start gossiping about us. For instance, that they would say that I couldn’t earn enough money so I forced my wife to start agricultural work. “

But working together has transformed their economic situation, he continued.

“Not only our life has become so good, but we also have savings,” Gul said. “I realise now that I was wrong, because women can do anything that men can do.”

This report was produced under IWPR’s Promoting Human Rights and Good Governance in Afghanistan initiative, funded by the European Union Delegation to Afghanistan.

https://iwpr.net/global-voices/afghan-w ... ke-farming
kmaherali
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A Start-Up Turns to Saffron to Help Afghanistan Regrow

Bomb-blasted roads, frequent blackouts, shortages of basic equipment and an untested consumer market are hardly conditions that make for natural entrepreneurial opportunities.

But three Army veterans and one civilian who all served in Afghanistan have taken on those challenges in their new venture. Their company, Rumi Spice, buys saffron from Afghan farmers and sells it to international customers.

Their business is part of a small crop of efforts to help develop Afghanistan’s resource economy.

“We wanted to create something to empower everyday Afghans long after we left,” said Kimberly Jung, one of Rumi Spice’s founders, who said the company’s name was inspired by the 13th-century Persian poet.

Started two years ago, Rumi Spice now sells saffron that is used by chefs in renowned restaurants like the French Laundry in California and Daniel in New York. It appeared on the shelves and website of the luxury food seller Dean & DeLuca this month.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/11/busin ... .html?_r=0
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Attack at University in Kabul Shatters a Sense of Freedom

KABUL, Afghanistan — As cafes, restaurants, and performance centers in Kabul came under attack one after another in recent years, the campus of the American University of Afghanistan remained a rare oasis for some of the country’s brightest young men and women.

Beyond providing a quality education, the school offered a glimpse of a carefree life away from the unpredictable violence that afflicted the rest of the capital. Behind layers of security, students could play basketball at the gym, compete in debate tournaments or just have an uninterrupted conversation over coffee.

That sense of freedom, too, was violated Wednesday night.

Men with Kalashnikov rifles and grenades first gunned down a guard at the adjoining school for the blind. One drove a car packed with explosives into the American University’s wall, blowing a gap through it. Two more militants dashed onto campus, where hundreds of students were taking evening classes. The attackers methodically stalked the men and women trapped inside, fighting off the Afghan security forces for nearly 10 hours in a terrifying overnight siege.

On Thursday morning, at least 13 lay dead: seven students, three police officers, two university guards and the night guard at the neighboring school for the blind. Abdul Baseer Mujahid, a spokesman for the Kabul police, said that more than 30 others were hurt in the attack; another estimate, from the Health Ministry, said 16 had been killed and 53 wounded.

The attack was unmistakably a blow to young Afghans who had chosen to defy the migrant exodus away from the country’s war and instead pursue their dreams in the difficult circumstances at home.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/26/world ... d=71987722
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Taliban Gain Ground in Afghanistan as Soldiers Surrender Their Posts

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — Besieged Afghan officials in the southern province of Oruzgan said on Sunday that scores of regular Afghan soldiers had surrendered in the past week to the Taliban, a trend also occurring recently in other provinces.

The latest case involved 41 Afghan National Army soldiers who surrendered and turned their base, the Mashal base in Chora District, over to the insurgents on Saturday night, according to Dost Mohammad Nayab, the spokesman for the province’s governor.

He said it was the third Afghan Army post in the province to surrender to the Taliban in the past week. Significant surrenders have been reported in Kunduz and Helmand Provinces as well.

The Taliban have taken more territory in Afghanistan this year than at any time in their 15-year struggle against the Western-supported Afghan government, according to United Nations data. At the same time, the Afghan military has suffered declining numbers and high attrition rates, according to data from the United States military. Afghan officials have said military casualty rates are historically high.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/31/world ... d=71987722
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Saudis Bankroll Taliban, Even as King Officially Supports Afghan Government

KABUL, Afghanistan — Fifteen years, half a trillion dollars and 150,000 lives since going to war, the United States is trying to extricate itself from Afghanistan. Afghans are being left to fight their own fight. A surging Taliban insurgency, meanwhile, is flush with a new inflow of money.

With their nation’s future at stake, Afghan leaders have renewed a plea to one power that may hold the key to whether their country can cling to democracy or succumbs to the Taliban. But that power is not the United States.

It is Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia is critical because of its unique position in the Afghan conflict: It is on both sides.

A longtime ally of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia has backed Islamabad’s promotion of the Taliban. Over the years, wealthy Saudi sheikhs and rich philanthropists have also stoked the war by privately financing the insurgents.

All the while, Saudi Arabia has officially, if coolly, supported the American mission and the Afghan government and even secretly sued for peace in clandestine negotiations on their behalf.

The contradictions are hardly accidental. Rather, they balance conflicting needs within the kingdom, pursued through both official policy and private initiative.

The dual tracks allow Saudi officials plausibly to deny official support for the Taliban, even as they have turned a blind eye to private funding of the Taliban and other hard-line Sunni groups.

The result is that the Saudis — through private or covert channels — have tacitly supported the Taliban in ways that make the kingdom an indispensable power broker.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/06/world ... d=45305309
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A Female Afghan Pilot Soars and Gives Up

Perhaps no Afghan’s story better embodied America’s aspirations for Afghanistan than that of Capt. Niloofar Rahmani, the first female fixed-wing pilot in the fledgling Afghan Air Force.

She was celebrated in Washington in 2015 when the State Department honored her with its annual Women of Courage award. “She continues to fly despite threats from the Taliban and even members of her own extended family,” the first lady, Michelle Obama, said in a statement.

On Thursday, on the eve of her scheduled return to Afghanistan from a 15-month training course at Air Force bases in Texas, Florida and Arkansas, Captain Rahmani broke a sobering piece of news to her American trainers. She still wants to be a military pilot, but not under her country’s flag. This summer, she filed a petition seeking asylum in the United States, where she hopes to eventually join the Air Force.

“Things are not changing” for the better in Afghanistan, Captain Rahmani said in an interview on Friday. “Things are getting worse and worse.”

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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/23/opini ... ef=opinion
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Saving Private Enterprise in Afghanistan

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/02/opini ... ef=opinion
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Taliban, Collecting Bills for Afghan Utilities, Tap New Revenue Sources

KABUL, Afghanistan — The Afghan government faces a peculiar problem in at least two major provinces: It provides precious electricity, some of it imported at costly rates from neighboring countries, but Taliban militants collect most of the bills.

If the government cuts off power, it will further anger a population that is already disenchanted. If it does not, the revenue from the power will continue to provide more income to an already emboldened Taliban.

The Taliban, fighting the Afghan government and a large international military coalition, have long tapped into Afghanistan’s lucrative drug trade and illegal mining, in addition to the streams of donations they receive from supporters abroad, mainly in the Persian Gulf states.

But as they have taken over increasingly large areas in the past two years, they have found new ways of diversifying and collecting revenue, according to interviews with officials, Taliban commanders and local residents.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/28/worl ... d=71987722
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Afghan Taliban Awash in Heroin Cash, a Troubling Turn for War

KABUL, Afghanistan — The labs themselves are simple, tucked into nondescript huts or caves: a couple-dozen empty barrels for mixing, sacks or gallon jugs of precursor chemicals, piles of firewood, a press machine, a generator and a water pump with a long hose to draw from a nearby well.

They are heroin refining operations, and the Afghan police and American Special Forces keep running into them all over Afghanistan this year. Officials and diplomats are increasingly worried that the labs’ proliferation is one of the most troubling turns yet in the long struggle to end the Taliban insurgency.

That the country has consistently produced about 85 percent of the world’s opium, despite more than $8 billion spent by the United States alone to fight it over the years, is accepted with a sense of helplessness among counternarcotics officials.

For years, most of the harvest would be smuggled out in the form of bulky opium syrup that was refined in other countries. But now, Afghan and Western officials estimate that half, if not more, of Afghan opium is getting some level of processing in the country, either into morphine or heroin with varying degrees of purity.

The refining makes the drug much easier to smuggle out into the supply lines to the West. And it is vastly increasing the profits for the Taliban, for whom the drug trade makes up at least 60 percent of their income, according to Afghan and Western officials.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/29/worl ... liban.html
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Harassment All Around, Afghan Women Weigh Risks of Speaking Out

KABUL, Afghanistan — “You’re ugly, Maryam, everyone says so, but I guess you’re a virgin so when you’re ready to have sex, let me know and I will be glad to …” Her male co-worker, writing on her Facebook account, finished the sentence obscenely.

It was 10 a.m. on a normal day in the life of an Afghan working woman. The journalist Maryam Mehtar, 24, said she had already that morning been harassed or assaulted at least five times: in the bus to work, on the street waiting for the bus, by a man who grabbed her buttocks, by another man who asked how much she charged and by a young boy who said she had a “pretty vulva.”

Finally in the relative safety of her own office, she opened her computer to read the Facebook offer from one of her colleagues to deflower her.

Emboldened by the uprising of women in America and Europe against sexual harassment, a few particularly courageous Afghan women are speaking out, too, in the face of a problem long just accepted as commonplace and unsolvable.

“Most of my friends are silent,” said Ms. Mehtar, who works for the Afghan news agency Sarienews. “They think if they talk everyone will blame them, and they’re right.”

Ms. Mehtar is one of the few Afghan women willing to name and shame her abusers, something most are afraid to do — and not just because of fear of public humiliation.

When women speak up, they take a big risk, said Shaharzad Akbar, 30, who works as an adviser to President Ashraf Ghani and says she was sexually assaulted when she was an intern early in her career. “In Afghanistan, women can’t say they faced sexual harassment. If a woman shares someone’s identity, he will kill her or kill her family. We can never accuse men, especially high-ranking men, without great risk.”

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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/10/worl ... d=45305309
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Why Attack Afghan Civilians? Creating Chaos Rewards Taliban

They were hardly the first Taliban attacks in the capital. Still, there was something particularly alarming in their scale and implication about the pair of episodes, just a week apart, that rocked Afghanistan: a hotel siege that killed 22, then a car bomb, loaded into an ambulance, that killed 103.

But the question of why — why target bystanders, and in such numbers — is perhaps best answered not by peering into the minds of the attackers but by examining the structure of a war that increasingly pulls its participants toward the senseless.

Whether the week’s events will translate into a long-term gain for the Taliban or serve only as a terrible but temporary show of force, the attacks embody the trends toward violence and disintegration that appear to be only worsening in Afghanistan.

A War Engineered for Chaos

The war’s participants embarked on what they thought was a traditional battle for control of Afghanistan’s territory and for the allegiance of its people. But over more than 16 years, without setting out to do so, they have remade it into a war over one issue: whether or not the country can have a central, functioning state.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/28/worl ... d=45305309
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Most Afghans Can’t Read, but Their Book Trade Is Booming

KABUL, Afghanistan — Nuts come in from Iran and fresh fruit from Pakistan, even though Afghanistan grows both in abundance. Years of bloated foreign aid budgets have produced high salaries, destroying local industries. As a result, about the only thing the country does not import is opium.

And books.

At a time when book publishers in many countries are struggling, over the last three years those in Afghanistan have been flourishing — and that is despite the country’s chronically low literacy rates: Only two out of five Afghan adults can read. But those who can seem to be doing it with remarkable regularity, both in spite and because of the country’s cyclonic violence, especially recently.

In a turbulent, troubled society, curling up with a book has become the best tonic around.

“I think in any environment, but perhaps especially places at war, book reading creates a pause from day-to-day life and isolates a reader from their surroundings while they’re buried in a book,” said Jamshid Hashimi, who runs an online library and is a co-founder of the Book Club of Afghanistan. “This is powerful anywhere, but in a place like Afghanistan, it can be a means of emotional survival.”

Unsurprisingly, Afghanistan’s book publishers have capitalized on this. What is more noteworthy is that a major piece of Afghan socioeconomic development is happening without direct foreign aid or foreign advisers.

“It’s an Afghan-owned and Afghan-led process,” said Safiullah Nasiri, one of the four brothers who run Aksos, a book publisher that also operates several bookstores in Kabul. His remark was a deliberate play on international community jargon about shifting to Afghan control of institutions dominated by Westerners.

“It’s really an exciting time in the book world here,” Mr. Nasiri said. “Publishers are all trying to find new books to publish, young people are trying to find new books to read, writers are looking for publishers. It’s a very dynamic atmosphere. And it’s something independent, with no foreign assistance.”

Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan with a rapidly growing population of more than five million, now has 22 book publishers, many with their own presses, or using the presses at local printing houses. Scores of others are scattered throughout the country’s 34 provinces, even in war-torn areas like Helmand and Kandahar.

In the past year, especially, many publishers have been expanding, opening up distribution centers across the country and underwriting either their own bookstores or providing consignments to independent bookstores. Kabul has 60 registered bookstores, according to the government.

It was not always so. During the Taliban reign from 1996 to 2001, only two publishers survived: the state publisher and a private company, Aazem Publishing. By the end of 2001, the only independent bookstore was in the Intercontinental Hotel, the site of a deadly attack last month.

Reading poems at a shop in Kabul. A hunger for both foreign and local viewpoints is driving a reading renaissance in the country. For the minority of Afghan adults who are literate, books can be an escape. Credit Mauricio

In the years after the American-led invasion, cheaply printed and brazenly pirated books from Pakistan were as dominant as that country’s fruits and vegetables in the markets of Kabul.

Afghanistan’s new government faced the enormous task of rebuilding the educational system, which had been savaged by decades of civil war, followed by five years of a Taliban regime that closed schools and destroyed foreign-language books. That meant millions of new textbooks, which initially were printed in Pakistan. But as relations with that country soured, the government steered those textbook contracts to a few major Afghan publishers.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/03/worl ... d=45305309
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Post by kmaherali »

An Unprecedented Peace Offer to the Taliban

KABUL, Afghanistan — On Feb. 28, President Ashraf Ghani of Afghanistan made the most comprehensive offer inviting the Taliban to join direct, formal peace talks with the Afghan government. The offer, made without preconditions, recognizes the role of the Taliban in Afghan politics and seeks to proceed toward a comprehensive peace agreement.

President Ghani’s offer is the result of the Kabul Process, which saw delegates from 30 countries and international organizations — including the United Nations, NATO and the European Union — gather and deliberate in Kabul.

The announcement of the peace initiative was preceded by months of national consensus building in Afghanistan. Members of the High Peace Council, the inclusive body of Afghan elders formed to steer efforts for peace and dialogue; the government’s chief executive, Abdullah Abdullah; and President Ghani had long deliberations and consultations with Afghan political figures, members of civil society, clergy, women and youth. They found overwhelming support for the initiative to reach a political settlement with the Taliban.

The peace offer is underpinned by our belief in the common equality of all Afghans and their right to live in peace and dignity. We believe that this offer will give the Taliban the opportunity to organize as a legitimate political force, pursue their goals through peaceful means and join the political process.

The Afghan government is firmly committed to addressing the core concerns and demands of the Taliban, including the future presence of the international military forces, amendments to our constitution and the release of Taliban prisoners.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/11/opin ... dline&te=1
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Drought Adds to Woes of Afghanistan, in Grips of a Raging War

KABUL, Afghanistan — Afghanistan, already torn by decades of intensifying violence, is grappling with a drought in two-thirds of the country that could lead to severe food shortages for up to two million more people, the United Nations has warned.

The United Nations humanitarian coordinator in Afghanistan said in a report released last week that a “precipitation deficit” of 70 percent in most parts of the country had affected winter harvests, and resulted in grim prospects for the spring and summer.

Many farmers have seen their seeds dry out or have delayed planting crops, and there is little or no feed for livestock on pasturelands.

The drought has led to the displacement of thousands of people this spring, adding to the nearly two million who have been forced from their homes in recent years, largely because of violence.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/27/worl ... t-war.html
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A Grass-Roots Afghan Peace Movement Grows, Step by Step

GHAZNI, Afghanistan — As they march for peace through Afghan villages laced with roadside bombs and bottomless heartache, their numbers keep growing.

They come from all walks of life, ages 17 to 65. Among them is a high school student who went home to complete his final exams before rejoining the others; a poet who still carries in his chest one of the four bullets he was shot with; a bodybuilding champion who abandoned his gym and has lost 20 pounds of muscle on the journey. They are day laborers, farmers, retired army officers, a polio victim on crutches, a mechanic who was robbed of his sight by war.

Afghanistan’s most striking grass-roots movement for peace in recent years started with just eight people. I started watching their movement then, when it was a hunger strike born out of pain and outrage at a suicide bombing that killed and wounded dozens in Helmand Province. A group of young men pitched a protest tent next to the carnage. Their blood had become cheap — too cheap, they said. For too long, they had been dying in silence.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/worl ... arch-.html
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Post by kmaherali »

Who Is Winning the War in Afghanistan? Depends on Which One

KABUL, Afghanistan — Two wars are convulsing Afghanistan, the war of blood and guts, and the war of truth and lies. Both have been amassing casualties at a remarkable rate recently.

The first is that messy war in which, just in the past week, more than 40 high school students were blown to pieces in their classroom, hundreds of bodies were left abandoned for a week in the streets of Ghazni city or dumped in a river, and two important Afghan Army units were destroyed, almost to the last soldier.

The other is the war in which most of that, according to official accounts, did not happen — or at least was not as bad as it sounded. Not until late on the third day of the Taliban’s assault on Ghazni did President Ashraf Ghani’s aides even inform him of the desperation level there, two government officials said privately; Mr. Ghani himself later confirmed that publicly. By then the Taliban had control of nearly every neighborhood.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/18/worl ... 3053090819
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In Afghanistan’s Season of Crisis, ‘Words Do Not Have the Strength’

KABUL, Afghanistan — In the past 17 years of war and crisis in Afghanistan, no one remembers a season quite like this one, with peril and hopelessness at every turn. People here struggle for words to explain how it feels.

A former minister, fit with healthy habits and hardened by years of battle and politics, said he could barely force himself out of bed in the morning. A young professional, after years of dedicated work in civil society and government jobs, teared up as she tried to explain why she was losing hope, her usual clarity choked by emotion. A poet in the country’s east said his verse had dried up.

“Every time something bad happened, I would turn to poetry — it would give me calm,” said the poet, Sajid Bahar, 26, who lives in the city of Khost. “It’s been seven months that I can’t write. It no longer gives me calm. When I sit down to focus on one incident for a poem, 30 others flash through my head. My words do not have the strength for all of them.”

If there is a common theme in this upswell of alarm and worry that seems so widespread, it is a sense that no one sees any clear path through a minefield of crises.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/17/worl ... 3053091018
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Taliban Slaughter Elite Afghan Troops, and a ‘Safe’ District Is Falling

SANG-E-MASHA, Afghanistan — One pickup truck after another arrived at the government compound in a district capital in Afghanistan on Sunday, pulling around to the back of the governor’s office to unload the dead, out of sight of panicked residents.

Soldiers and police officers, many in tears, heaved bodies of their comrades from the trucks and laid them on sheets on the ground, side by side on their backs, until there were 20 of them.

The dead all wore the desert-brown boots of Afghanistan’s finest troops, the Special Forces commandos trained by the United States. Four days earlier, the soldiers had been airlifted in to rescue what is widely considered Afghanistan’s safest rural district, Jaghori, from a determined assault by Taliban insurgents.

Early on Sunday, their company of 50 soldiers was almost entirely destroyed on the front line. And suddenly, Jaghori — a haven for an ethnic Hazara Shiite minority that has been persecuted by extremists — appeared at risk of being completely overrun by the Taliban.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/12/worl ... 3053091113
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A Generation of Widows, Raising Children Who Will Be Forged by Loss

Excerpt:

The war in Afghanistan is disproportionately killing young men, and it is leaving behind a generation defined by that loss. Children like Benyamin will have only early memories of their fathers, and the deaths will shape their lives even as true recollections fade. Babies like Sarfarz will have even less, with death taking fathers they will never know.

Carrying it all are the tens of thousands of widows the war has created since 2001. Like Mrs. Kakar, they are left to raise families in a country with a dearth of economic opportunity and plagued by a war that kills 50 people a day.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/01/worl ... 3053091202
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How Afghans Have Adapted to Life After Losing a Limb

Photographs of prosthetics made by Afghans who had to
rely on their own ingenuity when they were wounded in war.


In Kabul, where I lived on and off as a journalist for eight years, disabled men are a ubiquitous sight in the streets, begging alongside women and children at busy intersections, where traffic slows to a crawl. With sleeves or pant legs rolled up to show naked stumps or withered limbs, they weave between the cars on crutches or hand-cranked wheelchairs, navigating the unpaved streets and open gutters that, when rain or snow comes, turn into rivers of mud and sewage. Warlords and Taliban commanders sometimes have noms de guerre (which tend to be things like Mullah Rauf or Commander Ibrahim) with a peculiar suffix: “lang,” or “the Lame,” a testament to the injuries accumulated over decades of war. Whenever I visited a trauma hospital, the sight of patients resting quietly with their white-bandaged stumps — many of them children — made me think that what is most difficult for us to imagine is not tragedy but the prospect of living in its aftermath. Life after suffering a permanent injury is particularly harsh for people in Afghanistan, where agriculture still employs nearly two-thirds of the working population and many of the few jobs available in the cities involve manual labor.

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https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/201 ... ogin-email
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Post by kmaherali »

A School With No Heat or Computers but Many College-Bound Students. Mostly Girls.

Excerpt:

Rustam may seem an unlikely place to encourage collegiate dreams. With seven crude stone classrooms, supplemented by six big tents, there are so many students that they are divided into morning and afternoon sessions only four hours long.

There is no electricity, heat, working computers or copy machines. Many school materials are written out in longhand by teachers. Foreign aid once helped but has dried up. One teacher said she has fewer books than students.

Only 5 percent of the students have parents who can read and write, Mr. Nasiri said. Most are the children of subsistence farmers.

Yet Rustam’s 2017 graduating class saw 60 of 65 graduates accepted to Afghanistan’s public universities, a 92 percent college entrance rate. Two-thirds of those accepted were girls. A couple of years earlier, 97 percent of the graduates went to college.

Unlike most Afghan schools, Rustam mixes boys and girls in its classrooms. “Men and women are equal,” the principal said. “They have the same brains and the same bodies.”

He added, “We tell these boys and girls, there is no difference between you guys, and you will all be together when you go to college, so you need to learn how to respect one another.”

One day late in the spring term, Badan Joya, one of five female teachers among the school’s 12, was teaching a fourth-grade math class in one of the overflow tents. A piece of cardboard painted black served as a chalkboard, with simple algebra formulas scribbled on it. She asked her students, nearly all girls, to name their favorite subject. They chorused: “Math.”

That is not surprising at Rustam; 40 percent of questions on the college entrance exams cover mathematics, more than any other subject. And the girls excel.

The head student in 11th-grade math, based on test scores, is Shahrbano Hakimi, 17. Ms. Hakimi is also head student in her computer class, where, on that recent day, the girls were studying the Windows operating system, from books. Only one of the 60 students had a computer at home.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/27/worl ... 3053090628
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Post by kmaherali »

Book

Afghanistan’s Islam

From Conversion to the Taliban


This book is about the historical development of the diversity of religious practices and institutions in Afghanistan. The contents and the introduction can be accessed at:

https://www.academia.edu/31491156/Islam ... n_Khan.pdf
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What We, the Taliban, Want

I am convinced that the killing and the maiming must stop, the deputy leader of the Taliban writes.


When our representatives started negotiating with the United States in 2018, our confidence that the talks would yield results was close to zero. We did not trust American intentions after 18 years of war and several previous attempts at negotiation that had proved futile.

Nevertheless, we decided to try once more. The long war has exacted a terrible cost from everyone. We thought it unwise to dismiss any potential opportunity for peace no matter how meager the prospects of its success. For more than four decades, precious Afghan lives have been lost every day. Everyone has lost somebody they loved. Everyone is tired of war. I am convinced that the killing and the maiming must stop.

We did not choose our war with the foreign coalition led by the United States. We were forced to defend ourselves. The withdrawal of foreign forces has been our first and foremost demand. That we today stand at the threshold of a peace agreement with the United States is no small milestone.

Our negotiation team, led by my colleagues Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar and Sher Mohammed Abas Stanekzai, has worked tirelessly for the past 18 months with the American negotiators to make an agreement possible. We stuck with the talks despite recurring disquiet and upset within our ranks over the intensified bombing campaign against our villages by the United States and the flip-flopping and ever-moving goal posts of the American side.

Even when President Trump called off the talks, we kept the door to peace open because we Afghans suffer the most from the continuation of the war. No peace agreement, following on the heels of such intensive talks, comes without mutual compromises. That we stuck with such turbulent talks with the enemy we have fought bitterly for two decades, even as death rained from the sky, testifies to our commitment to ending the hostilities and bringing peace to our country.

We are aware of the concerns and questions in and outside Afghanistan about the kind of government we would have after the foreign troops withdraw. My response to such concerns is that it will depend on a consensus among Afghans. We should not let our worries get in the way of a process of genuine discussion and deliberation free for the first time from foreign domination and interference.

It is important that no one front-loads this process with predetermined outcomes and preconditions. We are committed to working with other parties in a consultative manner of genuine respect to agree on a new, inclusive political system in which the voice of every Afghan is reflected and where no Afghan feels excluded.

I am confident that, liberated from foreign domination and interference, we together will find a way to build an Islamic system in which all Afghans have equal rights, where the rights of women that are granted by Islam — from the right to education to the right to work — are protected, and where merit is the basis for equal opportunity.

We are also aware of concerns about the potential of Afghanistan being used by disruptive groups to threaten regional and world security. But these concerns are inflated: Reports about foreign groups in Afghanistan are politically motivated exaggerations by the warmongering players on all sides of the war.

It is not in the interest of any Afghan to allow such groups to hijack our country and turn it into a battleground. We have already suffered enough from foreign interventions. We will take all measures in partnership with other Afghans to make sure the new Afghanistan is a bastion of stability and that nobody feels threatened on our soil.

We are conscious of the immense challenges ahead. Perhaps our biggest challenge is to ensure that various Afghan groups work hard and sincerely toward defining our common future. I am confident that it is possible. If we can reach an agreement with a foreign enemy, we must be able to resolve intra-Afghan disagreements through talks.

Another challenge will be keeping the international community interested and positively engaged during the transition to peace and after the withdrawal of foreign troops. The support of the international community will be crucial to stabilizing and developing Afghanistan.

We are ready to work on the basis of mutual respect with our international partners on long-term peace-building and reconstruction. After the United States withdraws its troops, it can play a constructive role in the postwar development and reconstruction of Afghanistan.

We acknowledge the importance of maintaining friendly relations with all countries and take their concerns seriously. Afghanistan cannot afford to live in isolation. The new Afghanistan will be a responsible member of the international community.

We will remain committed to all international conventions as long as they are compatible with Islamic principles. And we expect other countries to respect the sovereignty and stability of our country and consider it as a ground for cooperation rather than competition and conflict.

More immediately, there will be the challenge of putting into effect our agreement with the United States. A degree of trust has been built through our talks with the American negotiators in Doha, Qatar, but just as the United States does not trust us completely, we too are very far from fully trusting it.

We are about to sign an agreement with the United States and we are fully committed to carrying out its every single provision, in letter and spirit. Achieving the potential of the agreement, ensuring its success and earning lasting peace will depend on an equally scrupulous observance by the United States of each of its commitments. Only then can we have complete trust and lay the foundation for cooperation — or even a partnership — in the future.

My fellow Afghans will soon celebrate this historic agreement. Once it is entirely fulfilled, Afghans will see the departure of all foreign troops. As we arrive at this milestone, I believe it is not a distant dream that we will soon see the day when we will come together with all our Afghan brothers and sisters, start moving toward lasting peace and lay the foundation of a new Afghanistan.

We would then celebrate a new beginning that invites all our compatriots to return from their exile to our country — to our shared home where everybody would have the right to live with dignity, in peace.

Sirajuddin Haqqani is the deputy leader of the Taliban.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/opin ... 0920200220
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Post by kmaherali »

U.S.-Taliban sign landmark agreement in bid to end America's longest war

DOHA, Qatar — The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan started nearly 7,000 miles away on a sunny September morning that saw hijacked planes slam into the iconic twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, the Pentagon and a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

On Saturday, more than 18 years after it was triggered by the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. made a bid to end America's longest war.

Hundreds of miles from the battlefields of Afghanistan in a glitzy banquet hall in a five-star hotel in Qatar, the United States and the Taliban signed a landmark agreement that paves the way for U.S. troops to begin withdrawing from the desperately poor and war-torn Central Asian country.

U.S. special envoy Zalmay Khalilzad and the Taliban’s chief negotiator and one of its founders, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, signed the agreement in Doha after more than a year of on-off formal talks.


U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also attended the ceremony, but did not sign the document, which stipulates that the U.S. will withdraw all forces within 14 months and pull out of five bases in 135 days.

The Taliban agreed to enter into peace talks with Afghan government officials, representatives of the opposition, and members of civil society on March 10. The group also promised that the country would not be used as a base for Al Qaeda or for terrorist attacks, and that its members would not support terrorist groups that seek to attack U.S. and its allies.

The U.S. also committed to work with both sides in upcoming talks to secure the release of up to 5,000 prisoners held by Afghan government and 1,000 prisoners held by Taliban by start of intra-Afghan peace talks.

Some in the room broke out in whoops, cheers and shouts of "God is Great" at the signing. The several dozen members of the group exited the room after the ceremony beaming.

Meanwhile, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper was in Kabul Saturday to meet with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and leaders of NATO and the resolute support mission which trains, advises and assists Afghan national defence and security forces. His aim there was to “further engage with the Afghan peace process,” he wrote in a tweet.

The deadliest terror attack on American soil, which killed nearly 3,000 people, prompted President George W. Bush to send the first of many waves of U.S. troops to Afghanistan, a country most Americans could not then spot on a map, in October 2001.

Their mission was to topple the Taliban regime after it sheltered Al Qaeda and its leader, Osama bin Laden, the architect of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. While the invasion sw­­iftly overthrew the militants, it also embroiled America in a deadly quagmire that has cost the lives of around 2,300 U.S. troops and wounded thousands of others.

After 18 years, there are currently between 12,000 to 13,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, who advise Afghan forces and carry out counterterrorism operations against Al Qaeda and the Islamic State militant group.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly railed against America’s “endless wars” abroad and Saturday’s deal will give him a talking point in his bid for re-election.

America’s war in Afghanistan has spanned three U.S. administrations and Trump’s predecessor in the White House, Barack Obama, had tried to extricate U.S. troops from the country and even outlined a plan for a final exit. But Obama held off in the end amid concerns about the staying power of the Afghan security forces against a resilient insurgency.

The war has taken a devastating toll — Afghanistan currently tops the list of the world’s deadliest conflicts.

Since 2016, children have accounted for nearly one-third of the estimated 11,000 civilian casualties every year in the conflict, according to Human Rights Watch. Since the United Nations began systematically documenting the impact of the war on civilians in 2009, it has recorded more than 100,000 civilian casualties, including more than 35,000 killed and 65,000 injured.

Between 2001 and October 2018, more than 58,000 Afghan security forces were also killed, according to a study by Brown University.

Click to expand
And nearly two decades after the U.S. invaded and billions of American taxpayer dollars later, the Taliban control, influence or contest nearly half of the country, according to the last reported numbers released by the Department of Defense in January 2019.

The Afghan government is perceived to be one of the world’s most corrupt and is currently facing its own political crisis as its rivals refute the results of September’s presidential elections, claiming that the polling was riddled with fraud.

And the status of women in Afghanistan — like so many other parts of Afghan life — is once again up in the air as a return to Taliban rule in the country could potentially jeopardize nearly two decades of progress for Afghan women.

Saphora Smith and Mushtaq Yusufzai reported from Doha, Dan De Luce from Washington and Ahmed Mengli from Kabul.

Video photos at:

https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/us ... ailsignout

******
How Afghans Can Work Together to End the War

Negotiators from the Taliban and the Afghan government must build on the achievements of the past two decades.


KABUL, Afghanistan — Momentum is building toward peace in Afghanistan.

On Saturday, the United States and the Taliban will sign an agreement that will pave the way for talks between the Taliban and a team of negotiators led by the Afghan government in March. There is hope, at last, of respite from the long war.

The Afghan government deserves credit for planting the seeds of peace two years ago by offering unconditional talks to the Taliban and announcing a unilateral cease-fire that blossomed into a three-day pause in hostilities in June 2018.

Kabul continued to reach out to the Taliban and sent some officials in July to an informal peace dialogue in Doha that brought together the warring sides for the first time. In February, the government of Afghanistan agreed to stop its operations against the Taliban for seven days to facilitate the first formal negotiations between Kabul and the insurgents. The Afghan government and the American forces abided by the agreement. There were reports of several attacks by the Taliban on the Afghan civilians and security forces, but violence certainly decreased during this period.

Negotiations between an inclusive Afghan government-led team with the Taliban offer us a historic opportunity to end the war. If these talks are going to deliver peace, both the Afghan government and the Taliban urgently need to think more clearly about their coming talks and what they envision as the potential outcomes.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/28/opin ... ogin-email
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Post by kmaherali »

Afghan Rivals Sign Power-Sharing Deal as Political Crisis Subsides

President Ashraf Ghani gave Abdullah Abdullah the leading role in seeking peace with the Taliban and the ability to name half the cabinet.


KABUL, Afghanistan — Afghanistan’s monthslong election dispute, which resulted in the bizarre reality of two men taking the oath of office as president, reached a resolution on Sunday when President Ashraf Ghani gave his chief rival, Abdullah Abdullah, the leading role in the country’s peace process with the Taliban and the right to appoint half the cabinet.

The deal ends a political crisis that cast a major shadow over efforts to end the country’s long war with the Taliban. The standoff complicated Afghan negotiations with the insurgents after the United States agreed with the Taliban to begin a phased troop withdrawal.

All but one of Afghanistan’s presidential elections since the 2001 American invasion have ended in dispute, and the most recent two brought the country to the verge of more bloodshed even as war with the Taliban raged. In 2014, Secretary of State John Kerry negotiated a power-sharing arrangement that kept Mr. Ghani as president and Mr. Abdullah as the government’s chief executive with half of the power.

After Mr. Abdullah disputed Mr. Ghani’s victory in clinching a second term in last September’s elections, both sides dug in. They refused to come together in one government even after the United States chided both leaders and cut $1 billion in aid.

As international pressure grew and the Taliban appeared to be benefiting from the political disarray, the two sides began talks to find a way out.

The new deal — whose negotiations were mediated by Afghan political leaders including former President Hamid Karzai — strips Mr. Abdullah of an executive role in the government but gives his coalition half the cabinet appointments. In return, Mr. Abdullah takes charge of the peace efforts with the Taliban in a new role as chairman of the High Council for National Reconciliation.

Mr. Ghani also agreed to the formation of a High Council of Governance, which will give major political leaders a role in advising the president in hopes of shaping a united front as Afghanistan seeks an endgame with the Taliban. Mr. Ghani struggled to create political consensus in his first five years in office, alienating many influential political figures.

“I am proud that today the ranks of the republic are united in reaching the sacred goal of peace and stability,” Mr. Ghani after signing the deal.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/17/worl ... 778d3e6de3
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