Review of Security Developments in Afghanistan Over Past Year

August 16, 2022 Current News Articles

By Farshad Daryosh

Tolo News

16 August 2022

Daesh has claimed responsibility for most of the past year’s attacks in Afghanistan.

Although ensuring security in Afghanistan is considered one of the Islamic Emirate’s accomplishments over the past year, following August 15th, 2021, various provinces in the country had security incidents.

One of the largest security events of the year was the American airstrike in Kabul, along with attacks on mosques, explosive events, and other incidents.

“The security situation over the past year has really been better than prior years. However, this situation is not completely guaranteed,” said Hekmatullah Hekmat, military expert.

These are the deadly incidents from the previous year:

At least 180 people were killed and over 200 others were injured in the incident that took place at Kabul Airport on August 26, 2021, while American soldiers were still stationed there.

Over 50 people were killed and at least 150 injured in the attack that targeted a Shia mosque in Kunduz province on October 8, 2021.

The attack on the Sardar Mohammad Daoud Khan National Military Hospital on November 2, 2021, killed at least seven people and injured more than 25 others.

On October 15, 2021, a blast in Kandahar province targeted a mosque, leaving 32 people dead and 70 others injured.

On April 9, 2022, an explosion that targeted the Khalifa Sahib Mosque in Kabul left more than 10 people dead and more than 25 others wounded.

According to a UNAMA report, at least 700 people died, and 1406 others were injured in Afghanistan during the 10 months the Islamic Emirate was in power.

Daesh has claimed responsibility for most of the past year’s attacks in Afghanistan.

One of the major events of the past year was the house-to-house search operations in Afghanistan, which the Islamic Emirate soldiers began on February 25, 2022, in Kabul and continued in all 34 provinces of the country.

Talking at a press conference in Kabul, Islamic Emirate spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid said house clearings were intended to catch criminals, some of whom were released from prison during the change of government.

According to Mujahid, women were among the Islamic Emirate forces searching homes, and only “suspected areas” were searched.

“Nine kidnappers, six affiliated with Daesh, and 53 robbers were detained,” Mujahid said.

On March 5, 2022, Sarajuddin Haqqani, the acting Interior Minister, made his first appearance on TV screens. America had set aside $10 million for his discovery and detention.

One of the most notable events of the past year in Afghanistan was the US drone strike that occurred on July 31, 2022, in the Sharpoor area of Kabul.

Two days after the attack, US President Joe Biden declared that America has killed Al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in the Kabul strike.

In his speech, Biden said that Ayman al-Zawahiri was killed in an American drone strike in Kabul.

“On Saturday at my direction, the United States successfully concluded an airstrike in Kabul, Afghanistan, that killed the emir of al-Qaida, Ayman al Zawahiri. You know, Zawahiri was bin Laden’s leader. He was with him all that whole time. He was his number two man, his deputy at the time of terrorist attack 9/11. He was deeply involved in the planning of 9/11. One of the most responsible for the attacks and murdered 2,977 people on American soil,” Biden said.

Although the Islamic Emirate acknowledged that a US drone had targeted a home in Kabul’s Sherpoor area, it has not yet confirmed or denied US claims that Ayman al-Zawahiri was killed.

Following the US drone strike in Kabul, the Islamic Emirate and US has accused each other of violating the Doha agreement.

Abdul Salam Hanafi, the 2nd Deputy Prime Minister of the Islamic Emirate, said that the US drone attack in Kabul violates both national sovereignty and the Doha Agreement and that Afghan territory will not be used against any country.

“These issues are still unclear to us, the only thing we know for sure is that a drone attack has taken place, which is against international law and the Doha Agreement. The Islamic Emirate’s policy, which has been repeatedly stated to the people, is that our soil is not used against our neighbors,” said Abdul Salam Hanafi, the 2nd deputy of PM.

U.S. Will Not Release $3.5 Billion in Frozen Afghan Funds for Now, Citing Terror Fears

August 16, 2022 Current News Articles

The New York Times

Published Aug. 16, 2022

The Biden administration on Monday ruled out releasing $3.5 billion in funds held in the United States back to Afghanistan’s central bank anytime soon, citing the discovery that Al Qaeda’s leader had taken refuge in the heart of Kabul apparently with the protection of the Taliban government.

The position on the funds was outlined on the one-year anniversary of the takeover of Afghanistan by the extremist Taliban militia and just over two weeks after an American drone strike killed Ayman al-Zawahri, the Qaeda leader, on the balcony of a house tied to a faction of the Taliban coalition in an exclusive enclave of the Afghan capital.

“We do not see recapitalization of the D.A.B. as a near-term option,” said Thomas West, the American government’s special representative for Afghanistan, referring to the initials for the central bank. He noted that American officials have engaged for months with the central bank about how to shore up Afghanistan’s economy but have not secured persuasive guarantees that the money would not fall into terrorist hands.

“We do not have confidence that that institution has the safeguards and monitoring in place to manage assets responsibly,” Mr. West said in a statement, previously reported by The Wall Street Journal. “And needless to say, the Taliban’s sheltering of Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri reinforces deep concerns we have regarding diversion of funds to terrorist groups.”

Ned Price, the State Department spokesman, said the administration was searching for alternative ways to use the money to help Afghans at a time when millions are afflicted by a growing hunger crisis.

“Right now, we’re looking at mechanisms that could be put in place to see to it that these $3.5 billion in preserved assets make their way efficiently and effectively to the people of Afghanistan in a way that doesn’t make them ripe for diversion to terrorist groups or elsewhere,” Mr. Price said.

The issue of the frozen money remains one of the most sensitive questions a year after President Biden’s decision to withdraw the last American troops from Afghanistan, leading to the fall of the Western-backed government and the Taliban’s return to power. The White House has been acutely sensitive to the approach of the anniversary, anticipating that it would renew criticism of the chaotic American withdrawal and the restoration of a draconian regime of repression, especially targeting women and girls.

The operation that found and killed al-Zawahri has only accentuated the debate in recent days. Mr. Biden and his allies have argued that the success in hunting al-Zawahri down showed that the United States can still fight terrorists without a large deployment of ground troops. His critics have pointed to the operation as evidence of the fecklessness of Mr. Biden’s decision to leave Afghanistan since it showed that the Taliban is once again sheltering Qaeda figures as it did in the months and years before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken has said that al-Zawahri’s presence showed that the Taliban had “grossly violated” the withdrawal agreement first negotiated by President Donald J. Trump and carried out by Mr. Biden. But the administration has not explained what if any consequences it would impose on the Taliban as a result. The Taliban has denied knowing that al-Zawahri was living in Kabul with his family, even though the Haqqani clan, a terrorist faction of the government, appeared to be sheltering him.

U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded since the drone strike that while a handful of longtime members of Al Qaeda remain in Afghanistan, the group has not reconstituted a major presence there since the American withdrawal. But some counterterrorism experts said the judgment may be too optimistic.

The funds at issue on Monday are part of a total of $7 billion deposited at the Federal Reserve Bank in New York by the Afghan central bank at the time of the Taliban takeover. Mr. Biden froze the money and decided to split it in half, with one share available to the relatives of Sept. 11 victims to pursue legally and the other to be used to support the needs of the Afghan people, like for humanitarian relief.

The United States is working with allies around the world to establish an international trust fund with the $3.5 billion meant to help the Afghan people. Officials said they have made considerable progress in setting up such a trust fund but have not said when it will be created and how it will work.

The Afghan economy has collapsed in the year since the Taliban takeover, leading to mass starvation and a wave of refugees. In recent days, the United States announced that it would send $80 million to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization to help combat hunger in Afghanistan, as well as $40 million to UNICEF to support educating Afghan children, particularly girls, and $30 million to U.N. Women to aid Afghan women and girls seeking social protection services and running civil society organizations.

The Taliban’s year-one report card

August 16, 2022 Analytical articles

Sultan Barakat

Professor in Conflict and Humanitarian Studies at Qatar Foundation’s Hamad Bin Khalifa University and an Honorary Professor of the University of York

Al Jazeera

The Taliban’s first year back in power was one of crisis, but they also scored victories that deserve to be acknowledged.

When asked in a recent interview to assess the Taliban’s first year back in power, Afghanistan’s former President Hamid Karzai (2002-2014) delivered a fair summary: the Taliban have brought an “…end to widespread fighting and conflict”, he said but the Afghan people cannot “find themselves” in the government and the “economic situation is disastrous”.

Indeed, in the eyes of many Afghans, the year since the Taliban seized Kabul with little to no resistance has been shaped by a bewildering mix of half-realised hopes, unexpected blessings, many disappointments and devastating economic, social and political crises.

According to the West, however, Afghanistan’s first year back under Taliban rule was marked by just three main events: the chaotic evacuation of Western nationals from Kabul airport; the decree by the Taliban leader to stop girls’ secondary education; and the drone killing of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri – in a clear violation of Afghanistan’s sovereignty – in a Kabul safe house allegedly owned by the Haqqani network and the Taliban’s interim minister of interior, who is responsible for law and order in the country.

So what exactly were the many gains and undeniable losses and failures of the Taliban during their first year back in power?

US and the Taliban

Given the emphasis the 2020 Doha Agreement – which paved the way for the withdrawal of US-led foreign forces – places on the Taliban’s guarantees that it will not allow transnational armed groups to operate on Afghan soil, many observers concluded that the assassination, which exposed enduring ties between al-Qaeda and the new Afghan leadership, would lead to a total collapse of trust between the US and the Taliban and perhaps even trigger a new military confrontation.

However, the situation is much more complex in reality. To start with, the relationship between the two parties was never built on trust, but on a set of pragmatic interests which both are determined not to abandon even if pursuing them requires turning a blind eye to potential violations of the Doha Agreement.

For this reason, following the assassination, the Taliban refrained from threats and actions that could lead to the total collapse of relations and tried to reassure its constituents merely with relatively measured condemnations. Likewise, the US has been careful not to allow the discovery of al-Zawahiri in Kabul to drastically change its policies towards the Taliban.

Despite appearances, both parties are keen to protect their alignment around the strategic objective of preventing Afghanistan from becoming a failed state that could provide a haven to “terror” organisations such as the ISIL (ISIS) group and a base for the distribution of narcotics to the rest of the world.

A nation hostage

Despite efforts by the Taliban and the US to maintain a delicate relationship, however, in the past year Afghanistan experienced severe economic devastation, largely due to the ongoing efforts by Washington – and the rest of the Western alliance – to prevent the group from further consolidating power through economic pressure.

First came the sudden decline in international aid. Billions of dollars that were used to finance the war effort and to support a wide range of developmental projects, including funding a thriving civil society, in the past two decades have suddenly dried up, causing a sharp rise in unemployment, particularly in the public sector. Almost simultaneously, the country was isolated from the international financial system, which crippled local banking. Adding insult to injury, the US froze almost $9bn in Afghan foreign exchange reserves held abroad and started to float the possibility of using some of that money to compensate the families of 9/11 victims.

Although a serious threat of famine was averted last winter thanks to the Taliban’s willingness to cooperate with the international community – which provided the Afghan people with $1bn in humanitarian aid – the country still came to the brink of universal poverty soon after the change of government, with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) warning that as much as 97 percent of the Afghan population could sink into poverty before the end of 2022. Incomes dropped so starkly since the Taliban takeover that the World Bank said in April that about 37 percent of Afghan households did not have enough money to cover food while 33 percent could afford food but nothing more. Moreover, given Afghanistan’s dependency on imported food and skyrocketing global food prices due to the war in Ukraine, a deadly famine is still on the cards for Afghanistan.

As a result, while most of this economic devastation was beyond the control of the Taliban, many in Afghanistan – just like those in the West – are struggling to see any positives in the group’s year-one report card.

And yet, the group took some steps – and implemented some policies – that if they did not significantly improve the living conditions of most Afghans, at least helped avert bigger catastrophes.

Acknowledging Taliban achievements

Indeed, the country could not have absorbed the combined effects of the above-mentioned economic shocks if it was not for some of the Taliban’s achievements.

First and foremost, the security situation in Afghanistan has significantly improved since the Taliban’s takeover. After NATO forces left, the Taliban officially ended their armed struggle, declared a general amnesty for all political and military opposition and announced a nationwide decommissioning of weapons. As a result, civilians started to feel safe once again and mobility increased significantly across the country.

By bringing the country under the control of a single authority for the first time in more than 40 years, the Taliban also curbed the influence of local warlords who have been acting above the law and terrorising locals. Kabul and other cities were cleared of the concrete barrier walls that had made certain parts off limits for citizens and caused huge traffic jams. Body searches at the entrances to public buildings were downgraded. All this increased the confidence of Afghans and restored a degree of normality. Of course, these positive developments were not felt by huge segments of the Afghan population, namely women and members of the Hazara minority who continue to find themselves on the receiving end of ISIL (ISIS) attacks.

Second, at the regional level, except for some tensions with Pakistan, the Taliban have managed to maintain good relationships with all of Afghanistan’s neighbours. Despite UN sanctions, for example, China maintains diplomatic and economic relations with the Taliban and has plans to not only provide humanitarian assistance but invest in the country. Uzbekistan also has friendly relations with the new Afghan government and has opened its border to trade. None of the countries in the region is interested in supporting a proxy war in Afghanistan today.

Third, the Taliban managed to protect Afghanistan’s public sector institutions and infrastructure, including its security apparatus. Most public institutions maintained their employees and continued to provide a reasonable level of services. By far the most important institution the Taliban managed to protect was the Central Bank. Under the Taliban, the bank’s acting governor was given a good degree of independence and was allowed to work closely with national and international advisers to protect Afghanistan’s currency. As a result, the local currency was quick to recover much of its value against many international and regional currencies and newly printed bank notes were quickly brought from Poland to circulate in the local market. The Taliban government also managed to recruit almost 100,000 young men to the national army and up to 180,000 to the national police in the past year. Admittedly, many were former Taliban fighters, although not all were.

Fourth, in just a year, the Taliban, having lost international budget support, were able to put forward a national budget dependent only on national income. By tackling the culture of corruption that held the country back over the last 20 years, the Taliban were able to increase state revenue to the unprecedented level of $100 million per month despite the economic difficulties facing the country and the low tax base that this has resulted in.

While these achievements undoubtedly deserve some acknowledgement, it cannot be denied that they have all been overshadowed by the Taliban’s confused and regressive social policies. For example, while girls are still allowed to go to secondary school in several provinces, in most localities their access to education has been restricted to please a minority view within the movement. This combined with the crackdown on liberties, including press freedom, cultural expression (music and dance) and political activism has resulted in many Afghans feeling detached from the Taliban government and becoming wary of its rule. Counterproductive social policies also placed the country on a path to international isolation despite its officials’ occasional ability to participate in regional and international bilateral visits and conferences.

All in all, the Taliban’s year one report card is far from perfect. Nevertheless, the group also had some significant victories against difficult odds in their first year in power that deserve to be acknowledged.

As West puts Taliban on hold, Kabul eyes future in China, Russia

August 16, 2022 Current News Articles

By Giorgio Cafiero

Al Jazeera

The killing of al-Qaeda leader in Kabul will add to mistrust between the Taliban and the West, prolonging the group’s diplomatic isolation.

Monday marks a year since the Taliban took control of Afghanistan after almost 20 years of US occupation.

But the Taliban rulers have much work left to do as they struggle to revive the country’s lifeless economy and address the dire humanitarian situation.

Meanwhile, the Taliban’s international isolation has not helped its cause.

Despite repeated appeals and efforts by Taliban leaders, no country in the world has recognised the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA), as the country is officially known under Taliban rule.

The West has demanded that the Taliban ease curbs on women’s rights and make the government more representative as a condition for recognition. The Taliban says the United States is violating the 2020 Doha Agreement by not recognising its government.

Last month’s killing of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in a US drone strike in Kabul has led to Western governments accusing the Taliban government of failing to live up to its commitments under the Doha Agreement, which required the Taliban to deny safe haven to al-Qaeda and other armed groups in Afghanistan in exchange for the US withdrawal.

Several deadly attacks attributed to the Islamic State in Khorasan Province, ISKP (ISIS-K) have further raised concerns in the Western capitals about post-US Afghanistan’s security landscape.

Washington will find it hard to trust the Taliban in the wake of al-Zawahiri’s killing, with the West likely taking a hardened stance towards the Taliban government amid growing support for sanctions imposed on it.

The US’s dwindling trust in the Taliban could prove disastrous from a humanitarian standpoint as the negotiations held between the two sides in Doha, the Qatari capital, for the release of funds to Afghanistan have come to a screeching halt.

Nathan Sales, the former US ambassador-at-large and coordinator for counterterrorism, said after al-Zawahiri’s killing that “the risk is substantial that money released to [the Taliban] would find their way inevitably and directly into al-Qaeda’s pockets”.

“Al-Qaeda is not a key consideration for many of the regional countries and it is possible they may continue their engagement despite this development.”

Non-Western countries’ approach

It is important to examine how non-Western countries approach the Taliban government. Several of Afghanistan’s neighbours, including China, Pakistan, and Iran, have accepted Taliban diplomats, along with Malaysia, Qatar (which hosts the Taliban office in Doha), Saudi Arabia, Russia, and Turkmenistan. In fact, Ashgabat, Beijing, Islamabad, and Moscow have even formally accredited Taliban-appointed diplomats, underscoring how the Taliban’s international isolation is relative.

Given how China, Russia, and Iran see ISIS-K as a far graver threat than al-Qaeda, these countries will “have at least some sympathy” for the IEA “as long as the Taliban continues to fight against [ISIS-K]”, Anatol Lieven, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute of Responsible Statecraft, told Al Jazeera.

“Hostility to [ISIS-K] helps explain why Russia and China reached out to the Taliban in the years before their victory [in August 2021]. However, these links stop well short of the kind of financial support that the Taliban urgently needs. Russia does not have it to give, and China has always been extremely cautious about this kind of handout,” Lieven said.

Although Tehran has carefully engaged the rulers in Kabul, the exclusion of the Hazara Shia minority from governance has not impressed Iran, which has also experienced border clashes and disputes over water rights with the Taliban since August 2021.

Pakistan, a long-term Taliban ally which was one of only three governments to recognise the Taliban government in the 1990s, has also had major problems with post-occupation Afghanistan. Taliban rule has emboldened Pakistan Taliban, known by the acronym TTP, in its attacks against Islamabad, which has responded by carrying out cross-border air attacks.

For China’s government, a primary concern pertains to questions about how the Taliban will deal with armed Uighur groups which have a history of being based in Afghanistan in the 1990s.

China worries that the Taliban might give such organisations the freedom to operate against China. Beijing has offered the Taliban economic and development support on the condition that Afghanistan cooperates with China vis-à-vis such armed factions and avoids targeting Chinese interests, particularly the Belt and Road Initiative – a global infrastructure project funded by Beijing.

“While Moscow and Beijing do have more contacts with the Taliban than do Western countries, they are nevertheless also weary of the leaders in Kabul,” Claude Rakisits, an honorary associate professor in the Department of International Relations at the Australian National University, told Al Jazeera.

“The confirmation that the Taliban was protecting the al-Qaeda leader, will further strengthen these sentiments.

“Accordingly, despite the Taliban’s promises that they would not allow their territory to be used by non-state actors to attack other countries, the Russian and Chinese leaders would be worried that, indeed, the Taliban would do nothing to prevent various non-state actors, such as the Uighurs’ [East Turkestan Islamic Movement or ETIM] and other central Asian militant groups from launching terrorist attacks into China and Central Asian countries – Russia’s soft strategic underbelly,” Rakisits said.

Human rights

Since the Taliban took over Afghanistan last year, it has taken draconian actions that lead observers to see its approach to women and minorities being as extreme as it was during its first stint in power during 1996-2001.

Such human rights violations drastically decrease the chances of any Western government recognising the Taliban or easing sanctions. Yet the Taliban believes that time is on its side and that the West and the rest of the international community will eventually come to terms with its rule irrespective of its governance.

“The Taliban are principally about the Taliban rights, not human rights, and they generally perceive the concept of ‘rights’ as less about being equitable and more about redemption,” Javid Ahmad, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, told Al Jazeera. “And so, they frankly are unconcerned about the world community and believe the world will eventually bow.”

Moreover, Afghanistan’s immediate neighbours and other countries throughout the region are far less likely to make decisions about how to engage the Taliban based on human rights-related issues.

“Many of the neighbouring countries and regional powers appear to be continuing their engagement and in some rare cases, even offering cover for the Taliban’s actions by framing these matters as Afghanistan’s sovereign prerogative,” Bahiss, the analyst from the International Crisis Group said.

Emerging anti-hegemonic axis

As great power competition intensifies while East-West bifurcation increases in the wake of the Ukraine-Russia war, Afghanistan could become more important to China and Russia’s strategies for challenging the US.

Moscow and Beijing seem to have embraced a mostly wait-and-see approach to the Taliban government for now, before they embrace Kabul.

But if the Taliban rulers successfully convince Moscow and Beijing of their commitment to fighting ISIS-K and denying ETIM a haven in Afghanistan, these capitals could help the Taliban circumvent Western sanctions.

For example, Chinese companies investing in Afghanistan could decrease the harm caused by the West’s financial warfare, which in turn would benefit China in terms of its ability to access the war-torn country’s prized rare-earth mineral reserves, copper, lithium, iron ore, and other natural resources.

As China, Russia, and Iran grow increasingly cooperative in their efforts to challenge US hegemony, these powers might come around to viewing the Taliban as a partner through which they can expand their influence in Greater Central Asia.

Within this emerging anti-hegemonic axis, China is probably the power that can do the most for the Taliban as it continues grappling with major domestic, regional, and global challenges. Although foreign companies are unlikely to quickly reap rewards in Afghanistan given the extent to which the country lacks stability, Chinese firms are known for their patience and long-term vision.

“Afghanistan has long been considered a graveyard for conquerors – Alexander the Great, the British Empire, the Soviet Union and now the United States,” wrote Zhou Bo, an expert on global security who previously served as a senior colonel in China’s People’s Liberation Army, five days after the Taliban took control of Afghanistan last year.

“Now China enters – armed not with bombs but construction blueprints, and a chance to prove the curse can be broken.”

SOURCE: AL JAZEERA

Beneath Kabul’s surprising veneer of normalcy, a precarious balancing act

August 13, 2022 Current News Articles

Pamela Constable

The Washington Post

August 11, 2022 at 9:35 a.m. EDT

Terrorist attacks, mixed signals on girls’ education disrupt Afghans’ detente with Taliban regime

Kabul – An uneasy calm has settled over the Afghan capital this summer, a wary detente between the country’s stern religious rulers and a deflated, worried populace that is struggling to survive but also relieved that the punishing 20-year war involving foreign troops is over.

Both sides have been trying to maintain a precarious balancing act. The Taliban regime, hoping not to further alienate foreign donors, has been sending out muddled signals rather than ironclad orders on controversial topics, especially women’s rights. The citizenry, hoping to get through another hard day without crossing an unpredictable red line, is mostly lying low.

But as the first anniversary of the Taliban’s return to power approaches next week, the balancing act has become harder to sustain. A series of violent attacks in the capital have belied the regime’s assertions that it can keep the public safe, while the Taliban’s shifting explanations for keeping teenage girls out of school have left thousands of families frustrated and angry.

In poor city neighborhoods, life seems to go on as normal. The summer nights are hot, and the power fails often. Men sit on concrete stoops and stroll toward corner mosques when the evening call to prayer wafts through the muggy air. Children chase one another in the streets. Burqa-covered women huddle beneath bakery windows, begging for a piece of bread.

But gradually, the capital that had swelled to 4 million just two years ago is hollowing out. Downtown, choice parking spots sit empty and clusters of drug addicts are taking over the sidewalks. Gone are the traffic jams that once inched ahead while small boys darted among cars like fish, attempting to wash windshields for pennies.

The illusion of postwar security has collapsed. First, on July 31, an American drone missile struck a house in central Kabul, its tremor felt for several miles. Soon afterward, President Biden announced that the strike had killed the leader of al-Qaeda, which the Taliban had agreed to ban in its 2020 peace deal with U.S. officials.

Then, over the next several days, a spate of terrorist attacks in Kabul’s Shiite Muslim community — including a bomb hidden in a flowerpot and gunfire from an apartment building — shattered hopes that after years of persecution, Shiites could gather without fear to observe Muharram, a month of mourning for Imam Hussein, grandson of the prophet Muhammad.

“We used to think of the Taliban as a faraway monster. Now the monster is here, in charge of the government, so it is their responsibility to protect us. People feel more confident,” Safar Baqri, 32, said two weeks ago as he hung up colorful banners to sell during Muharram.

But by last weekend, scores of people in the area had been killed or wounded. Thousands of banners were taken down by the police, traffic was banned and the streets were empty except for Taliban forces in armored trucks. Community leaders angrily accused the authorities of “canceling” their sacred rite instead of safeguarding it.

“We took many victims to hospitals, some missing legs or arms, some with shrapnel in their stomachs, some with burned faces,” an ambulance driver named Syed Ali, 55, recounted after a bomb exploded Aug. 6 near a major intersection. “We tried to get all their names, but some were too injured to speak.”

The drone strike, in contrast, harmed no local residents, damaged a single house and targeted a foreign-born militant — Ayman al-Zawahiri — who was little-known to many Afghans. But it sparked a surge of public anger at the United States that had receded since the withdrawal of foreign troops last August.

There were defiant tweets on the internet, mocking the Taliban regime for failing to retaliate. There was an anti-American rally in Kabul, with Taliban security escorts and marchers holding up perfectly lettered placards in English saying “Down with America.”

For the most part, though, the capital soon settled back into a familiar, glum routine of making do with far too little. In conversations over the past several weeks, people from all walks of life said they were mostly trying to get through each day — and avoid thinking too far ahead into an uncertain future.

In central Kabul, a line of haggard-looking men formed outside a World Food Program depot and stretched along several city blocks. Nearby, other men waited with battered wheelbarrows, hoping to earn a few pennies lugging supplies of wheat, sugar and cooking oil to people’s homes.

“This is my third time here,” confided a dignified man in his 60s named Khalid Aziz, who said he had spent 25 years teaching Persian literature to high school students. “This country has suffered a tragedy, and we are all just trying to survive it,” he said. “We are afraid for the future of our children, and we have no hope for tomorrow.”

A few blocks away, a glittering bridal shop sat empty. The carpeted showroom featured shapely mannequins in sequined, imported gowns, but their faces had been covered by masks or wigs, in obedience to Taliban instructions. The owner, Sayed Hussain, said he had few customers now, because most brides could afford only simple dresses stitched by local tailors.

“I am worried and upset all the time. Everyone in this country is upset,” Hussain said, fingering prayer beads nonstop. “We have no idea what will happen next, or what our future will look like. When I see the hundreds of messages on Facebook, so many people trying to leave the country, it makes me think I should take my family and go.”

As with the partly covered mannequins, Taliban officials have taken other half-steps to implement their strict Islamic code without turning the public against them. Weddings, the social glue of Afghan society, were already divided into separate rooms for males and females. The regime has allowed weddings to continue but banned live bands, known for earsplitting, amplified vocals and drums.

The Taliban administration has also been working to modernize its bureaucracy and soften its international image. Government ministries now include trimly dressed professionals and spokesmen. Many are Talibs, but they bear little resemblance to the scowling figures with bristling beards and Kalashnikov rifles who ran the country in the late 1990s.

At the international airport, arriving passengers are whisked through once cumbersome immigration lines, and uniformed female officers stamp passports in booths adjacent to their male counterparts — even as the regime has banned women from most public jobs except at hospitals and detention centers for women.

Inside a gleaming bank, foreign cash transfer services, until recently blocked by international sanctions, are processed efficiently by technicians sitting behind computer screens. The premises are spotless and the scene far more orderly than the scrums of pre-Taliban days.

Outside, many women shop with their faces exposed, seemingly without fear of punishment, even though the regime has instructed those of childbearing age to veil themselves in public or, preferably, not leave home at all. New rules also forbid women to travel long distances without a male chaperone.

Officials refer to these orders as mere “guidance,” and there have been no reports of women in the capital being beaten for dressing immodestly. But in rural areas, religious officials have begun meting out severe punishments to both criminals and moral offenders. In Zabul province, authorities recently announced the public whippings of two thieves and an adulterous couple.

Such mixed signals have roiled public opinion on the most sensitive issue of the day: whether and when the Taliban will allow girls above sixth grade to attend school. Since May, when the regime abruptly reneged on its pledge to let older girls back in class, officials have offered various explanations: The curriculum needs to be revised; religious scholars are divided; some rural men do not want their daughters to leave home.

The wait has been a growing source of anguish and frustration for families in Kabul, whose teenage daughters have sat home for months — and whose younger ones dread what will happen when they finish sixth grade.

“I feel so sad for my daughter,” said Ghulam Haider, 38, an engineer who lost his job with a foreign construction company when the Taliban took over. As the family gathered in their parlor one recent evening, 13-year-old Samia sat shyly on a sofa, looking downcast.

“She loves school, and she is so bright,” Haider said. Although many of their friends have left the country, the family had been planning to remain. “We wanted to see Afghanistan become peaceful and begin to prosper,” he said. “But now, for the sake of her future, we are thinking about leaving, too.”

The Afghanistan Deal that Never Happened

August 11, 2022 Analytical articles

By LARA SELIGMAN

Politico

08/11/2022 04:30 AM EDT

A Q&A with General Frank McKenzie, one year after his negotiations with the Taliban and the chaotic American withdrawal.

General Frank McKenzie was on his way to negotiate with the Taliban when he got the call that Kabul had already fallen.

It was Aug. 15, 2021, and the then-commander of U.S. Central Command had watched anxiously for weeks as the group seized provincial capitals across Afghanistan in one of the most stunning guerilla campaigns in modern history.

But by the time McKenzie landed, the offer was DOA. Taliban fighters were already inside the presidential palace, and Afghanistan’s president, Ashraf Ghani, had fled the city. The Afghan government the United States had worked so hard to keep afloat for 20 years had collapsed in a matter of hours.

McKenzie had to think fast. His mission, to conduct a massive air evacuation from Kabul’s one functioning airport, had not changed. So, on the way to Doha’s Ritz Carlton, he came up with a new proposal. Don’t interfere with the airlift, he told the Taliban’s co-founder, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, and we won’t strike.

The general, who spoke to POLITICO Magazine by video call almost exactly one year after the fall of Kabul, walked away from the meeting with a deal that would allow the U.S. military to control the airport while they undertook the largest air evacuation in U.S. history, flying out more than 120,000 people in the span of two weeks.

But during the meeting, he also made what critics say was a strategic mistake that contributed to what became a chaotic, deadly evacuation: refusing the Taliban’s offer to let the U.S. military secure Afghanistan’s capital city.

McKenzie defended his decision during the interview, noting that he did not believe it was a serious proposal, and in any case securing the city would have required a massive influx of American troops, which could have triggered more fighting with the Taliban.

At the end of the day, the U.S. military didn’t have many good choices.

Does McKenzie think the withdrawal from Afghanistan was a mistake? Yes – but it wasn’t his decision to make.

“My belief is we should have stayed. I believe that everything that happened flowed from that basic decision,” says McKenzie, who retired from the military on April 1. “My recommendation was that we keep a small presence where we could maintain a level of support for the Afghans. That was not the advice that was taken.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Seligman: It’s the week before Kabul falls. What is happening? What are you thinking? Set the scene for me.

McKenzie: In the last formal intelligence assessment I sent up on the 8th of August, I said, ‘It is my judgment that Kabul is going to fall.’ I did not think it was going to fall that weekend. I thought it might last a little bit longer, 30 days or so. But I felt Kabul would be surrounded in the immediate short term.

On Thursday or Friday, I got the direction to go to Doha to talk to the Taliban. What we wanted was about a 30-kilometer exclusion zone: You guys stay out of there while we do the evacuation. And if you stay out of there, we will not strike you anywhere in Afghanistan.

I got on the airplane on Sunday morning. While I was on the airplane over, I was getting reports that the Taliban is in downtown Kabul, they’ve actually overrun the city. By the time I met with them, they had significant forces inside the city. So I said, ‘Look, we can still have a solution here. We’re going to conduct an evacuation. If you don’t interfere with the evacuation, we won’t strike.’

Mullah Baradar said, off the cuff, ‘Why don’t you come in and secure the city?’ But that was just not feasible. It would have taken me putting in another division to do that. And I believe that was a flippant remark. And now we know in the fullness of time that Mullah Baradar wasn’t actually speaking for the hard-line Taliban. I don’t know if he could have delivered, even if he was serious about it.

I felt in my best judgment that it wasn’t a genuine offer. And it was not a practical military operation. That’s why they pay me, that’s why I’m there.

By and large, the Taliban were helpful in our departure. They did not oppose us. They did do some external security work. There was a downside of that external security work, and it probably prevented some Afghans from getting to Kabul airport as we would have liked. But that was a risk that I was willing to run.

Seligman: So after Kabul fell, the evacuation began. What happened next?

McKenzie: The next day, Aug. 16 it was my plan to fly to Kabul. But the airfield, the runway, was overrun by people coming in from the south. It took us about 16 hours to bring that under control — a combination of us, the Afghan commandos and the Taliban. We had 400 Taliban fighters beating people with sticks. It’s not what you want, but you’re in the land of bad choices now. It let the commander on the ground regain control of the airfield, and we never lost control again after that. But that was certainly intense.

Seligman: Had you personally warned the president at any point that Afghanistan would almost certainly collapse if U.S. troops left?

McKenzie: I wrote a number of letters over the course of the fall and into the spring, saying if we withdraw our forces precipitously, collapse is likely to occur. I was in a number of meetings with the president, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the secretary of Defense. We all had an opportunity to express our opinions on that.

It was my opinion that if we went from 2,500 to zero, the government of Afghanistan would not be able to sustain itself and would collapse. It was initially my recommendation that we should stay at 4,500. They went below that. Then it was my recommendation we stay at 2,500.

Seligman: Indefinitely?

McKenzie: Indefinitely. I know the criticism: the Taliban are going to come after you and you’re going to have to beef up your forces. The commander on the ground and I didn’t believe that was necessarily the case. For one thing, at 2,500 we were down to a pretty lean combat capability, not a lot of attack surface there for the Taliban to get at. Two, we would have coupled the 2,500 presence with a strong diplomatic campaign to put pressure on the Taliban.

What would have happened if we stayed at 2,500? It’s just difficult to know that. Here’s what we do know as a matter of history — if you go to zero, they collapse.

Seligman: Why did they collapse? We spent so long training the Afghans and then as soon as we were gone, they fell. How did that happen?

McKenzie: I believe the proximate defeat mechanism was the Doha negotiations [on a peace deal]. I believe that the Afghan government began to believe we were getting ready to leave. As a result, I think it took a lot of the will to fight out them.

Seligman: Do you blame the Trump administration for what happened?

McKenzie: It goes even back beyond that. You can go back to the very beginning of the campaign, when we had an opportunity to get Osama bin Laden in 2001, 2002 and we didn’t do that. The fact that we never satisfactorily solved the problem of safe havens in Pakistan for the Taliban. There are so many things over the 20-year period that contributed to it.

But yes, I believe that the straw that broke the camel’s back and brought it to the conclusion that we saw was the Doha process and the agreements that were reached there.

It’s convenient to blame the military commanders that were there. But it was the government of Afghanistan that failed. The government of the United States also failed.

Seligman: It was a political decision to leave. How much blame should the Biden administration get for the collapse?

McKenzie: Well, I think both administrations wanted to leave Afghanistan, that’s just a fact. But look, that’s a decision presidents get to make. I recommended something different. But they get to make that decision. I don’t get to make that decision. We are where we are as a result of that. They both ultimately wanted out.

Seligman: After the evacuation, did you see a reemergence of al Qaeda or other terrorist elements after we left?

McKenzie: Clearly. It’s very hard to see in Afghanistan after we left. We had 1 or 2 or 3 percent of the intelligence-gathering capability that we had before we left. All our intelligence told us that the Taliban would probably allow space for al Qaeda to reassert itself and at the same time, they’re unable to get rid of ISIS. I think both are going to be entities that are going to grow.

The fact that al Qaeda leader Al-Zawahri was in downtown Kabul should give us pause. It tells you first of all, that the Taliban obviously negotiated the Doha accord in complete bad faith. They said they wouldn’t provide a safe haven for al Qaeda. What’s the definition of a safe haven if it’s not the leader in your capital city?

The Taliban’s Dangerous Collision Course With the West

August 11, 2022 Analytical articles

By Matthieu Aikins

New York Times Magazine

Aug. 14, 2022

After barring girls from high school — and harboring an Al-Qaeda leader — the regime now risks jeopardizing the billions of dollars of global aid that still keeps Afghans alive.

Afghanistan’s ministry of education sits on a chaotic thoroughfare in downtown Kabul, not far from the presidential palace. When I visited this May, I was able to walk straight into the main building without having to state my business or undergo more than a light frisk. The country’s four-decade civil war is at its lowest ebb in years, and many of the capital’s draconian security measures have been scaled back by the new Taliban government. The crowds of petitioners inside the ministries have changed, as well: Women are seldom seen, and the traditional garb of robe and trousers has become nearly ubiquitous among men.

It was my first trip back since I covered the collapse of the republic the last summer. Regular flights had resumed from Dubai and Islamabad. At the Kabul airport, site of last year’s chaotic and bloody evacuation, there was a new sign on the side of the terminal, near the white flag of the Taliban: “The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan seeks peaceful and positive relations with the world.”

It had been 20 years since the United States and its allies overthrew the first Taliban government, which refused to allow Afghan girls to be educated, one of many repressive measures against women that cemented the regime’s pariah status. During the 1990s, only Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E. and Pakistan ever recognized the group as the nation’s legitimate government. Soon after the United States began airstrikes on Afghanistan in 2001, Laura Bush, the first lady, took over her husband’s weekly radio address to tell Americans that “only the terrorists and the Taliban forbid education to women.” Since then, the liberation of Afghan schoolgirls was held up as a justification for the thousands of lives and trillions of dollars expended by the United States and its allies here, and as a symbol of the moral superiority of the republic that came crashing down last August, after the Taliban seized power and re-established the Islamic emirate.

The new government stirred outrage last fall when it allowed only boys to return to Grades 7 and up, but the Taliban insisted this was only a temporary measure. In January their top spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, said it “was a question of capacity,” and said he hoped that girls’ high schools would reopen at the beginning of the Afghan school year, on March 23. “We are not against education,” he told journalists.

But on the first day of classes, the education ministry suddenly announced that the girls’ schools would not reopen after all. With such late notice, many went ahead unaware, only to have to kick their students out later that day. Other girls showed up to find the doors of their school locked. These scenes were captured by the foreign press, who turned up to cover what was supposed to be a hopeful day for the country; instead, they broadcast images of crying teenage girls. If the Taliban wanted to sabotage relations with the West, they couldn’t have planned things better.

‘Quite honestly, we had all been counting the days toward March 23 and had been seeing it as, you know, that fork in the road,” Rina Amiri, who was appointed in December to the newly created position of U.S. envoy for women, girls and human rights in Afghanistan, told me. “We had really concrete and detailed discussions with the Taliban and had received reassurances from everyone that we had spoken to that they would actually deliver on this.”

I had come to the education ministry to understand what happened, and what this revealed about the balance of power within the new government. Climbing the stairs, I entered a waiting room, where several men with newly grown beards ignored me until I explained I had come to see their boss. Much of the lower- and midlevel Afghan bureaucracy has remained in their posts, but above them now sit Taliban appointees, men who served in the militant movement and studied in religious seminaries. I was shown into the office of a senior education official who, like many Taliban I met during my trip, asked to remain anonymous in order to speak frankly on such a

Wearing a black turban, he sat behind his large wooden desk and listened politely as I posed my question: Why did Taliban, alone out of any government in the world, refuse to allow adolescent girls to study? He smiled — of course, that was what every Western journalist came to ask. He was eager to point out that, first of all, Afghan girls were already allowed to attend primary schools, universities and private high schools. In several provinces, even the public secondary girls’ schools had reopened, albeit unofficially. Moreover, girls’ primary schools, which reopened along with boys’ schools in the fall, had in fact seen a significant increase in enrollment since the days of the republic, a result of improved security and the fact that some conservative families felt more comfortable sending their girls to school under the Islamic emirate. “We want education for girls,” he told me, “and cooperation with the international community, but within our values.”

It was true that in some formerly war-torn districts, like Andar, in Ghazni Province, girls were attending elementary school for the first time in more than a decade. A World Bank-funded survey published in March estimated that the share of rural households sending their girls to primary school had increased from one-third to one-half. The jump in high school enrollment was unlikely to be as sharp, but it seemed quite possible that, if all schools reopened, more Afghan girls would be receiving an education under the Taliban than under the U.S.-backed republic.

“Why don’t we announce it?” he said. “Well, Kabul is not Afghanistan. People are not educated, they’re tribal. We don’t want a reaction.”

Opposition to girls’ education among the Taliban was rooted in a particularly strict interpretation of traditional gender roles practiced in rural Afghanistan. It was this vision of a virtuous village lifestyle, where a woman’s place was at home, that the Taliban tried to impose nationwide in the 1990s. But over the last 20 years, millions of Afghan families — some of them Taliban supporters — experienced firsthand the economic and social benefits of educating their daughters. The country had modernized, a fact that many in the emirate understood. For months, the issue was debated by the interim cabinet, an all-male group composed of Taliban stalwarts.

“Munir has argued for girls’ education many times,” the official told me, referring to his boss, the education minister, Mawlawi Noorullah Munir, an Islamic scholar who served as the Taliban’s chief justice during the insurgency. “He said that if anyone disagrees on the basis of Shariah, I’m ready to debate them.” (A spokesman for Munir declined to comment.)

According to several Taliban officials, by the end of the winter, a majority of the cabinet was in favor of reopening the schools, including military leaders like the minister of defense, Mawlawi Muhammad Yaqoub, and Sirajuddin Haqqani, the interior minister with an F.B.I. bounty on his head. “If it was up to him, girls would have already been back in school,” one of Haqqani’s aides told me.

At the beginning of March, the education ministry prepared a plan to reopen the schools, calling back teachers and prepping classrooms around the country. But there was a problem. “When we sent our plan to the cabinet, they replied that they didn’t have the authority to make this decision, since it was a sensitive issue,” the education official told me.

Final say belonged to the leadership shura, or council, based in the southern city of Kandahar and presided over by a supreme leader called the amir al momineen, or commander of the faithful. This theocratic structure had been grafted onto the government after the Taliban’s sudden victory, an arrangement that revived the overlapping power centers of the ’90s regime, with a formal cabinet in Kabul and a more powerful shadow government in Kandahar.

It wasn’t until a few days before the start of the school year, on March 23, that a meeting of the shura was called. Munir, the education minister, and the other cabinet officials, many of whom were also members of the shura, were summoned to Kandahar, where the Taliban first arose amid the chaos of post-Soviet factional fighting in the ’90s, promising to rid the country of warlords and institute Islamic law. It was in Kandahar City that, in front of an ecstatic crowd in 1996, Mullah Muhammad Omar held aloft a cloak said to have belonged to the Prophet, laying claim to the mantle of the amir, a leadership role that dates back to the earliest Muslim state. Omar, who was known for his ascetic lifestyle and aversion to foreigners, died in hiding in 2013; his successor, Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, was more worldly. As the Taliban’s chief of aviation during the ’90s, Mansour traveled abroad to countries like Germany and, as amir, proved to be a pragmatic leader who authorized negotiations with the Americans. “If he was still alive, we wouldn’t be stuck on the girls’-school issue,” a Taliban diplomat told me.

But Mansour was assassinated by a U.S. drone strike in Pakistan in 2016. His successor, Sheikh Haibatullah Akhunzada, whose son became a suicide bomber, is an austere cleric who has adopted the reclusive mystique of the original amir. “He’s more like Mullah Omar than Mullah Omar,” a senior Taliban bureaucrat, who knew both men, told me.

The leadership council’s meetings in late March, which stretched over several days, were off limits to the press, but I spoke with several Taliban officials familiar with the details, including a member of the cabinet. Haibatullah and the shura had not been consulted, I was told, about the decision to allow all university students, including women, to return to class the previous month; some in the cabinet may have been hoping that the high school girls’ return had become a fait accompli. But when several hard-line clerics, who were seen as expressing Haibatullah’s own position, spoke out against the reopening, no one was willing or able to move them. And if there was no consensus, then the girls’ schools would not open. Kandahar had asserted itself over Kabul.

The education ministry had been planning a ceremony to mark the first day of school, and had invited the foreign ambassadors still remaining in the capital. It wasn’t until 11 the night before that Munir informed his staff of the news. “We got the call from Kandahar,” the education official said, lifting his hands in dismay. The girls weren’t going back to school tomorrow. “It was like being hit by an atom bomb.”

Crippled by sanctions and the sudden cutoff of development aid, Afghanistan’s economy is on the verge of collapse. According to the United Nations, Afghans are facing the world’s largest humanitarian crisis, with half the population threatened by starvation. Since last August, the country has been offered billions in emergency assistance, of which the United States was the largest contributor. The Taliban have welcomed this aid, and their control over rural areas means that humanitarian workers can go to places that were inaccessible for nearly two decades. And yet the Taliban’s refusal to allow Afghan girls to return to high school has overshadowed this cooperation. No country has yet officially recognized the emirate, but a delegation of Taliban officials was invited to Oslo to meet with Western counterparts in January, where they gave assurances that the schools would reopen. “I can remember particular Taliban leaders using the word zhmena, you know, this is a promise, this will happen,” Thomas West, the State Department’s special representative for Afghanistan, told me.

The timing of the controversy was egregious. On March 23, the same day the girls were held back from class, West had a conference call scheduled with his fellow envoys from the G7 countries. The U.N. had made a record-breaking $4.4 billion appeal for humanitarian aid, and a pledging conference for donors was a week away. “Not surprisingly, this issue absolutely dominated our discussion,” West recalls. “I think we all understood that this was a turning point in our engagement with the Taliban, and we all needed to fundamentally reassess our approach to Afghanistan.”

Cooperation between the United States and the Taliban began in earnest during the evacuation last summer, in order to avoid a blood bath in the capital. At the Americans’ request, the Taliban helped keep crowds back from the airport; on Aug. 23, the director of the C.I.A., William Burns, traveled unannounced to Kabul and met with Taliban leaders, to date the highest-level contact with the new government, the “de facto authorities” in diplomat-speak.

With the embassy in Kabul shuttered, the United States’ relationship with the Taliban has been taken up by West, who has met repeatedly with the Taliban foreign minister, Amir Khan Muttaqi, in Doha, Qatar. He inherited the role of special envoy from his former boss, Zalmay Khalilzad, who stepped down last fall after his efforts to broker a peace settlement between the Afghan republic and the Taliban ended in failure.

Now that U.S. troops were out, what were America’s vital interests in Afghanistan? Apart from preventing terrorist threats to the homeland from groups like Al Qaeda, the Biden administration has prioritized the fate of U.S. citizens like the contractor and veteran Mark Frerichs, held by the Taliban since 2020. I was told by multiple sources that West had planned his first official trip to Kabul to mark the release of another American, a Navy reservist and humanitarian named Safi Rauf, but canceled after March 23, with the C.I.A. station chief traveling in secret instead. (Both West and the C.I.A. declined to confirm or deny this.)

The most urgent task for West and his team, however, has been Afghanistan’s looming humanitarian disaster. The United States is in the peculiar position of being both the largest donor to aid efforts and a prime actor in the country’s economic crisis. After the Taliban takeover, the Biden administration seized $7 billion in Afghan bank assets in the United States, earmarking half for victims of the Sept. 11 attacks and their families. Sanctions against the Taliban were now strangling the country’s financial system. Since then, West and the Treasury Department have worked to issue multiple exemptions for humanitarian aid, even at the risk of bolstering the new government.

“It is fundamentally in our interest to support the Afghan people,” West told me. “We do not want to see a situation where the economy utterly collapses. We do not want to see a situation that drives millions to become refugees.”

The scale of suffering in Afghanistan today is difficult to fathom. Despite more than $100 billion in development spending by the West, Afghanistan has remained one of the poorest and most aid-dependent states in the world. Three-quarters of the republic’s budget was financed with foreign grants; outside assistance amounted to nearly half of G.D.P. After the Taliban takeover, that money was cut off, with predictable results. Joblessness soared, imports plummeted and poverty reached near-universal levels. A cholera outbreak has gripped the south, while hunger, worsened by a drought in its second year, has become a crisis for millions of families. At meal times in the capital, crowds of women and children sit outside bakeries, hoping for a piece of bread.

The response has been a “humanitarian surge,” with more expats now working inside Afghanistan for aid agencies than before the Taliban’s takeover. In Kabul, I visited a World Food Program distribution site, where men stood in a line that wound for several blocks through a residential neighborhood. Beside them was a second queue of day laborers with wheelbarrows, who’d shown up in the hope of earning the equivalent of 50 cents, if that, to cart heavy sacks of flour and beans back to people’s homes. Those waiting for food were mostly middle-aged heads of families; the porters ranged from elderly men to boys who looked 9 or 10 but were probably older.

As I reached the front of the line, a white, armored S.U.V. with World Food Program markings pulled up and dropped off Philippe Kropf, the organization’s head of communications. I followed him into the rented compound where a group of Afghans were getting their allowance of flour, beans, cooking oil and salt. They were from Qala-e Wazir, a downtown neighborhood where many people had held jobs with foreign contractors and N.G.O.s. “This was the middle class,” Kropf said.

Many of the people in the line lost their jobs after the collapse. One of them was Nasib Nazari, who told me he had taught German in a program sponsored by the now-shuttered embassy. He had supported an extended family on his $700 monthly salary, which was cut off when the Germans evacuated. “This is my first time in a food line,” he told me. He smiled weakly. “There’s no shame when you have no choice.”

Even under the republic, many Afghans didn’t get enough to eat. Before the collapse, the W.F.P. was providing assistance to around one million people each month. Afterward, they scrambled to expand aid distribution around the country, a monumental task made easier by the improved security situation and the Taliban’s willingness to coordinate. By the peak of need over the winter, the W.F.P. was supplying food to 18 million, their largest scale-up in history. “We’re feeding almost half the population,” Kropf said. “It’s mind-blowing.”

The entire country was being kept on humanitarian life support. With the Afghan financial system still mostly paralyzed, the U.N. has been flying in pallets of cash to fund its operations, more than a billion dollars to date, which has in turn kept the country’s currency afloat and stabilized local markets.

“We avoided the worst predictions of the fall,” West, the U.S. special envoy, told me. But he worried that donors’ interest would eventually wane, especially given their anger over girls’ education. Need abated during the summer, but winter would come again — this time with the world facing a food-price crisis as a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, along with the threat of a global recession. Donations had already slowed, but the U.N. said it needed billions more just to get through the year. “How sustainable is this massive humanitarian response?” West said. “Unfortunately, I think it is not sustainable.”

For two decades, the United States and its allies have spent lavishly in Afghanistan on schools, hospitals and roads in support of the nation-building project that grew out of the U.S. invasion. This level of spending was not only wasteful but also pernicious, because of the corruption it encouraged. Yet there were meaningful results, including a sharp increase in life expectancy and literacy rates — goods that became, over time, part of the circular logic for why American troops were fighting there. The faces of Afghan women became the face of the war.

Since development aid has political aims, it typically depends on collaboration with a host government. After the Taliban seized power and this assistance was frozen by donors, many of the gains of the last 20 years threatened to come crashing down. The government’s coffers were empty, threatening the country’s public hospitals, which might have collapsed had the International Committee of the Red Cross not stepped in. Unlike organizations that administer development aid, humanitarian groups like the I.C.R.C. are typically insulated from donor governments and adopt politically neutral stances. In Kabul, I visited a hospital with Reto Stocker, an official at the I.C.R.C.

“A lot of people would have died,” Stocker said as our S.U.V. navigated Kabul’s traffic, much lighter since the crisis. “It was an absolute emergency situation.”

In its four decades working in Afghanistan, the Red Cross has seen regimes come and go. Stocker, who is Swiss, served on his first mission here during the 1990s, and he worked with some of the same Taliban officials then. After 2001, the I.C.R.C. visited many of them in U.S. custody at Guantánamo and Bagram. “This is obviously something that has, with those individuals in particular, created an appreciation for I.C.R.C.’s neutrality,” Stocker told me. He met regularly with the Taliban health minister, who was a medical doctor, unlike the religiously trained leadership whom Stocker recalled from the 1990s.

The I.C.R.C. could insulate Western donors and enable them to continue funding government programs inside Afghanistan without giving money directly to the Taliban. The organization had taken responsibility for 33 public hospitals across the country, a role that doubled its budget here to $200 million. “To recreate such a system after it collapses is extremely complicated,” Stocker said. “Even if you don’t sustain it perfectly, the benefits of trying to sustain it are enormous.”

Our S.U.V. pulled into the walled courtyard of Malalai Maternity Hospital in downtown Kabul, where a group of women sat waiting outside the outpatient department. We were met by Dr. Mursal Rasool, a young public-health specialist and Stocker’s colleague, who was coordinating the I.C.R.C.’s support here.

“It’s one of the biggest and most important hospitals for women in Afghanistan,” she explained. The patients were female, of course, but so were nearly all the members of the medical staff. As we walked through the corridors, which smelled of disinfectant, she pointed out that they were clean and freshly painted — a drastic change from a year ago, when they were fetid with bodily fluids and waste. The hospital, too, had suffered from the corruption and dysfunction endemic to the republic. Much of the Civil Service stopped receiving salaries as early as April or May. The former government had been trying to switch to a new payroll system, while simultaneously burning through its cash reserves in a last-ditch attempt to fund anti-Taliban militias. At the hospital, the staff kept working for months without pay, and begged for donations of food and other supplies from local businesses. “It was heartbreaking to think that this was on the verge of collapsing,” Stocker said.

In the recovery room, the nurses were transferring a young patient from a gurney into her bed, her back arched in agony. Twenty-four years old, she was suffering from eclampsia, a complication from pregnancy that caused seizures so intense she’d lacerated her tongue and cracked her teeth; the doctors had performed an emergency abortion to save her life. Her gray-haired mother sat at her bedside, the relief apparent on her face. “She would have died,” she told me.

Now that fighting had stopped in the countryside, more patients were able to make it into the capital from remote areas, where women’s reproductive health, in particular, was often abysmal. As a result, the staff was struggling with very serious cases: women who, like this young patient with eclampsia, would have simply died at home. The economic crisis had gutted the private sector and ended medical tourism abroad, so public hospitals like Malalai, where treatment was free, had experienced a surge in admissions — in some, outpatient visits were up tenfold. The strain on the medical workers was evident, but at least — unlike much of Afghanistan’s public sector — they could expect regular salaries. But for how long?

In addition to its appeal for emergency aid, the U.N. was seeking funding for a $3.42 billion plan to provide basic services directly to the Afghan people, bypassing the Taliban government, what some call “humanitarian plus.” But as Stocker pointed out, the intervention of groups like the I.C.R.C. entrenched the very dependency that was the problem. “Our sense was that a national health care system needs a ministry holding it together,” Stocker said. “You need a state.”

As a teaching hospital, Malalai also helped to train the next generation of Afghan maternity specialists, nurses and midwives, women like Dr. Rana Afzali, whom I met in the neonatal ward, where a young mother sat in the corner, holding her newborn. Dressed in a white coat and colorful head scarf, Afzali was fresh out of her residency. It was a daunting time to be entering her profession, but she told me she was glad to be working, unlike many of her classmates who had fled abroad. “They’re sitting inside, depressed — I stayed,” Afzali said, and shrugged. “I’m a hopeful person.”

Higher education had also been thrown into crisis by the collapse of the republic. The Kabul airlift evacuated more than 100,000 Afghans, many of them the country’s educated professionals. Those with Western connections had a better chance of being let through the desperate crowds outside the airport. Others fled to neighboring countries like Pakistan, hoping to be resettled in the West. In a country where nearly every profession had received development aid, the evacuation meant stripping the society of technical experts, bureaucrats, lawyers and doctors, turning them into refugees. Of course, you couldn’t evacuate a whole country, and those left behind were struggling to take up the slack.

“Women are still allowed to go to medical school, but there’s no teachers anymore,” Rasool said. “Most of them escaped.”

We followed the shift warden, Dr. Shahrbanu Ghazanfar, into the intensive-care unit, pausing in front of an incubator where a premature infant rested, looking as fragile as a newly hatched bird. “This one is extremely low birthweight,” Ghazanfar said, using the English term. The infant weighed just over 21 ounces, less than a quarter of a newborn’s normal weight.

As hospitals like Malalai make clear, reproduction depends on women’s labor. The paradox of the Taliban’s patriarchal vision was that it necessitated female doctors to serve women, and female teachers to train them — thus ensuring that a core of educated women would endure.

“Twenty years ago, we put on our burqas and went to work,” Ghazanfar said. “We’re going to keep working. Of course, I can’t say the same for engineers and lawyers.”

Even in the 1990s, when women were forced out of almost every workplace, the Taliban allowed some doctors to continue. This was why their ban on secondary education was not simply a matter of damaging international goodwill; it was also jeopardizing the future of the country’s work force. After already having lost a year when schools closed during the pandemic, adolescent girls were still sitting at home. Unless the Taliban allowed them to study, the pipeline of women doctors and nurses would eventually run dry.

At the center of the Taliban’s plan for an Islamic society is the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, which became notorious in the 1990s for enforcing rules against music and television, and regulations on beards and women’s clothing, sometimes through public beatings. The ministry, which takes its name from a phrase in the Quran, was rebranded as the Invitation and Guidance Commission during the insurgency, when it was also responsible for persuading republican officials and soldiers to surrender in exchange for amnesty, a strategy used to devastating effect during the collapse last summer. It was a deft illustration of the Taliban’s religious logic: If the emirate was mandated by Islamic law, then calling on Afghans to defect was summoning them to be good Muslims.

After the Taliban’s rise to power, the ministry reinstated its more forceful name, and installed itself in a conveniently empty building, the disbanded Ministry of Women’s Affairs. But when I paid a visit to its spokesman, Akif Muhajer, we met at an annex in the south of the city, next to an intelligence facility. His ministry, with several thousand personnel, was expanding; signs for the H.R. and logistics departments hung in the corridors.

“The Taliban hasn’t changed — the Taliban is the Taliban, as it was in 1995,” he told me, as we sat in his office. Muhajer, who often gave interviews to the foreign press, had become a prominent defender of the emirate’s ideology. In his view, the question of a reformed Taliban was based on a false impression of the original regime, which he denied was violently repressive. “There was so much propaganda against the Taliban — that we were murderers, savages and terrorists.”

Muhajer believed that the U.S.-backed republic, though Islamic in name, was a corrupt tool of Western imperialism, whose leaders not only stole billions intended for their own people but also allowed sins like alcohol and adultery to flourish. “I can say that the majority of the activities of the previous government were against Islam,” he said. His ministry’s task was to root out that corruption; its officers, clad in white tunics resembling pharmacists’ coats, roamed the capital in search of vice, though he said they were under orders to use verbal persuasion, not violence. “I believe that through advice, people influenced by Western culture and beliefs will also be reformed and guided in the right direction.”

After the ban on girls’ high schools was upheld on March 23, Virtue and Vice stirred further outrage by announcing a decree on hijab, or Islamic veiling, which stated that women who were “neither too young or old” should cover their faces in the presence of unrelated men, and wear a full-body cloak, or burqa. The best hijab of all, the decree noted, was staying at home; male guardians, not women, would be punished for violations. While in many of Afghanistan’s rural communities and conservative households, face-veiling was the norm, for others, especially urban professionals, it was an attack on their own beliefs and dignity, one that sought to erase women’s faces from public life. Some critics called it gender apartheid.

Now in his early 30s, Muhajer was part of a new generation of Taliban who grew up with television and the internet — both forbidden under the 1990s regime. In our conversation, he espoused an Islamist modernism where both men and women participate in society, albeit segregated from one another; it was a model closer to conservative Persian Gulf societies like Saudi Arabia, one symbolized by Afghanistan’s now-veiled TV anchors. In this view, the controversial hijab decree was in fact setting the conditions for a return of women to classrooms and offices. “The hijab is the first step in the reopening of the schools,” he said. Indeed, one of the religious scholars who signed the decree was Munir, the education minister who had argued for the girls’ schools to reopen.

“A woman can become a doctor, she can become an engineer, she can become a teacher, she can become a director and work in government,” Muhajer said. “There may be areas in our country where people do not allow their wives to leave their homes, but my opinion is based on Islam, not the norms of part of the country.”

In a country as impoverished as Afghanistan, strict rules for a gender-segregated society have meant that, in practice, many Afghan women are simply excluded from formerly mixed offices and public places. As with the ongoing closure of girls’ high schools, the excuse is that it is a question of capacity, of building separate facilities — that it is simply a matter of time, and therefore patience.

Yet in my meetings with the Taliban in Kabul, I was surprised how much frustration there was with the ongoing ban and Virtue and Vice’s culture war, particularly among those in government tasked with reviving a failing state and feeding a hungry nation.

“Why are we making problems for ourselves with these announcements? Just do your work,” said the Taliban bureaucrat who knew Mullah Omar. A former military commander and an Islamic scholar himself, he worried the emirate would miss the opportunity offered by peace to rebuild the country and win over Afghans. “People are just hearing these announcements about clothes — they aren’t seeing any actual work.”

More surprising was how even senior Taliban officials seemed to struggle to explain the decisions of their own government, or the distinction between the cabinet in Kabul and the shura in Kandahar, or even the role of the amir himself, who they complained was out of touch and inaccessible. Although Haibatullah has recently begun speaking at publicized meetings outside Kandahar, including at a conference of religious scholars in Kabul, the amir — no doubt mindful of his predecessor’s assassination — has operated in a secrecy so profound that it has fueled rumors of his death. The modus operandi of secrecy and consensus that served the Taliban through its guerrilla years was now hampering its ability to rule the nation.

Yet I was also often told by reform-minded Taliban that outside pressure would only make matters worse, since those in favor of reopening the girls’ schools could be portrayed as kowtowing to the West. The emirate needed to proceed cautiously, these officials said; the Taliban’s rank and file, who did not receive salaries, had been motivated to jihad against their own countrymen by tales of a corrupt, immoral republic. In its latest propaganda, the Islamic State, perhaps the gravest internal threat to the Taliban, has accused the emirate of compromising its Islamic principles in return for aid.

Even Taliban officials in favor of opening girls’ schools stressed the imperative of eta’at, or obedience, an Islamic virtue essential for preventing fitna, internal strife — a term applied to the disastrous civil wars of the early Muslim states, as well as to the inter-mujehadeen struggles of the 1990s, when Kabul was destroyed in factional fighting. Obedience to the amir, coupled with the inherent conservatism of the shura’s consensus mechanism, explained why the Taliban are likely to remain beholden to their most hard-line elements.

“The leader has decreed it, so we have to obey,” the bureaucrat said of the ban on girls’ schooling. “It’s more important than what’s allowed as halal. We have to avoid fitna.”

On mornings when I got up early enough to beat Kabul’s heat and traffic, I’d lace up my sneakers and jog up a hill that overlooked the former Green Zone. On my way, I’d pass through a neighborhood called Sherpur, notorious for its gaudy “poppy palaces” with wedding-cake balconies and mirrored windows, built on land appropriated by warlords and government officials after the U.S. invasion. Some were later rented out to U.S.A.I.D. contractors. Now, the Taliban occupied many of these vacant properties and set up checkpoints to protect their V.I.P.s; there were rumors as well that Arabs and other foreign fighters had been seen in the neighborhood.

Early on July 31, two missiles fired by a U.S. drone struck a house in Sherpur, not far from where I’d been running; the next day, President Biden announced that he’d taken out Ayman al-Zawahri, the leader of Al Qaeda. It was proof, the president said, that America no longer needed troops in Afghanistan to defend itself. What it meant for the Taliban, who issued a muted condemnation of the strike, was less clear. Antony Blinken, the secretary of state, said by “hosting and sheltering” al-Zawahri, the Taliban had “grossly violated” their assurances that they would not allow Afghanistan to be used by terrorists as a base to threaten other countries. But a senior U.S. official told me that most of the Taliban leadership apparently had been unaware of al-Zawahri’s presence in Kabul, and that sheltering him had been the work of a faction connected to Haqqani, the interior minister. (The aide to Haqqani did not respond to a request for comment.)

The killing raised the question of how long the Taliban, who are nearing their first year in power, can endure in the face of international isolation. While I was in Kabul in May, I heard many reasons the emirate would not last, and many reasons it would — often mentioned by the same people, in the same breath. The Taliban have moved to extend the reach of the state and bolster its fiscal self-reliance, dismantling the many illegal checkpoints that lined the highway under the republic, increasing trade and customs revenue. They have arrested warlords and announced a ban on opium cultivation. Yet while the totality of the republic’s moral and political collapse has left them with no serious rivals, the Taliban leadership remains a small and insular group, almost entirely Pashtun. In their tight grip on power, they risk making the same mistake as previous victors: marginalizing swaths of a heavily armed population in a country rived by grievances from decades of civil war, where the state remains weak. In July, the U.N. released a damning report on human rights violations under the new government, including extrajudicial killings. (A Taliban spokesman called it “baseless and propaganda.”)

“I think that, at the end of the day, what we have to bear in mind is that the Afghan population itself is not going to be that patient,” says Amiri, the U.S. envoy for women and human rights. “There will be more violence. This conflict has not ended. It is on pause.”

But the most important factor fueling Afghanistan’s conflict has been foreign intervention. For now, no major or regional powers appear willing to support an armed opposition to the Taliban. “I think there is a fair degree of consensus in the world on this,” West, the State Department’s special representative, told me. This includes the United States, which has, according to both American officials and members of the Afghan opposition, declined to offer any material support to the anti-Taliban resistance.

On the contrary, the past year has seen a quiet normalization of the emirate’s relations with its neighboring countries, most of whom, along with Russia and China, have accepted Taliban-appointed diplomats in their capitals. India, once bitterly opposed to the Taliban, has recently re-established a presence at its embassy in Kabul. According to a German official, their mission has prepared to do the same, pending final approval from Berlin.

While the revelation that al-Zawahri was hiding in downtown Kabul will cast a pall over the Taliban’s foreign relations, the group’s entanglement with Al Qaeda, which deepened during their joint war against the Western occupation, has long been known. The senior U.S. official told me that pragmatic engagement with the Taliban would continue. Indeed, even as formal meetings between the U.S. special envoy and the Taliban foreign minister have resumed, West has broadened his contacts with leaders closer to the center of power in Kandahar. When the Taliban defense minister, Yaqoub — who is the son of the first amir, Mullah Omar — traveled to Doha in July, he met, unannounced, with West. Among the issues they discussed was the American captive Frerichs, in exchange for whom the Taliban have demanded Haji Bashir Noorzai, an Afghan tribal leader convicted on drug charges. (Both West and a spokesman for the Taliban foreign ministry declined to comment on the negotiations.)

In terms of the country’s so-called vital interests, much of the fallout in the year since the republic’s collapse has been contained by the United States and its allies. Famine in Afghanistan has been averted, thanks to the vast humanitarian machine that has cleaned up after political disasters in places like Somalia and Yemen. While the European Union has seen an uptick in Afghan asylum seekers, thus far it has been nothing like the huge numbers that arrived by boat during the migration crisis of 2015. Investments in border defenses since then, along with regular deportations by Iran and Turkey, both of which receive E.U. money to manage migration, have helped to cage Afghans within their own country.

Apart from its counterterrorism efforts, the White House, focused on the challenges from Russia and China, has pursued a strategy described to me by a U.S. official as “making sure Afghanistan stays off the front page.” In this, the Biden administration has been helped by a marked lack of interest from Congress in the country since the withdrawal, an apathy as bipartisan as support for the war in Ukraine, which has replaced Afghanistan as the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid. “For a minute the world was really concerned about the Taliban takeover,” Amiri says, “and there was enormous sympathy for Afghans. And then Ukraine happened.” People inside Afghanistan didn’t have the luxury of giving up, but she was worried their struggles were already being forgotten.

In June, after I returned to the United States, I awoke to messages on my phone from friends and acquaintances worried about my safety. Overnight, there was a deadly earthquake in Afghanistan. I went online and quickly learned that it had taken place in a remote area in the southeast. No one I knew personally, it seemed, was harmed, but more than 1,000 people were killed. There were heartbreaking tales of whole families being wiped out when their houses, built of mud and straw, collapsed on them as they slept. The United States promised to send more humanitarian aid; the Taliban pledged to cooperate. For a day, Afghanistan was back on the front page.

As much as the war waxed and waned in the public consciousness, Afghanistan was, by virtue of the troops serving there, part of the American body politic for 20 years. But when the last soldier stepped onto the last C-17, that connection with the country and its people was severed. What remains is a painful sense of how much we owe them, and how little we can do about it. When I was in Kabul, I visited two teenage sisters named Zakera and Husna, who were stuck at home, waiting for the Taliban to allow their school to open. Zakera wanted to be a doctor, Husna a journalist. The sisters told me that they were, in spite of everything, hopeful that they’d soon be back in class. “They keep saying that the schools will reopen,” Zakera said. “They promised.”

Additional reporting by Zabihullah Padshah.

Matthieu Aikins is a Puffin fellow at Type Media Center and the author of “The Naked Don’t Fear the Water: An Underground Journey With Afghan Refugees.” This year, he won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting, as part of a New York Times team that investigated civilian casualties from U.S. airstrikes.

A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 14, 2022, Page 29 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Collision Course.

Save The Children: Hungry, Laboring Afghan Kids ‘Wasting Away’

August 11, 2022 Current News Articles

TOLOnews

TV Network

11 August 2022

SIGAR Report Says Cash Taken by Ghani ‘Did Not Exceed $1M’

August 11, 2022 Current News Articles

TOLOnews

TV Network

11 August 2022

SIGAR began its investigations after Ashraf Ghani was accused by the Russian embassy of transferring millions dollars as he fled Afghanistan.

The final report on the transfer of funds by Ashraf Ghani, the former president of Afghanistan, while he was fleeing the country, has been made public by the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR).

According to the report, this number did not exceed $1 million and may have been closer in value to $500,000.

“Although SIGAR found that some cash was taken from the grounds of the palace and loaded onto President Ghani’s evacuation helicopters, evidence indicates that this number did not exceed $1 million and may have been closer in value to $500,000. Most of this money was believed to have come from several Afghan government operating budgets normally managed at the palace,” the report reads.

SIGAR’s report says that a lot of money was left in government buildings, including those of the president and national security, and has disappeared.

“SIGAR also identified suspicious circumstances in which approximately $5 million in cash was accidentally left behind at the presidential palace. Some or all of this money likely belonged to President Ghani or the government of the United Arab Emirates. Some or all of it was also supposedly divided by members of the Presidential Protective Service after the helicopters departed but before the Taliban captured the palace,” the report reads.

SIGAR further added that former president Ashraf Ghani refused to be interviewed, and his attorney answered only 6 questions out of 56.

“On March 14, 2022, SIGAR sent 56 written questions to President Ghani through his attorney concerning these theft allegations and other matters related to SIGAR’s congressionally mandated examination of the Afghan government’s collapse. On July 28, 2022, through his attorney, President Ghani provided answers to only six of those 56 questions,” according to the report.

The Islamic Emirate commented on the issue:

“Regarding the country’s assets, whether it be money or equipment and facilities, all the items and materials associated to “Baitul-Mal” are all under the jurisdiction of the Islamic Emirate and are maintained in the government’s treasury,” said Bilal Karimi, deputy spokesman of the Islamic Emirate.

“We hope that such cases will be investigated by the international organizations so that these funds will be returned to the national treasury,” said political analyst Mujtaba Kakar.

SIGAR began its investigations after Ashraf Ghani was accused by the Russian embassy of transferring millions dollars as he fled Afghanistan.

Prominent Taliban scholar killed in Kabul attack

August 11, 2022 Current News Articles

Al Jazeera

11 August 2022

Taliban officials say an investigation is under way after Rahimullah Haqqani was killed in a bombing at a seminary.

A prominent Taliban religious leader, Sheikh Rahimullah Haqqani, has been killed in a bombing attack at a seminary in Kabul, Taliban officials have said.

“Very sadly informed that respected cleric [Sheikh Rahimullah Haqqani] was martyred in a cowardly attack by enemies,” said Bilal Karimi, a spokesperson for the Taliban administration, on Thursday.

It was not immediately clear who was behind the blast. The Reuters news agency, citing four Taliban sources, said the attacker was someone who had previously lost his leg and had hidden the explosives in a plastic artificial leg.

“We are investigating who this … person was and who had brought him to this important place to enter the personal office of Sheikh Rahimullah Haqqani. It’s a very huge loss for the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan,” said a senior Taliban official of the interior ministry, referring to the group’s name for its administration.

Haqqani was a prominent scholar in the Taliban who had survived previous attacks, including a large blast in the northern Pakistani city of Peshawar in 2020 claimed by the ISIL (ISIS) group that killed at least seven people.

Many Taliban officials took to social media to express their condolences.

A US-led invasion toppled the Taliban government following the September 11, 2001, attacks. Since coming back into power a year ago, the Taliban have said that they have restored security.

However, regular attacks by armed groups, many of them claimed by an ISIL affiliate known as the Islamic State in Khorasan Province, ISKP (ISIS-K), have taken place in recent months.

Lately, the group has increased attacks on mosques and minorities across Afghanistan. In June, ISKP claimed responsibility for the attack on a Sikh temple in Kabul, killing two people.

The ISIL affiliate, which has been operating in Afghanistan since 2014, is seen as the greatest security challenge facing the country’s Taliban government.

SOURCE: NEWS AGENCIES

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