It’s approaching six months since the Taliban took over the Afghan capital, Kabul, on August 15. And in the months since the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, neighboring China has taken a keen interest in the fate of the Central Asian country.

The interest, in fact, predated the Taliban takeover. In late July, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and a nine-member Taliban delegation met in the northern Chinese city of Tianjin. The meeting, some analysts said at the time, underscored Beijing’s warming ties with the Islamist group and the Taliban’s growing clout on the global stage.

In addition, last October, Foreign Minister Wang spoke about China’s expectations for Afghanistan’s future after he had met with the Taliban interim government representatives in Doha, Qatar, where the two parties “decided to establish a working-level mechanism.”

China’s expectations, Wang said, include the following: Build a more inclusive political structure in which all ethnic groups and factions play a part; implement more moderate foreign and domestic policies, including the protection of women’s rights; “make a clear break with all terrorist forces, including the Islamic State and the East Turkestan Islamic Movement”; and pursue a peaceful foreign policy, especially with neighboring countries.

However, since the Taliban regained control of the country — two decades after the U.S. and its allies had toppled it in 2001 — no country, including China, has officially recognized its legitimacy.

Beijing, though, according to experts, has participated in friendly bilateral interaction with Kabul to build a functioning relationship with Taliban authorities.

“What has been surprising has been China’s willingness to be seen so publicly as doing this and being the most forward of Afghanistan’s many neighbors to be doing this,” said Raffaello Pantucci, a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore.

The Taliban’s appointment of a new ambassador to Beijing this month reflects pragmatism by the leaders of the Islamist group, who see China as an important partner, Pantucci told VOA.

After the Taliban had appointed its ambassador to Beijing, the former Afghan ambassador to China, Javid Ahmad Qaem, resigned from his job through a handover note posted on Twitter on January 9. 

On January 17, Qaem told VOA Afghan Service that Beijing “agreed” with the new appointment.

“Now that they (the Taliban) introduced someone and China has agreed to it, it is clear that it was the Chinese government’s decision,” Qaem told VOA, adding that it could not be possible without China’s approval.

Beijing has also been speaking up for the Taliban on international stages, Pantucci said.

“Additionally, we have seen Beijing quite actively lobby for the Taliban authorities in international formats like the U.N. as well as more widely in advance of desired Taliban goals.”

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called Wednesday to unfreeze Afghan assets overseas, a move China’s Ambassador Zhang Jun spoke out in support of in front of the Security Council. Imposing sanctions and freezing assets “are no less lethal than military intervention,” Zhang said, according to The Associated Press.

Some $9.5 billion of Afghanistan’s central bank assets have been sanctioned by the U.S. since the Taliban regained control of Kabul last August, overthrowing the internationally recognized former Afghan government.

“We once again call for the unfreezing of Afghanistan’s overseas assets as soon as possible,” Zhang said during last month’s U.N. Security Council meeting. “These assets should be returned to their real owners and cannot be used as a bargaining chip for threats or coercion.”

According to Michael Kugelman, the deputy director of the Asia Program and senior associate for South Asia at the Wilson Center, this “cordiality” between China and the Taliban should not be viewed as a prelude to recognition.

“China is still a long way off from that, and it’s unlikely to take that step unless several other countries do first, or at the same time,” Kugelman told VOA.

“No matter how repressive the Taliban may be,” Kugelman said, Beijing will be comfortable engaging with the Taliban if China concludes it is safe on the ground.

“This means that its interests in Afghanistan are shaped by security conditions and not by considerations about human rights and inclusivity,” Kugelman told VOA. “This is especially the case for China, an authoritarian state that prizes stability above all else.”

The U.S. and other Western countries, as well as rights groups such as Human Rights Watch, have called on the Taliban to respect the rights of women and minorities in Afghanistan and form an inclusive government.

According to Andrew Small, a senior transatlantic fellow with the Asia Program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, China had hoped for a government in Afghanistan that, although Taliban-dominated, could “tick enough boxes with the international community” to achieve diplomatic recognition. 

“It means that Beijing faces an operating context there that still seems to be politically provisional and remains constrained by economic sanctions,” Small told VOA.

Although China is willing to give small volumes of humanitarian aid in the short term and provide a little bit more economic support, Beijing is still “uncertain how the Taliban’s dealings with militant groups in the region” will develop, Small said.

China still has “questions about what they (the Taliban) are willing to do with Uyghur fighters.”

The U.N. reported last year that a few hundred Uyghur Muslim militants were in Afghanistan. They call themselves the Turkestan Islamic Party, which is also known as the Eastern Turkestan Islamic Movement, or ETIM, a group founded in the late 1990s in Afghanistan by exiled Uyghurs from China’s Xinjiang region, which shares a border with Afghanistan.

China has asked the Taliban to curb the insurgency of the ETIM members in Afghanistan. In an interview with China state media Global Times in September, a Taliban spokesperson Suhail Shaheen said many Uyghur fighters had left his country on its request.

“I know after the Doha (Qatar) agreement, many have left Afghanistan, because we categorically said that there is no place for anyone to use Afghanistan against other countries, including neighboring countries,” Shaheen told the Global Times.

By supporting and playing the long game with the Taliban, China is building a strong diplomatic foundation with the regime, said Hasan Karrar, who specializes in modern Chinese and Central Asian history at the Lahore University of Management Sciences in Pakistan.

“But also [Beijing is] remaining mindful of why the Taliban remain isolated internationally.” Karrar told VOA. “For example, I do not believe China can ignore the fact that girls can’t go to school in the new Afghanistan.”

Roshan Noorzai from VOA’s Afghan Service contributed to this story.
…

The Taliban have arrested two journalists working for a local news channel in Afghanistan, which has seen an increase in assaults on dissent since the Islamist group seized power last August. 

The arrests come days after two women activists went missing in the capital, Kabul, amid accusations they are being held by the Taliban.

Local press freedom advocates alleged Ariana TV reporters Waris Hasrat and Aslam Hijab were picked up by Taliban forces on Monday afternoon while they were leaving office for lunch in the capital. 

“The reason for the arrest of these reporters is not yet clear,” Free Speech Hub, an independent Afghan group working for press freedom, said in a statement.

The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) demanded Tuesday the Taliban address the journalists’ detention and make clear the whereabouts of the missing women activists. 

“Mounting concern about restrictions on media & free expression. UN urges Taliban to make public why they detained these @ArianaNews_ reporters & to respect Afghan’s rights,” UNAMA said on Twitter. 

Taliban officials have not yet commented on the incident. Ariana TV officials said the Taliban “have assured us of comprehensive investigation.” 

Amnesty International demanded Tuesday the Islamist rulers “unconditionally and immediately” release the two journalists.

“The arbitrary arrest of two Ariana News journalists by the Taliban is unjustifiable. Such escalating attacks on media freedom are a grave threat to the right to freedom of expression,” Amnesty wrote on Twitter. “The Int’l community must call on the Taliban to end human rights violations & hold them accountable,” said the global rights defender.

The female activists went missing two weeks ago after taking part in a protest rally in Kabul calling for women’s rights and denouncing the Taliban’s directive for women to wear hijabs. 

Taliban authorities have denied knowledge of the women’s whereabouts, saying an investigation is underway into the incident. 

The Islamist group has cracked down on human rights activists, forcefully dispersed protests against their regime and subjected several journalists to torture for covering demonstrations not approved by authorities. 

Last week, the Taliban blocked an Afghan media advocacy group from holding a press conference in Kabul, drawing international condemnation. 

The United States and other countries have not yet recognized the Taliban as the de facto government of Afghanistan.

The international community has been pressing the Islamist group to deliver on pledges that it would respect human rights, especially those of women, and govern the country through a broad-based government.

But critics say the Taliban have reneged on their commitments and they are slowly reintroducing restrictions they had placed on women during the hardline group’s previous regime in Kabul from 1996 to 2001. 

The alleged human rights violations have discouraged foreign governments from directly engaging with the Taliban, restoring financial aid to Afghanistan, removing international sanctions and unblocking billions of dollars in Afghan national assets held at the U.S. Federal Reserve. 

These financial restrictions have plunged the Afghan economy into an unprecedented turmoil, worsening an already dire humanitarian crisis in the war-torn country.

The United Nations said in a report last week that it had received “credible allegations” that more than 100 members of the former Afghan government have been killed since the Taliban took over the country. 

The report quoted U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres as saying that that “more than two-thirds” of the victims were alleged to result from extrajudicial killings by the Taliban or its affiliates, despite the Taliban’s announcement of “general amnesties” for those affiliated with the former government and U.S.-led coalition forces. 

The Taliban rejected the report. “After a general amnesty, no one is allowed to harm anyone,” Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid claimed. If any of the alleged killings were a result of personal revenge, they will investigate and punish the perpetrators, Mujahid added. 

Some information for this story came from the Agence France-Presse. 
…

India’s government has pledged to spend billions of dollars on public infrastructure to reboot an economy that is bouncing back from the massive contraction it suffered during the novel coronavirus pandemic. But concerns remain about an uneven pace of growth that has seen big businesses flourish but its vast unorganized sector struggle.

Asia’s third largest economy is projected to grow at 8% to 8.5% this year, according to government figures.

The strong economic recovery began last year despite a deadly second wave of COVID with growth estimated at 9.2% in the financial year that will end in March. 

“The economy has shown strong resilience to come out of the effects of the pandemic with high growth,” Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said as she presented the country’s annual budget Tuesday. “However, we need to sustain that level to make up for the setback of 2020-21.”

The budget increases spending to $533 billion in the coming year from $477 billion. 

She announced that the government would spend $2.7 billion to build highways and $6.4 billion on housing for the poor. It will also expand rail networks, ports and airports, manufacture energy efficient trains and extend credit guarantees to small businesses.

Sitharaman said climate action is a priority and promised to focus on electric mobility and solar power in a bid to reduce the country’s carbon emissions.

“I am conscious of the need to nurture growth through public investment to become stronger and more sustainable,” Sitharaman said.

Economists have welcomed the government’s decision to step up spending. “The decision to increase public investment to 2.9% of gross domestic product, is rock solid and good news and should attract private investment into infrastructure,” says Santosh Mehrotra, a human development economist and author of the book “Reviving Jobs: An Agenda for Growth.”  

According to the finance minister, the new investments would help create six million jobs over the next five years. 

Mehrotra however points out that this fails to address the scale of the challenge India faces. “The unemployment crisis we face is huge. Five to six million people join the labor force every year. That is on top of the unemployed we already have. That number was 30 million in the year 2019 and it has only grown post the pandemic by another 10 million,” says Mehrotra. “And we also have millions who want to come out of agriculture into non-farming jobs.”  

The unemployment challenge was underlined last week by violent protests by job seekers that erupted in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. 

Several economists point out that while India’s economy has rebounded, growth has not percolated down as its vast informal sector, which provides most livelihoods, continues to reel under the impact of long shutdowns imposed when infections spiraled during the last two years. Tens of thousands of small enterprises have shut down. That has widened income inequalities with an estimated 80% of households losing incomes during the pandemic.

But there is optimism as a third wave of the pandemic driven by the omicron variant begins to recede. India’s vaccination program has made significant progress since July last year — 75% of adults are fully inoculated. That is creating confidence in opening most sectors of the economy.

“The economy is in a good place to grow strongly into the next year or two,” the finance ministry’s principal economic advisor, Sanjeev Sanyal, said while presenting the country’s economic survey on Monday.

India’s economic growth two years into the pandemic is seen as the fastest among major economies in the world. The revival comes after its economy shrank in 2020 by 6.6% — the sharpest dip in 40 years that came after a long and stringent shutdown.

India also said the country’s central bank will introduce a “digital rupee” this year using blockchain technology, becoming one of the first major countries to do so and said it will levy a 30% tax on income from virtual digital assets.
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On the first anniversary of the February 1 military coup in Myanmar, the United States announced more sanctions on individuals and entities associated with the regime, the Treasury Department said Monday.

The UK and Canada also announced sanctions.

“One year after the coup, the United States, along with allies in the United Kingdom and Canada, stands with the people of Burma as they seek freedom and democracy,” said Brian Nelson, the Treasury undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence in a statement. “We will continue to target those responsible for the coup and ongoing violence, enablers of the regime’s brutal repression, and their financial supporters.”

Among those sanctioned were Union Attorney General Thida Oo, Supreme Court Chief Justice Tun Tun Oo, and Chairman of the Anti-Corruption Commission Tin Oo.

Two entities sanctioned are KT Services & Logistics Company Limited and the Directorate of Procurement of the Commander-In-Chief of Defense Services, which the U.S. says support the military regime.

“The United States will continue to work with our international partners to address human rights abuses and press the regime to cease the violence, release all those unjustly detained, allow unhindered humanitarian access, and restore Burma’s path to democracy,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement, using an older name for the country.

The individuals and entities targeted will have any assets in the U.S. restricted or blocked.

The military seized power in a February 1, 2021 coup, overthrowing the civilian government and detaining de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi and other high-ranking officials.

The U.S. has accused the regime of engaging in “brutal acts of violence against pro-democracy protesters.” An estimated 1,500 people have been killed in violent protests.

The U.S. government has called for the immediate release of Suu Kyi, leader of the National League for Democracy Party, ousted President Win Myint, and protesters, journalists and human rights activists it says have been unjustly detained since the coup.

Military officials claimed widespread fraud in the November 2020 general election, which Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy won in a landslide, as justification for the February takeover. The fraud allegations have been denied by Myanmar’s electoral commission.

The political unrest on top of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic have caused economic hardship in Myanmar with rising food prices and increasing unemployment. 
…

In the streets around a revered religious site in the Indian city of Mathura where a temple and mosque stand side-by-side, the handful of Muslim restaurants that remain are mostly empty or shuttered. 

A ban on meat last year by the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh state, a Hindu monk who issued the order on religious grounds, has decimated their trade. 

Now the saffron-clad Yogi Adityanath, up for re-election in key state polls next month, has turned his attention to the temple itself, suggesting he will champion the Hindu cause in a long-running dispute with Muslims over who owns the site.   

The issue has become a central part of the ruling party’s campaign to extend its grip on power in Uttar Pradesh, home to 200 million people and the bellwether of national politics. 

Hindus and Muslims have argued for decades over who should control the site, echoing other disputes in India that have, on occasions, flared into deadly riots between the two communities. 

While communal violence in India is sporadic, clashes erupted across the country in early 2020 over a citizenship law that Muslims said was discriminatory. Dozens of people died. 

Now mention of the Mathura dispute during campaign rallies and on social media has the city’s Muslims worried, according to interviews with more than 20 residents.   

“An old case which has been settled … is being revived because we have a new, triumphalist Hinduism,” said Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, author of several books on Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Hindu nationalist movement. 

“There is a greater emphasis on playing the temple card.” 

Opinion polls suggest that the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), to which Adityanath belongs, will win the vote in Uttar Pradesh, despite broad discontent over the economy and the government’s handling of the pandemic.   

The chief minister, seen by some analysts as a potential successor to Modi, has cast the ballot as “80% versus 20%”, figures he did not fully explain. The percentages closely match the Hindu and Muslim share of the population across the state. 

Adityanath’s office did not respond to a request for comment on the situation in Mathura.   

‘Nothing to fear’ 

The BJP swept to power in Uttar Pradesh on a Hindu-first agenda in 2017 and did not field a single Muslim candidate. 

Indians vote for powerful state legislatures separately from nationwide parliamentary elections. 

That victory reflected the party’s dominance nationally, since Modi stormed to power in 2014 after appealing to the Hindu majority. 

The main opposition Congress party complains that by putting Hindus first, he and the BJP discriminate against minorities and risk stoking violence. Modi has defended his record and says his economic and social policies benefit all Indians. 

Jamal Siddiqui, head of the BJP’s minority commission, said the party was working to increase the number of minority candidates in Uttar Pradesh and the four other states going to the polls next month. 

“I hope the minority community will participate both in elections and in government,” he told Reuters. “The Modi government has protected religious sites for all religions. Now, 

instead of being afraid of saffron, Muslims are coming closer.” 

Suspicion of the BJP among Muslims in Mathura had been caused by misleading claims from opposition parties, Siddiqi added.   

‘No compromise’ 

Among the holiest cities in Hinduism, Mathura, some 150 km south of New Delhi, is believed to be the birthplace of Krishna, one of the most important Hindu deities. 

A temple standing on the reputed site of his birth was razed and replaced by a mosque, known as the Shahi Eidgah, in the 17th century during the Islamic Mughal empire. A Hindu temple complex built in the 1950s now backs on to the mosque. 

An agreement was brokered in 1968 to settle the use of the land, and the two structures stood like “two sisters” until legal action to demolish the mosque began in 2020, said Z. Hassan, president of the trust that runs the Eidgah. 

“I have been here for 55 years. I have not felt tension between Hindus and Muslims,” he said. “Only in the last few years this idea has come that there are two communities.”

The case, brought to a local court by several Hindu priests, says the 1968 agreement was fraudulent. 

“This land is very important to us,” said Vishnu Jain, the lawyer acting for the petitioners. “I don’t believe in any kind of dialogue. There is only one compromise which can happen — that they will be out of this property.” 

Both sides expect the case to last for years. 

The local dispute has been taken up by Adityanath and several other BJP leaders during campaigning. 

He told a rally last month that work on constructing a temple in Mathura, along the lines of a similar development in Ayodhya, was “in progress”, without giving more detail. 

Ayodhya was the scene of communal violence in 1992 and 1993 in which more than 2,000 people died, after a mob demolished the 16th century Babri Masjid mosque that many Hindus claimed was on the birthplace of Lord Rama —another important deity. 

A court ruling allowing the construction of a temple on the site of the Babri Masjid was a major campaign issue in the 2019 general election, when the BJP increased its majority.   

‘The land is ours’

Many Hindu residents of Mathura support plans to reclaim the land from the mosque. 

“The land is ours and should be given back,” said Bipin Goswami, an 19-year-old with his face daubed saffron with sandalwood paste. 

Local authorities mobilized thousands of security personnel in December after fringe Hindu groups announced an attempt to place a statue of Krishna inside the mosque on the anniversary of the Babri Masjid’s destruction.   

The attempt failed, but at the mosque, ringed with barbed wire and lookout towers since the early 1990s, police now check the ID cards of everyone entering the complex. 

Aved Khan, a 30-year-old Muslim who has a food cart in Mathura, said he changed the name of his business from Srinath Dosa to American Dosa Corner after a group of men demanded that he stop using a Hindu name. 

“You are Muslim, how can you have this name?” one of the men asked, tearing down the stall’s signs, according to a police report of the incident in August. 

Rajesh Mani Tripathi, national president of the Shri Krishna Janmabhoomi Mukti Dal — a hardline Hindu group that was also behind the attempt to install the statue — told Reuters he was one of the men involved in the altercation. 

“If he was Muslim then he should write his name on the banner and should not cheat people by mentioning a Hindu name,” he said. 

Muslims in Mathura also complained about Adityanath’s decision in September to ban meat within a 3 km radius of the temple. 

At the empty Royal Restaurant, one of the few in the area remaining open, cooks fashion traditional lamb kebabs and chicken tikka out of soya. 

“Before the BJP there was no tension here,” said Sajid Anwar, standing before his shuttered Labbaik Restaurant. 

Anwar said there was no demand for vegetarian food among Muslims. He is waiting for the election results before deciding  whether to close permanently. 

“If Yogi returns, I will have to find another trade.” 

(Reporting by Alasdair Pal in Mathura and Saurabh Sharma in Lucknow; Editing by Mike Collett-White) 
…

The United Nations has received “credible allegations” that more than 100 former members of the Afghan government, its security forces and those who worked with international troops have been killed since the Taliban took over the country Aug. 15, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres says.

In a report obtained Sunday by The Associated Press, Guterres said that “more than two-thirds” of the victims were alleged to result from extrajudicial killings by the Taliban or its affiliates, despite the Taliban’s announcement of “general amnesties” for those affiliated with the former government and U.S.-led coalition forces.

The U.N. political mission in Afghanistan also received “credible allegations of extrajudicial killings of at least 50 individuals suspected of affiliation with ISIL-KP,” the Islamic State extremist group operating in Afghanistan, Guterres said in the report to U.N. Security Council.

He added that despite Taliban assurances, the U.N. political mission has also received credible allegations “of enforced disappearances and other violations impacting the right to life and physical integrity” of former government and coalition members.

Guterres said human rights defenders and media workers also continue “to come under attack, intimidation, harassment, arbitrary arrest, ill-treatment and killings.”

Eight civil society activists were killed, including three by the Taliban and three by Islamic State extremists, and 10 were subjected to temporary arrests, beatings and threats by the Taliban, he said. Two journalists were killed — one by IS — and two were injured by unknown armed men.

The secretary-general said the U.N. missions documented 44 cases of temporary arrests, beatings and threats of intimidation, 42 of them by the Taliban.

The Taliban overran most of Afghanistan as U.S. and NATO forces were in the final stages of their chaotic withdrawal from the country after 20 years. They entered Kabul on Aug. 15 without any resistance from the Afghan army or the country’s president, Ashraf Ghani, who fled. 

The Taliban initially promised a general amnesty for those linked to the former government and international forces, and tolerance and inclusiveness toward women and ethnic minorities. However, the Taliban have renewed restrictions on women and appointed an all-male government, which have met with dismay by the international community.

Afghanistan’s aid-dependent economy was already stumbling when the Taliban seized power, and the international community froze Afghanistan’s assets abroad and halted economic support, recalling the Taliban’s reputation for brutality during its 1996-2001 rule and refusal to educate girls and allow women to work.

Guterres said: “The situation in Afghanistan remains precarious and uncertain six months after the Taliban takeover as the multiple political, socio-economic and humanitarian shocks reverberate across the country.”

He said Afghanistan today faces multiple crises: a growing humanitarian emergency, a massive economic contraction, the crippling of its banking and financial systems, the worst drought in 27 years, and the Taliban’s failure to form an inclusive government and restore the rights of girls to education and women to work.

“An estimated 22.8 million people are projected to be in crisis' andemergency’ levels of food insecurity until March 2022,” the U.N. chief said. “Almost 9 million of these will be at `emergency’ levels of food insecurity -– the highest number in the world. Half of all children under five are facing acute malnutrition.”

On a positive note, Guterres reported “a significant decline” in the overall number of conflict-related security incidents as well as civilian casualties since the Taliban takeover. The U.N. recorded 985 security-related incidents between Aug. 19 and Dec. 31, a 91% decrease compared to the same period in 2020, he said.

The eastern, central, southern and western regions accounted for 75% of all recorded incidents, he said, with Nangarhar, Kabul, Kunar and Kandahar ranking as the most conflict-affected provinces. 

Despite the reduction in violence, Guterres said the Taliban face several challenges, including rising attacks against their members.

“Some are attributed to the National Resistance Front comprising some Afghan opposition figures, and those associated with the former government,” he said. “These groups have been primarily operating in Panjshir Province and Baghlan’s Andarab District but have not made significant territorial inroads” though “armed clashes are regularly documented, along with forced displacement and communication outages.”

Guterres said intra-Taliban tensions along ethnic lines and competition over jobs have also resulted in violence, pointing to armed clashes on Nov. 4 between between Taliban forces in Bamyan city.

In the report, the secretary-general proposed priorities for the U.N. political mission in the current environment, urged international support to prevent widespread hunger and the country’s economic collapse, and urged the Taliban to guarantee women’s rights and human rights.
…

The Taliban announced Sunday they would start reopening all public universities in Afghanistan from this week, more than five months after the Islamist group retook control of the war-torn country.

Abdul Baqi Haqqani, the minister for higher education, said by video that students in Afghan provinces with a warm climate would return to classes on Wednesday, while universities in the colder areas, including Kabul, will reopen February 26.

Haqqani did not elaborate, but in his earlier statements the minister had announced that gender segregation would be enforced in public universities in line with Sharia or Islamic law before reopening them. He also said at the time that hijabs would be mandatory for female students.

Sunday’s announcement comes as the Taliban face pressure from the international community to respect the human rights of all Afghans, especially those of women, and allow all girls to receive an education. 

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres renewed his call for the Taliban earlier on Sunday to uphold pledges to respect human rights. 

“In Afghanistan, women & girls are once again being denied their rights to education, employment & equal justice,” Guterres tweeted on Sunday. “To demonstrate a real commitment to be a part of the global community, the Taliban must recognize & uphold the basic human rights that belong to every girl & woman.”

In mid-September, the Taliban allowed female students to resume classes in some 150 private universities under a strictly gender-segregated classroom system.

Afghan public and private universities were co-educational before the Taliban takeover, with males and females studying side by side, and women didn’t have to abide by a dress code. In elementary and high schools, however, girls and boys were taught separately until the Islamist group regained power last August. 

“Co-education is in conflict with the principles of Islam and with national values and it is against the traditions of Afghans as well,” Haqqani said in a September news conference in Kabul.

While the Taliban’s male-only caretaker government opened secondary schools for boys in early September, most girls across Afghanistan are still waiting for official permission to continue their education. 

The Taliban have pledged that all girls will be allowed to go back to the classroom in March when the new school year begins in the country.

Leaders of the ruling Islamist group have repeatedly rejected as false propaganda that they oppose education for women, saying financial constraints and a lack of an “Islamic environment” in educational institutions were preventing them from letting women resume their studies.

No country has yet recognized the Taliban as the legitimate rulers of Afghanistan. 

The global community has been watching closely to see whether the Islamist group might rule the country differently from its first time in power in the late 1990s, when girls were banned from attending schools and women from leaving home unless accompanied by a close male relative.
…

She reported on the difficult conditions mothers and babies face just to survive in desperate Afghanistan. Now, a pregnant New Zealand reporter has chosen Kabul as a temporary base for her uphill fight to return home because of her country’s strict COVID-19 entry rules.

Charlotte Bellis, 35, is expecting her first child with her partner, freelance photographer Jim Huylebroek, a Belgium native who has lived in Afghanistan for two years. Bellis, who is 25 weeks pregnant with a daughter, told The Associated Press on Sunday that each day is a battle. 

She said she has been vaccinated three times and is ready to isolate herself upon her return to New Zealand. “This is ridiculous. It is my legal right to go to New Zealand, where I have health care, where I have family. All my support is there,” she said.

Bellis first wrote about her difficulties in a column published in The New Zealand Herald on Saturday. New Zealand’s COVID-19 response minister, Chris Hipkins, told the Herald his office had asked officials to check whether they followed the proper procedures in Bellis’s case, “which appeared at first sight to warrant further explanation.”

Bellis had worked as an Afghanistan correspondent for Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based satellite station. In November, she resigned from Al Jazeera which is based in the Middle Eastern state of Qatar, because it is illegal to be pregnant and unmarried in Qatar. Al Jazeera did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Bellis then flew to Belgium, trying to get residency there, but said the length of the process would have left her in the country with an expired visa. She said she could have hopped from country to country on tourist visas while she waited to have her baby. She said this would have meant spending money on hotels without support or health care, while she fought to return to New Zealand.

In the end, she and her partner returned to Afghanistan because they had a visa, felt welcome and from there could wage her battle to return to her home. They have a house in Afghanistan and after “evaluating all of our options,” returned to Kabul, she said.

Bellis said she has set herself a deadline of leaving Afghanistan once she is 30 weeks pregnant, to protect the health of herself and her baby. “I am giving myself to the end of February,” she said. At that time, she will still have more than a month left on her Belgium visa so that she can re-enter the country, if she fails to get back to New Zealand by that time.

She said she tries to stay calm as she wages a paper war with New Zealand’s quarantine system, but that she worries about how the stress she has been under will impact her baby.

“I am very concerned about a premature birth and . . . also the implication of stress,” she said. 

Bellis has found an Afghan gynecologist, who promised she could call her if she wakes up in the night with a problem. Bellis toured the doctor’s clinic which has basic facilities, including one incubator. The doctor told her the incubator is often occupied.

Bellis has found a lawyer who is handling her case pro bono and has submitted more than 60 documents to the New Zealand government, answered countless questions, only to be rejected twice for entry to her home country. 

On Sunday, she received her most recent email from the New Zealand government, this one telling her to apply as a person in danger and that this will get her home, she said. Bellis said she was rejected earlier because her pregnancy didn’t meet the criteria of “threshold of critical time threat.”]

“If I don’t meet the threshold as a pregnant woman then who does?” she asked.

Bellis said that prior to returning to Afghanistan, she sought permission from the Taliban. She said she had feared arriving “with a little bump and not married” could be problematic.

Instead, the Taliban response was immediate and positive.

“I appreciate this isn’t official Taliban policy, but they were very generous and kind. They said, ‘You are safe here, congratulations, we welcome you,’ ” said Bellis.

As she ponders her next move, Bellis said she is contemplating whether to take the latest option offered by New Zealand — applying as a person in danger — because it would exonerate the government of responsibility for her earlier rejections.

“It gives them an opportunity to deny any responsibility and frankly that is not true,” she said. The government’s current COVID-19 policy has left “how many stranded around the world with no pathways to get home.”
…

Unknown gunmen have shot dead a Christian priest and wounded another in an attack in Pakistan’s northwestern city of Peshawar. 

Police and local leaders of the minority community said the victims were leaving a city church following Sunday Mass when two men riding a motorcycle ambushed and opened fire on the priests’ vehicle. 

Police identified the slain priest as Father William Siraj, who was 75. 

Doctors said the wounded priest, Father Patrick Naeem, was being treated in a Peshawar hospital and described his condition as stable.

No one immediately took responsibility for the shooting. 

Police officials said an operation to find and arrest the assailants was under way. 

Christian leaders condemned the attack.

“We demand justice and protection of Christians from the Government of Pakistan,” tweeted educator and Bishop Azad Marshall, from the Church of Pakistan. 

Members of the Christian community have previously been targeted in Peshawar. 

The deadliest attack occurred in 2013 when two suicide bombers blew themselves up at a city church as hundreds of worshippers were leaving Sunday Mass. The assault killed at least 80 people and wounded 120 others.

Islamist militants in Pakistan have long made religious minorities, including Christians, one of their targets. 

Christians represent about 2% of Pakistan’s population of around 220 million people, which is overwhelmingly Muslim. 
…

Indian troops on Sunday killed five militants, including a top commander from the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) group, in stepped-up anti-militancy operations in Kashmir, police said.

The militants were killed in two separate overnight operations by Indian troops south of Srinagar, Kashmir Police chief Vijay Kumar told Reuters.

“We had launched two separate operations on the basis of inputs about the presence of militants in these areas last night. Five militants, including JeM commander, Zahid Wani, and a Pakistani national, Kafeel, were killed in these two operations,” Kumar said.

A police officer was shot to death by militants outside his residence Saturday evening in the south of Srinagar, Kumar said.

In January, 21 militants, including eight Pakistan nationals, have been killed across Indian Kashmir, according to police.

Last year, the disputed region witnessed a wave of civilian killings, with militants seemingly targeting non-Kashmiris, including migrant workers, and members of the minority Hindu and Sikh communities in the Muslim-majority Kashmir valley.

Indian forces in the heavily militarized region responded with a widespread crackdown.

More than 189 militants were killed in Kashmir last year, a police official said.
…

Violent protests by job seekers that gripped two Indian states this week have turned the spotlight on India’s unemployment crisis, especially among young and educated people, economists say.

Angry mobs burned train cars and tires, and blocked rail traffic in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, two of India’s most populous states, over alleged flaws in the recruitment process for jobs in the government-run rail sector.

They complained of lack of transparency and said that the process unfairly gives an advantage to graduates applying for low-skilled jobs.

There were more than 12 million applicants for the 35,000 openings, reflecting the acute job scarcity. Even before the pandemic battered the economy, unemployment was running at a four-decade high, reflecting the inability of the job market to cater to the more than 10 million new applicants every year.

The situation has worsened in the last two years even though the economy is recovering. It is most stark in states such as Bihar, where the unemployment rate is double the national average. One of India’s least developed states, it has very few avenues for private sector employment, which is why government jobs that are better paid and offer security are highly prized.

Among the applicants for a rail sector job is Guddu Kumar Singh, a 32-year-old resident of Bihar, who has spent nearly 15 years applying unsuccessfully for a variety of government jobs. After failing to make the cut for a clerk in the Indian army after graduating from high school, he focused on improving his educational qualifications and earned a degree in economics — he and his brother were the first generation in his farming family to get college degrees. Like millions of others, the family saw education as the path to a brighter future.

“I was a sincere student – I spent 13, 14 hours a day studying to get my degree. I was so positive. I never thought I would not get a job,” Singh said. “I am totally dejected. My family also asks me, what did I achieve by studying?”

According to the Center for Monitoring Indian Economy, an independent think tank, India’s unemployment rate was nearly 8% in December. It says, however, that this number does not reflect the true scale of unemployment in India because millions of educated people have stopped looking for jobs.

They are people like Singh — if he does not get a railway job he could simply drop out of the job market, returning to what he has been doing while he searched for a job – tutoring school students.

“Unemployment is higher among younger and more educated people because appropriate jobs are not available,” economist Arun Kumar, a former professor with New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, said.

“The organized sector barely generates about 300,000 jobs a year, so where do the other aspirants go? There is a crisis of unemployment.”

The huge gap between supply and demand has resulted in qualified people taking jobs of much lower skills.

Earlier this month, graduates, post-graduates, engineers, and civil judge aspirants were among the more than 10,000 young people who turned up for interviews for 15 government jobs such as drivers and watchmen in the central state of Madhya Pradesh, according to a report by local broadcaster NDTV.

Economists say that part of the problem is that, unlike several other Asian countries, India never created a large-scale manufacturing sector — its growth is being powered by its booming services sector, which creates fewer jobs.

The government says job creation is a priority – in recent years, it has been trying to pitch India as an attractive investment destination to woo global manufacturers. Those efforts have intensified since the pandemic as India eyes the opportunity of luring companies that are looking to move some manufacturing out of China.

“India is committed to becoming a trustworthy partner for the world’s global supply chains,” Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi told a virtual meeting of the World Economic Forum earlier this month. “We are making way for free trade agreements with many countries. India’s capacity to adopt to innovative technologies and its spirit of entrepreneurship can give new energy to all our global partners. This is why now is the best time to invest in India.”

Economists like Kumar, though, point out that even if India is able to attract companies to set up factories, modern manufacturing generates far fewer jobs than it did in the past because of automation.

“India must invest more resources in more employment-intensive sectors like health and education that provide jobs for more qualified people like teachers, nurses, technicians,” he said. “The frustration among the young and educated is boiling over.”

Indian commentators have called the recent protests a wake-up call in a country where half the population of 1.3 billion is under 25. The Indian Express newspaper said they were a “sobering message.”

The government has suspended the examination for rail jobs and said a committee has been formed to investigate candidates’ concerns.

For those like Singh, who sees it as his last chance to secure employment, the uncertainty is unbearable.

“I feel really anguished when I think of the years I spent getting a college degree. If I had spent the same time doing something else, I would have had better earnings.” 

 
…

Rights activists are alleging that police and a paramilitary force in Bangladesh are coercing families of the victims of enforced disappearances to issue statements that they deliberately misled police by hiding information about how their relatives went missing. 

A 57-page report by Human Rights Watch in August last year said that “despite credible and consistent evidence that Bangladesh security forces routinely commit enforced disappearances, the ruling Awami League has ignored calls by donor governments, the U.N., human rights organizations, and civil society to address the culture of impunity.”

Rights activists have said the security agencies themselves are writing the statements and asking the families to sign them to make them look like voluntary statements from the families.  

“According to the statements, the disappeared persons had gone into hiding on their own, and the families falsely reported them as cases of enforced disappearance,” Mohammad Ashrafuzzaman, liaison officer of the Asian Legal Resource Center in Hong Kong, told VOA on January 28.  

“The police and RAB are coercing the victim families into signing the so-called statements in an attempt to exculpate the perpetrators,” he said, referring to Bangladesh’s paramilitary Rapid Action Battalion.   

The recent police pressure on the families of the victims of enforced disappearance was triggered by the U.S. human rights-related sanctions on the RAB last month, Ashrafuzzaman added.

On December 10, the U.S. imposed human-rights-related sanctions on the RAB and six former and current officers, saying they were responsible for hundreds of enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings.  

Since 2010, human rights groups have published dozens of reports claiming police, military, RAB and other security agencies were involved in enforced disappearances of people who were mostly political activists and dissidents opposed to Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League-led government.

According to the Bangladeshi human rights organization Odhikar, between 2009 and September 2021, at least 605 people vanished by enforced disappearance in the country. Among those who disappeared, 81 were found dead and 154 people remain missing, the organization said.

Last month (DEC 2021), the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances said it knew of “86 documented cases [of enforced disappearance in Bangladesh] in which the victims’ fate and whereabouts remain unknown.”  

One of the 86 cases of victims of enforced disappearance who remain missing is that of Mahabub Hasan Sujan, a student wing leader of the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party. Sujan, then 31, went missing after some men, introducing themselves as members of a law enforcement agency, picked him up in December 2013. 

Sujan’s father, Abdul Jalil Khan, said he refused to sign the statement the police brought to him on January 10. 

The police brought a statement written by themselves to my house and asked me to sign it. When I read it, I found it did not carry the true description of how exactly my son had disappeared,” Khan, 74, told VOA.

Sujan’s family all along has insisted he was picked up by “members from a law enforcement agency.” But the statement the police wanted Khan to sign said he had been “taken away by some unknown person or group,” the elder Khan said.

“I told the police I would not sign it. … We are anxious. We fear that the police might return, trying to pick me up again,” Khan added.

Farid Ahmed Raju, a BNP activist, remains missing after RAB allegedly picked him up in January 2014. His sister, Shilpi Akhtar, said in the second week of this month, her family was coerced into signing statements by police.

“My husband, mother and I were forced to sign three separate statements. We do not know what the statements said,” Akhtar told VOA.

“When I asked why we had to sign the statements, police said they were in our interest or would help us.”  

Afroza Islam Ankhi, a co-founder of Mayer Daak, which represents families of the victims of enforced disappearance, said January 28 that police and RAB tried to coerce several families to sign the statements in the past three weeks.  

“I don’t think that it is necessary to get any signed statement from any family in the interest of an investigation. The police are seeking the signed statements in an attempt to cover up their crimes,” Ankhi told VOA. “People fear the police in our country. So, some families are ending up signing the statements.”  

Despite many attempts, VOA failed to get a response from Bangladesh police and RAB.

Since the current Awami League-led regime came to power in 2009, Bangladesh has become all too familiar with enforced disappearance, said exiled BNP leader A.K.M. Wahiduzzaman. The former university teacher in Bangladesh fled to Malaysia in 2016, fearing for his life.

“Statistical evidence shows that the number of cases of enforced disappearance and extrajudicial killing spiraled in the months leading up to the last two general elections. And more than half of the victims were political opposition activists and leaders. The government-compliant security agencies use enforced disappearance as a tool, largely to decimate the political opposition force in the country,” Wahiduzzaman told VOA.

“Now, the crimes committed by the security agencies of Bangladesh have been exposed to the world and the global pressure against the government has increased in recent weeks. This is the reason the agencies are desperately trying to hide their criminal records.” 

Ashrafuzzaman said the latest round of organized coercion by the security agencies indicates “the masterminds within the government are afraid of the consequences of their command responsibilities and have been trying to wash the bloods from their hands.” 

“The tactics of silencing the surviving families will not work finally. It is the time for the perpetrators to suffer the consequences of the crime against humanity that they have been committing for over a decade,” he said.
…

Pakistan this week has marked a full year without detection of wild polio cases, a landmark development in a country where the disease annually paralyzed approximately 20,000 children in the early 1990s.

The South Asian nation of about 220 million people and neighboring Afghanistan are the last two wild polio-endemic countries in the world.

While polio paralyzed 84 children in Pakistan in 2020, the most recent infection of the wild virus, known as WPV1, was recorded on January 27, 2021, the lowest number of reported cases in the country ever.

“Twelve months without detection of WPV1 cases in Pakistan is an encouraging epidemiological signal but must be taken with caution,” Dr. Hamid Jafari, director of polio eradication for the World Health Organization Eastern Mediterranean Region, told VOA. 

“It does not mean that WPV1 has been eradicated from the country or the circulation of virus has stopped in Pakistan,” he said.

“Poliovirus does not follow calendar years – it is a seasonal virus, and right now we are in the low-transmission season when the virus is weakest,” Jafari said.

Surveillance efforts continued to detect the virus in environmental samples as recently as last month, pointing to continued transmission of WPV1 in Pakistan.

Pakistani officials and international partners recognized that challenges to reaching all Pakistani children with vaccines also persist in key areas of the country, including parts of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province bordering Afghanistan.

“The biggest danger we face right now is complacency. This is the time we need to pull out all stops to intensify our surveillance and actively search for the virus — be it in tracking down the remaining chains of transmission, or any remaining affected children,” Jafari said.

He noted that countries in the final stages of their anti-polio efforts, notably India and Nigeria, have shown that low-level transmission can persist for a significant amount of time before the strain is completely eradicated.

Nigeria officially eradicated wild polio in 2020, leaving Pakistan and Afghanistan as the only countries where the disease is still endemic.

Setbacks, skepticism

Pakistan formally launched national anti-polio drives in 1994 and tens of thousands of vaccinators have since been staging regular inoculation campaigns across the country.

Polio vaccination drives in Pakistan have suffered setbacks in recent years due a variety of factors, including attacks on vaccinators and police personnel guarding them.

The latest attack came on Tuesday when gunmen shot and killed a policeman providing security for polio vaccinators in a northwestern town, Kohat. No health workers were harmed in the incident.

Outlawed militant groups, which claim they are fighting for establishing their brand of Islamic law, or Sharia, in Pakistan, see the polio vaccine as an effort to collect intelligence on their activities. Pakistani officials denounce the claims as ridiculous and dismiss the militants as criminals and thugs.

Fundamentalist religious groups in conservative rural parts of the majority-Muslim nation reject the immunization as a Western-led conspiracy to sterilize children.

The false information has triggered attacks during vaccine campaigns, killing scores of health care workers and security forces in the last decade or so.

Pakistani officials insist the attacks on polio teams have particularly increased since 2011, when the CIA arranged a fake vaccination campaign with the help of a local doctor, enabling U.S. forces to locate and kill fugitive al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden deep inside Pakistan.

“The progress that has been made to date is largely thanks to sustained commitment by leaders at all levels, including at the highest levels – and now is the time to ensure commitment and effort must now be sustained and intensified,” Jafari said. 

Only four cases of wild polio were confirmed in Afghanistan in 2021, down from 56 cases a year before. The U.N. said the lowest ever polio transmission in the country has provided an unprecedented opportunity to achieve eradication. The end of the Afghan war has also fueled hopes a polio-free Afghanistan is within reach.

Last year in November and December, U.N. officials say health workers were able to deliver polio vaccinations to 2.6 million Afghan children who had previously been inaccessible due to the conflict.

“Close coordination with Afghanistan is being strengthened to detect poliovirus and improve vaccination among cross border mobile populations,” Jafari said.
…

Kazakhstan’s president was voted chairman of the ruling party Friday, replacing his mentor and former head of state Nursultan Nazarbayev, after a bloody crisis exposed a struggle at the top of the leadership.

“By the decision of the extraordinary XXI Party Congress, the President of the Republic of Kazakhstan, Kassym-Jomart (Tokayev), was unanimously elected Chairman of the Nur Otan Party,” his office said on Twitter.

The move came after unprecedented unrest that left 225 people dead earlier in January.

Tokayev this month questioned 81-year-old Nazarbayev’s legacy, in particular widening inequality between the elite and the poor in Central Asia’s richest country.

Nazarbayev ruled ex-Soviet Kazakhstan for close to three decades, brooking no opposition, before hand-picking Tokayev, 68, a career diplomat and then-loyalist, to replace him as president in 2019.

The octogenarian last year announced his decision to hand the party leadership over to Tokayev — a move that seemed to confirm Tokayev would stand for another presidential term even if many thought his predecessor still pulled Kazakhstan’s political strings.

Tokayev said during the congress that his chairmanship of the party could be a temporary affair, citing the need for an “equidistant status of the head of state”.

‘Undoubted successes’

Accepting his new appointment, Tokayev softened his prior criticism of Nazarbayev, by praising his predecessor’s state-building achievements.

“I know that various negative rumours are circulating around the country,” he said. “In this regard, as head of state, I repeat: the first president did a lot to turn our country into a strong state.”

Among the achievements Tokayev credited Nazarbayev with was the decision during the 1990s to transfer Kazakhstan’s capital from its largest city Almaty — the epicentre of violent unrest — to a steppe city 1,000 kilometres north that was renamed “Nur-Sultan” in Nazarbayev’s honour in 2019.

“This decision is recognized as strategic everywhere: both abroad and in our country,” Tokayev told Nur Otan party members at the congress.

“Let us also pay tribute to the historical merits of the first president, highlight his undoubted successes and merits, and leave possible miscalculations as a warning to the future leaders of our country,” Tokayev added. 

Tokayev took over Nazarbayev’s most powerful position — chairmanship of the national security council — on January 5, a day when protests that began over a fuel price hike morphed into deadly clashes and looting.

During a speech to lawmakers and officials on January 11, Tokayev criticised his mentor for failing to share the country’s vast wealth with ordinary people. He said Nazarbayev’s rule had created “a layer of wealthy people, even by international standards”. 

In the days that followed, Nazarbayev’s once-powerful relatives and in-laws were jettisoned from top corporate and political posts.

Appearing for the first time since the crisis began on January 18, Nazarbayev denied any conflict with his successor, referring to himself as “a pensioner”.
…

The United States is marching ahead with sending free vaccines to lower-income nations, with the White House on Thursday announcing a donation of nearly 300,000 doses of the two-shot Pfizer vaccine to the landlocked central Asian nation of Tajikistan.

The doses are set to ship Thursday, a White House official told VOA.

Just a day earlier, the White House announced that the U.S. hit the milestone of 400 million donated doses to at least 112 countries. VOA spoke exclusively to Dr. Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to U.S. President Joe Biden, who said that international vaccine donations are part of the U.S. strategy to beat the pandemic.

“It’s absolutely critical,” Fauci told VOA via Zoom. “You address a global outbreak by a global solution and a global effort. And that’s why the United States has been committed to, and will deliver on, vaccine doses to low- and middle-income countries.” 

The latest donation will see the central Asian nation receive 299,520 doses of the Pfizer vaccine. The donation will be handled by COVAX, a global initiative founded to ensure equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines. Scientific, legal and regulatory teams in both nations will ensure the prompt delivery of safe and effective tranches of vaccine, the White House said. These new doses come from the half-billion doses secured by the Biden administration over the summer, according to the White House. 

Critics have said that while the U.S. has done more than any other nation, the world’s wealthiest country can afford to do still more.

Some are pushing for the global adoption of the TRIPS waiver, an agreement that would waive patents and intellectual property rights on COVID-19 tools like vaccines, therapeutics, tests and more.

“I don’t think that that’s really necessarily a part of the puzzle, because it’s very clear that we can get doses that are manufactured in the plants that are already going full-blast to the low- and middle-income countries,” Fauci said, when asked about how the TRIPS waiver fits into the fight against the pandemic. “I mean, obviously, you want to make sure that you have everything you can do to make doses available for the developing world. But I think we can do that on the basis of what’s going on right now.” 

Global aid groups say the waiver is key.

“The U.S. should lead in responding to what low- and middle-income countries are asking for — the ability to manufacture their own doses for their own citizens,” said Robbie Silverman, senior manager of private sector advocacy at Oxfam America. “This starts with adopting the TRIPS waiver, opening the vaccine recipe, sharing the technical know-how, and providing resourcing to qualified manufacturers throughout the world,” he added. 

“The waiver is needed now more than ever,” said Candice Sehoma, South Africa advocacy officer for Doctors Without Boders’ Access Campaign.

VOA asked Fauci whether the U.S. might retool its vaccine donation plans now that booster shots are becoming the norm in the developed world. 

“I think the donation effort is really substantial and will get better and better,” he said. “And I think, ultimately, that will accommodate the need for boosters. But let’s take one step at a time. A very small percentage of some of the countries, particularly in southern Africa, are fully vaccinated. Let’s get that first, and then we’ll worry about the boosters. But we do appreciate the need, ultimately throughout the world, to get people optimally protected. And we know that optimal protection with an mRNA [vaccine] means a third shot. And with [the one-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine] means a second shot.” 

The most recent recipient of American donations, Tajikistan, appears to be moving swiftly on its vaccination campaign. As of the start of the year, nearly 6.9 million vaccine doses have been administered in the nation of 10 million people, according to the World Health Organization.

Tajikistan has seen more than 17,600 confirmed cases of the virus and 125 deaths.

Jorge Agobian contributed to this report.
…

This year marks the 30th anniversary of China having established diplomatic ties with five central Asian countries. In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed, and Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan gained independence.

Three decades later, in the first week of January 2022, President Xi Jinping exchanged congratulatory messages with the presidents of the five states.

China’s influence in Central Asia has grown exponentially in recent decades as the five nations seek Chinese financing for everything from infrastructure projects to educational endeavors, according to Samantha Custer, director of policy analysis at AidData, a research lab at the College of William and Mary in Virginia.

She told VOA the main goal of Chinese financial diplomacy in the region is to gain “access to energy supplies and strategic positioning for transit routes.”

Custer said the five countries are of interest to Beijing for two main reasons: First, they offer access to ready supplies of energy via oil, natural gas, or hydropower; and secondly, potential Belt and Road initiative trade routes from China to Europe and the Middle East run through them.

“In keeping with this strategy, most of China’s financial diplomacy has been focused on the energy and transportation sectors,” Custer said.

Last month, in a new report titled Corridors of Power, Custer and her coauthors analyzed how China used massive financial assistance to win friends and allies across Central and South Asia.

According to the report, the Chinese government directed $127 billion in financial assistance across 13 countries in Central and South Asia over nearly two decades. The five countries in Central Asia are among the biggest recipients of Beijing’s financial assistance.

“Kazakhstan alone attracted 26% ($33 billion) of Beijing’s financial assistance dollars,” Custer said, adding these investments were heavily focused on the China-Central Asia Gas Pipeline. “Turkmenistan was the second-largest Central Asian recipient of Chinese financing, worth $9 billion.”

Soft power investments

Even as Beijing emphasizes economics over soft power in Central Asia, it recognizes that these tools are most formidable when employed in concert, according to Custer.

“In this vein, Chinese leaders doubled down on soft power overtures via education, culture, exchange and media to foster people-to-people ties with Central Asian students and professionals over the last two decades,” Custer said, adding these efforts are important avenues to cultivate future markets for Chinese goods, services and capital in Central Asia.

In its bid to become a premier study-abroad destination for students from Central Asia, China offers less burdensome visa requirements than its competitors and financial assistance for education, according to the report.

“Kazakh and Kyrgyz students were top recipients of Chinese state-backed scholarships, and both countries received a large share of Beijing’s language and cultural promotion efforts in the form of Confucius Institutes at the university level and Confucius Classrooms at the primary and secondary school level,” Custer said.

Chinese leaders have also practiced city-level diplomacy to cultivate relationships with public and private sector leaders at the local level, according to the report.

“As a case in point: Turkmenistan’s Mary province received more money from Beijing over two decades than seven of the 13 countries in South and Central Asia,” Custer said. “Kazakhstan’s Atyrau, which received $5 billion, was the second-largest district-level recipient of Chinese state-backed financing in the entire region.”

Investing in security

China has also been investing in security in Central Asia, according to Emil Avdaliani, director of Middle East Studies at the Georgian think tank Geocase.

“Before, Russia was seen as the only and irreplaceable security provider,” Avdaliani said. “China has also penetrated the region. It operates a military base in Tajikistan, funds a new semi-military one there and has increased the number of drills with separate states in the region.”

Avdaliani said that even though China’s position in central Asian countries has evolved quite successfully, China still faces obstacles such as nationalism in the Central Asian states and political elites’ distrust of Beijing.

But the elite also sees that “the five states need China. They need investment, and in the longer run, they need China as a balancer against Russia,” Avdaliani told VOA in an email.

Beijing successfully uses this opportunity, and it is likely to continue in the future, he said. 
…

Pakistan’s military confirmed Thursday that a militant raid against a security base in southwestern Baluchistan province has killed at least 10 soldiers.

The deadly “terrorist” assault took place late Tuesday in Kech, a remote Pakistani district next to the border with Iran, according to the military’s media wing. It said that security forces in the ensuing intense shootout had killed at least one assailant and injured several others.

“While repulsing terrorists’ fire … 10 soldiers embraced martyrdom,” the statement said, adding that security forces had captured three “terrorists” in “a follow-up clearance operation” underway in the area.

An outlawed militant group known as the Baluchistan Liberation Front (BLF) took credit for what is apparently one of the deadliest attacks against Pakistani security forces in the sparsely populated province in recent months.

Several ethnic Baluch armed separatist organizations, including BLF, are active in natural-resource-rich Baluchistan and routinely claim attacks against government forces.

The banned Pakistani Taliban, known as the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan or TTP, has a presence in the province, which also borders Afghanistan. In recent years, some of the attacks against security forces and civilians in Baluchistan have been claimed by Islamic State terrorists.

Pakistan has experienced an upsurge in militant attacks in its southwestern and northwestern districts, which used to host TTP strongholds until a few years ago, when a military-led offensive dismantled the militant infrastructure, killing thousands of militants and forcing others to flee across the Afghan border.
…

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi highlighted cooperation at a virtual summit with leaders of Central Asian countries Thursday, calling it vital for regional security and prosperity.   

The first-ever summit of India and Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan took place amid concerns about radical Islamist groups gaining a deeper foothold in the region in the aftermath of the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan.  

“I would like to emphasize that Central Asia is central to India’s vision of an integrated and stable, extended neighborhood,” Modi said. “We are all concerned about the developments in Afghanistan. In this context also, our mutual cooperation has become even more important for regional security.”  

A joint statement issued after the summit called for regional consensus on issues related to Afghanistan such as the formation of a truly representative and inclusive government in Kabul. It said that the leaders would continue close consultations on the situation in the conflict-ridden nation.  

New Delhi, which has been sidelined in Afghanistan since the Taliban takeover, worries that Afghan territory could be used by Islamic militant groups, including those that led a separatist insurgency in Kashmir.  

Analysts say such concerns also echo in Muslim-majority Central Asian countries, which are seen as moderate Islamic states. Three of them, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, share a border with Afghanistan and fear the impact of radical Islam, terrorism and the drug trade in their own territories, according to analysts. 

“India wants to use all levers to have a play in the Afghan situation and regional security situation,” says Pankaj K. Jha, a professor of defense and security affairs at O.P. Jindal Global University. “Afghanistan could emerge as a haven for terror groups of different ideological backgrounds and different political objectives and Central Asian countries have concerns about instability due to radicalization.” 

Stepping up engagement  

The summit was held virtually after the leaders of the Central Asian nations were unable to attend India’s Republic Day celebrations on Wednesday because of a COVID-19 surge.  

New Delhi has stepped up its engagement with the region in recent months — Central Asian countries participated in a regional security dialogue hosted by New Delhi on Afghanistan in November and their foreign ministers met last month.   

India’s foreign ministry said that the summit reflected strong momentum in their ties and had set an agenda for increasing cooperation in areas such as medicine, healthcare, education and information technology to boost trade, which the joint statement described as far from “realizing its true potential.”  

At the moment, India’s trade with Central Asia is a meager $2 billion. A lack of connectivity to the landlocked countries has been a major hurdle to expanding trade because Pakistan does not allow New Delhi access through its territory. But India hopes to use Iran’s Chabahar Port to promote a trade route. Iran shares a long border with both Turkmenistan and Afghanistan.

India’s summit took place two days after Chinese President Xi Jinping also held a meeting with Central Asian leaders to mark 30 years of diplomatic relations. China’s trade with the five countries has flourished, amounting to about $40 billion. The Central Asian countries are also a key part of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative.   

Analysts say the summits held by the Indian and Chinese leaders underscore the growing geopolitical importance of the region, where Russia has always been influential.
…

Bathed in crisp morning light, Sidra Hussain grips a cooler stacked with glistening vials of polio vaccine in northwest Pakistan. 

Watching over Hussain and her partner, a policeman unslings his rifle and eyes the horizon. 

In concert they begin their task — going door-to-door on the outskirts of Mardan city, dripping bitter doses of rose-colored medicine into infants’ mouths on the eve of a major milestone for the nation’s anti-polio drive. 

The last infection of the wild poliovirus was recorded on January 27, 2021, according to officials, and Friday marks the first time in Pakistan’s history that a year has passed with no new cases. 

To formally eradicate the disease, a nation must be polio-free for three consecutive years — but even 12 months is a long time in a country where vaccination teams are in the crosshairs of a simmering insurgency. 

Since the Taliban takeover of neighboring Afghanistan, the Pakistan version of the movement has become emboldened and its fighters frequently target polio teams. 

“Life or death is in God’s hands,” Hussain told AFP this week, amid a patchwork of high-walled compounds in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. 

“We have to come,” she said defiantly. “We can’t just turn back because it’s difficult.” 

Thriving in uncertainty  

Nigeria officially eradicated wild polio in 2020, leaving Pakistan and Afghanistan as the only countries where the disease — which causes crippling paralysis — is still endemic. 

Spread through faeces and saliva, the virus has historically thrived in the blurred borderlands between the South Asian nations, where state infrastructure is weak, and the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) have carved out a home. 

A separate group sharing common heritage with the Afghan Taliban, the TTP was founded in 2007 and once held sway over large swathes of the restive tribal tracts of Pakistan. 

In 2014 it was largely ousted by an army offensive, its fighters retreating across the porous border with Afghanistan. 

But last year overall militant attacks surged by 56 per cent according to the Pakistan Institute for Conflict and Security Studies, reversing a six-year downward trend. 

The largest number of assaults came in August, coinciding with the Taliban takeover of Kabul. 

Pakistan’s newspapers are regularly peppered with stories of police slain as they guard polio teams — and just this week a constable was gunned down in Kohat — 80 kilometers (50 miles) southwest of Mardan. 

Pakistani media has reported as many as 70 polio workers killed in militant attacks since 2012 — mostly in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. 

Still, a TTP spokesman told AFP it “never attacked any polio workers,” and that security forces were their target. 

“They will be targeted wherever they perform their duties,” he said Mardan deputy commissioner Habib Ullah Arif admits polio teams are “a very soft target” but says the fight to eradicate the disease is entwined with the security threat. 

“There is only one concept: we are going to defeat polio, we are going to defeat militancy,” he pledged. 

Vaccine skepticism  

Pakistan anti-polio drives have been running since 1994, with up to 260,000 vaccinators staging regular waves of regional inoculation campaigns. 

But on the fringes of the country, the teams often face skepticism. 

“In certain areas of Pakistan, it was considered as a Western conspiracy,” explained Shahzad Baig — head of the national polio eradication program.  

The theories ranged wildly: polio teams are spies, the vaccines cause infertility, or contain pig fat forbidden by Islam. 

The spy theory gained currency with the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011, whose hideaway in Abbottabad was revealed to the United States — unwittingly or otherwise — by a vaccine program run by a Pakistani doctor. 

“It’s a complex situation,” said Baig. “It’s socio-economical, it’s political.” 

The porous border with Afghanistan — a strategic crutch for the TTP — can also keep polio circulating. 

“For the virus, Pakistan and Afghanistan were one country,” said Baig.  

In Mardan, 10 teams — each comprising two women and an armed police guard — fan out across the city’s suburbs as morning turns to afternoon. 

The teams chalk dates on the homes they visit and smear children’s fingers with indelible ink to mark those already inoculated. 

On Monday they delivered dozens more doses to add to the nationwide tally. 

“We have the fear in mind, but we have to be active to serve our nation,” said polio worker Zeb-un-Nissa. 

“We have to eradicate this disease.” 
…

The U.N. secretary-general warned on Wednesday that Afghanistan is “hanging by a thread,” as the organization appealed for a total of $8 billion to scale up humanitarian assistance to more than 22 million Afghans this year. 

“When it comes to complex humanitarian emergencies, Afghanistan is as bad as it gets,” Antonio Guterres told a meeting of the U.N. Security Council. 

Afghanistan’s economy has been in a free fall for months, there is a severe drought, and a brutal winter has descended on the country, exacerbating daily suffering. 

The Taliban, which seized power nearly six months ago, are cut off from billions of dollars of the former government’s assets that are frozen abroad as the international community waits to see how they will behave. 

In the meantime, the United Nations and its partners are trying to meet growing humanitarian needs. Two weeks ago, the organization said it required $4.4 billion for its aid response. On Wednesday, it launched what it says is a complementary appeal for $3.6 billion to fund essential social services, including health and education, and maintain basic infrastructure. In all, a staggering $8 billion to keep the population from catastrophe. 

Sanctions call 

The U.N. chief also appealed to the international community to suspend restrictions that are hurting Afghanistan’s economy. 

“We need to give financial institutions and commercial partners legal assurance that they can work with humanitarian operators without fear of breaching sanctions,” Guterres said. 

He urged the release of frozen currency reserves and re-engaging with the country’s central bank, as well as foreign cash injections for the ailing economy. 

“Time is of the essence. Without action, lives will be lost, and despair and extremism will grow,” he warned. “A collapse of the Afghan economy could lead to a massive exodus of people fleeing the country.”

The United States has frozen about $9 billion in Afghan reserves, and Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield said Washington is looking at options to ease the cash crunch. 

“Ultimately, a functioning Afghan economy will require an independent and technically competent central bank that meets international banking standards,” she said. “While Afghan Central Bank reserves held in the United States are subject to ongoing litigation, we recognize calls to examine making available reserves to help the people of Afghanistan.” 

Mixed reviews 

The U.N.’s top diplomat in Afghanistan, Deborah Lyons, said the Taliban have taken some positive actions to function more effectively as a government, including agreeing on a budget financed by their own revenues, paying some government salaries and making efforts to engage the private sector. They are also working with UNICEF to reopen schools for both boys and girls in March.

“On the other hand, here on the ground there is compelling evidence of an emerging environment of intimidation and a deterioration in respect for human rights,” she said from Kabul. “This suggests that the consolidation of government authority may be leading toward control of the population by fear, rather than by understanding and responding to its needs.” 

Lyons said that despite Taliban declarations of general amnesties for those who worked for or defended the former government, the U.N. continues to receive credible allegations of killings, enforced disappearances, detentions of political opponents and civil society representatives. 

“After 20 years of tasting freedom — working, studying, playing sports, performing music — it has taken less than six months to completely dismantle the rights of the women and girls across the country,” Afghan human rights defender Mahbouba Seraj said, telling the Security Council they must keep promises made to Afghan women over the years. 

Taliban 

The Taliban is not an internationally recognized government, and the country’s seat at the United Nations is still held by the former government. But the Ashraf Ghani-appointed envoy quietly resigned in December, and a deputy is now heading the Afghan mission. 

Naseer Faiq said he does not represent the views of either the former government or any political group. He urged the international community to provide humanitarian assistance and help with the economic crisis, and he called on the Taliban to end human rights violations, honor their general amnesty, and let women work and girls go to school and university. 

Pakistan, which has been close to the Taliban over the years, said it would be more useful if a Taliban representative could address the council. They have designated their spokesman in Qatar, Suhail Shaheen, to be their U.N. envoy, but the general assembly committee that approves credentials of representatives deferred a decision, leaving the status quo in place.

On other outstanding issues, Pakistan’s envoy said engagement is required. 

“It is only through dialogue, through consultations and mutual persuasion that we will be able to achieve agreed outcomes,” Ambassador Munir Akram said. “Coercion is not the road to peace in Afghanistan. It has not been for the past 20 years, and it will not be in the future.”
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Violence, arrests and unclear media laws are adding to a difficult environment for Afghan journalists.

Several journalists have been attacked or detained, and some who were beaten say the Taliban have done nothing to hold those responsible accountable. Media experts say a lack of laws and state institutions is exacerbating the problem.

Since the start of the year, at least four journalists have been detained, including three who were arrested on January 6 after covering protests against the Taliban in Panjshir province, where a Taliban fighter killed a civilian.

The journalists work for a YouTube-based media outlet called Kabul Lovers, which has 244,000 subscribers.

Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid accused the journalists of manufacturing stories.

Referring to the news team as “so-called journalists,” Mujahid told VOA they were arrested after traveling to Panjshir in the northeast, where they “made an uproar and shot videos without doing any investigation into the case.”

The spokesperson said the journalists were detained by the Taliban’s intelligence to “punish” them. “They were made to understand that this can harm public and national security,” he said.

Separately, the Taliban also arrested Faizullah Jalal, a professor of law and political science at Kabul University, on January 8.

Jalal was detained for four days on accusations of making “nonsensical” statements and “inciting” people against the Taliban.

After his release, Jalal told VOA’s sister network Radio Azadi that his arrest was connected to a televised debate in which he took part with a Taliban spokesperson in November.

Part of the problem is that the Taliban issued guidelines for journalists, but “there is no media law,” said Hujatullah Mujadadi, vice president of the Afghanistan Independent Journalists Association. “I am not sure if there is a plan for something like that, but we have not seen it yet.”

In the early days of the Taliban takeover, Mujadadi represented the independent journalists association on a three-person committee set up by the Talban to address media issues.

The Taliban issued a series of directives to the media in September, including a ban on content deemed to go against Islam or national figures, and said the media should coordinate with authorities on reporting. But journalists and media analysts say the Taliban have not said whether media laws that existed under the previous government were still in force.

Abdul Subhan Misbah, former deputy of the Lawyers Union of Afghanistan, also believes an absence of state institutions is the problem.

“A commission cannot deal with criminal cases. Killings and beatings of journalists are cases that police, attorneys and judges should deal with. The Taliban have to have formal government institutions,” Misbah said.

Climate of impunity

Mujadadi said violence against journalists has increased under the Taliban.

“No investigation has been conducted or the perpetrators brought to justice yet,” he said.

Sadaqat Ghorzang, a freelance reporter who contributes to Afghan media outlet Tolo News, is still waiting for the Taliban to investigate an attack from October 2021.

Members of the Taliban beat Ghorzang and threw his equipment into a river when he was reporting from Torkham, a town in eastern Nangarhar province, where Afghans were trying to cross into neighboring Pakistan.

“Just after the incident, the Taliban apologized. But when I went out, other Taliban fighters started threatening me,” Ghorzang told VOA.

The Taliban promised to look into his complaint, but nothing has come of it, he said.

Mujahid and Qari Mohammad Hanif, head of the Nangarhar provincial department of information and culture, both said they would investigate, Ghorzang said, “but nothing happened.”

“It is difficult to live and work here in Afghanistan,” Ghorzang told VOA.

The lack of accountability is increasing fear among media members.

In mid-January, images of Kabul journalist Zaki Qais circulated on news and media rights websites showing cuts and wounds to his face and neck after an attack in his home.

Qais is also a filmmaker who covered human rights issues.

On January 15, two people claiming to be local police knocked on the journalist’s door and then hit and stabbed him, the Committee to Protect Journalists reported. He said he had been threatened because of his social media posts and whipped by the Taliban while filming a women’s rights protest in Kabul last year.

Such cases add to the unease among journalists.

“We are very afraid,” said one Kabul-based journalist. “Any Taliban soldier can harass, beat or detain a journalist without any reason.”

The journalist, who did not want to disclose his identity for fear of reprisal, said the intimidation and jailings were concerning.

“It is becoming impossible to work as a journalist under the Taliban,” the unnamed journalist said.

The journalist, who worked with local and international media for about 15 years, said reporters are stopped and questioned at checkpoints and that it is getting harder to find people willing to speak.

“Whenever we go to report, they ask us many times, ‘Where have you been? Where are you coming from? Where do you go? Who do you work for?’ ” the journalist said.

“There is fear everywhere. Everyone is afraid. Common people do not want to talk to us. Experts are threatened. You know what happened to Professor Jalal?” the journalist said, referring to the university teacher detained earlier in January.

No justice

The International Federation of Journalists has condemned the repressive environment and called for the Taliban to free any detained journalists and secure justice for those attacked or threatened.

“The disturbing trend of arrests and attacks against journalists and media workers in Afghanistan continues to grow under the Taliban regime,” the IFJ said in a statement. “The Taliban must cease its harassment of the media and display a tangible commitment to safeguarding press freedom.”

Misbah, of the Lawyers Union of Afghanistan, said the Taliban should guarantee access to justice to journalists in the country.

“They should work at least on a mechanism to address the worries that journalists have. They feel that there is no justice for them under the Taliban,” he said.

Najiba Khalil ​contributed to this report, which originated in VOA’s Afghan Service.
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The Taliban takeover of Afghanistan has seen a surge in attacks, sexual assaults and threats against the long-pressed lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people because of their sexual orientation or gender.

The abuses are documented in a new report released Wednesday by Human Rights Watch and OutRight Action International. 

The research, titled, “Even If You Go to the Skies, We’ll Find You: LGBT People in Afghanistan After the Taliban Takeover,” urged the Islamist Taliban to stop their abuse of LGBT people and protect them from vigilantes. 

The report is calling on the international community to pressure the Taliban — which swept back into power last August — to stop the abuses and grant asylum to any LGBT Afghan facing persecution. 

Some LGBT people are being targeted through their mobile phones, on social media or by former partners who have shared their details with the Taliban in hopes of protecting themselves. 

The research details cases of rape, mob attacks and violence.

Researchers at Human Rights Watch and OutRight Action International interviewed 60 LGBT Afghans from October to December 2021, and interviewees came from at least 11 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces.

“Many of those interviewed reported being attacked, sexually assaulted, or directly threatened by members of the Taliban because of their sexual orientation or gender identity.”

Riza, a trans woman, said a group of angry neighbors knocked at her door and attacked her, saying they were going to call the Taliban police to “clean you from this place.”

Eventually, the Taliban police caught Riza. “They beat her, shaved her head, jailed her for more than a week and dressed her in men’s cloths before dumping her back on the street,” the report said.

‘I had to escape’

Qurban, a trans man, told the researchers he was living with his family when the Taliban came. “My father said, ‘You have to wear girls’ clothes now and marry a man.’ So, I had to escape.”

In another case, a man named Ramiz was kidnapped by Taliban members at a security checkpoint and raped for hours. The rapists later told Ramiz, “From now on, anytime we want to be able to find you, we will, and we will do whatever we want with you.” 

The report noted that Afghanistan was a dangerous place for LGBT people well before the Taliban seized power from the Western-backed government of President Ashraf Ghani.

In 2018, the Ghani government passed a law that outlawed homosexuality, forcing many LGBT persons to conceal key aspects of their identity from society and from family, friends and colleagues. 

“However, when the Taliban, which had been in power from 1996 to late 2001, regained control of the country in August 2021, the situation dramatically worsened,” the report said.

Taliban officials have not yet commented on the report, but a spokesman for the Islamist group told the Reuters news agency in October, “LGBT … that’s against our Sharia [Islamic] law.”

The Taliban are under fire for allegedly not living up to their pledges to respect human rights. They are accused of engaging in widespread rights abuses, including revenge killings, systematic discrimination against women and girls, and severe restrictions on freedom of expression and the media

The Islamist group denies the criticism but maintains that restrictions on women are in line with Sharia.

The international community has not yet recognized the Taliban government and is waiting to see if they govern Afghanistan through a broad-based government and respect human rights, especially those of women.
…

Norway Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere has described as “serious” and “genuine” the talks his country hosted this week between the Taliban and Afghan civil society activists as well as Western diplomats regarding the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan. 

The three-day talks concluded Tuesday amid protests and criticism, particularly from Afghan rights groups, of Norway’s decision to host the Islamist Taliban, who seized power in Afghanistan last August.

Gahr Stoere told reporters in New York the meetings were not tantamount to legitimizing the hardline group’s government in Kabul. He said it was “a first step” in dealing with the de facto Afghan authorities to prevent a humanitarian disaster in that country. 

“It’s no act of recognition. It’s a mere framework to address them … passing clear messages to the Taliban and also listing (international) expectations and listening back what they have as messages,” the Norwegian prime minister said. “So this is, I believe, a measure that makes it possible to hold those who hold power in Afghanistan accountable.” 

Taliban delegates, led by Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi, met with members of Afghan civil society, including women, on Sunday, followed on Monday and Tuesday by multilateral talks with diplomats from the United States, the European Union, Britain, France, Italy, the United Nations and host Norway. 

Wide range of  issues covered

The closed-door meetings, which took place at a hotel outside Oslo, were supposed to cover a wide range of issues including education for Afghan women, humanitarian aid and greater inclusivity in the caretaker government the Taliban have established since taking over the conflict-torn nation. 

No country has yet recognized the Taliban regime.

Gahr Stoere acknowledged that hosting the Islamist group was a challenging move for his government.

“It’s also something that is a troubling thing for many people, including for me, but the alternative — to leave Afghanistan — 1 million children at danger of starving, half the population in need of aid, 90% are really out of any proper working. That is no option,” he stressed.

“We made it clear we want to see girls back at school in March, also those above 12. We want to see humanitarian access unimpeded,” Stoere said, without sharing further details.

Successful meetings

Speaking to reporters on Monday, Muttaqi said his team’s meetings with Afghans and Western envoys were successful.

“Norway providing us this opportunity is an achievement in itself because we shared the stage with the world,” Muttaqi said. “From these meetings, we are sure of getting support for Afghanistan’s humanitarian, health and education sectors,” he added. 

The Taliban regained power in mid-August as the Western-backed government collapsed. Remaining U.S.-led foreign troops withdrew from the country later that month, ending a 20-year occupation. 

The change in power immediately halted international assistance for aid-dependent Afghanistan, and the U.S. blocked the Taliban’s access to roughly $9.5 billion in foreign assets — largely held in the U.S. Federal Reserve — in addition to imposing financial sanctions on Kabul. 

International donors have urged the Taliban to form an inclusive government and respect human rights, especially those of women, as a condition for the release of more aid, which the group has not done.

Schools start mid-March

The EU’s special envoy to Afghanistan, Tomas Niklasson, tweeted after his meeting with Muttaqi’s delegation that he had “underlined the need for primary and secondary schools to be accessible for boys and girls throughout the country when the school year starts in March.” The new Afghan education year begins mid-March.

While the Taliban allowed boys to resume classes in September, most secondary schools for girls remained shuttered across the country, and most female government employees have not been allowed to resume their jobs.

The punitive actions have plunged the fragile Afghan economy into an unprecedented crisis, worsening an already bad humanitarian crisis in the country. The U.N. says it needs $5 billion this year to bring urgent relief to an estimated 24 million people experiencing acute food insecurity, 9 million of whom are threatened with famine. 

The U.N. Security Council session on the situation in Afghanistan is scheduled to take place on Wednesday. The Norwegian prime minister will chair it as well.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, his special representative for Afghanistan, Deborah Lyons, and the Norwegian foreign minister will brief the council.

Margaret Besheer contributed to this report.
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Diplomats of the former Afghan government who have held on to their jobs in the U.S. are grappling with a new problem: their official bank accounts have been suspended. 

Two senior Afghan diplomats, who did not want to be named because the issue is under discussion with U.S. officials, confirmed to VOA that the Citibank accounts of the embassy in Washington and two Afghan consulates in the U.S. have been suspended for more than a month. 

The Afghan mission in Washington does not receive funds from Kabul, because the Afghan capital now under the control of the Taliban, and it has survived thus far through dwindling consular service fees. 

The consulates have run out of new passports but continue to renew expired passports. Because checks issued to cover passport renewal can no longer be made out to the Afghanistan Embassy, the remaining staff members deposit blank money orders into personal bank accounts, then meet at the end of each month to tally embassy revenue. 

“We’ve held talks with the Department of State, but so far there has been no breakthrough,” one Afghan diplomat said, adding that U.S. officials had advised the diplomats against discussing the matter publicly. 

While the government they represented collapsed more than five months ago, about 90 Afghan diplomats remain in four diplomatic posts in the U.S., including the Afghanistan Permanent Representative at the United Nations in New York. 

Suspension of their official bank accounts has adversely impacted the embassy’s financial transactions, including salaries, rent and health care insurance payments, the diplomats said. 

When asked about the status of the mission’s accounts, a State Department spokesperson told VOA, “There has been no change in the accreditation status of Afghan mission members,” but declined to comment on the account suspensions. 

A spokesman for Citibank also declined to comment. 

Policy confusion? 

The United States does not recognize the Taliban’s self-declared Islamic Emirate as the official government of Afghanistan, but U.S. officials have met with Taliban officials in Qatar, Norway and elsewhere. 

“As we seek to address humanitarian crisis together with allies, partners, and relief [organizations],” U.S. special envoy for Afghanistan Thomas West said before holding talks with the Taliban foreign minister, Amir Khan Muttaqi, in Oslo on Sunday. “We will continue clear-eyed diplomacy with the Taliban regarding our concerns and our abiding interest in a stable, rights-respecting and inclusive Afghanistan.” 

Analysts say the U.S. approach has led to confusion among Afghans who are trying to sort out visa and logistical issues, leaving them in legal limbo. 

“Not thinking through the ramifications and implications of having these two parallel governance structures going at the same time is a completely flawed approach,” said Candace Rondeaux, an expert at the Washington-based New America think tank. 

“I think the U.S. has been confused on Afghanistan for a long time,” said Jennifer Murtazashvili, an expert with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, adding that the U.S. will need a functioning Afghan mission to handle consular services for the tens of thousands of Afghans who are being brought to the U.S. since the collapse of the former Afghan government. 

The loss of the bank accounts is the latest blow to the Afghan diplomatic mission, which has already been laboring under severe financial restrictions. 

Calls to the embassy are directed to a voice message system as all local staff have been laid off, and diplomats say they have been working on-and-off on a voluntary basis and without pay for two months. 

The embassy in Washington, like many other Afghanistan diplomatic missions around the world, has refused to work with the Taliban foreign ministry, and diplomats say they represent the former Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. 

Despite repeated Taliban pleas for recognition of the Islamic Emirate as the de facto government of Afghanistan, no country has yet officially taken steps to recognize the regime. 

Diplomats seeking asylum 

At least three Afghan diplomats who worked at the embassy in Washington have sought asylum in Canada and the rest are exploring long-term options, the two diplomats said. 

“Obviously, we cannot return to Afghanistan,” one of the diplomats said, adding that his diplomatic visa is set to expire in December. “We are seeking a solution for the future of all our diplomats here.” 

Anticipating their move, the U.S. Citizenship, Immigration and Customs agency has announced specific steps for the Afghan diplomats to change their status in the U.S. 

“If you are an Afghan national who entered the United States as an A-1, A-2, G-1, or G-2 nonimmigrant; were performing duties that were diplomatic or semi-diplomatic on July 14, 2021; and are seeking a Green Card under Section 13, you may file Form I-485, Application to Register Permanent Residence or Adjust Status, without a fee,” reads a public notice at the USCIS website. 

State Department Bureau Chief Nike Ching contributed to this story. 

 
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