US President Biden defends US withdrawal from Afghanistan and also says if Russia attacks Ukraine, will cause damage to Russia.
Celebrating the first year in office, US President Joe Biden on speaking about the US withdrawal from Afghanistan asserted he was not apologetic on US withdrawal from Afghanistan as there was no way easy way out after 20 years.
He stated that the weekly spending of about one billion dollars for the American forces in Afghanistan did not guarantee a peaceful resolution. He said, “The question was, do I continue to spend that much money per week in the state of Afghanistan knowing that the idea that being able to succeed, other than sending more body bags back home, is highly, highly unusual. “There is no way to get out of Afghanistan after 20 years easily. Not possible, no matter when you did it. And I make no apologies for what I did.”
At the briefing, the President voiced his condolence on the lives lost during the withdrawal. He said, “I have a great concern for the women and men who were blown up on the line at the airport by a terrorist attack against them.”
Speaking on the Ukraine issue, Biden said that a “minor incursion” by Russia would elicit a lesser response than a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, CNN reported. “I’m not so sure he is certain what he is going to do. My guess is he (President Vladimir Putin) will move in. He has to do something. He is trying to find his place in the world between China and the West,” he said. “If they actually do what they’re capable of doing with the forces amassed on the border, it is going to be a disaster for Russia if they further invade Ukraine. And that our allies and partners are ready to impose severe cost and significant harm on Russia and the Russian economy,” he added.
However, USA’s failed departure from Afghanistan left destruction in the war-torn land, and presently, Afghanistan is facing a humanitarian crisis due to that sudden departure. After 20 years of getting deeply involved in the nation’s affairs, dwelling in their nation, and meddling in their matters, leaving them in the lurch was like abandoning a child in the middle of a war, and many Afghans are feeling betrayed. Afghanistan does not have free media to report situations as they are and their media will give rosy pictures around the globe that the people are happy with the Taliban.
The Taliban is presently urging Muslim countries to recognize the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) government. This comes as the current Afghan government has yet to be recognized by any foreign countries.
Situations Which Led to US Departure From Afghanistan
On February 29, 2020, the United States and the Taliban signed a peace agreement in Doha, Qatar, officially titled the Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan. The conditions of the treaty included the withdrawal of all American and NATO troops from Afghanistan, a Taliban pledge to prevent al-Qaeda from operating in areas that were under Taliban control, and talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government.
The United States agreed to an initial reduction of its force level from 13,000 to 8,600 troops by July 2020, followed by a full withdrawal of its troops within 14 months if the Taliban keeps its commitments. This agreement was supported by China, Russia and Pakistan, but did not involve the government of Afghanistan.
Then in September 2020, over 5,000 Taliban prisoners, including 400 of whom were accused and convicted of major crimes such as murder, were released by the Afghan government as part of the Doha Agreement between the United States and the Taliban. According to Afghanistan’s National Security Council, many of the freed prisoners who were “experts” returned to the battleground, bolstering up the power of the Taliban.
In early 2021, both the Pentagon and the Afghan government assumed that continuous US military support would need to be provided to Kabul. However, President Biden announced in April 2021 that it would continue the withdrawal beyond the initial deadline, with an expected completion date by 11 September 2021.
On 8 July, Biden shifted the U.S. withdrawal deadline to 31 August. The Taliban and allied militant groups began a widespread offensive on 1 May 2021, simultaneous with the withdrawal of most U.S. troops from Afghanistan. Following its fast deterioration across the country, the Afghan National Army was left in bedlam, and only two units remained operational by mid-August: Taliban captured the whole of Afghanistan on 15 August 2021. The capture took place hours after President Ashraf Ghani fled the country.
The History of the Taliban
Taliban initially enjoyed enormous goodwill from Afghans wearied of the corruption
A small Taliban militia first emerged near Kandahar in the spring and summer of 1994, committing vigilante acts against minor warlords, with a fund of 250,000 USD being supplied to it by local businessmen. They soon began to receive backing from local Durrani Pashtun leaders.
Taliban initially enjoyed enormous goodwill from Afghans wearied of the corruption, brutality, and continuous fighting of Mujahideen warlords. One story is that the rape and murder of boys and girls from a family traveling to Kandahar or a similar outrage by Mujahideen bandits sparked Mohammed Omar (Mullah Omar) and his students to vow to free Afghanistan of these criminals.
Another narrative was that the Pakistan-based truck shipping mafia known as the “Afghanistan Transit Trade” and their allies in the Pakistan government, trained, armed, and financed the Taliban to clear the southern road across Afghanistan to the Central Asian Republics of extortionate bandit gangs.
Around 20,000 Afghan students aged between 14 and 24, with scanty education, came from madrassas in Pakistani refugee camps to join the Taliban, with thousands more joining the march on the way. The Taliban offered the young men a way of life that gave it meaning.
Taliban Military Takeover
The first major military movement of the Taliban was in October–November 1994 when they marched from Maiwand in southern Afghanistan to capture Kandahar City and the surrounding provinces and captured a weapons dump in mid-October with equipment for tens of thousands of soldiers in 17 tunnels created by Saudi and Pakistani intelligence near the border crossing of Spin Boldak by buying it from an Afghan commander supposedly loyal to Massoud.
A Pakistani government convoy was soon aided across checkpoints by the Taliban. By mid-November, the Taliban ruled Kandahar with six Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-21 fighters and four Mil Mi-17 helicopters captured from the airport.
The Mujahideen warlords often surrendered to them without a fight and the “heavily armed population” gave up their weapons. In the spring of 1996, Mullah Omar held a meeting of over a thousand Pashtun leaders for two weeks in Kandahar and the largest gathering of religious leaders in modern Afghan history along with Pakistani officials who endorsed him as the Amir al-Mu’minin and declared the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan with a jihad against Ahmad Massoud.
The Taliban launched a surprise ambush against Jalalabad in August 1996. Osama bin Laden may have funded up to three million USD to buy off the remaining commanders on the way to Kabul. Other sources of heavy funding may have included Saudi and Gulf individuals, local trucking mafia, heroin traders, and the ISI. Armed with weapons, the Taliban advanced from Surobi District and the plains south of Kabul.
On September 26th, Massoud withdrew from the capital to Panjshir Valley and the Taliban entered it the next day. Within a day, every government building and military base had been occupied. President Mohammad Najibullah and his brother were massacred and hung above a traffic circle. The capture of the capital from Tajik rule gave the Taliban a new height of prestige.
Weeks after the fall of Kabul, Massoud had founded the Northern Alliance together with conquered northern militias. Hekmatyar, on the other hand, had escaped to Iran, with many of his supporters switching to the Taliban. The country was deeply divided by sectarianism.
Ethnic Massacres and Persecution Conducted by the Taliban During the 1990s
The worst attack on civilians came in the summer of 1998 when the Taliban swept north from Herat to the predominantly Hazara and Uzbek city of Mazar-i-Sharif, the largest city in the north. Entering at 10 am on 8 August 1998, the Taliban drove their pickup trucks “up and down the narrow streets of Mazar-i-Sharif shooting to the left and right and killing everything that moved — shop owners, cart pullers, women and children shoppers and even goats and donkeys.” More than 8000 noncombatants were reported killed in Mazar-i-Sharif and later in Bamyan.
The mass graves where Taliban prisoners had been massacred near Sheberghan were later revealed to have contained over 2000 bodies, with the UN finding that they had been tortured and starved where prisoners had been thrown into wells with 10 to 15 meters of water, followed by shots and hand grenades before the wells were bulldozed shut. They had also been suffocated in containers. The Taliban had in turn massacred Hazara villagers and pushed out Tajiki farmers.
Contrary to the demands of Islam, which requires immediate burial, the Taliban forbade anyone to bury the corpses for the first six days while they rotted in the summer heat and were eaten by dogs. The Taliban also slaughtered members of the Hazara, a mostly Shia ethnic group, while in control of Mazar-i-Sharif as they did not consider Hazaras as Muslims.
The Taliban did not allow the UN to supply food to Hazara in the provinces of Bamiyan, Ghor, Wardak, and Ghazni. During the years that followed, massacres of Hazara by Taliban forces were documented by groups such as Human Rights Watch.
in 1998, the Taliban also forced foreign aid agencies to shut down. International pressure was mounting as Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Russia met in Tashkent on 25 August 1998 to make shared plans to stop the Taliban from advancing further. The wider international community continued to condemn the Taliban’s gender policies and refusal to honor diplomatic norms. The United Nations Security Council passed a resolution on 8 December 1998 threatening with sanctions if the Taliban did not change its behavior, including sheltering terrorists.
Women in particular were targets of the Taliban’s restrictions, stopped from working; and the religious forces forced all women off the streets of Kabul and issued new regulations ordering “householders to blacken their windows, so women would not be visible from the outside. Schools were shut down for girls and women were even killed if caught not wearing their hijab.
Due to severe human atrocities, on 15 October 1999, the bank accounts of the Taliban were frozen and international flights in and out of the country were banned by the Security Council. On February 6, 2000, an Ariana Afghan Airlines flight was hijacked and flown to London by passengers asking for asylum. After the drought of 2000, the Taliban only received 8 million out of 67 million US dollars requested for aid from international donors. An embassy by the unrecognized breakaway state of Chechen Republic of Ichkeria was opened in 2000, which enraged Russia.
Circumstances That Led to the Attack on World Trade Center in America
With surging world pressure against the Taliban amid the new emerging leadership of Osama bin Laden of Taliban who formed the group Al-Qaeda, they, the Al-Qaeda, were furious with American support of Israel, the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, and sanctions against Iraq. As an act of revenge, Al-Qaeda, trained by Osama bin Laden, executed the attack World Trade Center on 09/11/2001 killing over 2000 US citizens. In retaliation, USA advanced their troops into Afghanistan with an aim to target terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda organization and have been there since 2001 and withdrew in 2021.
The USA military forces captured Osama bin Laden in a hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan, and subsequently killed by the U.S. military on May 2, 2011. T
Human Rights Crisis In Afghanistan and Afghans are Fighting Back
Ms. Nada Al-Nashif appointed United Nations Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights on 6 December, 2019 said, “The safety of Afghan judges, prosecutors, and lawyers – particularly women legal professionals – is a matter for particular alarm,” adding, “Many are currently in hiding for fear of retribution, including from convicted prisoners who were freed by the de facto authorities, notably men convicted of gender-based violence.”
Ms. Al-Nashif reported that although fighting has receded since August when the Taliban took over, Afghan civilians remain at risk of conflict as the Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISIL-KP) and other armed groups are still carrying out lethal attacks. espite a general amnesty by the Taliban, announced in August, her office has received “credible allegations” of more than 100 killings of former Afghan national security forces and others associated with the former Government.
At least 72 killings were attributed to the Taliban, and in several cases the bodies were publicly displayed.
“In Nangarhar province alone, there also appears to be a pattern of at least 50 extra-judicial killings of individuals suspected to be members of the ISIL-KP. Brutal methods of killings, including hanging, beheadings, and public display of corpses have been reported,” she added.
Our fearless Uzbek compatriots are rising against the Taliban’s tyranny in #Faryab. The resistance is growing through the people’s will for their dignity, rights and values – we must join hands and support their call nationwide and across the world. #Afghanistan
Our fearless Uzbek compatriots are rising against the Taliban’s tyranny in #Faryab. The resistance is growing through the people’s will for their dignity, rights and values – we must join hands and support their call nationwide and across the world. #Afghanistan pic.twitter.com/zMtjbv6hbF — Ahmad Wali Masoud (@awmasoud) January 13, 2022
“Afghanistan is facing an avalanche of hunger and destitution the likes of which I have never seen in my twenty-plus years with the World Food Programme,” said Mary-Ellen McGroarty, the agency’s Country Director there.
Women are largely prohibited from working, except for some teachers, health workers and NGO staff. They also cannot take products to market since local de facto authorities have closed women-operated bazaars.
Although 3 December decree on women’s rights was “an important signal”, Ms. Nashif said it leaves many questions unanswered.
“For example, it does not make clear a minimum age for marriage, nor refer to any wider women and girls’ rights to education, to work, to freedom of movement, or to participate in public life,” she said.
“Many Afghan women and girls now have to be accompanied by a male relative whenever they leave their residence. These are strictly enforced in some places, but not all,” Ms. Al-Nashif told the Council.
She warned that UN partners estimate that restricting women from working will contribute to an immediate economic loss of up to $1 billion.
The Afghan civil society has also come under attack in recent months and since August, at least eight activists and two journalists have been killed, and others injured, by unidentified armed men.
The UN mission in the country, UNAMA, has documented nearly 60 apparently arbitrary detentions, beatings, and threats of activists, journalists, and staff of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, attributed to the de facto authorities.
Several women’s rights defenders have also been threatened, and there is widespread fear of reprisals since a violent crackdown on women’s peaceful protests in September. Many media outlets have shuttered, as have numerous civil society groups.
The Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission has been unable to operate since August, while the Afghanistan Independent Bar Association faces a loss of independence as the de facto authorities now administer its activities under the de facto Ministry of Justice.
Ms. Al-Nashif stressed that upholding human rights is critical for Afghanistan to move forward. “The de facto authorities’ respect for and protection of fundamental rights and freedoms of all persons in Afghanistan, without discrimination, is integral to ensuring stability. Failure to uphold human rights will inevitably lead to further turmoil and unrest, and will hold back Afghanistan’s development,” she said.
“Moreover, as a member of the international community, Afghanistan is bound by the existing international obligations of the treaties it has ratified. Obligations under these treaties remain in place, regardless of the particular authorities exercising effective power.”
In this video, an Afghani girl is screaming for help.
Tamana Partani a protestor from Kabul shared this video and said that the Taliban has gone in Parwan-e-2 mid-night at their home’s gate. She is asking for help in this video.#Afghanistan pic.twitter.com/AHMdsrBexH — Farahnaz Forotan (@FForotan) January 19, 2022
A university teacher in Kabul, Selai Popal tells me – we go to sleep with the hope that this is just a bad dream… so that the next day we won’t be afraid that the Taliban will come and marry us or kill us. Girls and women are losing their hope for the future of #Afghanistan
A university teacher in Kabul, Selai Popal tells me – we go to sleep with the hope that this is just a bad dream… so that the next day we won’t be afraid that the Taliban will come and marry us or kill us. Girls and women are losing their hope for the future of #Afghanistan pic.twitter.com/GSH8eDbfUp — Yalda Hakim (@BBCYaldaHakim) January 18, 2022
Noone will really understand the horrors in Afghanistan as a lot will be masked without a free open media. Freezing money to them will hit at the civilians more than anyone, who cannot even earn their livelihoods. The globe must gather together to chalk out proper ways to help the Afghanis. It is tragic that this war-torn bleeding brave nation is always in wrecking hands be it a bad ruler, Mujahideen war lords, the Taliban, or foreign countries. It is time Afghanistan gets concrete help to stand on its feet.
You might want to read https://hamslivenews.com/2021/07/16/us-afghanistan-taliban/
Rita
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