According to the report, Afghanistan has climbed 24 places compared to 2021 when the country was ranked 174 out of 180 countries.
In a recent report released by Transparency International, Afghanistan was ranked 150 in the Corruption Perception Index (CPI) in 2022 out of 180 countries.
According to the report, Afghanistan has climbed 24 places compared to 2021 when the country was ranked 174 out of 180 countries.
Somalia was ranked as the most corrupt nation in the world.
The report states that countries with strong institutions and well-functioning democracies often find themselves at the top of the Index. Denmark stands in first place, and Finland and New Zealand tie for second spot.
“When their work is in the government, they do not pay bribes to do that work. Also, the personal use of government resources by government officials has decreased, as well as the appointment of relatives and friends,” said Maiwand Rohani, an expert in governance and anti-corruption.
“One of the main and essential reasons why corruption has decreased in Afghanistan is because, unlike the republic administration, low-ranking officials do not pay money to the upper-level government officials,” said Hamid Azizi, a political analyst.
Some Kabul residents meanwhile said that although corruption in government institutions has decreased compared to past years, there is still corruption in some government institutions.
“Compared to the past, corruption has decreased. There was a lot of corruption in the past. Although there used to be a lot of facilities, the number has since dropped. Now, there is no convenience, for instance, in the passport application procedure,” Kabul resident Abdul Hamid Karimi told TOLOnews.
“Hiring should not be based on personal connections; rather, it should be done on the basis of ability and capability,” said Sayed Adel Shah Baqiri, another resident of Kabul.
However, the Islamic Emirate calls the report of Transparency International on the issue of corruption in Afghanistan “unfair and unreliable.”
“They judge from a distance, perhaps they depend on rumors, they don’t research carefully and don’t investigate the matter deeply, thus their figures and their calculations are not very credible,” said Zabiullah Mujahid, spokesman of the Islamic Emirate.
Afghanistan Ranks 150th on Corruption Perception Index
Since falling into the hands of the Taliban, some of the weapons have been seized from militants in Indian-controlled Kashmir in what experts say could be just the start of their global journey.
SRINAGAR, India — Weapons left behind by U.S. forces during the withdrawal from Afghanistan are surfacing in another conflict, further arming militants in the disputed South Asian region of Kashmir in what experts say could be just the start of the weapons’ global journey.
Authorities in Indian-controlled Kashmir tell NBC News that militants trying to annex the region for Pakistan are carrying M4s, M16s and other U.S.-made arms and ammunition that have rarely been seen in the 30-year conflict. A major reason, they say, is a regional flood of U.S.-funded weapons that fell into the hands of the Taliban when U.S.-led NATO forces withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021.
Most of the weapons recovered so far, officials say, are from Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) or Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), both Pakistan-based militant groups that the U.S. designates as terrorist organizations. In a Twitter post last year, for example, police said they had seized an M4 carbine assault rifle after a gunfight that killed two militants from JeM.
Militants from both groups had been sent to Afghanistan to fight alongside or train the Taliban before the U.S. withdrawal, said Lt. Col. Emron Musavi, an Indian army spokesperson in Srinagar, the capital of Kashmir.
“It can be safely assumed that they have access to the weapons left behind,” he said in an email last year.
Government officials in Afghanistan and Pakistan did not respond to requests for comment.
Kashmir, a Himalayan region known for its beautiful landscapes, shares borders with India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and China. A separatist insurgency in the part of Kashmir controlled by India has killed tens of thousands of people since the 1990s and been a constant source of tension between nuclear powers India and Pakistan.
The year opened in violence as Kashmir police blamed militants for a Jan. 1 gunfire attack that killed four people in the southern village of Dhangri, followed by an explosion in the same area the next day that killed a 5-year-old boy and a 12-year-old girl. At least six people were injured on Jan. 21 in two explosions in the city of Jammu.
While the U.S.-made weapons are unlikely to shift the balance of power in the Kashmir conflict, they give the Taliban a sizable reservoir of combat power potentially available to those willing and able to purchase it, said Jonathan Schroden, director of the Countering Threats and Challenges Program at the Center for Naval Analyses, a research group based outside Washington.
“When combined with the Taliban’s need for money and extant smuggling networks, that reservoir poses a substantial threat to regional actors for years to come,” he said.
A trove of weapons
More than $7.1 billion in U.S.-funded military equipment was in the possession of the Afghan government when it fell to the Taliban in August 2021 amid the withdrawal, according to a Defense Department report published last August. Though more than half of it was ground vehicles, it also included more than 316,000 weapons worth almost $512 million, plus ammunition and other accessories.
While large numbers of small arms that had been transferred to Afghan forces most likely ended up in the hands of the Taliban, “it’s important to remember that nearly all weapons and equipment used by U.S. military forces in Afghanistan were either retrograded or destroyed prior to our withdrawal,” Army Lt. Col. Rob Lodewick, a spokesperson for the Pentagon, said in a statement.
The Defense Department report also pointed out that the operational condition of the Afghan army’s equipment was unknown.
Questions around the weapons being used in Kashmir were raised in January 2022, when a video of militants brandishing what appeared to be American-made guns was shared widely on Indian social media. Though the origin of the weapons in such cases can be difficult to verify — some may be modified to look like U.S. weapons, while others may not have been manufactured in the U.S. — the Indian military says it has recovered at least seven that are authentic.
“From the weapons and equipment that we recovered, we realized that there was a spillover of high-tech weapons, night-vision devices and equipment, which were left by the Americans in Afghanistan [and] were now finding their way toward this side,” Maj. Gen. Ajay Chandpuria, an Indian army official, was quoted as saying by Indian media last year.
Jammu and Kashmir Lt. Gov. Manoj Sinha said the government was aware of the issue and that measures were in place to combat the infiltration of U.S. weapons into Kashmir.
“We are monitoring the situation closely and have taken steps accordingly. Our police and army are on the job,” Sinha, the region’s top official, said on the sidelines of a news conference last year at his official residence in Srinagar.
Kashmir police official Vijay Kumar also said authorities were fully capable of countering the militant threat.
“Our forces are tracking down militants on a daily basis,” he said. “We are constantly upgrading our equipment and have the latest weaponry at our disposal.”
The militant groups JeM and LeT could be buying U.S. weapons from the Taliban in Afghanistan, where the United Nations says both groups have bases, or through smugglers in Pakistan, said Ajai Sahni, an author on counterterrorism who serves as executive director of the Institute for Conflict Management, a think tank in New Delhi.
Militants will struggle to get the upper hand, however, without more advanced weapons that have greater firepower but are more difficult to smuggle into the region, Sahni said.
Schroden said that although he had not seen substantial reports of U.S.-made weapons left behind in Afghanistan appearing outside of Kashmir, it would not be surprising if they eventually began turning up farther away in places such as Yemen, Syria and parts of Africa.
“I suspect there hasn’t yet been enough time for these weapons to percolate out that far,” he said. “It’s also possible that the Taliban have held tightly to most of them thus far as part of their efforts to consolidate power and seek legitimization from the international community.”
Beyond weapons, the Taliban’s victory in Afghanistan gave an ideological boost to radical militants in Kashmir and elsewhere, said Ahmad Shuja Jamal, a former Afghan civil servant living in exile in Australia.
Such militants, he said, “now see in clear terms the political dividends of long-term violence.”
U.S. arms left in Afghanistan are turning up in a different conflict
ISLAMABAD (AP) — Afghanistan’s Taliban-appointed foreign minister Wednesday asked Pakistani authorities to look for the reasons behind militant violence in their country instead of blaming Afghanistan.
The comments from Amir Khan Muttaqi came two days after Pakistani officials said the attackers who orchestrated Monday’s suicide bombing that killed 101 people in northwest Pakistan staged the attack on Afghan soil.
During a ceremony to inaugurate a drug addiction treatment center in the capital of Kabul on Wednesday, Muttaqi asked Pakistan’s government to launch a serious investigation into Monday’s mosque bombing in Peshawar.
He insisted that Afghanistan was not a center for terrorism, saying if that was the case then attacks would have also taken place in other countries.
“If anyone says that Afghanistan is the center for terrorism, they also say that terrorism has no border,” Muttaqi said. “If terrorism had emanated from Afghanistan, it would have also impacted China, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan or Iran.”
“We have to cooperate with each other, instead of blaming each other,” he said. “Both countries are brothers to each other and must work in a peaceful environment together.”
Authorities in Pakistan said Wednesday the death toll from Monday’s suicide bombing at a mosque in Peshawar increased by one to 101. It was not clear how the bomber was able to slip into the walled police compound in a high-security zone with other government buildings.
Pakistan Defense Minister Khawaja Mohammad Asif on Tuesday accused the Pakistani Taliban, or Tahreek-e Taliban-Pakistani, or TTP, of carrying out the attack, saying they were operating from neighboring Afghan territory. He demanded the Afghan Taliban take action against them. A TTP commander earlier claimed responsibility, but a spokesperson for the group later distanced the TTP from the carnage, saying it was not its policy to attack mosques.
During the nearly 20-year U.S. war against the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan, militant groups blossomed in the tribal regions of Pakistan along the border and around Peshawar. Like the Taliban, they took root among the ethnic Pashtuns who make up a majority in the region and in the city.
Some groups were encouraged by the Pakistani intelligence agencies. But others turned their guns against the government, angered by heavy security crackdowns and by frequent U.S. airstrikes in the border region targeting al-Qaida and other militants.
Chief among the anti-government groups was the Pakistani Taliban. In the late 2000s and early 2010s, it waged a brutal campaign of violence around the country. Peshawar was the scene of one of the bloodiest TTP attacks in 2014, on an army-run public school that killed nearly 150 people, most of them schoolboys.
Taliban asks Pakistan not to blame them for violence at home
Sofia Sprechmann Sineiro (on screen), Secretary General of Care International, briefs reporters on the situation in Afghanistan after a recent visit to the country.
A UN-led group of humanitarians are hoping that the Taliban will allow Afghan women to again work with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) on the ground following last month’s ban, four senior aid officials told journalists in New York on Monday.
Representing the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC), they stressed that the world’s largest humanitarian operation – supporting some 28 million people in Afghanistan – simply cannot function without women staff.
The officials reported on their mission to the country last week, in the wake of the edict prohibiting Afghan women from working with local and international aid agencies, announced on 24 December.
Days later, the de facto Taliban authorities authorized women to continue working in healthcare.
A similar exception was made in education, though focused on the primary level as Afghan girls and women have been barred from attending high school and university.
A clear message
In their meetings with the Taliban, the IASC mission expressed opposition to the ban, which they hoped would be rescinded, and advocated for exemptions in all aspects of humanitarian action.
They were told that guidelines are being developed, and were asked to be patient, said Martin Griffiths, UN relief chief and the IASC chair, speaking during a press conference at UN Headquarters.
“I’m somebody who doesn’t like to speculate too much, because it is a matter of speculation. Let’s see if these guidelines do come through. Let’s see if they are beneficial. Let’s see what space there is for the essential and central role of women in our humanitarian operations,” he said.
“Everybody has opinions as to whether it’s going to work or not. Our view is that the message has clearly been delivered: that women are central, essential workers in the humanitarian sector, in addition to having rights, and we need to see them back to work.”
Women’s vital role
Humanitarians will require $4.6 billion to fund their activities in Afghanistan this year.
Three years of drought-like conditions, economic decline, and the impacts of four decades of conflict, have left roughly two-thirds of the population, 28 million people, dependent on aid, with six million on the brink of starvation.
Women comprise 30 per cent of the 55,000 Afghan nationals working for NGOs in the country, according to Janti Soeripto, President and Chief Executive Officer of Save the Children.
“Without women on our teams, we cannot provide humanitarian services to millions of children and women,” she said.
“We won’t be able to identify their needs; communicate to female heads of households, of which there are many in Afghanistan after years and years of conflict, and to do so in a safe and culturally appropriate way.”
Lives at risk
Furthermore, many women aid workers are themselves the sole breadwinners for their families, which means many more households will go wanting.
“We’ve made it very clear that humanitarian aid must never be conditional, and it cannot discriminate,” said Ms. Soeripto. “We were not there to politicize aid. We cannot do this work without women in all aspects of our value chains.”
The loss of these valuable workers also comes as Afghanistan is facing its coldest winter in 15 years, with temperatures falling to nearly -30 degrees Celsius, resulting in numerous deaths.
The IASC mission visited a clinic on the outskirts of the capital, Kabul, run by the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and a local partner.
Services restored
Critical health and nutrition services there are up and running again now that women staff are back on board, said Sofía Sprechmann Sineiro, Secretary General of CARE International.
The clinic’s staff also shared a horrific statistic, as 15 per cent of the children who seek help suffer from severe acute malnutrition.
“So, let there be no ambiguity. Tying the hands of NGOs by barring women from giving life-saving support to other women will cost lives,” she said, speaking from Kabul.
During their meetings with the de facto authorities, the humanitarian chiefs also pushed for the full inclusion of girls and women in public life.
Huge learning loss
More than one million Afghan girls have lost out on learning due to the order banning them from secondary school, which has added to losses sustained during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The university ban, announced last month, has further crushed their hopes, said Omar Abdi, UNICEF Deputy Executive Director for Programmes.
“We are very concerned about girls’ and women’s development and particularly their mental health. In 2023, if secondary school education remains closed, an estimated 215,000 girls who attended grade six last year will once again be denied the right to learn,” he said.
Despite the bleak outlook, Mr. Abdi pointed to a few positive signs.
Room for hope
Since the ban, some 200,000 girls continue to attend secondary schools in 12 provinces, and women secondary school teachers continue to receive their salaries.
“The officials we met in Kabul…reaffirmed that they are not against girls learning in secondary schools, and again promised to re-open once the guidelines are approved by their leader,” he said.
Meanwhile, the number of community-based education classes in private homes and other locations has doubled to 20,000 over the past year, serving some 600,000 children, more than half of them girls.
“These positive signs are the results of both the commitment from the de facto authorities and pressure from local communities to keep schools and community schools open,” said Mr. Abdi.
“As long as communities continue to demand education, we must continue to support both public and other forms of education, community-based classrooms, catch-up classes and vocational training.”
Afghanistan: Humanitarians await guidelines on women’s role in aid operations
The bomber struck shortly before afternoon prayers, when the mosque in Peshawar’s bustling Police Lines district would be at its busiest. Hundreds of people, including many police officers, were inside as the device detonated, creating a blast so strong the roof and wall collapsed and 100 people were killed.
The attack on Monday was among the worst in years to hit Peshawar, a city in north-west Pakistan that has been ravaged relentlessly by deadly terrorist violence over decades. Hours after the attack, responsibility was claimed by a low-level commander from one faction of the Pakistan Taliban, known as Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), as revenge for the death of a fighter in Afghanistan.
Suicide bombing kills worshippers at mosque in Peshawar, Pakistan
Later, an official spokesperson from the TTP distanced themselves from the incident, stating it was not their policy to target mosques. Yet it was just the latest escalation in an onslaught of violence claimed by TTP in the north-west province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, which in recent months has been in the grip of a deadly Taliban resurgence that the government and Pakistan’s powerful military appear powerless to control.
Only two weeks previously, a police station on the outskirts of Peshawar was targeted in a coordinated onslaught by well-equipped Taliban fighters. “The terrorists were armed with modern weapons and night vision glasses,” said Irshad Malik, an assistant sub-inspector who was in the police station during the attack. “They targeted officers with snipers and hurled hand-grenades at the police station.” Three officers were killed.
Raza Khan, another officer present, said security agencies were “under attack across the province”. “It is a scary situation,” he added. “The terrorists seem to be everywhere.”[
TTP, which is separate from the Taliban in Afghanistan but shares a similar hardline Islamist ideology, has waged a bloody insurgency in Pakistan for the past 15 years, fighting for stricter enforcement of Islamic sharia law. The group has been responsible for some of the deadliest terrorist attacks on Pakistan soil, including the 2014 Peshawar school massacre in which 132 children were killed.
After military operations in 2014 and 2017, which resulted in heavy bloodshed, they were largely suppressed. Yet since November, they have once again stepped up attacks after peace negotiations with the government failed and the group declared it was ending its ceasefire.
Since then, the security situation has deteriorated rapidly in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the province neighbouring Afghanistan, as the Pakistan Taliban have carried out almost a dozen deadly attacks targeting police and military posts. In one incident in December, Taliban detainees overpowered their guards at a counter-terrorism unit, seized control of the facility and held them hostage for more than 24 hours, leaving more than a dozen army and police officers dead.
Michael Kugelman, a senior associate for south Asia at the Wilson Center, said: “TTP’s intensifying attacks on Pakistani security forces are meant to send a simple but unsettling message: the state can’t stop them.”
The seemingly uncontrollable resurgence of the TTP in Pakistan had been forewarned by many observers since the return of the Taliban to power in Afghanistan in August 2020, after they seized control from the US-backed government and imposed brutal Islamic rule on the country. The triumph of the Taliban in Afghanistan was celebrated in Islamabad including by the then prime minister, Imran Khan, who said the country had broken from “the shackles of slavery”.
But promises by the Afghan Taliban not to shelter TTP fighters proved hollow and the relationship between the Pakistan government and the Taliban began to break down.
“Pakistan’s mistake was to think that the Taliban would be willing to help it curb TTP,” said Kugelman. “The Taliban’s track record has been consistent: the group doesn’t turn on its militant allies. It didn’t turn on al-Qaida, so why would it turn on TTP, with which the Taliban have been aligned ideologically for years?”
Meanwhile, misguided efforts by Khan’s government included 5,000 TTP fighters being brought back to Pakistan from Afghanistan to be rehabilitated and resettled in the tribal area of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The programme failed after ceasefire negotiations broke down and funding could not be found to resettle the fighters, leaving Pakistan with more TTP fighters freely roaming on home soil.
The defence minister, Khawaja Asif, who serves under the new government of Shehbaz Sharif, confirmed that the hundreds of TTP fighters had been brought over under the previous Khan government. Asif was critical of the failed rehabilitation plan, accepting that it had instead helped fuel recent terrorist activity in the country.
He said the TTP fighters “did not settle down like normal citizens. Instead they are going back to their old activities, creating an atmosphere of fear in these areas.”
Asif described the situation in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa as “bad without a doubt”. “They know it, we know it, everyone knows that Pakistani Taliban are using Afghan soil for terrorism in Pakistan,” he said. “We would like to avoid a military operation but if we are compelled to use force then we will have to.”
In Waziristan, a heavily militarised mountainous region bordering Afghanistan, which historically has been at the centre of Taliban attacks and brutal security operations in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, locals described how the Taliban presence could be felt heavily once again. They said an influx of TTP fighters had come from Afghanistan and the Taliban were now controlling the many security checkpoints at night.
“For over a year we have seen TTP militants crossing into Pakistan,” said Anwar Khpalwak, from the local organisation The Voice of People. Locals described how Pakistan Taliban militants now roamed freely around the area, including in the bazaar, and said they had been involved in ransom, kidnapping and extortion of local businesses.
Local anger at the government and military was potent. Most had lost relatives to years of terrorist attacks and retaliatory military operations, and the return of the TTP meant only more violence and bloodshed. “We have lost most men and our widowed women would guard the house at night. We had peace for a very short period, and it seems the terrorists are back. We are tired of war,” said Malik Ala Noor Khan, 40, who lost 14 family members and joined a recent march calling for peace.
Many believed the TTP had only used the ceasefire with the government to regroup and reorganise so they could come back stronger. Manzoor Pashteen, the founder of the Pashtun Tahafuz movement (PTM) that works for peace in the violence-stricken tribal areas, said all the government’s negotiations with the Pakistan Taliban had “never yielded us peace”.
“These negotiations were only to give each other space for a few months,” he said. “In a way, these negotiations were a justification, a gateway to allow militant organisation in tribal areas.”
As hundreds of locals gathered recently in Wana, a town in Waziristan, they waved white flags of peace to protest against the violence that had once again imposed itself on their lives. “Through peaceful protests of the people, we will continue to challenge this war being fought on our soil,” said Pashteen. “This is not our war.”
North-west Pakistan in grip of deadly Taliban resurgence
FILE – Taliban fighter talk to recently arrested prisoners in the Pul-e-Charkhi prison in Kabul, Afghanistan, Sept. 13, 2021.
Less than two years after releasing all prisoners held by the previous Afghan government, including suspected terrorists, the Taliban are rapidly refilling prisons with new inmates.
Over the past 18 months, de facto Taliban authorities detained more than 29,000 individuals on various charges such as theft, kidnapping, murder and moral crimes according to country’s top prison official.
“We have released some 15,000 inmates,” Mohammad Yusuf Mistari, the Taliban’s director of prisons, told VOA in WhatsApp messages. “Currently, there are approximately 14,000 inmates in the Islamic Emirate’s jails.”
Among the prisoners, up to 1,100 are women.
Taliban officials claim they have no political prisoners and that all the prisoners are held on criminal charges — a claim not confirmed by independent organizations.
But groups like Human Rights watch say the Taliban have opted for killing criminals associated with armed opposition groups — Islamic State and other Afghan militias that have increasingly posed serious security threats to the fledging Islamist regime —instead of keeping them in jails.
Under the Islamic Emirate’s strict interpretation of Sharia, acts such as drinking alcohol or extramarital relationships are considered criminal and carry severe penalties, while homosexuality and sodomy are punishable by death.
Since November, the Taliban have restarted public displays of punishment. Thieves have had their hands chopped off, adulterers have been flogged, and those found guilty of murder have been shot and killed in front of hundreds of male spectators.
More than 100 men and women have been publicly whipped, and at least two men have been executed so far, according to the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), which monitors human rights in the country.
“Such barbaric punishments — often carried out against persons for activities that should not even be considered crimes, such as listening to music — constitute torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, and are prohibited under international law,” Patricia Gossman, associate Asia director at Human Rights Watch, told VOA.
Redoing torture
Various forms of torture have been widely practiced at formal and informal detention centers and jails in Afghanistan, according to UNAMA and various rights groups.
Hundreds of Taliban fighters reportedly died in extremely brutal detention conditions in late 2001 and early 2002 during U.S.-led military campaigns that toppled the Taliban with the help of local Afghan militias, according to reports by the New York Times and Physicians for Human Rights.
Torture of detainees was also prevalent under the former Afghan government, which incarcerated more than 30,000 individuals, a large number of whom were alleged Taliban insurgents, according to U.N. reports dating back to at least 2011.
Last year, the Taliban produced a film documenting the bitter experiences of some prisoners held at the Parwan Detention Facility beside Bagram Air Base, which the U.S. military operated until 2012 when it was transferred to the Afghan government.
“The Taliban seem to be repeating all the mistakes and abuses of the past, including those they complained that the Republic [former Afghan government] had been responsible for, like torture,” Gossman said.
Mistari, the Taliban’s top official for prisons, refuted the torture allegations.
“Our leaders have given us a 39-articles guidance in which it’s said that we should treat inmates nicely,” he said, adding that the guidance also states if a guard or a jail official is seen taunting prisoners, he should be transferred elsewhere.
“We have nothing to do with their crimes. We are only there to protect the prisoners, feed them and keep them,” Mistari added.
Food, cold
Maintaining the prisons and feeding the large inmate population has long been a challenge in Afghanistan.
The previous Afghan government received financial and technical support from international donors to manage its prisons and detention facilities.
Facing strict international sanctions, the Taliban appears to be unable to run the jails, feed and care for the large inmate population.
Even outside the Taliban jails, an overwhelming majority of Afghans face hunger.
Millions of Afghans Facing Catastrophic Hunger
Throughout 2022, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) provided three meals daily for some 12,000 inmates in Afghanistan.
“The ICRC continues to work with Afghan authorities to ensure humane and dignified conditions of detention across Afghanistan,” Lucien Christen, an ICRC spokesperson, told VOA.
Moreover, the humanitarian organization has donated blankets, shawls, jackets and socks to keep 20,000 prisoners warm during the frigid winter temperatures.
Cold weather has killed more than 120 Afghans over the past two weeks, Taliban authorities have confirmed.
Both UNAMA and ICRC have access to prisons in Afghanistan for monitoring purposes.
“De facto authorities do appear to be seeking to fulfil their obligations in relation to the treatment of detainees,” UNAMA reported in July 2022. “Progress is hindered by financial constraints, resulting at times in inadequate food, medical care and hygiene supplies for detainees, and the cessation of vocational education and training programs for prisoners that were previously funded by the international community.”
Some senior Taliban leaders, including current ministers and governors, have a history of incarceration inside and outside Afghanistan, including at the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp, a U.S. military prison set up in 2002 where only one Afghan inmate remains.
Griffiths said if the Islamic Emirate does not reconsider its decision on women’s employment and education, it will be “catastrophic.”
Speaking at a joint press conference, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, Martin Griffiths, CARE International Secretary-General Sofía Sprechmann Sineiro, and officials of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) emphasized the need to remove the restrictions imposed on women’s education and work.
Griffiths said if the Islamic Emirate does not reconsider its decision on women’s employment and education, it will be “catastrophic.”
The United Nations’ humanitarian operations in Afghanistan, in Griffiths’ opinion, were dealt a devastating blow by the ban on women working.
“It is a potential deathblow to many very important humanitarian programs and what we have described as one of the most difficult and priority areas for humanitarian assistance protections. If we don’t get those exceptions and if they are not reinforced… locally, then those activities won’t happen and this would be catastrophic,” Martin Griffiths said.
“Tying the hands of NGOs by barring women from giving lifesaving support to other women will cost lives. We are insisting on the repeal of the edict,” Sofía Sprechmann Sineiro said.
More than a million girls who should have been attending secondary schools have been denied an education for the past three years, said Omar Abdi, the deputy executive director for the program at UNICEF.
“The numbers are alarming, more than one million girls who should have been in secondary schools have lost out on learning for three years now, first due to Covid, and then in September 2021 due to the ban on attending secondary school,” Abdi said.
According to the United Nations, 28 million Afghans are in need of humanitarian assistance, and the restriction on women working has hampered relief operations.
UN, CARE Officials Express Concerns About Afghanistan at Press Conference
However, the Islamic Emirate considers the current government’s engagement with the international community a crucial step and a means of success.
Mohammad Sadiq, Pakistan’s special envoy for Afghanistan, said that Islamabad supports the continuous engagement with the current Afghan government, during a meeting with Thomas West, the US special representative for Afghanistan.
The Pakistani official tweeted that he spoke with the US special representative for Afghanistan on recent developments in Afghanistan.
“I underlined Pakistan’s support to continued engagement with Afghan Interim Government and humanitarian support to the people of Afghanistan,” Mohammad Sadiq said in a tweet.
“Discussions have been had over the recent developments, and the engagement with the current government in Afghanistan has also been stressed,” said Tahir Khan Andar, a Pakistani journalist.
However, the Islamic Emirate considers the current government’s engagement with the international community a crucial step and a means of success.
“I consider the interaction with the Islamic Emirate as a good and positive move. Governments who place emphasis on this have come to understand that cooperation is the only way to win, make progress and build trust,” said Zabiullah Mujahid, spokesman for the Islamic Emirate.
Some political analysts think that in order to solve the issues, the US special representative for Afghanistan should speak with the Afghans.
“The best way for Thomas West would be for him to speak directly with Afghans, the Afghan Islamic system, and the Islamic Emirate,” said Hatif Mukhtar, a political analyst.
“I don’t think that a new change will come and be really helpful for Afghanistan or create changes in the region,” said Sayed Bilal Ahmad Fatemi, another political analyst.
Thomas West, the US’s special representative for Afghanistan, is expected to travel to Germany and Switzerland after Pakistan in order to talk with US allies on shared interests.
Envoys West, Sadiq Meet on Afghanistan in Islamabad
AFTF has thirty members which include former government employees, Islamic Emirate officials, representatives of civil society, and academics.
The Afghanistan Future Thought Forum (AFTF), which describes itself as a “high-level, independent, non-partisan initiative” and includes “Taliban” participants, said in a statement the group has examined the key challenges and opportunities that the people of Afghanistan face and has offered its plan to the Afghan government and the international community.
In a press release, this forum, which convened its fifth session on the situation in Afghanistan at the Hamad Bin Khalifa University’s College of Public Policy in Doha on January 23-25 ,2023, asked that the Islamic Emirate lift its restrictions on women’s employment and education.
In support of a peaceful, stable and prosperous Afghanistan, the AFTF participants stressed the importance of reaching a political settlement based on dialogue, trust and consensus building.
“The interim government must lift restrictions imposed on female education and employment,” the media release reads.
“In reality, it does not have an Islamic aspect, and from an economic point of view, sadly, it affects the country, and our young people—of whom half are women—and are denied education,” said Tariq Farhadi, a political analyst.
“This issue shows that there is tension among the Taliban,” said Wahid Faqiri, another political analyst.
However, the spokesman of the Islamic Emirate said that the problem regarding women will be solved based on Islamic Sharia.
“The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan is taking positive steps in all possible areas in terms of Sharia and law. The challenges are temporary, efforts are ongoing to resolve them and they won’t last forever,” said Zabiullah Mujahid, spokesman of the Islamic Emirate.
The Afghanistan Future Thought Forum (AFTF) emphasized the need for the international community to continue supporting the Afghan people under the leadership of the Afghans and with full and effective supervision.
“This procedure has been created in two chapters and eleven articles for the goal of better distribution of humanitarian aid,” said Abdul Rahman Habib, the spokesman of the Ministry of Economy.
AFTF has thirty members which include former government employees, Islamic Emirate officials, representatives of civil society, and academics.
Afghanistan Future Thought Forum Calls to Lift Restrictions on Females
Female students meanwhile asked the Islamic Emirate to remove ban on girls’ education and to reopen schools and universities for them.
Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, the foreign minister of Iran, said at a meeting with Sheikh Mohamed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani, the foreign minister of Qatar, that the banning of women from education in Afghanistan is wrong and is against Islamic principles.
Speaking at the meeting, Abdollahian said that Tehran is ready to work with the current Afghan administration to provide educational facilities for women and girls in Afghanistan.
“We consider denying Afghan women and girls an education a wrong action in conflict with the teachings of the merciful religion of Islam,” Abdollahian said.
The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) called the decree preventing the registration of women in the university entrance exams disappointing, and asked the Islamic Emirate to reconsider its decision.
“OIC General Secretariat expressed its disappointment over the decision announced on Saturday 28/1/2023 by de facto Administration in Afghanistan, banning female students from taking university entrance exams this year in all public and private universities across the country,” OIC tweeted.
“The Islamic Emirate should share its plan for the educational process with the Afghan people as soon as possible,” said Mawlawi Hasibullah Hanafi, a religious cleric.
Female students meanwhile asked the Islamic Emirate to remove ban on girls’ education and to reopen schools and universities for them.
“We ask the Islamic Emirate to open the doors of schools and universities to students,” said Negina, a student.
“The restrictions they imposed are not acceptable from the perspective of Islam or the people of the world, and I hope that they would lift these restrictions so that the women of Afghanistan can continue to grow as they have in the past,” said Manizha, another student.
Stefania Giannini, assistant director general for education at UNESCO, criticized the continued ban on women’s and girls’ education in Afghanistan.
“Currently, all Afghan girls and women above the age of 12 are denied access to secondary schools and, more recently, to universities following the decisions of the de facto authorities,” Giannini said.
Nearly 500 days have passed since girls in Afghanistan were denied access to education, and, most recently, the Ministry of Higher Education ordered private universities and other higher education institutions to forbid girls from enrolling in admission tests.
Abdollahian Says Ban on Women’s Education Against Islamic Principles
Afghanistan Peace Campaign
