Hazara communities in Afghanistan are being targeted in violent attacks by the Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP), Islamic State’s affiliate in Afghanistan, with more than 700 people killed in 13 attacks in the past year, according to a report by Human Rights Watch.
In the report, Human Rights Watch (HRW) accused the Taliban of doing little to protect Hazara and other religious minorities from suicide bombings and deadly attacks, and failing to provide adequate medical care and assistance to victims and their families, despite pledging to do so when they took power in August 2021.
A Taliban spokesperson said that the government had taken the “necessary measures” to protect the Hazara and that the report did not reflect the reality on the ground.
The ISKP have been behind attacks on Hazara mosques, schools, and workplaces across Afghanistan, said HRW.
“The issue isn’t that the Taliban is responsible for the violence. They’re responsible for not providing adequate security to their own people,” said John Sifton, Asia advocacy director at HRW. “If they’re going to act as the governing authorities, their first priority should be protecting their own people from violence by this insurgent group.”
Sifton said that while the new Taliban government has become comparatively more accepting of the Hazara and other religious minorities, the ISKP, who have been rapidly gaining power in some areas of the country, continue to view all Shia groups as heretics and “enemies of Islam”.
ISKP has claimed responsibility for a series of attacks in April that targeted Hazara-majority schools as well as the largest Shia mosques. HRW said it fears that many attacks in the provinces are going unreported due to the Taliban’s tightened grip on media.
On 19 April, six people were killed and least 20 injured in a suicide bomb attack at Abdul Rahim Shahid high school in west Kabul. “There were dead bodies everywhere,” said a survivor.
Two days later, 31 people were killed and 87 injured when ISKP bombed Seh Dokan mosque in Mazar-e Sharif, one of Afghanistan’s largest Shia mosques, which has now shut down.
Later that month, 14 people were killed and 13 injured in multiple attacks targeting Hazara at their workplaces and in public in Samangan province and in Mazar-e Sharif city.
In Kabul, 120 people were killed and injured on 7 August while celebrating the Shia holiday of Ashura, UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan reported.
The ISKP attacks on Hazara and other Shia and Sufi communities have become more systematic, Richard Bennett, the UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Afghanistan, said in May. He added that they reflect “elements of an organisational policy” and bear “hallmarks of crimes against humanity”.
Taliban troops continue to fight ISKP forces, however no security measures have been implemented to protect Hazara from further attacks, Human Rights Watch said.
“We are not contesting that the Taliban is fighting ISKP. We’re simply asking that they do more to protect the community that is most at risk,” said Sifton.
The attacks have also effectively excluded Hazara from participating in public life, practising their religion or accessing education. “Most of my classmates have stopped attending school after the tragedy,” said an 18-year-old survivor of the Abdul Rahim Shahid high school bombing. “When the Taliban took power, instead of a class of 50, there were only 25. Now, only 10 to 15 kids are attending classes.”
One of his injured classmates is determined to return to school, but bullet shards in his feet have made it difficult to walk even a short distance. “If I am supposed to die, I will die, but so long as I am alive, I will go to school,” he said.
A Taliban spokesperson said: “As per the current government policy, all Afghans are equal in the sight of the law; there is no discrimination. The government has taken necessary measures for the security of Hazara and they are free to perform their rituals. Some individual incidents have taken place in all mosques, whether they belonged to Sunni Muslims or Shias. The Human Rights Watch should correct its report; it doesn’t reflect ground realities.”
Hundreds of Hazaras killed by ISKP since Taliban took power, say rights group
According to available figures, in the last year 1.3 million female students stopped going to school.
The acting minister of education, Noorullah Munir, held a meeting with Ron Mac Cammon, chief of the United States Educational Development Program, and said in a tweet that the US group is considering making an online education program for Afghan children and young people in remote areas.
However, some lecturers at the university said that due to a lack of electricity and a lack of telecommunication services in remote areas, this does not seem practical.
“Attention to Afghan children is good, and we ask for more attention, but for now online education programs do not work in Afghanistan,” said Shah Pur Barez, a lecturer.
Some teachers say the government has to work toward opening schools for students, and the destiny of millions of students depends on that.
“There are some restrictions facing the online education program: lack of electricity and internet are the main restrictions,” said Hekmat Merzaye, a lecturer.
According to available figures, in the last year 1.3 million female students stopped going to school.
“One year has passed and it’s another year now also passing. When will they open schools for us?” said Yasra, a student.
Previously, officials at the Islamic Emirate said that the decision to open schools belongs to their leader, but it’s not clear when that decision will be made.
Ministry: US Proposes Online Education for Young Afghans
The bombing in Kabul, which also left 4 Afghan civilians dead, was the first strike on a diplomatic mission since the Taliban regained control.
A suicide bomber attacked the Russian Embassy in Kabul on Monday, killing two employees and four Afghan civilians, Russian and Afghan officials said, in the first assault on a diplomatic mission in the country since the Taliban seized power last year.
The attack took place around 11 a.m. at the entrance to the embassy, according to Khalid Zadran, a spokesman for the Kabul police force, when the bomber managed to detonate the explosive in a crowd before Taliban security forces outside the embassy shot and killed him.
Most attacks over the past year have targeted Taliban members and mosques belonging to Shiites and Sufis, two of the country’s minority groups. Until Monday, since the takeover, foreign delegations in Afghanistan had been spared.
The two embassy employees who were killed were identified by the Russian government as a diplomat and a security guard, and Mr. Zadran said at least 10 others were injured along with the four civilians who died.
The Investigative Committee of Russia, the country’s equivalent to the F.B.I., said in a statement that it would open a criminal case into the attack.
The Taliban have tried to court foreign governments that pulled their missions out of Kabul after the collapse of the Western-backed government. Russia is one of a limited number of countries, including Iran and Pakistan, that have maintained a diplomatic presence in Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover.
The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan “condemns in the strongest terms this attack,” Abdul Qahar Balkhi, a spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said on Twitter. “Our security has launched a comprehensive investigation, & will take further measures to safeguard the Embassy,” he noted.
“Two of our comrades died,” said Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister. “We hope that the organizers and perpetrators of that terrorist act will be punished soon,” he said at the beginning of a meeting with his Tajik counterpart in Moscow on Monday. Mr. Lavrov asked the delegates to stand for a minute of silence.
Late Monday, the Islamic State’s affiliate in the country, known as the Islamic State-Khorasan or ISIS-K, claimed responsibility for the attack, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks extremism. The group has claimed to have been behind most of the assaults over the past year. ISIS-K holds that the Taliban’s strict interpretation of Islam does not go far enough and has sought to undermine the government.
From August 2021 to August 2022, the first year of Taliban rule, ISIS-K claimed 262 attacks in Afghanistan — the same number claimed by the group in the year before the Taliban takeover, according to Abdul Sayed, an analyst with the conflict tracking system ExTrac who focuses on ISIS-K and other jihadist groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Of the attacks over the past year, 76 percent have targeted the Taliban, compared with just 5 percent the year before the Taliban seized power, Mr. Sayed said. The majority of the attacks the previous year targeted the Western-backed government.
The attacks have showcased ISIS-K’s newfound reach outside of its eastern stronghold and undercut the Taliban’s hallmark pledge to provide security.
In recent months, ISIS-K has also claimed at least three rocket attacks launched from Afghanistan into Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, according to Mr. Sayed, underscoring the Taliban’s inability to contain the threat within Afghanistan’s borders.
In recent months, a number of high-profile supporters of the Taliban have been targeted and killed — attacks that have highlighted the Taliban’s inability to protect even the group’s own members.
On Friday, a blast outside a mosque in Herat, a city in western Afghanistan near the border with Iran, killed a prominent cleric with close ties to the Taliban who preached a strict interpretation of Shariah law and had carved out his own fief in a conservative district of the city even before the Taliban seized power.
The explosion rocked the mosque around noon, when worshipers had gathered for Friday Prayer, and killed 18 people including the cleric, Mawlawi Mujib Rahman Ansari, and his brother, according to Hamid Gul Motawakel, spokesman for the provincial governor in Herat. No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack.
Last month, another prominent cleric, Sheikh Rahimullah Haqqani, was targeted and killed in a suicide bombing. Sheikh Haqqani was a vocal advocate for the Taliban who gave multiple speeches at Taliban military graduation ceremonies encouraging the killing, abduction and harassment of Afghans who worked alongside Western forces under the previous government.
He was also known as a vocal critic of ISIS-K, which claimed responsibility for the attack. His death, like Mawlawi Ansari’s, prompted an outpouring of grief from Taliban leaders.
“Very sadly informed that respected cleric” was “martyred in a cowardly attack by enemies,” Bilal Karimi, a spokesman for the Taliban administration, said at the time, referring to Sheikh Haqqani.
Najim Rahim and Ivan Nechepurenko contributed reporting.
Suicide Attack Hits Russian Embassy in Afghanistan, Killing 2 Employees
Two recent books chronicle how the United States turned its back on Afghanistan and pitched the country into chaos.
The betrayal of Afghanistan by the United States was inked on Feb. 29, 2020, when an emissary of then-U.S. President Donald Trump signed a bilateral deal with the unreconstructed terrorist-led crime gang known as the Taliban, which U.S. forces had spent the last two decades fighting. The agreement sealed the withdrawal of all U.S. military forces who had been supporting Afghanistan’s democratic experiment for those same two decades, in exchange for empty Taliban promises about breaking ties with terrorists. The deal essentially handed the Taliban the victory they’d so long sought.
But the betrayal wasn’t completed until Aug. 30, 2021, when the last U.S. military transport plane left Kabul crammed with scores of desperate people who feared for their lives in a Taliban-ruled state. The final liftoff came after two weeks of pandemonium that followed the hurried flight of former Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and his circle.
There would be no “Saigon moment” in Afghanistan, U.S. President Joe Biden said of the departure from Kabul of American soldiers, diplomats, and Afghans who had worked with them, after he decided to abide by Trump’s Taliban deal. But the terror, chaos, and violence of those last days were as bad as anything that led up to the last choppers on the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon on April 30, 1975, as the United States cut and ran from South Vietnam. Young men clung to the undercarriages of planes as they taxied for takeoff from Kabul’s international airport; some died as they plummeted to the tarmac. The horrific scenes, the capstone to America’s Afghan misadventure, were painfully reminiscent of the nameless silhouettes seen leaping from New York’s blazing Twin Towers after al Qaeda’s terrorist attack on Sept. 11, 2001, the event that precipitated the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in the first place.
With America’s departure from Afghanistan, its so-called war on terror had come full circle. The homeland was safe, and the troops were back home. America’s forever war, its longest, was over. Afghanistan’s isn’t. Those left behind are emotionally and physically scarred and were left to their fate as vengeful, victorious extremists began their pogroms against perceived enemies, reprisals that continue today with impunity. Many millions of people are hungry, jobless, and penniless, some so desperate to feed themselves and their families that they have sold children and body parts for money to buy food. Many of those who need to escape from Afghanistan are in hiding; many more are waiting for the knock on the door that could spell interrogation, torture, or death. In Afghanistan, no one can hear you scream.
Even those who made it out are suffering: Hundreds of thousands of Afghans who were evacuated remain depressed and discombobulated by the disappearance of the lives they knew and wonder if they’ll ever be able to go home again. Many are refugees for the second or third time, a testament to the vicious cycle that is country’s recent history.
Inside and out of Afghanistan, they ask why their country has been allowed to turn dark, their friends and families hunted down for their ethnicity, their religion, or their past affiliations with the government or its security forces. They ask why women are virtually locked indoors, girls all but barred from education, if not raped, killed, and forgotten. There are no answers to the question: Why?
A pair of recent books, from radically different perspectives, seek to grapple with the question, if not quite finding the answer. Betrayal is a theme that runs through both. The authors are under no illusion that this disaster in Afghanistan is of America’s doing. As soon as the United States began its troop drawdown to zero, upon the signing of Trump’s deal with the Taliban, NATO partners began their own rush to the exits; the U.S.-trained Afghan army wasn’t far behind in collapsing.
The Fifth Act: America’s End in Afghanistan is a memoir by Elliot Ackerman, a former U.S. Marine and CIA operative, who grapples with the weight of his own involvement in a now-lost cause as he attempts to lend a hand in the evacuation process immediately after the Taliban’s takeover. It’s a tome tinged with guilt, the guilt felt by many with a connection to Afghanistan who watched the human horror unfold far away, and the guilt they still feel as the pleas keep coming: “Help me, I’m desperate, I have no money, my children are hungry. I worked for the United States, for Britain, for Germany. I’m gay, I’m a journalist, I’m a woman. Please help.” Help is not on the way.
Less personally engaged, but no less angry, is The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and the Fragility of U.S. Power. The book is a conversation between linguist, activist, and political gadfly Noam Chomsky and Vijay Prashad, who runs a left-leaning think tank. They discuss the origins and excesses of U.S. foreign policy since America’s post-World War II rise as global hegemon. Chomsky stays true to form with his critiques of the legacy of imperialism, whether British, Portuguese, French, or American, that has culminated this century alone in the disruption and destruction of societies in Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan—and beyond. After a lifetime of telling us so, the book is Chomsky’s latest “I told you so.” Few listened.
Ackerman is thoughtful and regretful, a man who cares deeply for the people he believes he and his buddies in the Marines and the CIA fought for. His conscience was clouded by America’s wars for years, as he makes clear in the recounting of targeted killing campaigns—which Chomsky and Prashad call “the worst terrorist campaign in the world by far.” Ackerman believes those programs violated the U.S. prohibition on government-directed assassinations.
“[L]awyers working for multiple presidential administrations had drawn up semantic arguments carefully delineating the difference between a targeted killing and an assassination,” he writes. “But when the picture of the person you were trying to kill sat on your desk, when you watched the predator [drone] strikes light up the night sky … and then when you took that same picture and moved it into a file for archiving, it sure felt like an assassination.” To the hearts and minds of the local populations living under that deadly rain, it surely must have, too, as they turned increasingly sour on the presence of foreign soldiers.
n’s narrative is the Afghan endgame, long after he’d left the country. The fall of Kabul caught him on vacation in Italy, and the contrast between sunshiny days, rooftop restaurants, and his children playing at gladiators contrasted cruelly with the distress of those trying to navigate the chaos of Kabul for a desperate flight to freedom. Some, Ackerman could help; many, he could not.
Ackerman scours his WhatsApp and Signal threads in a vivid retelling of the failures and successes that provided the all-too-human dimension of the evacuation efforts. The tension and drama unfold like a movie script: a pacey, urgent, heart-in-throat, will-they-make-it-this-time narrative as he communicates with fellow Americans and veterans who are trying to get Afghans through the horrible gauntlet surrounding the airport entrances and onto planes that will fly them to safety. At one point, we are in the lobby of a fine Kabul hotel, standing among terrified Afghan friends and colleagues as the decision is made to board a fleet of buses to chance a run to the airport, before they turn back, hoping to try again tomorrow.
Across Europe, the United States, Australia, and all over the world, well-meaning people mobilized their contacts to collate and vet thousands and thousands of names that could otherwise become epitaphs to the Taliban takeover. They lobbied governments, politicians, activists, nongovernmental organizations, wealthy people with private jets, interest groups, human rights defenders, anyone at all who could potentially help get people out of hell before the Taliban found them. Operations like those that Ackerman was involved in were life-saving airlifts for anyone lucky enough to get on the right list, the right bus, arrive at the right gate, wave to the right soldier, know the right people with the right contacts to get them on a crowded plane headed somewhere, anywhere else.
Whereas for Ackerman, the story is personal, especially the awful endgame, for Chomsky and Prashad, it is intellectual. If Ackerman focuses more on the final act, Chomsky and Prashad’s quest for the source of betrayal focuses more on what they see as the original sin. The allied invasion of Taliban-ruled Afghanistan that began on Oct. 7, 2001, was illegal, Chomsky says, serving only as a warning to anyone who would challenge American supremacy. As if the 9/11 attacks had never happened, he says that “it was unprovoked, it was an illegitimate aggression, and it was a severe atrocity.” That cherry-picked history overlooks both the universal condemnation of al Qaeda’s attack and the immediate United Nations Security Council resolution that stressed “that those responsible for aiding, supporting or harboring the perpetrators, organizers and sponsors of these acts will be held accountable,” an unequivocal reference to the Taliban then controlling Afghanistan who had hosted Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda as the attacks were planned and carried out. But Chomsky is right that those who paid the biggest price for the U.S. intervention were the people of Afghanistan, who themselves had nothing to do with 9/11 but have been paying for it for more than 20 years.
Washington repeatedly called on the Taliban to hand over bin Laden before and after 9/11, and it had been repeatedly rebuffed. But Chomsky and Prashad, like other scholars of the Afghan War, find fault with the George W. Bush administration’s refusal to negotiate with the Taliban to that end. Carter Malkasian, in The American War in Afghanistan: A History, wrote that the Bush team was under pressure to ensure the United States was safe from future terrorist attacks, but it missed two opportunities to “avoid a long war”—convincing the Taliban to hand over bin Laden, and including the Taliban in the post-2001 political landscape. These were the signal mistakes that led to the 20-year quagmire and thousands of deaths, Chomsky and Prashad argue in a section titled “The Godfather,” comparing the United States to a mob family.
“[T]he Taliban understood the gravity of a U.S. attack after 9/11 and made it clear on several occasions that it would be prepared to hand over Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaeda network to a third country,” Chomsky and Prashad write. “Their plea for a settlement was rejected” because, they add, “When the United States wants war, it gets a war.”
And what a war it got. Gangsters, murderers, and drug dealers exploited the local ignorance of the foreign forces to eliminate their own enemies, while a spigot of cash poured into the coffers of the corrupt appointees who masqueraded as a government. Of the trillions of dollars spent by the United States alone, billions remain unaccounted for, their disappearance logged by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, set up by the U.S. Congress to follow the money.
Chomsky and Prashad find fault in the endgame, too, blaming the vested interests of a military-industrial complex that serves to benefit the Western elite and multiply and secure its wealth. U.S. asset freezes on Afghan central bank funds that could today finance the Taliban are, for Chomsky and Prashad, just another theft. What possible benefit, Chomsky asks, could there be for the masters of the universe in “battering the country to dust” for 20 years and then robbing the Afghan people of their own money, condemning them by this “cruelest of current crimes” to “imminent starvation”?
For Chomsky and Prashad, the war in Afghanistan is just one more piece in the United States’ quest to put together its hegemonic jigsaw puzzle. For Ackerman, by contrast, the war helped achieve the “essential objectives of the global war on terror” by keeping the U.S. homeland safe. But he, too, ponders the cost of this success—not only in the thousands of lives lost or ruined, but also in the financial cost to the American people who have barely noticed the grim toll on their democracy of a long war fought by a volunteer military and paid for on credit. He notes that 2001 was the last federal budget passed by Congress that had a surplus. He fears, too, a creeping politicization of the military, warning that history from Julius Caesar to Napoleon Bonaparte shows that “when a republic couples a large standing military with dysfunctional domestic politics, democracy doesn’t last long.”
As we mark the first anniversary of the Taliban’s return to power and the final act of America’s betrayal, genuinely reasonable people watch slack-jawed while the Islamists squabble violently among themselves as they further brutalize a long-brutalized population. The neighboring states that cheered the departure of the United States now despair of transforming their problem child into a credible, responsible creature.
On Aug. 14, 2021, just hours before the Taliban entered Kabul and declared the war over, Biden told the people of the United States that the point of the war had already vanished 10 years earlier, with the death of bin Laden. Now, he said, it’s time for the Afghan people to take responsibility for themselves; the United States, he warned, would hold the Taliban accountable for its promises to stop cooperating with terrorists. And it has: At the end of July, a U.S. drone strike killed bin Laden’s successor, al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, who was living as a guest of the Taliban in a Kabul villa. From beginning to even after the end, the United States put homeland security first. Ackerman fought for it. Chomsky resents it. And the Afghans?
Almost exactly a year after Biden made that speech, this Aug. 13, brave young women marched through the streets of Kabul carrying banners that mourned a “black day” as they demanded their now-vanished rights to work, to learn, to be free. Taliban gunmen fired over their heads, beat them, and detained them. They, like a lot of American hopes and promises, are lost in the Taliban’s Afghanistan, where no one can hear them scream.
Lynne O’Donnell is a columnist at Foreign Policy and an Australian journalist and author. She was the Afghanistan bureau chief for Agence France-Presse and the Associated Press between 2009 and 2017.
Human Rights Watch asked the UN not to extend the existing government officials’ travel exemption as a result of the closure of girls’ schools in Afghanistan.
Following the end of the travel exemption for some officials of the Islamic Emirate, Kabul is once again asking that the United Nations Security Council lift the sanctions imposed on the current government officials.
The Islamic Emirate’s deputy spokesman, Bilal Karimi, warned that the sanctions will put Kabul further apart from the international community, and that this distance will have unfavorable effects.
“It is good that they should come together and bring the Islamic Emirate to the international level as a responsible and prominent system in the world. There should be an emphasis on adopting diplomatic means,” Karimi said.
Since the travel exemption expired, Kabul officials have not visited any countries in the past two weeks, and it is unclear when the UN Security Council will make a decision on this issue.
However, some political analysts believe that if the travel exemptions for the current government officials are not extended, Afghanistan will go further into political isolation.
According to the analysts, one of the main reasons for not extending the travel exemption for officials of the Islamic Emirate is the failure to implement the Doha Agreement.
“It’s possible that they’ll gradually impose these limits on Afghanistan’s business, which would paralyze yet another large class of ours and result in severe persecution for the Afghan people…,” said Sayed Ishaq Gailani, Leader of the National Solidarity Movement of Afghanistan.
“There have been three issues that prevented the UN Security Council from making a decision regarding the Taliban delegation’s travel. First, the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council cannot agree. The second is that the Taliban group failed to uphold its obligations to the international community and the Afghan people, one of which is to respect Afghan citizens’ fundamental rights,” said Nematullah Bizhan, international relations expert.
Human Rights Watch asked the UN not to extend the existing government officials’ travel exemption as a result of the closure of girls’ schools in Afghanistan.
“Human Rights Watch has four demands of the international community for how they should be responding to the intense women’s rights crisis in Afghanistan. The first is to the Security Council. The Security Council should permanently end all exemptions to the travel bans that are covering and restricting some Taliban leaders. The Security Council should be looking to add more Taliban leaders to the list of people subject to travel bans and to add other measures and based on their involvement in human rights violations,” said the associate director of the women’s rights division at Human Rights Watch, Heather Barr.
The first deputy of the prime minister, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the second deputy Mullah Abdul Salam Hanafi, the political deputy of the prime minister Mawlawi Abdul Kabir, the acting minister of foreign affairs Amir Khan Muttaqi, the political deputy of the foreign ministry Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanekzai, the minister of mines and petroleum Shahabuddin Delawar, the intelligence director Abdulhaq Wasiq, minister of information and culture Khairullah Khairkhah, deputy minister defense Fazel Mazloum, minister of economy Din Mohammad Hanif, minister of Haj Noor Mohammad Saqib, minister of borders and tribes Noorullah Noori and minister of energy and water Latif Mansour are those whose travel ban exemption period has ended, and they cannot travel abroad.
Regarding political party activities, the deputy minister of justice noted that given the current situation, there is no need for parties to be active.
A Ministry of Justice representative said Afghanistan does not require a constitution and can resolve its issues with only the application of Islamic law.
In a press conference, Abdul Karim Haider, the deputy minister of justice, stated that Hanafi law serves as the framework for resolving people’s problems.
“The holy Quran, the Sunnah of Mohammad (PBUH), and the jurisprudence of every Islamic country are the basis and the text of the constitution in general and in detail,” Haidar said.
“A constitution for any government in the modern era is a crucial and a basic requirement. No government in the modern era can function without a constitution,” said Fazel Hadi Wazin, a university lecturer.
Regarding political party activities, the deputy minister of justice noted that given the current situation, there is no need for parties to be active.
Speaking of the work being done by women lawyers in the country, he said that all women would be provided their rights under Islamic law.
“The Islamic Emirate will grant women the rights that Islam has granted them–when the conditions are favorable,” Haider said.
According to ministry officials, the ministry is prepared to prepare the constitution in accordance with Islamic law at the Prime Minister’s request.
“We are awaiting Amirul Muminin’s direction. when he directs the creation of law. The Hanafi law system, the Quran, and the Sunnah of Mohammad (PBUH) are its sources, thus we are confident that a comprehensive law will be established quickly to address everyone’s concerns, Haidar stated.
The Ministry of Justice added that this organization’s revenue over the previous year exceeded 42 million Afghanis.
Officials: Afghanistan Does Not Need a Constitution
We must resist the temptation to believe that if only the United States had done this or that differently, the war would have been won.
Editor’s note: In August, The National Interest organized asymposium on Afghanistan one year after the U.S. withdrawal and the Taliban takeover of Kabul. We asked a variety of experts the following question: “How should the Biden administration approach Afghanistan and the Taliban government?” The following article is one of their responses:
One year ago, the Afghan government and military disintegrated in one of the most remarkable, sudden, and widespread collapses in modern military history. Looking back, not just at the year since that collapse but the twenty years that preceded it, there are some important lessons for the United States to acknowledge. Key among them: foreign interventions to “promote democracy” and “fight terrorism” have been exposed as expensive failures. We fail to apply these lessons to our future peril.
Just before midnight in Kabul on August 30, 2021, Maj. Gen. Christopher T. Donahue, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, left the tarmac to board a U.S. C-17 military transport, becoming the final U.S. servicemember to leave Afghan soil. After twenty years of blood, sacrifice, and futility, the American military had withdrawn from Afghanistan—with the victorious Taliban watching from the Kabul government buildings they had captured.
As one who deployed to Afghanistan over the course of two combat tours, watching the mission literally disintegrate before my eyes last August was a bitter pill, to say the least. Especially during my 2010-2011 combat deployment, I had traveled thousands of miles throughout the areas in northern, eastern, central, and southern Afghanistan where U.S. Army troops had been operating. I met hundreds of U.S. and allied soldiers and scores of Afghan citizens and military personnel.
Like nearly every American sent to Afghanistan, I had hoped to be part of something that would bring peace to the people of Afghanistan, who had by 2010 already suffered under forty consecutive years of one war or another. Yet as I had identified as early as 2009, the strategies, objectives, and plans the United States tried to employ in pursuit of helping Afghanistan win were so deeply flawed that failure was almost baked in.
For example, in a 2010 essay I wrote in the Armed Forces Journal, I pointed out that it was already obvious our efforts were failing. I warned that absent a “major change in the status quo that currently dominates in Afghanistan, the U.S.-led military effort there will fail to accomplish the president’s objectives and, despite our best effort to spin it otherwise, we will lose the war in Afghanistan.”
The problems I identified in that essay proved prescient. Too many senior leaders had spent too many consecutive years making optimistic claims of military and governmental success, yet none had been evident on the ground. The history of the Afghan people resisting any foreign military presence—considering outside forces occupiers—had helped fuel the insurgency.
Other foundational problems included a fatally corrupted government in Kabul, an Afghan military that was clearly inadequate for the task of securing the country and unlikely to do so for the foreseeable future, and, most critically of all, the Pakistani sanctuary. Without getting Islamabad fully on board with U.S. strategy and shutting down all support for the Taliban, it would be physically impossible to defeat them.
None of those issues I had raised in 2010 were ever rectified (many others, by the way, had likewise raised similar warning bells). If anything, the problems mounted over the next decade. Compounding the strategic errors, as exposed in the 2019 Washington Post Afghanistan Papers, was a resolute unwillingness to acknowledge plain truth. It was always clear that the government never corrected its severe corruption problem (as graphically evidenced by the fact that the Afghan state the United States created after September 11 never produced a free and fair presidential election; all were marred with massive cheating).
As I discussed at some length in my public criticism of the war in February 2012, I had observed during my 2010-2011 combat deployment that the Afghan National Security Forces had not made any progress since my 2005 deployment, and there was fundamentally no reason to believe that would change. It never did. None of the problems that I and many others identified year after year were ever acknowledged—and therefore they were never resolved.
The plain truth of the matter is that the war was never winnable. There was no “right” strategy to find, no formula that if only we’d have adopted things might have been different, and no amount of troops on the ground would have changed the outcome. Some contend it was reasonable for U.S. forces to have punished the Taliban for their support of Al Qaeda in the smoldering aftermath of September 11. Once that punishment had been meted out, however, the absolute best thing that could ever have happened for U.S. national security would have been to withdraw.
By the summer of 2002, there was no Taliban and no organized resistance to the formation of a government in Kabul. That was the perfect time to let the Afghan people decide, on their own, what sort of government they wanted, requiring them to figure out how to make it happen. The United States would have still been perfectly capable of taking out any identifiable direct threat to American national security, as it demonstrated by taking out Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in Syria, and, just last week, Ayman al-Zawahiri in Kabul.
Instead, the United States continued the fiction of believing that with “just a little more time,” “just a little more money,” or “just the right tweak to the strategy,” the outcome could be changed. Despite every report, every sober analysis of the fundamentals, and every observable outcome screaming that the war was always unwinnable, U.S. leaders at nearly every level in the White House and the Pentagon continued to blithely ignore the evidence in search of the unattainable.
Of course, none of those advocates for keeping the war going forever paid any price for their arrogant, presumptuous behavior (in fact many of them still hold highly-paid positions to this day). But 2,443 Americans paid with their lives, another 20,666 were physically wounded, and hundreds of thousands more will carry the plague of suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injuries for the rest of their lives.
We must resist the temptation to believe the many architects of the Afghan disaster who try to convince us that “if only” the United States had done this or that differently, the war would have been won. From virtually the opening stages of the war, the fundamentals involved showed that both the war and our nation-building efforts were futile. One can only hope that now, a year after the two-decade disaster culminated, we can accept the truth.
Daniel L. Davis is a Senior Fellow for Defense Priorities and a former Lt. Col. in the U.S. Army who deployed into combat zones four times. He is the author of The Eleventh Hour in 2020 America.
Afghanistan was a lost war long before last year’s final withdrawal.
A T-shirt that was popular with veterans for much of America’s nearly 20-year war in Afghanistan showed a helicopter in flight with the caption we were winning when I left. U.S. generals seem to be the only ones who didn’t get the joke. On the first anniversary of our botched withdrawal, the military leaders most responsible for America’s disastrous outcome in Afghanistan have continued to loudly insist that the war was winnable when they were in charge, and that responsibility for the debacle must lie with someone else.
Retired Generals Frank McKenzie and Joseph Votel, the last two commanders of U.S. Central Command, which includes Afghanistan, recently made the case that America should have stayed indefinitely, arguing that the pullout was a mistake and that America could have defended its interests—and kept the Taliban at bay—with a small residual force of a few thousand soldiers. And inThe Atlantic, the retired general and former CIA director David Petraeus, who commanded the war in Afghanistan after presiding over the surge that helped bring temporary stability to Iraq, wrote that more than a decade ago “we had finally established the right big ideas and overarching strategy.” But the problem, he maintained, was that America did not have the stomach for a “sustained, generational commitment.”
A sustained, generational commitment? The United States spent more than $2 trillion in Afghanistan and sacrificed the lives of 2,461 service members over those two decades. And in that time, the top brass mostly got their way. President Barack Obama caved to his generals, agreeing to a substantial troop surge in a war he was trying to end. President Donald Trump did the same on a smaller scale, entering office on a promise to end the war but eventually agreeing to a “mini-surge” and deferring a full withdrawal to his successor.
The outcome of America’s commitment was an Afghan government and military that couldn’t hold out long enough even for U.S. forces to leave with a semblance of dignity. The “right big ideas” deployed by a generation of generals proved to be empty slogans: “government in a box,” “money as a weapons system,” “ink spots.” All of these were tactical approaches or overly simplistic frameworks that ignored the nuances of Afghan politics and the reality of attempting to modernize a fractured country that was mired in corruption and a continuing civil war.
This myth of a sustainable stalemate is contradicted by a mountain of evidence and experience. U.S. casualties in the Afghan War’s last years remained low because of the Doha Agreement, whatever its flaws. The Kabul government’s forces that had to fight and win the war were losing “gradually and then suddenly,” as Ernest Hemingway described bankruptcy.
By 2017, Afghan army and police recruiting began to dry up, a result of high casualties, corruption, and mistreatment, as well as successful Taliban propaganda that capitalized on those failures. Later that year, the U.S. government classified Afghan security forces’ size and stopped collecting district stability data, a fraught but valuable metric of security. These were not the hallmarks of a winning campaign. General McKenzie admitted to the Senate Armed Services Committee in 2018 that Afghan security forces were suffering unsustainable attrition. And when Afghan forces failed in battle with the tools and training we had given them, the answer from the generals was not to shift our approach but always to ask for more time and more money.
We both first deployed to Afghanistan more than a decade ago; our combined experience in the war covers the period from 2009 to 2014. What became clear during those deployments was that the war was a fundamentally doomed endeavor. Our efforts to build a national Afghan army in the image of our own military were not only ineffective; they also made the Afghan government’s crisis of legitimacy worse. We both served alongside a range of Afghan government forces and saw firsthand how the model we were imposing on their military simply did not fit the country we were fighting in.
In June 2011, a full decade before last year’s total withdrawal, President Obama announced a major troop reduction in Afghanistan and a future “responsible end” to the war. Trump successfully campaigned in 2016 on a pullout promise; as president, he signed the February 2020 Doha Agreement that would deliver just that. President Joe Biden ordered an Afghanistan policy review, and then chose to delay the withdrawal but ultimately honor the Doha terms.
In the face of all these signals that the U.S. intervention was coming to an end, America’s generals seemed to think they could keep a small war in Afghanistan going forever. If the war didn’t end, hard questions about the fundamental flaws in execution never had to be acknowledged. U.S. military leaders could continue to pretend that they had achieved something in the country.
As for the inevitable chaos of the withdrawal itself, the U.S. State Department deserves most of the blame for the shameful condition of the Afghan Special Immigrant Visa program, which prevented tens of thousands of our Afghan partners from getting out of the country safely, and the White House must own some final operational and timing decisions in Kabul. But the bulk of the blame for the failures of analysis, planning, and execution still rests on the shoulders of our military and its leaders. They built a house of cards in Afghanistan. As years of reporting and research have shown, whether it would come crashing down was never in doubt; it was only a matter of when and how.
Defeat is a bitter pill for any army to swallow. And unfortunately, blaming operational and tactical failures on politics at home—a stab in the back—is a long and dangerous tradition: You can find Iraq and Vietnam versions of that sardonic T-shirt. Plenty of blame can be spread around for America’s defeat in its longest foreign war. But don’t let the generals fool you: We were losing when they left.
Gil Barndollar is a senior fellow at Defense Priorities, a think tank specializing in military and strategic issues. He served in Afghanistan as a U.S. Marine in 2011–12 and 2013–14.
Jason Dempsey is a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, a think tank specializing in defense and national-security issues. He served in the U.S. Army in Afghanistan in 2009 and 2012–13.
A year after the last U.S. military flights left, some Afghans who are vulnerable to retribution from the Taliban are being resettled in the U.S. But others are stuck in third-party countries, and many remain trapped in Afghanistan, at great risk.
Last month, Metra Mehran, an Afghan human-rights activist, faced a choice. Until last summer, she lived in Kabul, where she worked as a director of a U.S.-funded women’s-education program. But, in August of 2021, when the Taliban took power, she was forced to flee. Through friends from the Fulbright program at Texas A. & M., which she had attended from 2016 to 2018, Mehran secured a place for herself on a list of Afghans eligible for protection in the U.S. Her mother, father, and brother travelled on a Special Immigrant Visa, granted for her mother’s role as a civil engineer, designing and building bridges and roads for American projects. They were flown to a military base in Kuwait, then eventually brought to Falls Church, Virginia.
I met Mehran in the winter of 2021, through a network of volunteers engaged in evacuation efforts, and we’ve worked together to help Afghan women still in peril. Mehran thought that she would be able to continue that work. But recently the Taliban began to harass her colleagues still in Kabul. “Because I openly criticize the Taliban’s policies and continue to engage with women on the ground, some low-level guys were threatening them,” she told me. “They kept coming to their offices, harassing them with screenshots of my tweets and of me on TV.” She had to decide whether to leave her job or continue risking the safety of her colleagues; in the end, she quit. It stunned her that the Taliban were able to assert power from so far away. “It was painful to see that, even though I am here in the United States, the Taliban can control my freedom of speech,” she said.
Mehran, like thousands of others who tried to leave the country last August, had little desire to build a new life outside of Afghanistan, but, for her safety, she had little choice. The U.S. government set up a system to evacuate thousands of people who were vulnerable to retribution from the Taliban—activists and civil-society members, judges and prosecutors, and people who had worked with the U.S. military or American-backed projects. But the effort was quickly overwhelmed by the speed of events. (A White House spokesperson said that the Administration conducted “extensive contingency planning,” and that its evacuation efforts constituted “one of the largest airlifts in history.” A State Department spokesperson added, “We will be relentless in this effort as we stand by our Afghan allies and their families.”) Alongside formal government initiatives, ad-hoc collectives stepped up. Afghans, former American officials, journalists, aid workers, and others cobbled together charter flights to evacuate those in danger. (With friends and colleagues, I took part in one of hundreds of such efforts.) Thousands of Afghans escaped, but then, on August 30, 2021, the military left, the airport closed, and many more were left behind.
It has now been a year since the last U.S. military flight left Afghanistan. At the end of 2021, according to the United Nations, there were more than 2.7 million Afghan refugees registered worldwide. Since Afghanistan fell to the Taliban, there have been no such reliable figures. “A year later, neither we nor the U.S.G. really knows in any comprehensive way where everyone ended up or how many there even are,” Mike Breen, the president and C.E.O. of Human Rights First, told me, referring to the United States government. “To this day, there appears to be no systemic solution for accounting for all these people and getting them somewhere safe and sustainable.”
Among the luckiest Afghans are roughly eighty-five thousand who made it to the U.S. Halima Amiri, a twenty-two-year-old belonging to the Hazara ethnic minority persecuted by the Taliban, was studying to be an engineer at a military academy before Kabul fell. She spent three months being shuttled between windowless safe houses in Afghanistan, before flying to the U.S. and being resettled in Duluth, Minnesota. She arrived in Duluth last February, with three other young Afghan women, wearing matching black puffy coats and combat boots they’d received at a U.S. base in New Jersey. They were greeted by a pastor and retired professors taking part in a pilot program that allowed private citizens to help resettle refugees. It was eight degrees outside, and the women had worried about the cold. They were also, as far as they knew, the only Afghans in a city of eighty-five thousand. But they had the support of Episcopal Migration Ministries, a resettlement agency, and also of a devoted group of volunteers, who took turns spending the night with the women in a retreat center when they first arrived.
When I spoke to Amiri, by phone this month, she was working in the kitchen of a Benedictine home for the elderly; one of the other women scooped cones at Love Creamery, a local ice-cream shop. They spent the summer intensively studying English, working, and sending money back to Afghanistan. “Our education has always been the most important factor,” Amiri told me recently. In September, she will start the fall semester at the College of St. Scholastica, studying computer science and health. But stories of their families suffering in Afghanistan, where the spectre of famine caused prices to spike, has made it difficult to focus on their new routines.
When Amiri, an accomplished amateur artist, first arrived, she sketched images of the girls left behind in the safe houses. “I’m only in touch with some,” Amiri told me. The safe houses had been disbanded; no one was leaving anytime soon, and the funding dried up. “Most are still living in hiding, on their own,” Amiri added. “They always tell me that I’m lucky that I’m not in their situation, and that makes me really sad.” Almost all those she knew of were still in Afghanistan, with only four making it over the border to Pakistan.
There are also an untold number of Afghans who made it out of the country but are stuck abroad. Breen, from Human Rights First, told me, “Thousands who’d hoped to find a pathway to the U.S. are in limbo in a kind of global safe-house archipelago all over the world.” Some are in Pakistan and others are in the United Arab Emirates, where thousands are stuck in a “humanitarian city”—a place sometimes described as an international no man’s land. Thousands are in Turkey and Greece. Most were transported out of Afghanistan with promises that they would eventually be resettled in the U.S., but, for various reasons, that hasn’t happened.
During the past year, Operation White Scarves, a volunteer effort led by women, has successfully evacuated more than a thousand female leaders from Afghanistan. Nasrin Oryakhil, a fifty-six-year-old gynecologist and the former minister of labor and social affairs, escaped this past August with only a small carry-on of possessions. “Because I’m not a corrupt minister, I don’t have any money,” she told me. She is currently living in Istanbul, waiting for the United States to process her application to enter the country. “I can’t accept that the United States is offering me no support at all,” she told me. In 2014, Michelle Obama awarded her the State Department’s International Women of Courage award. This year, Oryakhil found an online contact form for the Obamas and wrote to ask for her help. “She’s a very kind person,” she said, but “I never heard back.” In Turkey, Afghan refugees struggle to be able to work, and Oryakhil is unable to pay her rent. “Even though there are so many threats against me, I’m considering going back to Afghanistan to run my private clinic,” she said. “I might be tortured, but I have to support my daughters.”
Mursal Ayar, a twenty-eight-year-old freelance journalist who worked with CNN, among other outlets, was arrested at her home, in Kabul, in January. For two weeks, she was interrogated, locked in a toilet, and beaten with a steel pipe. “They beat you until you give them names,” she told me. In June, after she was released, she fled overland to a nearby country. No nation has yet offered her family asylum. “I’m not sure what’s going to happen to me,” she told me.
Some women are living in hiding, even abroad. “I am not safe here and I hope you don’t publish where I am,” Tamana Paryani, a well-known twenty-five-year-old activist wrote to me last week, by encrypted chat. In January, Paryani live-streamed the moment when the Taliban broke into her house to arrest her. “At the moment, my camera was my only weapon,” she told me. “It was my protest.” Paryani was recently awarded asylum in the U.S., but she’s deeply ambivalent about accepting it. “To be honest, I am not interested in going to America,” she wrote. “I don’t like to seek refuge in the same government who gave our land to the terrorists.”
Despite the chaos of the evacuation from Afghanistan, President Joe Biden has touted it as an “extraordinary success.” Many of the difficulties in processing refugees, the Administration has claimed, are the result of changes that the Trump Administration made to U.S. resettlement programs. “The United States fucked it up for sure last August, and there’s no giving anyone a pass on that,” Shawn VanDiver, who founded #AfghanEvac, which coördinates relocation efforts between the U.S. government and two hundred volunteer groups, told me. “But, man, I can’t imagine what this would’ve looked like under the previous Administration.”
Although a small number of individuals inside and outside the Biden Administration have committed themselves heroically to the effort, the situation remains a chaotic mess. Currently, there are a handful of legal pathways for Afghans who want to settle in the United States. “Not one is working like it should,” Becca Heller, the head of the International Refugee Assistance Project, a nonprofit organization that works on refugee policy, told me. One option is a Special Immigrant Visa, or S.I.V., designated for Afghans in danger because of their work with the United States. A report released this month by the nonprofit the Association of Wartime Allies estimated that a hundred and sixty thousand applicants eligible for S.I.V.s still await processing for their visas, and that the Administration has issued an average of only seven hundred and twenty-five such visas per month since September of last year. (The Administration claims that the number of “full applications,” or those that are ready for approval, is much lower, and amounts to seventeen thousand.) Even more distressing, according to a report co-authored by the Association of Wartime Allies and Mina’s List: only an estimated seven to ten per cent of S.I.V. primary applicants are women. Although they are also at risk, owing to their work, they often cannot meet the United States’s eligibility requirements.
A second pathway is through the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, for people including journalists and other members of civil society, but advocates say that it is also too slow. A third option, humanitarian parole, permits only a temporary stay in the U.S., during which Afghans must apply for permanent protection. As of August, of the sixty-six thousand Afghans who’ve applied, a mere hundred and twenty-three have been approved, according to the investigative outlet Reveal. (An Administration official said that the Biden Administration is dissuading Afghans from applying to humanitarian parole because of its temporary nature, and encouraging them to apply through a pathway that offers durable status, such as S.I.V. or the Refugee Admissions Program. The official also noted that, upon taking office, the Administration “substantially increased” the number of staff processing S.I.V. applications, increasing the pace of S.I.V. arrivals in the U.S. nearly eightfold between January and July of 2021.)
Compare these numbers with those fleeing Ukraine, for whom the United States has created the highly successful Uniting for Ukraine program, known as U4U. Of more than ninety-seven thousand Ukrainians who’ve applied for humanitarian parole, more than sixty-eight thousand applications have now been approved. “It’s pretty clear at this point that the U.S.G. needs to face up to the situation and create a parole program for everyone who fled the Taliban based on the lesson learned via U4U,” Breen said. (An Administration official said that U4U was created after speaking with Ukrainians in refugee camps, who “overwhelmingly” said that they plan to return to Ukraine and only seek temporary refuge in the United States.) These policy changes would begin with the passage of the Afghan Adjustment Act, currently before Congress. Among other things, the Afghan Adjustment Act would establish an interagency task force that could begin by providing a comprehensive picture of where at-risk Afghans actually are, and create a path to application for lawful permanent residency for many who now hold only temporary and uncertain status.
The American allies and activists most at risk are those still trapped in Afghanistan. “We still have ten thousand left on our list that didn’t make it out,” Horia Mosadiq, who helps lead Operation White Scarves, told me. The list includes one of Mosadiq’s colleagues who has been detained and tortured twice. There are at least three women on the list still inside Afghanistan who are under extreme threat. At least one was highly known for her work in tackling cases of violence against women, including cases committed by members of the Taliban. For those who have escaped, their families are now at risk of retribution. “Silencing exists far beyond the borders of Afghanistan,” she said.
There are still efforts to get women at severe risk out of Afghanistan, but they face steep odds. “There aren’t many flights available,” VanDiver told me. Given the demand, it’s nearly impossible to find a seat on one. Also, for many, evacuating through a third-party country is prohibitively expensive. “In a best-case scenario, we estimate that a family of five needs between twelve and twenty-five thousand dollars just to travel and stay afloat while awaiting an asylum interview,” Laura Deitz, who runs Task Force Nyx, a grassroots group helping small numbers of high-risk families evacuate and resettle, told me. “Even if they have that kind of money, they run the risk of running out and becoming homeless as they wait for processing.” When their temporary visas expire, those who make it out have been sent back to Afghanistan. “We’ve seen women deported from Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, and Central Asian countries, and returned to the Taliban,” Mosadiq told me. “That’s why the speed of processing isn’t just a matter of bureaucracy—it’s life and death.”
Mehran, the activist in Falls Church, wakes many mornings in a panic that something has happened to her friends. One recent morning, she reached for her phone to find bloody images of them in her text messages. Dozens of women had met up in the former site of Kabul’s Green Zone to protest the Taliban’s first year in power. Some were caught by the Taliban and beaten with sticks and pipes between their legs. Among the women was Munisa Mubariz, who previously held a position in the Ministry of Finance. Photos showed her in a bright-green coat, screaming into the face of a Talib. “We were screaming, ‘Food, freedom, work!’ ” she told me later. “The Taliban took my phone, so I’ve gone into hiding,” she said. “I can’t even go to the doctor.” She was looking for the quickest way out of Afghanistan. “Nobody wants to leave their country,” she told me. “But I can’t survive here anymore.” ♦
The deputy special envoy of the UN Secretary-General also expressed frustration over the lack of a constitution in Afghanistan.
The deputy head of the UN Assistant Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), Markus Potzel, called for the formation of an inclusive government in Afghanistan.
In an interview with TOLOnews, Potzel said that the caretaker government must obtain domestic recognition to be recognized by the international community.
“First of all, it is necessary that the government reach domestic recognition. It means based on elections, based on a referendum or based on a Loya-Jirga,” he said.
Potzel also expressed concerns over the deteriorated economic and social situation in Afghanistan, saying that the caretaker government must pay serious attention to this.
“The economic and social situation of Afghanistan is very weak,” he said.
The deputy special envoy of the UN Secretary-General also expressed frustration over the lack of a constitution in Afghanistan.
“We see that there is no plan and there is no constitution and there is no other law,” he said.
However, earlier the Islamic Emirate had stressed that its cabinet is inclusive and that it has formed proper strategies to govern the country.
Potzel Stressed Need for Inclusivity in Afghan Cabinet
The United Nations says aid workers are still in a “race against time” to remove rubble and rebuild after the devastating earthquake struck eastern Afghanistan last month, killing at least 2,200 people and cutting off remote areas.
The 6.0-magnitude quake on Aug. 31 was shallow, destroying or causing extensive damage to low-rise buildings in the mountainous region. It hit late at night, and homes — mostly made of mud, wood, or rocks — collapsed instantly, becoming death traps.
Satellite data shows that about 40,500 truckloads of debris still needs to be cleared from affected areas in several provinces, the United Nations Development Program said Wednesday. Entire communities have been upended and families are sleeping in the open, it added.
The quake’s epicenter was in remote and rugged Kunar province, challenging rescue and relief efforts by the Taliban government and humanitarian groups. Authorities deployed helicopters or airdropped army commandos to evacuate survivors. Aid workers walked for hours on foot to reach isolated communities.
“This is a race against time,” said Devanand Ramiah, from the UNDP’s Crisis Bureau. “Debris removal and reconstruction operations must start safely and swiftly.”
People’s main demands were the reconstruction of houses and water supplies, according to a spokesman for a Taliban government committee tasked with helping survivors, Zia ur Rahman Speenghar.
People were getting assistance in cash, food, tents, beds, and other necessities, Speenghar said Thursday. Three new roads were under construction in the Dewagal Valley, and roads would be built to areas where there previously were none.
“Various countries and organizations have offered assistance in the construction of houses but that takes time. After the second round of assistance, work will begin on the third round, which is considering what kind of houses can be built here,” the spokesman said.
Afghanistan is facing a “perfect storm” of crises, including natural disasters like the recent earthquake, said Roza Otunbayeva, who leads the U.N. mission to the country.
Afghanistan Peace Campaign