U.S. officials have confirmed that a newly formed armed group resisting the Taliban rule in Afghanistan has registered with the United States.

The confirmation came in response to claims by the anti-Taliban National Resistance Front (NRF) that its international office has “received authorization to officially open” in America.

Ali Maisam Nazary, the foreign relations chief for the anti-Taliban group, made the announcement on Friday via a Twitter post, promising the NRF “will soon expand its activities throughout the globe.” 

A spokesperson for the U.S. State Department told VOA officials “are aware that an entity calling itself “The National Resistance Front” registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act on October 26.”

The spokesperson, however, explained the decision to register was made by the registrant and did not require any further action or approval by the Department of Justice or any other American government entity.

“In general, organizations such as this one can open offices in the U.S. and do not require involvement from the Department of State,” the spokesperson said. 

The Taliban seized control of Afghanistan in August after ousting the Western-backed government in Kabul as American and NATO troops withdrew from the country after 20 years of involvement in the war. 

The Islamist group, which comprises mostly members of the ethnic Pashtun majority, announced a blanket amnesty for all those who served in the previous government after regaining control of the country, though Taliban fighters are being accused of carrying out targeted killings of former Afghan security personnel.

The NRF claims it has set up bases in crucial mountainous parts Panjshir Valley, a predominantly ethnic Tajik province, about 100 kilometers northeast of the Afghan capital, Kabul. Taliban officials reject those claims and say leaders of the so-called resistance have long left Afghanistan. 

NRF fighters come from the remnants of the U.S.-trained Afghan security forces and from local militias, although their exact number is not known. They are led by Ahmad Massoud, the 32-year-old son of former Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud, nicknamed the “Lion of Panjshir” for his efforts to resist Taliban rule in the 1990s.

In 2001, the Northern Alliance helped U.S. forces oust the Taliban following the terrorist attacks against the United States on September 11 of that year. 

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid, reacting to the threat posed by the NRF to his government and reports of opening of an office in the U.S., said on Saturday that no entity can threaten the Afghan people in “the name of resistance or anything else” and that no such activities will be allowed. 

Mujahid asserted while addressing a news conference in Kabul that American officials in recent bilateral talks conveyed to Taliban interlocutors that they could not confirm the reported opening of the NRF office nor did the U.S. think such activities were needed.

“I don’t know how reliable the message from [the U.S] is, but our message to those raising the slogan of resistance is that Afghanistan needs peace and prosperity, and not wars anymore.”

Despite holding meetings with Taliban representatives, Washington and the global community in general have not granted recognition to the interim Taliban government. 

They have been pressing the Islamist group to govern Afghanistan through an inclusive political setup that ensures protection of rights of all Afghans, including women and minorities in line with assurances the Taliban have given to the international community.

A group of prominent politicians, who had directly or indirectly served in the previous Afghan government and fled the country after the Taliban takeover of Kabul, announced last week the formation of a coalition to achieve lasting peace in the country through both political and military means.

The front, called the “Supreme Council of National Resistance of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan” said in a statement it was formed by a group of “prominent and sympathetic” political parties as well as figures, but mentioned no names.

Russia, which provided political and military support to the anti-Taliban campaign led by Massoud’s father in the 1990s, has been fully supportive of the current Taliban government. On Thursday, Moscow voiced concerns over the emergence of Afghan resistance groups.

“We have noted a declaration published by some of the country’s former leaders on establishing the Supreme Council of National Resistance of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan for waging an armed struggle against the Taliban,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova told her weekly news conference.

“We urge all ethnic and political forces in Afghanistan to renounce militant rhetoric and to do everything possible to complete the process of national reconciliation,” Zakharova said.

Cindy Saine contributed to this report.
…

Pakistan’s government and an outlawed radical Islamist party Sunday reached an agreement to end a 10-day long — and at times deadly violent — rally calling for the closure of France’s embassy and the release of the party’s leader.

Neither Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi nor religious leader Mufti Muneebur Rehman, who took part in the talks, gave any details of the agreement at a news conference in the capital Islamabad.

Thousands of supporters of the outlawed Tehreek-e-Labiak Pakistan party marched from Lahore on Oct. 22 toward the capital Islamabad. They demanded the expulsion of France’s envoy to Pakistan over publication of caricatures of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad in France. The protest march saw supporters clash with police at several points along the way.

At least seven police officers and four demonstrators were killed.

“Details and positive results of the agreement will come before the nation in a week or so,” said Rehman, who said he had the endorsement of TLP party leader Saad Rizvi.

The violence erupted a day after the government of Prime Minister Imran Khan said it would not accept the Islamists’ demand to close the French Embassy and expel the French envoy.

It wasn’t immediately clear Sunday when the party would end its rally. Thousands of supporters halted their march in Wazirabad, about 185 kilometers (115 miles) from the capital Friday after roads and bridges ahead of them were blocked. Paramilitary rangers were deployed to stop the protesters from continuing toward the capital. 

Sajid Saifi, TLP spokesman, said supporters were ready to “pack up” but were awaiting instructions from the party’s leadership. He said he hoped party leader Saad Rizvi and all the supporters arrested in recent days would be released soon.

Besides demanding expulsion of the French ambassador, the TLP was also pressing for the release of its leader, Rizvi, who was arrested last year for inciting supporters to stage an anti-France protest. 

Rizvi’s party started demanding the expulsion of French envoy in October 2020 after French President Emmanuel Macron tried to defend caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad as freedom of expression. Macron’s comments came after a young Muslim beheaded a French school teacher who had shown the caricatures in class. The images were republished by the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo to mark the opening of the trial over the deadly 2015 attack against the publication for the original caricatures.

Rizvi’s party gained prominence in Pakistan’s 2018 elections, campaigning on the single issue of defending the country’s blasphemy law, which calls for the death penalty for anyone who insults Islam.
…

China has reactivated a direct air trade link with Afghanistan in a bid to assist the war-ravaged neighbor’s new Taliban rulers in dealing with a deepening economic and humanitarian crisis.  

A cargo plane carrying 45 tons of pine nuts Sunday flew out of Kabul for Chinese markets, marking the restoration of the commercial corridor after the Islamist Taliban seized control of Afghanistan in August.  

“We hope the commercial activity will continue and boost our trade ties with China,” Bilal Karimi, a Taliban government spokesman, told VOA.   

He said the export of pine nuts was an outcome of recent wide-ranging “good discussions” between Kabul and Beijing, anticipating progress in other areas of bilateral trade in coming days.   

“Today’s export of pine nuts in particular marks a new good beginning (in relations between the two countries),” Karimi added.  

“The income reaching hundreds of millions of U. S. dollars, [is] greatly benefiting many Afghan farmers,” tweeted Wang Yu, the Chinese ambassador in Kabul after seeing off the cargo flight.

“The little pine nuts bring happiness to Afghan people and good taste to Chinese people, and ‘pine nut air corridor’ is the important bond of friendship between our two countries,” the ambassador wrote.

China, one of the largest importers of Afghan pine nuts, launched the air freight corridor in November 2018 to help Afghanistan increase its exports of dry and fresh fruits to Chinese markets and address a massive trade deficit.   

Officials at the time estimated the trade link would enable Afghan exporters to dispatch 23,000 tons of pine nuts annually to China, bringing home up to $800 million in revenue.  

The initiative boosted the Afghan pine nut industry as Chinese importers last year reportedly were contracted to purchase more than $2 billion of pine nuts over the next five years.   

Beijing has long seen bilateral economic cooperation as a way to stabilize Afghanistan and deter anti-China militants from using the country as a launching pad for terrorist attacks, particularly in the western Xinjiang border region.  

China has been actively working in coordination with neighboring and regional powers to help the Taliban stabilize the country since the United States and NATO allies left Afghanistan in August after nearly 20 years of war.   

Last week, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi held two days of talks with senior Taliban leaders in Doha, the capital of Qatar.  

A Chinese post-meeting statement quoted Wang as telling Taliban interlocutors that Beijing has been concerned about “the potential outbreak” of a humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan.   

“Once the security situation in Afghanistan is stabilized, China will discuss with Afghanistan the cooperation in the field of economic reconstruction and support the country to boost its connectivity with the region and its capability to seek independent development,” Wang said after his meeting in Doha.   

China has already announced more than $30 million worth of humanitarian aid for Afghanistan. Wang announced an additional $6 million cash and material assistance after last week’s talks.   

Washington and the global community at large have not granted legitimacy to the Taliban administration. The U.S. has blocked its access to about $10 billion in Afghan assets parked largely with the U.S. Federal Reserve, even as Afghanistan faces the humanitarian crisis and prospects of an economic meltdown.   

The sanctions stem from concerns over human rights and terrorism under the Taliban rule.   

China, along with Pakistan, Turkey, Iran and Russia, have been urging Western nations to unfreeze Kabul’s assets abroad and send urgent humanitarian assistance to Afghans.   

While Washington and European nations have so far ignored calls for recognizing the Taliban government, they have announced urgent humanitarian aid for Afghanistan.  

The United Nations says more than half of the country’s population of nearly 40 million people will face acute hunger this winter unless urgent aid arrives.
…

Taliban supreme leader Haibatullah Akhundzada addressed supporters in the southern city of Kandahar, officials announced Sunday, his first public appearance since taking control of the group in 2016.

Akhundzada has been the spiritual chief of the Islamist movement since 2016 but has remained a reclusive figure, even after his group seized power in Afghanistan in August.

His low profile has fed speculation about his role in the new Taliban government — and even rumors of his death.

On Saturday, he visited the Darul Uloom Hakimah madrassa to “speak to his brave soldiers and disciples,” according to Taliban officials.

There was tight security at the event and no photographs or video have emerged, but a 10-minute audio recording was shared by Taliban social media accounts.

In it, Akhundzada — referred to as “Amirul Momineen,” or commander of the faithful — gives a religious message.

The speech did not touch on political organization but sought God’s blessing for the Taliban leadership.

He prays for the Taliban martyrs, wounded fighters and the success of the Islamic Emirate’s officials in this “big test.”

Widely believed to have been selected to serve more as a spiritual figurehead than a military commander, Akhundzada’s statements will fuel speculation that he now plans to take a more central role in leading the new government.

Unifying figure

Akhundzada rose from low-profile religious figure to leader of the Taliban in a swift transition of power after a 2016 US drone strike killed his predecessor, Mullah Akhtar Mansour.

After being appointed leader, Akhundzada secured the backing of Al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri, who showered the cleric with praise — calling him “the emir of the faithful.”

This endorsement by Osama bin Laden’s heir helped seal his jihadist credentials with the Taliban’s longtime allies.

Akhundzada was tasked with unifying a Taliban movement that briefly fractured during the bitter power struggle after Akhtar’s assassination, and the revelation that the leadership had hidden the death of their founder Mullah Omar for years.

His public profile has largely been limited to the release of messages during Islamic holidays, and Akhundzada is believed to spend most of his time in Kandahar, the main city in the Taliban’s southern Afghan heartland.

His last message was on Sept. 7, when he told the newly appointed Taliban government in Kabul to uphold sharia law as they govern Afghanistan.

Last week, Mullah Yussef Wafa, the Taliban governor of Kandahar and a close ally of Akhundzada, told AFP he was in regular contact with his mysterious chief.

“We have regular meetings with him about the control of the situation in Afghanistan and how to make a good government,” he said in an interview.

“As he is our teacher, and everyone’s teacher. We are trying to learn something from him,” he added.

“He gives advice to every leader of Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan and we are following his rules, advice, and if we have a progressive government in the future, it’s because of his advice.” 

 
…

Gunmen on a motorcycle brandished small arms and fired on a broadcast journalist in his car in the Afghan capital of Kabul, lightly wounding him.

Ali Reza Sharifi, a journalist for Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, survived the late Friday night attack, Taliban deputy spokesperson Bilal Karimi told The Associated Press.

“We are investigating to find the perpetrator,” he said. No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack.

The assault comes just days after an Afghan media watchdog reported more than 30 instances of violence and threats of violence against Afghan journalists over the last two month, with nearly 90% committed by the Taliban.

Sharifi told the AP he was driving home when two men riding a motorcycle opened fire on his car. “A bullet fired from the left just touched my lip,” he said, adding that “shredded window pieces hit my left eye.”

Pictures of Sharifi’s car shared on social media show at least two bullet holes on one of the car’s windows. “They started firing from the front and I escaped to the back seat,” he said.

Since the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan in late August, three journalists have been killed in Afghanistan.

Separately, Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid said in a series of tweets that unknown gunmen fired on a wedding ceremony in a remote area of the eastern Nangarhar province, killing three civilians and wounding several others. Two men were arrested and a third remained at large.

It was unclear why the wedding was targeted, but Mujahid said the gunmen had tried to stop the wedding music by invoking the name of the Taliban, although they aren’t officially affiliated with the group. 

 
…

The Taliban said Saturday that a failure by the United States to recognize their government in Afghanistan would prolong multiple crises facing the country and it could eventually turn it into a problem for the world.

The Islamist group regained control of the country in August and established an interim government in Kabul after U.S.-led NATO troops withdrew from the country, ending nearly 20 years of involvement in the Afghan war. 

But the global community in general has not granted legitimacy to the Taliban administration and has blocked its access to about $10 billion in Afghan assets parked largely with the U.S. Federal Reserve, even as Afghanistan faces a deepening humanitarian crisis and prospects of an economic meltdown.

“Granting recognition to the current system is the right of Afghans and no one can deprive us of this right nor will it benefit anyone,” Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told a news conference in Kabul.

“Our message to America is, if non-recognition prolongs, problems of Afghanistan prolong, it is the regional problem and could eventually become a problem for the world,” Mujahid said. He noted that in a meeting in Qatar earlier this month, Taliban leaders conveyed the same message to U.S. officials.

“We are hoping they will consider it and, God willing, this issue will be resolved,” he added.

2001 invasion

While reiterating Kabul’s call for unfreezing Afghan assets abroad, Mujahid insisted the reason the Taliban and the United States went to war 20 years ago was the absence of bilateral diplomatic ties and recognition of the Taliban government at the time.

The U.S.-led military coalition invaded Afghanistan following the deadly September 2001 terrorist attack on America. It ousted the then-Taliban government for refusing to hand over al-Qaida chief Osama bin Ladan, whom Washington accused of planning the attack. 

“Those issues could have been resolved through negotiations, through a political compromise and could have prevented the ensuing, utterly exhausting 20 years of war,” Mujahid said. 

The Taliban spokesman said they have also conveyed to Washington their desire to see the U.S. embassy in Kabul reopen and resume normal diplomatic activities. 

While the U.S.-led Western countries have shut their embassies in Kabul after the Taliban takeover of the country, some of Afghanistan’s neighbors and regional countries, including China, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey and Russia, have kept their diplomatic missions open and held direct high-level meetings with Taliban officials in Afghanistan and abroad. 

Taliban pledges

The Islamist group is under pressure to live up to its public pledges of protecting rights of Afghan women and minorities. 

Under the previous five-year Taliban rule, women were barred from leaving their home unaccompanied and girls could not receive an education, among other human rights abuses, leaving Kabul internationally isolated at the time.

The Taliban have allowed boys to attend grades 6 to 12, but they have prevented girls in the same grades from resuming their education, saying regulations and arrangements are being put in place to ensure a safe environment for female students. 

Mujahid said Saturday that young girls in many Afghan provinces have returned to school and the issue is gradually being resolved for others across the country. 

“But we will not give this right to foreigners to direct us about how our girls should undertake educational activities. That is an internal Afghan matter,” he said. 

“We are part of the global community and we have fulfilled all the conditions required for the world to formally recognize our government,” Mujahid insisted. 

“There are issues in numerous countries vis-a-via international laws, but [those countries] have been formally recognized,” he said. “They have no democratic systems, they have dictatorships, kingdoms and other ruling systems. Why have they been recognized and why are conditions being set for us?”

UN says aid is urgent

The United Nations has been urging the global community to send urgent humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan, saying more than four decades of deadly conflicts and recurrent natural disasters have resulted in a protracted food crisis in the country. 

A new U.N. study said this week humanitarian needs have grown to unprecedented levels, and more than half of the conflict-torn country’s estimated 40 million people will “face acute food insecurity” by November. 

Washington announced on Thursday it is providing nearly $144 million in new humanitarian aid to Afghanistan, bringing the total U.S. relief assistance in Afghanistan and for Afghan refugees in the region to nearly $474 million in 2021, the largest amount of assistance from any nation. 
…

Thousands of protesters from a banned Islamist group traveled toward Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, Friday in a bid to get their leader released from prison and force the government to expel the French ambassador.

The leader of Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP), Saad Rizvi, has been in detention since April, when the group’s protests turned violent. The TLP started demanding the expulsion of the French ambassador after the French government expressed support for a French newspaper’s publication of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad that many Muslims found deeply insulting.

The proscribed group started its protest in Lahore last week but decided to march toward the capital when negotiations with the government gridlocked.

Four police officers killed

At a press conference in Islamabad on Friday, Interior Minister Sheikh Rasheed said four policemen had been killed and 80 wounded during clashes with the protesters.

“Six to eight of them are in critical condition,” Rasheed said.

The TLP said several of its members had also been killed or wounded.

On Friday, the country’s National Security Committee, chaired by Prime Minister Imran Khan and attended by Pakistan’s senior military leaders, decided to uphold the writ of the state at any cost.

The “TLP has crossed the red line and exhausted the state’s patience. … Law will take its course for each one of them and terrorists will be treated like terrorists with no leniency,” tweeted Moeed Yusuf, Pakistan’s national security adviser.

The government has deployed rangers, a paramilitary force, to help police in Punjab province. Together they’ve erected multiple roadblocks and in some places dug trenches to stop the group from marching on the capital.

A large banner placed along the road warned the protesters that the rangers had permission to shoot anyone breaking the law and advised people to return home.

“We cannot let them come to Islamabad. We will try not to use force, but if we have to, we will,” Pakistan’s information minister, Fawad Chaudhry, said on the local Geo TV channel.

No reporting

The Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority has ordered all television and radio channels to not report on the protesters.

The government has also suspended mobile phone service in areas the marchers are passing through. Security officials have warned people not to share the group’s messages on social media.

In a WhatsApp audio message obtained by VOA, a senior police official is heard warning people either to exit or dissolve any WhatsApp groups sharing posts of TLP members.

Khan and his party, however, have also come under criticism for supporting the TLP in the past against Khan’s political rival, Nawaz Sharif.
…

Central Asian republics are stepping up their diplomatic activity in the face of the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, seeking to balance fears of increased extremist activity in the region against the risk of an economic collapse that could send refugees flooding across their borders.

Three of those republics — Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan — joined Russia, China, Iran and Pakistan in issuing a joint statement from Tehran on Thursday, expressing support for the Afghan people while urging the nation’s new Taliban rulers to form an inclusive government representing all social and ethnic groups.

The issue is particularly sensitive for Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, both of which have large ethnic populations in northern Afghanistan hugging their borders. Uzbek Foreign Minister Abdulaziz Kamilov has recently visited Kabul and met with key Taliban players.

The call for an inclusive Afghan government has been a common global refrain, but where Western governments have sought to pressure the Taliban by withholding aid and access to the nation’s fiscal reserves, regional foreign ministers are stressing respect for Afghanistan’s sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity, as well as non-interference in its internal affairs.

The enhanced diplomatic engagement is driven in part by political calculation. Central Asians want the Taliban to suppress potential acts of terrorism against them and dampen the spread of extremism.

“Obviously, the Taliban takeover is not the most pleasant development,” said Dauren Abayev, deputy chief of staff to Kazakhstan’s president, in a public forum this week. “But if you compare them with other groups, it is the not the worst case.”

Afghanistan’s neighbors take some comfort from verbal reassurances delivered to Uzbekistan and others. Last week in Moscow, Taliban Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi said: “Afghanistan will never allow its soil to be used to threaten the security of another country.”

But the neighbors are equally concerned about the nation’s economic stability. For weeks, Uzbek, Kazakh and Kyrgyz officials have urged international partners to help avoid a humanitarian catastrophe that would destabilize the region further.

Talgat Kaliev, Kazakhstan’s special representative, told Euractiv, a pan-European media network, that his country is continuing to provide humanitarian aid

“It is necessary to create conditions for dialogue with the new government, regardless of its political attitudes and ideologies,” he said.

Kyrgyzstan, too, has delivered humanitarian aid, with Taalatbek Masadykov, deputy chairman of its Security Council, telling Kabul that his country wants peace and stability.

Turkmen officials are in Kabul this week, discussing a prospective pipeline project that, when completed, will link their natural gas-rich country through Afghanistan to Pakistan and India. Under construction in Afghanistan since 2018, the so-called TAPI project could carry 33 billion cubic meters of natural gas per year from Galkynysh, Turkmenistan, to Fazilka, India.

Mohammad Issa Akhund, the Taliban’s acting minister of mines and petroleum, said in a statement that Kabul has been “working hard for some time” and takes pride in the project. Afghanistan would take 5% of the gas, with the rest equally divided between Pakistan and India. Kabul hopes to earn transit fees.

One outlier in the regional diplomacy is Tajikistan, which has been openly critical of the Taliban while expressing support for Afghanistan’s ethnic Tajiks.

But Temur Umarov of the Carnegie Moscow Center writes that despite President Emomali Rahmon’s harsh rhetoric, Tajikistan has been extremely cautious, “limiting their criticism to the fact that Afghanistan’s new government is not inclusive enough of the country’s ethnic minorities.”

This summer Rahmon promised to accept up to 100,000 refugees, a pledge his interior minister Ramazon Rahimzoda later walked back, blaming the international community for failing to assist.

Dushanbe says there are some 15,000 Afghan refugees in Tajikistan. The State Committee for National Security recently reported up to 600 Afghans trying to cross the border daily.

Uzbekistan takes pride in opening the first channel of communication with the Taliban in the region and refers to it as Afghanistan’s “interim government.”

“Dialogue is key,” said Furkat Sidikov, Uzbekistan’s deputy foreign minister, while expressing confidence to VOA that even Tajikistan is in synch on Afghanistan and that disagreements can be worked out. “We will not leave any country in fear or concern … We are closely working with each other on Afghanistan.”

For Uzbekistan, Afghan policy is not about the Taliban but “the people of Afghanistan,” officials in Tashkent reiterate. Yet it is about Uzbekistan’s self-interest too.

“Peace there is essential for us,” said Sidikov.

Tashkent has opened the border town of Termez to the international community to serve as a hub for humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan — a temporary and ad hoc arrangement.

UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency, this month conducted three emergency airlifts to Termez, delivering more than 100 metric tons of shelter materials, blankets, plastic sheeting and supplies. The aid is trucked from Termez across the border to Mazar-i-Sharif while Afghan airports remain closed to commercial traffic.

“The border is peaceful. We are not doing this for propaganda… We don’t want our neighbors to suffer,” Sidikov said.

The deputy foreign minister confirmed that Uzbekistan will help Afghanistan repair the Mazar-e-Sharif airport and continue to supply the nation with electricity. Afghanistan can no longer pay, but Tashkent has deferred payment assuming the Taliban will eventually win financial support. To that end, Uzbekistan has called on international financial institutions and donors to unfreeze funds.

In forums ahead of Uzbekistan’s recent presidential election, the Mirziyoyev administration showcased regional diplomacy as its signature foreign policy success.

“Cooperation with Central Asian partners is the top priority,” said Sidikov. “Uzbekistan’s trade within the region nearly doubled from $2.7 billion in 2016 [when President Shavkat Mirziyoyev took power] to $5.2 billion this year.” Afghanistan comprises nearly one-fifth of this commerce.

In Tehran, Uzbek Foreign Minister Kamilov urged the world not to isolate Afghanistan, saying, “The international community needs a post-conflict strategy.”

“Uzbekistan is the driver of connectivity in Central Asia,” said Sidikov, Kamilov’s deputy. “We can build a common future, respecting each other’s interests. The interim government in Afghanistan wants this, too.”

Bakhtiyor Mustafayev, deputy head of Tashkent’s Central Asia International Institute, is encouraged by the fact that all the Central Asian governments, which long acted as rivals, now endorse the idea of connectivity, taking advantage of each others’ unique strengths, “from human capital to natural resources.”

Mustafayev argues that the region has learned lessons from 30 years of independence since the breakup of the Soviet Union: It needs to act and speak collectively and “every state has political will to create that regional space.”

Sherzod Muhammad Ashraf, an ethnic Uzbek from Afghanistan currently based in Tashkent, is happy with this intensified Central Asian focus. “I like that Uzbekistan and others see Afghans as one nation, but minorities have struggled and yearned for respect.

“I hope our neighbors take that into account with the Taliban, because they don’t represent us,” said Ashraf. “I’m happy with calls for inclusive government that involve all ethnic groups.”

This story originated in VOA’s Uzbek Service.
…

Afghan artists and activists say the Taliban have replaced their murals with their logo and slogans, making it impossible for them to continue working in Afghanistan. VOA’s Yalda Baktash has more. Roshan Noorzai contributed.
…

Desperate for work, Sabila Dafadar walks every morning from her poor neighborhood tucked behind tall glass and chrome buildings in the business hub of Gurugram, 32 kilometers from New Delhi, to a busy intersection where day laborers wait for contractors who come to pick up construction workers.

After she migrated from her village 10 years ago, she easily found jobs both as household help and in an office as a cleaner. Like millions of other women, she lost her job last year during a stringent lockdown because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Although Indian businesses and factories have reopened, it has been tough for Dafadar to find work as the economy struggles to recover.

“I have only managed to get work for 15 days during the last three months,” the 35-year-old said.

While women around the world have been hit harder by job losses than have men during the pandemic, the impact on women in India has been particularly severe, experts say.

Even before the pandemic, women made up only about 20% of India’s labor force – far below the global average and lower than is the case in such South Asian countries as Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Many of them work in India’s vast informal sector.

Now there are fears their space will shrink further, particularly for women from poorer households.

“Women are in distress in terms of reentering the labor force, especially urban women who were the worst affected,” said Sona Mitra, principal economist at Initiative for What Works to Advance Women and Girls in the Economy in New Delhi.

“Many who worked or ran small enterprises such as beauty or tailoring services and tiny shops used up their savings during the shutdown and could not restart work when the economy reopened. Others were concentrated in sectors like the garment industry and call centers where workers have less safeguards and can be hired and fired easily.”

A report by the Center of Sustainable Employment at Aziz Premji University this year said more women and younger workers lost jobs during a stringent lockdown last year and that even after jobs recovered, fewer women were able to return to the workforce.

While women are again picking up work, many have had to turn to lower-paid and less secure employment.

“For example, when small private schools in cities shut down, teachers went back to villages and joined unskilled work,” said Amarjeet Kaur, general secretary of the All India Trade Union Congress, one of India’s largest trade unions.

“So, the direction for many women during COVID and even post-COVID has been from skilled to semi-skilled and unskilled work,” she said.

‘Opportunities simply are not there’

Although the formal sector accounts for a much smaller percentage of India’s overall female workforce, here too women were disproportionately affected because industries such as hospitality, tourism and retail that employ more women were the worst-hit.

Six women were among employees laid off last year by a food delivery company in its New Delhi office – women made up a majority of the staff.

“It has been very hard for them to find work,” said a former manager who asked that her name not be used.

“The opportunities simply are not there,” she said.

The women who had lost jobs would not speak on the record.

Experts say the pandemic has highlighted a paradox that women faced even earlier – a steady decline in their participation in the workforce despite rising levels of education and a growing pool of women with college degrees.

From a little over 30% in 2011, their share in the workforce fell to about 20% in 2019.

“The pandemic simply magnified what was already happening. The big employing sectors have not been creating jobs and everything just became much more bare in the job market,” said Sairee Sahal, founder of SHEROES, a portal for female job seekers.

“In retail for example, what has been growing is e-commerce where women’s presence is marginal and not brick-and-mortar retail that employs a lot of women,” she said.

The public health crisis that has kept schools closed for the last year and a half also worsened the situation.

“Social norms in India put the primary burden of household chores and child care on women and put restrictions on their mobility,” Mitra said.

Calling shrinking opportunities for women a wake-up call, she said policymakers must spur expansion of labor-intensive sectors such as garment manufacturing, where women have more opportunities.

“While some work is coming back, we see it coming in the lower rung of the economy,” she said.

Those working on women’s issues say the shrinking space for them will affect not just the economic but also the social position of women in a country where they have struggled to break free of patriarchal norms.

“When they lose their earnings, they lose their independence and status. We have seen that happening during the pandemic,” Kaur said.

“And women who have no support system find themselves struggling to make ends meet,” she added.

Dafadar is aware of that situation.

“In the past year and a half, I have cut back on whatever I could, including food by half.” she said as she looked into the road, hoping for a day’s work. 

 
…

The United States announced Thursday it is providing nearly $144 million in new humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan, where millions of people could face acute hunger this winter unless aid arrives soon. 

National Security Council spokesperson Emily Horne said in a statement the U.S. assistance will be directed through independent organizations that provide support directly to more than 18.4 million vulnerable Afghans, including Afghan refugees in neighboring countries. 

“Our partners provide lifesaving protection, shelter, livelihoods support, essential health care, winterization assistance, emergency food aid, water, sanitation, and hygiene services in response to the growing humanitarian needs exacerbated by health care shortages, drought, malnutrition, and the impending winter,” Horne said. 

She noted that the additional funding brings the total U.S. humanitarian aid in Afghanistan and for Afghan refugees in the region to nearly $474 million in 2021, the largest amount of assistance from any nation. 

The United Nations said more than four decades of deadly conflicts and recurrent natural disasters have resulted in a protracted food crisis in Afghanistan.

Humanitarian needs have grown to unprecedented levels, and more than half of the conflict-torn country’s estimated 40 million population, a record 22.8 million people, will “face acute food insecurity” from November, U.N agencies warned earlier this week.

Among those at risk are 3.2 million children under age 5 who are expected to suffer from acute malnutrition by the end of the year, they said. 

U.S. and Western troops withdrew from Afghanistan in August after 20 years of involvement in the fighting, leading to the fall of the Afghan government to Taliban insurgents. 

The return of the Islamist Taliban to power has triggered financial sanctions on Kabul by the United States and other nations over human rights and terrorism concerns. 

The sanctions have blocked the group’s access to about $10 billion in Afghan assets parked largely with the U.S. Federal Reserve, raising prospects of an economic meltdown in Afghanistan.
…

Taliban diplomats have started work in the Afghan embassy in Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, and at Afghan consulates in other Pakistani cities, two Taliban officials and two Afghan diplomats told VOA Thursday. VOA has obtained copies of official Taliban notifications sent to the Afghan embassy in Islamabad. 

Pakistani officials say they have allowed the deployments even though Pakistan has not yet recognized the Taliban government. Also, Pakistan’s ambassador in Kabul, Mansoor Khan, confirmed the issuance of visas to the Taliban officials when queried by VOA via WhatsApp.

“These visas have been issued for facilitating consular work and visa facilities for Pakistanis visiting Afghanistan for humanitarian work and providing assistance to Afghan citizens in Pakistan,” Khan said. He added that issuance of the visas “does not mean recognition but facilitation.” 

Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan has been urging the international community to engage with the Taliban to avoid a humanitarian crisis and instability in Afghanistan since the Taliban took control of the capital, Kabul, in mid-August.

One Taliban official who talked to VOA on condition of anonymity since he was not authorized to talk to media said that Sardar Muhammad Shokaib, also known as Mosa Farhad, has taken charge as first secretary in the Afghan embassy in Islamabad.

An Afghan diplomat who has been working in Islamabad since the previous government of President Ashraf Ghani said that Shokaib has taken over as the de facto “chargé d’affaires” because there is currently no ambassador in the Afghan embassy.

“He [Shokaib] is looking after all diplomatic affairs as the post of ambassador has been vacant since the withdrawal of ambassador by the former government in July,” he said.

An official in Pakistan’s foreign ministry told VOA, also on condition of anonymity, that he believes the Taliban appointments at the Afghan embassy “would be an administrative thing, to enable proper functioning of the mission.”

Afghanistan recalled its ambassador and senior diplomats from Islamabad in July to protest the alleged abduction and torture of the daughter of Afghan Ambassador Najibullah Alikhil. The daughter, Silsila Alikhil, who was visiting Islamabad, said she was kidnapped while she was shopping in Islamabad and beaten for hours by unknown men. Pakistan investigated the incident but denied that she was abducted. 

The Taliban have also appointed diplomats at Afghan consulates in Pakistan’s three provincial capitals, Karachi, Peshawar and Quetta.

The official deployed in Peshawar, Hafiz Mohibullah, was formally introduced to the staff and assumed his duties Wednesday. A Taliban official said he would deal with consular affairs in lieu of the consul general.

VOA has seen the letter signed by Taliban Foreign Minister Amir Khan Mutaqqi sent to the Afghan embassy approving his appointment to the Peshawar consulate. 

Mullah Ghulam Rasool has been posted at Quetta, the capital of southwestern Balochistan province, while another senior Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Abbas, has been assigned to the Karachi consulate.

Abbas, who has not yet assumed office, served as deputy health minister during the previous Taliban government. He also served as a messenger for the Taliban, bringing messages from the Taliban leadership to the Pakistan government and back, when the group’s leadership was in hiding during the years of insurgency.

A diplomat at the Afghan embassy confirmed to VOA that the embassy had received two letters from Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi in late August about the appointments of the diplomats, even though they did not assume office until this week.

An Afghan embassy source said Pakistani visas have been issued to Taliban officials on diplomatic passports.

When asked for a comment, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid did not deny the appointments but said he is collecting information on the issue.

Pakistan recognized the Taliban government during its last tenure from 1996 to 2001 but withdrew recognition after the 9/11 attacks on the United States. Mullah Zaeef, who served as the Afghan ambassador to Pakistan during Taliban rule, wrote in a book that he was handed over to U.S. forces in Peshawar in early 2002.

Who is Shokaib? 

Taliban members who know Shokaib say he is an ethnic Pashtun from Zabul province and has served in the Information and Cultural Department in southern Kandahar and was associated with a Taliban magazine. He once worked as the Taliban spokesman under the name of Qari Yousaf Ahmadi and was arrested in Pakistan and later lived in Peshawar for several years. 

Financial crisis 

Afghan diplomats at the embassy in Pakistan told VOA the mission had been facing a financial crisis since the Taliban takeover and that they have not paid the rent of the embassy building for three months.

“The staff has not received salaries over the past three months,” one diplomat said. He did not want to be identified by name because he is not authorized to speak to the media. 
…

Former U.S. officials say the withdrawal of U.S. coalition forces from Afghanistan has changed the political calculus of U.S.-Pakistan relations, making Washington less reliant on Islamabad when it comes to counterterrorism activities.

In a recent interview with VOA’s Urdu Service, former U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said the U.S.-Pakistan relationship has always been complex.

“We would try to build a cooperative relationship with them (Pakistan) particularly when al-Qaida was located in the tribal areas of Pakistan,” Panetta said of his time as CIA director under former President Barack Obama. “As long as we kept them informed, as long as we continued to work with them, they gave us some cooperation.”

At the same time, Panetta said, Pakistan has maintained relationships with terrorist groups for leverage against India and has been very close to the Taliban and the Haqqani network — which the U.S. considers a terrorist group — contributing to a lack of trust between the two nations.

Pakistan’s National Security Adviser Moeed Yusuf disagrees with the assessment and says Washington and Islamabad are engaged in a positive dialogue. He notes as an example U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman’s recent visit to Pakistan.

“There is some mistrust that both sides have to overcome, and we are trying to do that, and that is also the reason why she (Sherman) came to Pakistan,” Yusuf recently told VOA. “The two countries are moving forward in a well-coordinated fashion, and there is no major crisis.”

Concerns about terrorism and Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal

Panetta and John Bolton, former national security advisor to then-President Donald Trump, both tell VOA they have significant concerns regarding the security of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. They cite the regional presence of Islamic State-Khorasan, al-Qaida, the Pakistani Taliban in Afghanistan, and the Taliban’s recent seizure of power in Afghanistan.

“The Taliban’s successful takeover of Afghanistan has significantly boosted radical ideology within the Pakistani government, TTP (Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan), and terrorists inside Pakistan,” Bolton told VOA in a recent interview.

“I’m worried that not only would there be a deliberate policy by the government of Pakistan at that point to transfer nuclear weapons to terrorists or to those who would have the money to pay for them.”

According to Bolton,” the main point is that the nuclear capability, a fragile state in Pakistan, let alone the failed state, would significantly increase the risk of these nuclear weapons falling into dangerous hands.”

Former Defense Secretary Panetta voiced similar concerns in his interview with VOA.

“One of our great concerns, when I was director of the CIA, was whether or not a terrorist group would be able to acquire a nuclear weapon of some kind in Pakistan, we were never convinced that it was a secure system,” said Panetta.

Pakistani National Security Advisor Yusuf insists there is no reason for concern about the security of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.

“Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal by the grace of God have always been safe and will always remain safe, and if anyone wants to lose sleep over it, it’s their choice.”
…

More than 30 instances of violence and threats of violence against Afghan journalists were recorded in the last two months, with nearly 90% committed by the Taliban, a media watchdog said Wednesday.

More than 40% of the cases recorded by The Afghanistan National Journalists Union were physical beatings and another 40% were verbal threats of violence, said Masorro Lutfi, the group’s head. The remainder involved cases in which journalists were imprisoned for a day. One journalist was killed. 

Most of the cases in September and October were documented in provinces across Afghanistan outside the capital Kabul, but six of the 30 cases of violence took place in the capital, ANJU said.

Lutfi, in a news conference Wednesday, said while most of the instances of violence — or threats of violence — were perpetrated by Taliban members, three of the 30 cases were carried out by unknown persons.

The report comes as Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers attempt to open diplomatic channels with an international community largely reluctant to formally recognize their rule. They are trying to position themselves as responsible rulers, who promise security for all.

Taliban deputy cultural and information minister and spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told The Associated Press they are aware of the cases of violence toward journalists and are investigating in order to punish the perpetrators.

“The new transition and unprofessionalism of our friends caused it,” said Mujahid, promising the problem will be solved.

The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for an attack by gunmen in early October in which journalist Sayed Maroof Sadat was killed in eastern Nangarhar province along with his cousin and two Taliban members.

Since the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan in late August, three journalists including Sadat have been killed in Afghanistan. Alireza Ahmadi, a reporter of Raha News Agency, and Najma Sadeqi, an anchor at Jahan-e-Sehat TV channel were killed in a suicide attack at Kabul airport during the evacuation.

Taliban officials have repeatedly urged media to follow Islamic laws but without elaborating. Lutfi said his group is working on a bill with media outlets and Taliban officials to enable the media to continue their daily operations.

Afghanistan has long been dangerous for journalists. The Committee to Protect Journalists said in early September that 53 journalists have been killed in the country since 2001, including 33 since 2018.

In July, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer from Reuters was killed covering clashes between the Taliban and Afghan security forces. In 2014, an Agence France-Presse journalist, his wife and two children were among nine people killed by Taliban gunmen while dining at a hotel in Kabul.
…

Although it has expressed concern over a new land boundary law passed by China, India has said it expects that Beijing will not take action that could “unilaterally” alter the situation in the countries’ border areas.

China’s National People’s Congress passed the law Saturday amid a protracted military standoff that has led the Asian rivals to deploy tens of thousands of soldiers along disputed stretches of their frontier in the Himalayas.

Analysts in New Delhi see the new law as a signal of a hardening stance by China on their boundary dispute.

The Land Borders Law, which is to take effect Jan. 1, calls China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity “sacred and inviolable.”

“The state shall take measures to safeguard territorial integrity and land boundaries and guard against and combat any act that undermines territorial sovereignty and land boundaries,” the law says.

The measure marks the first time China has passed a law spelling out how it guards its land borders. While it shares land borders with 14 countries, including Russia, it has unsettled boundaries with only two — India and Bhutan.

The dispute between India and China in the Himalayas flared last year amid accusations by New Delhi that Chinese soldiers had encroached into Indian territory in Ladakh, resulting in their deadliest clash in nearly five decades, killing 20 Indian and four Chinese soldiers.

India’s foreign ministry said on Wednesday that “China’s unilateral decision to bring about a legislation which can have implication on our existing bilateral arrangements on border management as well as on the boundary question is of concern to us.”

Ministry spokesperson Arindam Bagchi said in a statement that “both sides have agreed to seek a fair, reasonable and mutually acceptable resolution to the boundary question through consultations.”

“We also expect that China will avoid undertaking action under the pretext of this law which could unilaterally alter the situation in the India-China border areas,” he said.

Claims between the two countries overlap at several places along the 3,488-kilometer so-called Line of Actual Control that serves as their de facto border.

The new law has raised concerns that it could become harder to resolve the dispute that has bedeviled their ties.

Talks aimed at finding a political settlement to their unsettled border have dragged on for years but have made little headway. While confidence-building measures put in place had long helped to keep a lid on tensions, the hostilities that erupted last summer have eroded trust between the two sides.

The latest talks held this month between their military commanders aimed at disengaging troops from friction points in the Himalayas also ended in a deadlock.

“Multiple rounds of talks, whether it is at the diplomatic or military level between the two countries have made virtually no progress in overcoming the impasse,” said Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan, director of the Centre for Security, Strategy and Technology at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi.

“The new law indicates a hardening of position, it aims to show that China is powerful,” she said.

The deputy dean of the School of Law under Renmin University of China, Wang Xu, was quoted in China’s state-backed Global Times newspaper as saying that “the law will serve as a legal guideline for China in coping with all possible land border disputes, including the current specific territorial conflicts at China-India borders.”

Observers say the new law is an indication that the military standoff in the Himalayas is likely to drag on.

Calling the new law a signal of China’s inflexibility, an editorial in the Times of India on Tuesday said that it means that their current border standoff “has slim chance of satisfactory resolution” and that China will not budge from its border claims as it looks to legally formalize them by building permanent infrastructure and control systems in these areas.

“More icy hostility may follow,” the editorial warned adding, “An aggressive, inflexible and belligerent China is here to stay.”
…

Zalmay Khalilzad, the senior U.S. official who led the negotiations with the Taliban, blamed, for the most part, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani’s “intransigence,” the Afghan elite’s “selfishness” and Afghan soldiers’ lack of will to fight for the rapid Taliban military takeover of the country in August.

“We were all surprised by the intransigence of President Ghani in insisting on staying in power till his term ended, despite the fact that he had come out re-elected in a fraudulent election that very few Afghans participated in,” Khalilzad said Wednesday during a webinar organized by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington think tank.

He acknowledged for the first time publicly that the U.S. had discouraged Afghans from holding the presidential elections that led to Ghani’s winning a second term in office. Instead, Khalilzad said, the U.S. wanted to establish an interim setup that was acceptable to both sides while Afghan politicians and civil society negotiated a political settlement with the Taliban.

Ghani’s “grand miscalculation,” according to Khalilzad, was that he did not believe the U.S. would withdraw from a region that he thought gave the U.S. forces and its intelligence agencies physical proximity to strategically important countries like China, Russia, Iran and Pakistan.

“I tried to persuade him that President [Donald] Trump was very serious, and he said, ‘No, the intelligence and military told me otherwise,’ ” Khalilzad said.

Troops’ mettle

Ghani also widely miscalculated his own military’s will to fight.

Once the U.S. announced its decision to withdraw, he told Khalilzad, “now I am free to fight the war the Afghan way. In six months now I will defeat the Taliban because you were fighting it poorly.”

The fact that the more than 300,000-strong Afghan army, trained and armed by the U.S., melted away in front of 60,000 Taliban, was, according to Khalilzad, the result of a lack of morale, corruption and poor treatment of the soldiers on the front lines.

“[T]hat may have had much more to do with the politics of Afghanistan — that people didn’t believe in it, the soldiers, in the cause — [but] the Taliban believed in their cause,” he said.

Khalilzad also lamented what he called the Afghan elite’s “selfish, self-centered, corrupt” behavior that led to a failure of peace talks with the Taliban.

“I am disappointed that the elite that we worked with, they didn’t rise to the occasion, this golden opportunity that the American engagement provided,” he said.

Khalilzad, who was born in Afghanistan, was criticized for negotiating a deal with the Taliban that many called a surrender. His American and Afghan critics accused him of giving too many concessions to the Taliban in return for very little. The U.S. and Taliban signed the agreement in February 2020 that defined a timeline for foreign forces to withdraw in return for counterterrorism guarantees from the Taliban.

However, the agreement also called for the Taliban to negotiate with the Afghan government and others for a political settlement to end the war. Those negotiations started in September 2020 but never picked up steam until the Taliban took over the country militarily without significant resistance from the Afghan army.

They entered capital Kabul on August 15, 2021, without firing a single shot.

Defending his agreement, Khalilzad said the mechanism allowed flexibility to delay the withdrawal date if the Taliban did not fulfil their pledges, or if the political engagement between Afghans did not progress, but President Joe Biden decided to stick close to the original timeline.

What’s next?

Going forward, Khalilzad advocated a robust diplomatic engagement with the Taliban that includes agreement on a “road map that takes into account the trust or mistrust of each other and the behavior that needs to take place over a time period.”

He said policy toward Afghanistan in Washington has become hostage to an “ill-informed debate” that could be detrimental to U.S. interests.

Many in America wanted the Taliban to suffer and their government to collapse, he said, because “we did not succeed in defeating them, and that has left a bad taste in people’s mouths.”

He warned that a collapse of government in Afghanistan would lead to a civil war and a humanitarian catastrophe that would provide space for terrorist groups to flourish.

He said the Taliban had shown, in the 18 months after the signing of the agreement, that they could keep their word by not killing a single American even though U.S. air attacks in defense of Afghan forces killed hundreds or even thousands of Taliban during that period.

Khalilzad also said the Taliban could benefit from outside help on how to deal with the Islamic State extremist group in Afghanistan.
…

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Wednesday that he had ordered a full-scale review of the American withdrawal from Afghanistan in August as the U.S. ended its two-decade fight against terrorism there.

In a hastily arranged airlift, the U.S. and its allies evacuated more than 124,000 civilians, including Americans, Afghans and others, as the Taliban took swift control of the Kabul government while Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled to exile in the United Arab Emirates.

But thousands of other Afghans linked to the U.S. occupation of their country were left behind as the evacuation ended, although some have managed to get out of the country in the last two months. During the evacuation from the Kabul airport, 13 American service members were killed in a bomb attack orchestrated by the Afghan offshoot of the Islamic State terrorist group.

Blinken, speaking at the Foreign Service Institute outside Washington to a group of lawmakers, diplomats and others, said, “I’ve ordered a series of internal reviews focused on our planning and execution for the evacuation and relocation effort in Afghanistan.”

Blinken praised the State Department’s evacuation effort but said the agency needs to learn from it as well, in case the U.S. ever confronts a similar situation calling for a rapid withdrawal from a war zone.

“There are many things that now, looking back, we can and should ask: Could we have done things differently? Could we have taken that step differently? Should we have tried that idea first? Could we have gotten to that decision more quickly?” Blinken said.

The top U.S. diplomat did not spell out details of the review. But he said, “We owe it to ourselves, to our Afghan friends and partners, and to the future State Department employees who might find themselves facing a similar challenge one day to capture all that we learned, to study it, to apply it, to preserve it in a way that it enhances our future planning and helps us prepare better for future contingencies.”

U.S. news outlets reported last week that the State Department’s inspector general would review the end of diplomatic operations in Afghanistan, while also looking into the Special Immigrant Visa program, which allowed Afghans to be admitted to the U.S. as refugees, and their resettlement in the United States.
…

India’s top court on Wednesday established a committee of experts to look into accusations that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government used Israeli military-grade spyware to monitor political opponents, journalists and activists. 

The Supreme Court order came in response to petitions filed by a group of Indian journalists, rights activists and opposition politicians following an investigation by a global media consortium in July. The committee, headed by a retired judge, is expected to give its findings by year-end. 

India’s opposition has been demanding an investigation into how the Israeli spyware, known as Pegasus, was used in India. 

Modi’s government has “unequivocally” denied all allegations regarding illegal surveillance. India’s information technology minister Ashwani Vaishnaw in Parliament dismissed the allegations in July, calling them “highly sensational,” “over the top” and “an attempt to malign the Indian democracy.” 

But the government in an affidavit did not tell the court whether it used the Israeli equipment for spying, citing security reasons. 

On Wednesday, the court said the state cannot get a free pass every time by raising security concerns. 

“Violation of the right to privacy, freedom of speech, as alleged in pleas, needs to be examined,” the Press Trust of India cited Chief Justice N.V. Ramanna as saying. 

Based on leaked targeting data, the findings by a global media consortium provided evidence that the spyware from the Israel-based NSO Group, the world’s most infamous hacker-for-hire company, was allegedly used to infiltrate devices belonging to a range of targets, including journalists, activists and political opponents in 50 countries. 

The company said in July it only sells to “vetted government agencies” for use against terrorists and major criminals and that it has no visibility into its customers’ data. 

Critics call those claims dishonest and have provided evidence that NSO directly manages the high-tech spying. They say the repeated abuse of Pegasus spyware highlights the nearly complete lack of regulation of the private global surveillance industry.

Pegasus infiltrates phones to vacuum up personal and location data and surreptitiously controls the smartphone’s microphones and cameras. In the case of journalists, that allows hackers to spy on reporters’ communications with sources.

Rights groups say the findings bolster accusations that not only autocratic regimes but also democratic governments, including India, have used the spyware for political ends.
…

The U.N. refugee agency says it welcomes recent steps by Pakistan to ease restrictions at official border points with neighboring Afghanistan. The agency says this enables smoother movement of goods into troubled Afghanistan, and keep people from turning to human smugglers to cross the border.

Afghanistan is a landlocked country and depends largely on cross-border trade for survival. Since the Taliban took control of the country in mid-August, Pakistan has tightened border controls.

U.N. refugee agency spokesman Babar Baloch, speaking from the Afghan capital Kabul, says the border disruptions have created many hardships. He says they have affected trade and regular population movements. In some cases, he says the border restrictions may have acted as a barrier for people seeking safety.

“Disruptions have left many Afghans, including women, children and those needing urgent medical attention, stranded for weeks, especially at the Chaman-Spin Boldak border crossing between the two countries. This border has remained closed for the past three weeks now,” he said.

Balloch said the new steps will ease fears of people being pushed into the hands of human smugglers and traffickers, potentially with deadly consequences. He said, so far, a predicted mass exodus of refugees from Afghanistan has not materialized. To date, he said only some 50,000 people have fled to Pakistan and Iran.

He said the bigger problem remains the huge number of people displaced inside Afghanistan. This year, he noted, conflict has caused nearly 700,000 people to flee their homes, for a total of 3.5 million people uprooted within the country.

Balloch said the UNHCR is mainly focused on providing essential humanitarian assistance to displaced Afghans. He said his agency has provided tents, emergency shelter kits, food rations and many other relief supplies this year to nearly half a million people.

“UNHCR is also arranging further airlifts of humanitarian supplies into Afghanistan in addition to the three flights that recently landed in Termez, Uzbekistan. As we continue to scale up our humanitarian response, more resources are urgently needed ahead of the harsh winter that could bring deadly consequences for Afghans,” Balloch said.

The UNHCR is appealing for urgent international support to displaced Afghans living in dire conditions both within and outside the country.

A recent U.N. report finds more than half the Afghan population, nearly 23 million people, are suffering from acute hunger. It warns the looming harsh winter season will cut off access to many areas of the country where families desperately depend on humanitarian aid for survival.
…

Both the Islamic State terror group’s Afghan affiliate and al-Qaida could be ready to launch strikes against the United States and the West sooner than previously thought following the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The Pentagon’s third-highest ranking official told lawmakers Tuesday that the latest intelligence suggests Islamic State Khorasan, also known as ISIS-K, is on a faster track to regenerate its external strike operations, though al-Qaida’s terror operatives are not far behind.

“Both al-Qaida and ISIS-K have the intent to conduct external operations,” Defense Department Undersecretary for Policy Colin Kahl said, testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

“We could see ISIS-K generate that capability in somewhere between six and 12 months,” Kahl said. “Al-Qaida would take a year or two to reconstitute that capability.”

Fears that the terror groups could gain strength in Afghanistan following the departure of U.S. and coalition troops are not new. U.S. and Western officials have warned for months that both groups were poised to take advantage of the absence of U.S. boots on the ground.

Officials and analysts cautioned that IS Khorasan in particular had already bolstered its clandestine networks in Afghanistan and surrounding countries in the months leading up to the U.S. pullout.

Attacks sooner rather than later

But the intelligence shared with lawmakers Tuesday suggests both IS Khorasan and al-Qaida may have made additional gains in recent months, allowing them to speed up the time frame, which top Pentagon and intelligence officials previously put at six months to three years.

“I don’t think they are nearly as well-resourced as ISIS in Iraq and Syria were back in the heyday,” Kahl told lawmakers of the threat from IS Khorasan, though he warned the affiliate’s links to the terror group’s global network is troubling.

“They do have a cadre of a few thousand folks, some of which would love to conduct external attacks,” he said. “I think we have to be vigilant that a subset of ISIS-K could develop the resources and the capability to strike outward to the U.S. homeland.”

Kahl’s warning echoes the concerns of other top U.S. officials, who likewise have cautioned IS Khorasan has been steadily building momentum.

During a congressional hearing last month, Washington’s top counterterrorism official, Christine Abizaid, told lawmakers that the group seemed to be taking advantage of the notoriety it got for carrying out the deadly attack on Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul in the waning days of the U.S. withdrawal.

“Will it become more focused on the West? Will it become more focused on the homeland than it was?” Abizaid asked at the time.

U.S. officials have also said IS Khorasan has benefited from the way Taliban forces took over Afghanistan, emptying prisons and releasing thousands of IS supporters and fighters.

“What we see is ISIS newly rejuvenated,” General Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie, the commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East and South Asia, told lawmakers last month about the Taliban’s indiscriminate opening of Afghanistan’s Parwan prison in August.

Other U.S. officials now estimate the IS group has at least 2,000 “hardcore” fighters in cells across Afghanistan, though some foreign intelligence services think the number may be higher.

Growth of groups a concern

And there are concerns IS Khorasan’s numbers, as well as those for al-Qaida, could soon start to swell, with intelligence reports suggesting supporters of both groups have started to head to Afghanistan.

Getting a sense of how much both terror groups could grow, though, will be difficult.

Kahl said the U.S. is conducting daily surveillance flights over Afghanistan while also using technical capabilities to obtain information on each group’s plans.

But U.S. military and intelligence officials have consistently warned that getting vital intelligence on the threat is more difficult without a U.S. presence on the ground.

There are also questions about what role the Taliban will play, if any, in limiting the threat of terror plots emanating from Afghan soil against the U.S. and other Western countries.

“We have seen signs … that the Taliban is wary about Afghanistan being a springboard for al-Qaida external attacks, not because the Taliban are good guys but because they fear international retribution if that were to occur,” Kahl said.

U.S. officials have likewise said there is an expectation the Taliban will crack down on IS Khorasan, which already has launched attacks against Taliban targets across Afghanistan.

Still, there is concern that it won’t be enough.

“The Taliban certainly have a vested interest in quashing any Islamic State elements,” Katherine Zimmerman, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told VOA.

“[But] the gap between the will of the Taliban to eliminate the Islamic State and the Taliban’s capabilities to do so seems to be large enough that the Islamic State threat will persist from Afghanistan,” she said.

There are also lingering questions about the ability of U.S. forces to successfully limit terrorism threat from “over the horizon.”

Despite ongoing discussions, the U.S. has so far failed to acquire any basing options that would allow it to establish drones and other assets in the region, instead relying on flights from its bases in the Persian Gulf, some eight hours away.

“We’ve not secured firm basing arrangements,” Kahl told lawmakers, noting ongoing talks with Pakistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.

“They [Pakistani officials] continue to give us access to Pakistani airspace, and we’re in conversations about keeping that airspace open,” he added. “They don’t want Afghanistan to be a safe haven for terrorist attacks, not just against Pakistan but against others.”

Biden critics’ worries

A number of U.S. lawmakers have been highly critical of U.S. President Joe Biden’s decision to move ahead with the Afghanistan withdrawal, charging it has laid the groundwork for a terrorist revival in Afghanistan.

“The consequences of the president’s disastrous decisions are impossible to ignore,” Senator Jim Inhofe, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said Tuesday.

“The danger is likely to grow across the world in our own backyard,” he said, adding that “instead of putting together a real counterterrorism plan for the future, all we get is buzzwords.”

Lieutenant General James Mingus, the Joint Chiefs director for operations, on Tuesday tried to allay those concerns.

“We are actively setting the conditions to ensure we remain situationally aware and are postured to mitigate and neutralize developing terrorist threats,” Mingus told lawmakers.

He also said intelligence estimates that IS Khorasan or al-Qaida could launch terror attacks in six months to a year were, “based on no U.S. or coalition intervention.”

“Our efforts in the months ahead, and as we continue to improve our over-the-horizon architecture, is to ensure that that external capability never comes to fruition,” Mingus said.

Kahl on Tuesday, also pushed back, while admitting the U.S. needs to “remain vigilant.”

“The intelligence community assesses that the overall risk to the homeland across the world is at its lowest point since 9/11,” he told lawmakers, arguing other hotspots are just as dangerous, if not more so.

“We’re focused on the counterterrorism front on Somalia, the growth of violent extremism in places like the Sahel,” Kahl said. “We continue to have to vigilant in Iraq and in Syria and in Yemen.”
…

Uzbekistan has completed another election without real opposition. Yet Uzbeks, hungry to express their preferences, still turned out to vote, flocking to polling stations at a rate of over 80%. International observers say that is notable in a country that has undertaken halting and tentative reforms in recent years.

Anthony Bowyer of the International Foundation for Electoral Systems spent a month in Uzbekistan monitoring the campaign, visiting 30 polling stations on the October 24 election day. He sees the official turnout number as accurate, calling it a signal that people expect more from their leadership.

President Shavkat Mirziyoyev, who ran for the Liberal Democratic Party, crushed four token rivals: the National Revival Democratic Party’s Alisher Kadirov, the People’s Democratic Party’s Maqsuda Vorisova, the Justice Social Democratic Party’s Bahrom Abduhalimov, and the Ecological Party’s Narzullo Oblomurodov. These putative “opponents” lost badly to an incumbent who won with a whopping 80% of the official tally.

Several voters who talked to VOA on election day said they chose Mirziyoyev in part because he is a known quantity. Some rural voters said they chose the president “even though the changes he promised have not come to our village yet.” For many, his opponents were unknown, their parties irrelevant.

Others, like Rukhsora, a young Tashkent professional, said they are “happy with the changes,” which include greater openness and accountability than during the rule of authoritarian President Islam Karimov from 1989 to 2016. “The fact that we still have many problems does not make him a bad president.”

Uzbekistan has struggled to reflect opposition in a government-managed vote. Tashkent students complained that other candidates did not bother seeking their votes. “If you want to become president, should you not try to win hearts and minds? They can’t expect our vote just because their name is on the ballot,” said Sobir from Kashkadarya.

All candidates toured the country, while their representatives held community forums. But they were never seen together. And candidate debates are unheard of in Uzbek presidential elections.

Yet many voters remember live TV debates during parliamentary elections in 2019 as an exciting hint of what could be. But this time, two debates featuring the candidates’ representatives went unnoticed.

“Should not this be something the presidential nominees personally do?” asked a group of law students, attending political forums at the International Media Hall in Tashkent.

A group of international observers concluded Monday that “the lack of genuine pluralism and meaningful engagement between candidates or with citizens meant that Uzbekistan’s presidential election was not truly competitive, while significant procedural irregularities were noted on election day.”

But Sherzod Qudratkhoja, rector of the University of Journalism and Mass Communications in Tashkent and a member of the Central Election Commission, said it is not easy to satisfy everybody in a country of 35 million, most of whom are under age 45.

“The incumbent’s clear win does not mean that competition was unfair and undemocratic,” Qudratkhoja said.

“It’s unfair to criticize the absence of heated debates and personality-based campaigns. Uzbekistan is a modest society, and we never claim to be good at political advertising and election strategy. It’s clear we lack experience, but we are honest about it. This is not some spectacle. Believe me, we feel the difference now.”

The joint observation mission from the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly, and the European Parliament, acknowledged extensive legal reform but said election legislation still does not yet fully comply with international standards for democratic elections.

“This election has shown that the democratic reforms of recent years must be carried forward,” said Reinhold Lopatka, leader of the short-term OSCE observer mission. “Full respect for basic freedoms and real competition among political forces, which were lacking, will be essential to live up to the people’s democratic aspirations.”

Russian, Chinese and Central Asian leaders rushed to congratulate Mirziyoyev but Washington issued a cautiously optimistic statement that did not name the president himself.

“We concur with the OSCE-ODIHR monitoring mission’s observation that the vote was peaceful and characterized by high voter turnout but share the OSCE mission’s concerns that the elections took place in an overly restrictive political environment and that important election safeguards were disregarded,” said the State Department.

The Biden administration called on Tashkent to expand civil and political rights.

Mirziyoyev, for his part, has pledged to improve livelihoods within the span of his second and constitutionally final five-year term.

But experts caution that he may change the constitution. After all, no Uzbek leader has yet left office democratically, with his predecessor dying in office after more than 25 years in power.

A group of pro-Mirziyoyev bloggers told VOA they hope he will break that mold to set an example.

“If he turns into yet another strongman, following the path of our previous president, Islam Karimov, everything Mirziyoyev has been doing will be quickly forgotten,” said one.

Mirziyoyev’s constant refrain that his government is committed to serve the people resonates deeply with supporters who may ultimately call for him stay on.

Foreign observers criticized “excessively strict requirements for the right to become a candidate, together with burdensome party registration rules.”

The distinction between incumbency and candidacy was blurred, reported the OSCE, giving Mirziyoyev an undue advantage. It criticized the fact that even private media provided more coverage to him than to the other four candidates combined.

Party officials agree Uzbekistan “deserves better campaigns and elections” but argue that citizens should work towards those goals, mirroring the growing spirit of political activism in the country.

“The recent and ongoing reforms are an encouraging sign,” said Heidi Hautala, head of the European Parliament delegation. “But the exclusion of opposition parties and the lack of genuine competition, as well as the high number of irregularities we saw on election day, remain substantial obstacles in the path of democratization.”

Hautala urges that the system Mirziyoyev leads should open further, letting citizens form a genuine civil society.

However, many question the need for a formal opposition, reflecting an innate conservatism born of decades of authoritarian rule. “Will opposition solve our longstanding problems?” asked a middle-aged female voter. “Explaining all problems by pointing to the lack of opposition is quite naïve. I travel around the world and don’t think opposition parties are a solution.”

Bahrom Kuchkarov, vice chair of the Central Election Commission, says citizens are the ultimate judges: “We know the shortcomings, but this election is a step forward.”
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Afghanistan is facing a severe food shortage. With the winter coming, supply lines to large parts of the country will be cut off by snow. Aid agencies say they are rushing to stave off crippling hunger and malnutrition in freezing cold temperatures. VOA’s Ayesha Tanzeem met Afghan families struggling to feed their children. This is their story.

Camera: Malik Waqar Ahmed, Producer: Malik Waqar Ahmed, Mariam Alimi contributed to this report.
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A campaign that began with ordinary people donating frequent-flyer miles has raised enough in two months to provide 40,000 flights for refugees from Afghanistan, and organizers and the White House are looking to nearly double that figure.

About 3,200 flights with donated miles have already carried Afghans from temporary housing at U.S. military bases to new homes around the United States, according to organizers.

Corporations have made half of the contributions so far, mostly in tickets donated by airlines, including ones that ferried refugees from bases overseas to the U.S. under contracts with the federal government.

The campaign was started by Miles4Migrants, a group that was founded in 2016 and uses donated miles and credit card points to help refugees. The group saw support for refugees fleeing Afghanistan in August, as the U.S. military withdrew and turned the country over to the Taliban, and began talking to other nonprofits about helping.

“Government resources are limited, and we knew that the American people wanted to support Afghans who were arriving and help them find safe homes,” said the group’s co-founder, Andy Freedman. “That’s when we turned to the airlines.”

United Airlines has contributed 7,000 flights and American Airlines donated 6,000. Smaller contributions have come in from Delta, JetBlue, Alaska, Frontier, Air Canada, aircraft maker Boeing and the Tripadvisor Charitable Foundation, organizers say.

Individuals have donated enough miles and credit card points to cover 20,000 flights, according to Miles4Migrants and Welcome.US, a new not-for-profit coalition that is trying to generate private-sector support for arriving Afghans.

“It is incredibly inspiring to see the American people and American companies coming together to welcome our new Afghan neighbors in this way,” said Nazanin Ash, the CEO of Welcome.US and a former State Department official during the Bush and Obama administrations.

The organizers are looking to raise enough additional donations to pay for another 30,000 flights. Using donated miles and cash to pay for travel will free up government refugee aid for housing and other services, organizers say.

Historically, the evacuees typically pay for their own travel. That is quite a burden to be putting on people who come (to the U.S.) with very little,” said former Delaware Gov. Jack Markell, who is President Joe Biden’s point person on aiding the Afghan refugees and is also Biden’s nominee for ambassador to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

According to Markell, about 9,000 Afghans have been resettled in the U.S., about 53,000 are living in temporary housing at military bases in the U.S., another 3,700 are coming in next 10 days from bases in Europe and the Middle East, and up to 30,000 more are projected to arrive over the next year or so, a figure that includes people still in Afghanistan.

Veterans groups and others have scrambled to get Afghan allies such as interpreters who served the U.S. military on flights out of Kabul since the capital fell to the Taliban. Some don’t have the special immigrant visas that were intended for Afghans who helped Americans during the 20-year U.S. military presence, and the U.S. abandoned its embassy in August.

Some former Trump administration officials are working to build opposition to the U.S. resettlement of Afghan refugees, saying they are a security threat. “How many terrorists are among them?” Trump said in a recent statement. The Biden administration says they were vetted before entering the U.S.
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Uzbekistan’s incumbent leader has won a second five-year term in the tightly controlled Central Asian nation, preliminary results showed Monday.

President Shavkat Mirziyoyev received 80.1% of Sunday’s vote, the country’s Central Election Commission announced.

Mirziyoyev, who took office in 2016 following the death of longtime President Islam Karimov, has relaxed many of the policies of his dictatorial predecessor but maintained rigid controls over the political scene.

In Sunday’s election, he faced four relatively low-visibility candidates who didn’t even show up for televised debates, instead sending proxies who failed to engage in substantial discussions. Independent candidates weren’t allowed, and if it had not been for the billboards presenting the candidates and text messages sent by the government reminding voters about the forthcoming election, the campaign would have been hard to spot.

Jahongir Otajonov, a popular singer and representative of the unregistered Erk party, whose leaders are in exile, quit the race under intense pressure. Khidirnazar Allakulov, the leader of the Hakikat va Tarakkiyot party, also wasn’t allowed to run.

Despite the absence of significant competition, voter turnout was strong at 80.8%.

Under Mirziyoyev, freedom of speech has expanded compared with the suppression of the Karimov era, and some independent news media and bloggers have appeared. He also relaxed the tight controls on Islam in the predominantly Muslim country that Karimov imposed to counter dissident views.

Mirziyoyev lifted controls on hard currency, helping encourage foreign investment, and he moved to patch up foreign relations that had soured under Karimov.

“Mirziyoyev improved relations with world players such as Russia, China and the West, while also resolving conflicts with neighbors including establishing peaceful interaction with Afghanistan,” said Andrey Kazantsev of the Moscow State Institute of Foreign Relations.

Uzbekistan and Afghanistan share a 144-kilometer (89-mile) border, and Uzbekistan has consistently worried that conflict in its neighbor could spill over. The ex-Soviet republic’s foreign minister became the first foreign official to visit Afghanistan after the Taliban took control of the country in August.

Mirziyoyev has moved to boost economic and trade ties with Russia, which is building Uzbekistan’s first nuclear power plant and has invested in other big economic projects in the country. Russia also attracts a flow of migrant workers from Uzbekistan.

Russian President Vladimir Putin was the first to congratulate Mirziyoyev on his re-election, calling him Monday even before Uzbek election officials announced preliminary results.

While maintaining close ties with Russia, Uzbekistan has signed a number of key agreements with China, which became Uzbekistan’s largest trading partner as part of its Belt and Road Initiative.

As the only visible candidate during the campaign, Mirziyoyev toured the country to promise supporting local communities and bridging the gap between rich and poor. Experts say that inequality will be the biggest challenge during his second term.

Political scientist Akhmed Rahmonov noted that while under Karimov food and energy were subsidized by the state, “today, with the free market reforms, the subsidies have been removed, but no mechanism has been created to support redistribution of wealth.”

“People are dissatisfied because inequality and prices are rising and there is no mechanism to protect the most vulnerable people,” Rahmonov said. “Education, healthcare and other state services are now being privatized, and prices of public services are on the rise. At the same time, salaries grow much slower.”

The incumbent president will also have to face Uzbek society’s growing expectations for more political freedoms.

“Uzbek elections look like a ritual or ceremony with fanfare and gaudy tinsel, where everyone knows their role and plays it,” said Sardor, a 31-year-old Tashkent resident who asked for his last name to be withheld for fear of persecution.

He said that he didn’t vote as “there was no spirit of a real race,” adding that “the programs of the candidates were written based on Soviet-style standards.”
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