Poppy Cultivation at ‘Zero’ Says Counter-Narcotics Official

September 22, 2022 Current News Articles

Nazir Shinwari

Tolo News

20 SEPTEMBER 2022

Appeal at UN for world leaders to protect Afghan girls’ education

September 22, 2022 Current News Articles

Al Jazeera

21 September 2022

Women urge leaders to unite and demand the Taliban government reopen girls’ schools and offer protection of their rights.

After pleading with world leaders at the United Nations to protect the education and rights of women in Afghanistan a year after the Taliban took over, Somaya Faruqi, the former captain of the Afghan girls’ robotics team, broke down in tears backstage.

“I was in classroom last year, but this year girls are not in classroom. Classrooms are empty, and they are at their homes. So it was too hard to control myself, control my feelings,” Faruqi, aged 20, told the Reuters news agency.

Faruqi, who now attends the Missouri University of Science and Technology, left Afghanistan in August last year when the Taliban seized power and the United States and allies withdrew forces after a 20-year war.

Speaking at the UN in New York this week as world leaders gather for the high-level meeting of the UN General Assembly, she urged them to unite and demand the reopening of girls’ schools and the protection of their rights.

“This week, you are all here to propose solutions to transform education to all, but you must not forget those who left behind, those who are not lucky enough to be at school at all,” said Faruqi. “Show your solidarity with me and millions of Afghan girls.”

Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai, who was shot by a Taliban gunman in Pakistan as she left school in 2012, chided heads of state for the lack of action.

“Most of you know what exactly needs to be done. You must not make small, stingy and short-term pledges, but commit to uphold the right to complete education and close the funding gap once and for all,” Yousafzai said on Monday.

Last year, she pleaded with the world not to compromise on the protection of Afghan women’s rights following the Taliban takeover.

‘Lift all restrictions’

The Taliban says women should not leave home without a male relative and must cover their faces, though some women in urban centres ignore the rule.

In March, the Taliban made a U-turn on a promise to open girls’ high schools. Most teenage girls now have no access to classrooms and thousands of women have been pushed out of the workforce because of tighter restrictions and Afghanistan’s economic crisis, international development agencies said.

The Taliban says it respects women’s rights in accordance with their interpretation of Islamic law and that since March they have been working on a way of opening girls’ high schools.

At the Transforming Education Summit on Monday, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres appealed to the Taliban to “lift all restrictions on girls’ access to secondary education immediately”.

“Girls’ education is among the most important steps to deliver peace, security and sustainable development, everywhere,” said Guterres.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Tuesday opened the Alliance for Afghan Women’s Economic Resilience, a partnership between the State Department and Boston University aimed at advancing Afghan women’s entrepreneurship and educational opportunities and expanding workplace opportunities, in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

“Women, no matter where they live, should have equal rights in every facet of their lives,” Blinken said. “This should be, in the year 2022, self-evident to everyone on this planet. But of course, it’s not, and we have to fight for it. We have to struggle for it every single day.”

Rina Amiri, the US Special Envoy for Afghan Women, Girls and Human Rights, said the initiative would face a lot of challenges. Instability, a lack of security and financial chaos will weigh on any attempts to support women’s re-entry into Afghan society. “What we want to show is that there’s resilience,” she said.

Fereshteh Forough, the CEO of Code to Inspire, the first coding school for women and girls in Afghanistan, said at the alliance’s event that she had to close her school and move to online learning after the Taliban took over.

She broke down in tears as she said 80 percent of the students were back to school remotely, and that as of Monday, the school was able to get a permit from the Taliban to reopen conditionally.

“We were able to get 300 girls to get an entrance exam and come to our graphic design school. It’s just unbelievable how difficult it’s been this year,” she said, in tears. “The text messages I received from the girls, it was heartbreaking.”

U.S. hails release of Taliban captive following prisoner swap

September 20, 2022 Current News Articles

By Haq Nawaz Khan, Susannah George and Missy Ryan

The Washington Post

September 20, 2022

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Mark Frerichs, an American contractor held captive by the Taliban since his abduction in Kabul in 2020, was freed in exchange for an Afghan imprisoned on drug trafficking charges in the United States, U.S. and Afghan officials said Monday.

Frerichs’s family hailed his release, saying they were “grateful and excited” to learn he had been set free after more than 2½ years in militant captivity.

“Our family has prayed for this each day,” Charlene Cakora, Frerichs’s sister, said in the statement from Camden Advisory Group, which had been advocating for his release. “We never gave up hope that he would survive and come home safely to us.”

President Biden applauded the release of Frerichs, who U.S. officials said was in U.S. care in Doha, Qatar. “Bringing the negotiations that led to Mark’s freedom to a successful resolution required difficult decisions, which I did not take lightly,” the president said in a statement.

U.S. officials said Frerichs’s release capped months of behind-the-scenes negotiations with the Taliban, the insurgent group that has governed Afghanistan since August 2021, when the United States withdrew from the country.

To obtain his freedom, an official said, the U.S. government released detainee Bashir Noorzai (also known as Haji Bashir Noorzai), a warlord with ties to the Taliban who was sentenced to life in federal prison for drug trafficking after being lured to the United States and arrested in 2005.

In Kabul, acting Afghan foreign minister Amir Khan Muttaqi hailed Noorzai’s release. “This will open a new chapter in the bilateral relations between the United States and Afghanistan,” he said at a news conference that was broadcast by local television outlets.

“We have been persistent in our efforts to free [Noorzai], and now he is with us in his own country,” Muttaqi continued. He said the two men were swapped at Kabul’s international airport.

Senior U.S. officials, who spoke to reporters on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive negotiations, said Frerichs was in “stable health” and was being offered U.S. support. They declined to provide details on where Frerichs was kept during his long captivity.

Frerichs’s release illustrates the delicate path the Biden administration must tread in its dealings with Afghanistan’s new leaders, whom the United States fought for two decades before they took over after the collapse of the U.S.-backed government.

The United States, like other nations, has not officially recognized the Taliban as Afghanistan’s government, but U.S. officials have engaged with it regularly as they seek to provide aid to Afghans in need and advocate for the rights of women and girls as the group imposes new restrictions on them.

The Frerichs deal comes weeks after the United States conducted a drone strike in downtown Kabul that killed al-Qaeda’s top militant, a development that highlighted the Taliban’s ongoing ties to terrorist organizations and posed a major setback to the potential normalization of U.S. ties with Afghanistan’s new leaders.

One U.S. official said the Biden administration told Taliban leaders after that strike that “we would hold them directly responsible if any harm were to come to Mark, and that the best way they might begin to rebuild trust with the United States with the world was to immediately release him.”

“If the Taliban are as interested as they say they are in normal relations with the international community, then that practice must resolutely end,” another official said, referring to hostage-taking.

Officials said there was a “narrow window of opportunity” following Biden’s initial decision this summer to potentially grant Noorzai clemency. They contrasted the conviction of Noorzai, who was alleged to have been distributing heroin in the United States since the 1990s, with the fact that Frerichs hadn’t been tried for any crime.

The swap is not the first the United States has undertaken in Afghanistan. In 2014, the Obama administration approved the exchange of five senior Afghans held at the Guantánamo Bay prison for U.S. soldier Bowe Bergdahl, then a Taliban hostage. Other Americans abducted in Afghanistan have escaped or been freed.

The officials declined to say whether other U.S. citizens are now being held by the Taliban. Last month, the Committee to Protect Journalists said an American filmmaker and an Afghan producer had been taken into Taliban custody. It was not immediately clear whether they were still being held.

The release of Frerichs comes as the Biden administration attempts to secure the release of two Americans it says are being wrongly held by Russia, potentially via another prisoner swap.

In July, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said officials had made Moscow a “substantial proposal” to secure the release of basketball star Brittney Griner and businessman Paul Whelan. The offer was believed to include the release of convicted Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, who is imprisoned in the United States. On Monday, the Russian government accused Washington of holding up talks to secure their releases.

Laurel Miller, who served as a senior official for Afghanistan during the Obama and Trump administrations, said that while Frerichs’s release was a positive development, it wouldn’t necessarily lead to progress on other issues the United States has cited as impediments to fuller global support of the Taliban government, like allowing all girls to return to school.

“It’s very difficult to see that this solves any problems in the U.S.-Taliban relationship other than the specific problem of Frerichs being wrongfully held as a hostage,” she said. “This was a transactional exchange.”

Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill)., whose office has described Frerichs as an “Illinoisan,” said she had been advocating for his release since the Trump administration. In a phone interview, she said she had urged the Biden administration to free Noorzai, arguing that the Afghan prisoner is elderly and in poor health.

“He’s being kept alive at taxpayers’ expense; we’re providing his health care,” Duckworth said she told U.S. officials. “And I’d rather have Mark come home.”

George reported from Islamabad, Pakistan, and Ryan reported from Washington. Karen DeYoung in Washington contributed to this report.

U.S. looks to trade former Afghan aircraft for counterterrorism help in Central Asia

September 20, 2022 Current News Articles

By LARA SELIGMAN

Politico

The U.S. is negotiating with Uzbekistan and Tajikistan to trade nearly 50 military aircraft flown across the border as the Afghan government collapsed last summer for help hunting terrorists in Afghanistan, according to two people with knowledge of the talks.

The fate of the U.S.-donated aircraft has been in limbo for more than a year, after Afghan air force pilots flew them to Uzbekistan and Tajikistan last August to escape Taliban capture. The Taliban have insisted the aircraft — a mixture of light attack planes and helicopters — are Afghan property and demanded them back. But Uzbek authorities say they are the property of the United States and will not be returned.

Little has been said publicly about the issue, in part because of the sensitivity of Afghan-Uzbek relations and Russia’s economic and military influence in Central Asia. But behind the scenes, U.S. officials have been quietly working to use the aircraft as leverage to gain a foothold in a region where the U.S. military no longer has a presence on the ground, according to a senior Defense Department official and a congressional aide with direct knowledge of the negotiations, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive talks.

The U.S. is planning to conduct an assessment of the aircraft to see if they are flyable, the official said. The goal is to provide a number of aircraft to the Uzbek and Tajik governments in exchange for an informal agreement to “deepen our security relationships” on border security and counterterrorism, the official said.

The deal could include anything from increased intelligence sharing to, in the long-term, basing troops or aircraft in those countries as a regional staging post for keeping an eye on terrorist activity in Afghanistan — something the Biden administration tried and failed to arrange before the withdrawal. Both countries border Afghanistan and are much closer than the American bases hundreds of miles away in the Middle East the U.S. military relies on for access to the country.

But for now, it’s more likely the agreement would involve access to information the Uzbeks and Tajiks have about terrorist networks in Afghanistan.

“If I give you an airplane, then I call you and say, ‘Hey, can you tell that guy who has a cousin in Afghanistan to go look at something’ — that might be the nature of the relationship. That’s a hypothetical,” the senior DoD official said. “It might not be that I want to fly from there, but it might be, do I have access to networks of people that have access into Afghanistan?”

The Biden administration touted the U.S. military’s ability to conduct “over-the-horizon” counterterrorism operations after American troops left Afghanistan last August. The U.S. has since conducted only one counterterrorism strike since then, a drone mission that killed al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in July.

As the Taliban overran Kabul last summer, Afghan air force pilots flew about 25 percent of the total usable aircraft — 46 total — to Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, according to a 2022 report assessing the collapse of the Afghan government. The aircraft included C-208 utility aircraft, A-29 Super Tucano light attack aircraft, as well as Mi-17, Mi-25 and UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, according to satellite images analyzed by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Most of the planes had been supplied by Washington to build up the capability of the Afghan air force.

Both Central Asian countries are “certainly very interested” in keeping those aircraft, the senior DoD official said.

As for any kind of basing agreement, the issue isn’t on the table at the moment, a DoD spokesperson said.

“DoD is not currently seeking any basing or permanent presence of U.S. military forces in Central Asia for any purpose,” spokesperson Lt. Col. Rob Lodewick said.

In the short-term, it’s unlikely either country would allow the U.S. to use their territory for basing given their close ties to Russia. Uzbekistan cooperated more closely with the U.S. after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, leasing the Karshi-Khanabad air base to the Americans from 2001 to 2005 for Afghanistan operations. But that agreement was shut down amid unrest and pressure from the Kremlin. Uzbekistan also has close ties to the Taliban, and Uzbek society views any intervention in the Afghanistan conflict negatively.

Further, any U.S.-basing agreement in Uzbekistan would require a change to Uzbek law, which stipulates that the country cannot host any foreign military base on its territory.

Tajikistan, too, has a history of working with Washington, including permitting U.S. military planes to refuel at the country’s airports after the 9/11 attacks. But more recently, relations with Washington have been frosty, and the economy is also heavily dependent on both Russia and China. On the military front, Tajikistan is a member of the Collective Security Treaty Organization, a military alliance of selected former Soviet states, and already hosts a Russian military base on its territory.

However, of the Central Asian states, Tajikistan is “by far the most cooperative” on counterterrorism, the congressional aide said, noting that the country collaborates with the U.S. on border security and training.

A State Department spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

Faiq to Represent Afghanistan in UN General Debate of 77th Session

September 20, 2022 Current News Articles

Waheeda Hasan

Tolo News

20 September 2022

UN Chief Calls on Afghan Authorities to Open Girls’ School

September 20, 2022 Current News Articles

By Asma Saayin

Tolo News

20 September 2022

US-Taliban prisoner swap: Who are Mark Frerichs, Bashir Noorzai?

September 20, 2022 Current News Articles

By Al Jazeera Staff

Al Jazeera

The US hails the release of navy veteran Mark Frerichs by Afghanistan, exchanged for convicted drug trafficker Bashir Noorzai.

Washington, DC – The United States has freed a convicted Afghan druglord imprisoned in the US in a prisoner swap with the Taliban that saw the release of a US Navy veteran held in Afghanistan since 2020.

US President Joe Biden on Monday welcomed the release of Mark Frerichs, who was abducted while working as a civil engineer in Afghanistan.

But he acknowledged that the deal “required difficult decisions”, referring to the release of Bashir Noorzai, a Taliban ally who was serving a life sentence in a US prison on drug charges.

The prisoner exchange comes more than a year after the Taliban took over the Afghan capital amid the withdrawal of US troops in August 2021.

Washington has not recognised the Taliban government. But on Monday, officials in both countries said the prisoner swap was the result of lengthy negotiations, suggesting that communication channels between the Biden administration and the Taliban are open.

Here, Al Jazeera takes a look at who Frerichs and Noorzai are, and the efforts that led to their release.

Bashir Noorzai

Noorzai, also known as Hajji Bashir, is a tribal leader in Afghanistan’s southern Kandahar province.
According to the US government, he owned poppy fields and laboratories for the production of heroin and oversaw a global drug operation. US officials have described him as the “Pablo Escobar of heroin trafficking in Asia”, comparing him to an infamous Colombian druglord.
Noorzai was accused of having close personal ties with the Taliban’s late co-founder Mullah Omar. US prosecutors say he financially supported the Taliban in exchange for allowing his drug business to continue.
He was arrested in 2005 in the US, where his lawyers said he planned to talk with federal officials. It is not clear in what capacity he was communicating with US authorities at that time.
In 2008, Noorzai was convicted of drug-related conspiracy charges. A year later, he was sentenced to life in prison.
“Bashir Noorzai’s worldwide narcotics network supported a Taliban regime that made Afghanistan a breeding ground for international terrorism, a legacy that continues to destabilize the region,” a US Justice Department official said in a statement at that time. “Today’s sentence definitively puts an end to Noorzai’s long criminal career.”
Noorzai’s lawyers have denied the allegations against him, arguing that he was lured into the US on the promise that he would not be arrested.

Mark Frerichs

Frerichs, 60, is a navy veteran and civil engineer who worked as a civilian contractor in Afghanistan until he was abducted in Khost province, southeast of Kabul, in early 2020.
While the circumstances of his kidnapping remain unclear, unidentified US officials have told news outlets that they believe he was abducted by the Taliban-aligned Haqqani Network.
The Associated Press news agency reported in 2020 that US forces conducted a failed rescue operation to free Frerichs that year.
In a video filmed late in 2021 and made public in April, Frerichs pleaded for his release, saying he wanted to be reunited with his family. “I’d like to ask the leadership of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, please, release me,” he said.
Frerichs’s family called on the Biden administration earlier this year to free Noorzai – a known key demand of the Taliban – to secure the US Navy veteran’s release.
“I understand Noorzai is a convicted criminal … But I know we have held him for more than 16 years and that others who have done a lot worse have been sent home. It’s normal for prisoners to be returned after wars end,” Frerichs’s sister Charlene Cakora wrote in the Washington Post in January.
Lawmakers from Frerichs’s home state of Illinois had also urged Biden to “push on every reasonable lever” to ensure his release. Frerichs is from Lombard, a town near Chicago.
Frerichs’s family defended the prisoner swap deal on Monday. “My brother is alive and safe because President Biden took action. There were some folks arguing against the deal that brought Mark home, but President Biden did what was right. He saved the life of an innocent American veteran,” Cakora said in a statement, as reported by several US news outlets.

SOURCE: AL JAZEERA

Uzbek President Calls for Constructive Contact With Kabul

September 16, 2022 Current News Articles

Farshad Daryosh

Tolo News 16 Sept 2022

Journalists in Afghanistan Under Threat: US Embassy

September 16, 2022 Current News Articles

Nazir Shinwari

Tolo News

16 Sept 2022

Declassified report shows US predictions of IS group threat

September 16, 2022 Current News Articles

By NOMAAN MERCHANT

Associated Press

16 September 2022

WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. intelligence officials predicted two years ago that the Islamic State group would likely regain much of its former strength and global influence, particularly if American and other Western forces reduced their role in countering the extremist movement, according to a newly declassified report.

Analysts said many of the judgments in the 2020 report appear prescient today, particularly as the group is resurgent in Afghanistan following President Joe Biden’s withdrawal of American forces last year.

The Islamic State group is no longer controlling huge swaths of territory or staging attacks in the United States as it did several years ago before a major U.S.-led offensive. But it is now slowly rebuilding some core capabilities in Iraq and Syria and increasingly fighting local governments in places including Afghanistan, where an affiliate of the IS group, also known by the acronym ISIS, is fighting the ruling Taliban following the U.S. withdrawal.

“If the United States and our partners pull back or withdraw further from areas where ISIS is active, the group’s trajectory will increasingly depend on local governments’ will and capability to fill the resulting security voids,” says the report, originally published in classified form in May 2020, months after then-President Donald Trump’s administration reached an agreement with the Taliban to pull out American troops.

Biden and top national security officials have cited the recent strike killing al-Qaida head Ayman al-Zawahri as evidence that America maintains an “over-the-horizon” counterterrorism capacity in Afghanistan after the withdrawal. U.S. special forces also killed the head of the Islamic State group in a February raid in northwest Syria.

“The fact of those operations are, I think, reflective how serious this threat environment remains,” said Christy Abizaid, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, on Thursday. But she added that analysts believe the terrorist threat to the U.S. homeland is “less acute than we’ve seen it” at any time since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Analysts have recently seen growth in IS group branches around the world, particularly in Africa, said Abizaid, who spoke at the Intelligence and National Security Summit outside Washington.

“Afghanistan is a really interesting story along those lines about where the ISIS affiliate is and how we continue to be concerned about it,” she said.

Some outside analysts say al-Zawahri’s apparent presence in downtown Kabul suggests that extremist groups are more comfortable operating in Afghanistan — and that it will be tougher to counter the Islamic State group as it grows across the country.

Bruce Hoffman, senior fellow for counterterrorism at the Washington-based Council on Foreign Relations, called the May 2020 report “very clear-eyed and forthright.”

“It’s very different operating against ISIS in the isolated mountain redoubts or deep valleys of Afghanistan,” he said. “The advantages that enabled us to so brilliantly take out al-Zawahri, I would guess, are absent outside of Kabul.”

While the White House last month released declassified points from an intelligence assessment saying al-Qaida had not reconstituted in Afghanistan, the points did not address the Islamic State in Khorasan, the local IS group affiliate. IS-K was responsible for killing 13 U.S. troops outside the Kabul airport during the withdrawal and has continued to mount an insurgency against the Taliban now in control of the country.

The National Security Council said in a statement that the U.S. is working to deny “ISIS-K access to financing, disrupt and deter foreign terrorist fighters from reaching Afghanistan and the region, and counter ISIS-K’s violent extremism.”

The May 2020 report was declassified this August and published online last week by the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The ODNI periodically declassifies and releases older intelligence assessments. A spokesperson for the ODNI’s National Counterterrorism Center declined to answer questions about the assessment or address the intelligence community’s current view on the Islamic State group.

The report predicts that the Islamic State group’s global branches are likely to increase its “capability to conduct attacks in many regions of the world, including the West.” The U.S. would more likely face attacks from people inspired by the group’s ideology than plots directed or supported by the group, the report said.

Pressure by local governments where the IS group is active and their international partners “almost certainly will shape the scale of ISIS’ resurgence in Iraq and Syria and its expansion worldwide,” the report said.

Experts commonly agree with the report’s predictions, said Colin Clarke, an expert on counterterrorism who is director of research for The Soufan Group, an intelligence and security consultancy. But top intelligence analysts would have been involved in drafting and reviewing the assessment, formally known as a national intelligence estimate, he said.

Clarke noted several recent IS-linked attacks in Afghanistan, including an apparent suicide bombing outside the Russian embassy in Kabul that killed two diplomats, as well as ongoing fighting between militants and U.S.-backed forces at a sprawling camp in Syria.

“There are some things that have happened in the last few weeks,” he said, “that make you wonder if the situation is not more dire than is being presented.”

‘Lift all restrictions’

Bashir Noorzai

Mark Frerichs

By NOMAAN MERCHANT

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