Bharat Rakshak

The Taliban dissolved Afghanistan’s two election commissions as well as the state ministries for peace and parliamentarian affairs, an official said Sunday.

Bilal Karimi, deputy spokesman for Afghanistan’s Taliban-run government, said the country’s Independent Election Commission and Electoral Complaint Commission have been dissolved.

He called them “unnecessary institutions for the current situation in Afghanistan.” He said if there is a need for the commissions in the future, the Taliban government can revive them.

The Taliban government has reportedly declared a ban on the extraction of iron ore in the country.

The development comes after videos on social media reportedly showed vehicles being smuggled from Afghanistan to Pakistan.

Taliban's Zabhihullah Mujahid in a tweet had said that the Afghanistan government officials had met Russian investors to explore "extraction and establishment of oil and gas refineries" in the country.

Mujahid asserted the talks were also conducted for cement and alloy plants including the establishment of a cement production company. The Taliban government has been seeking investment from abroad in order to address the deep economic crisis ever since it took over the country in August last year.

Reports claimed last year that Chinese mining officials had visited Afghanistan to explore lithium and copper deposits.

China's state-run Global Times had reported that officials had made on-site visits to the country targeting lithium mining deposits.

Reports claimed at least five Chinese companies had obtained special visas in November to explore the new mining opportunities. Afghanistan reportedly has over $1 trillion worth of natural deposits.

Qatari and Turkish companies are set to manage technical operations at Afghanistan’s airports, with a deal expected to be finalised within two weeks, an official from the Afghan Ministry of Transport and Civil Aviation [MoTCA] said on Monday.

“We will not give the management of the airports to anyone. We will make contracts over the technical affairs of the international airports with standard and international companies,” Imamuddin Ahmadi, a MoTCA spokesman told Afghan news outlet TOLOnews.

Qatari and Turkish delegations had traveled to Kabul in December last year to hold discussions with Afghan officials over running various airports in the country.

Ahead of their departure, Doha and Ankara had signed a memorandum of understanding [MoU], under which they both agreed to run five different airports together if granted the contracts by Kabul.

NEW DELHI -- India delivered two tons of medicines to Afghanistan on Friday, although it has not officially recognized its Taliban government.

The medicine was given to Kabul’s Indira Gandhi Hospital, which was set up with Indian assistance in 2004, Indian External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Arindam Bagchi said.

Last month, India supplied Afghanistan with 500,000 doses of COVID-19 vaccines and 1.6 tons of medical supplies through the World Health Organization, Bagchi said in a statement.

India also announced that it will provide 50,000 tons of wheat to Afghanistan to ease food shortages there and is working out details of the shipment with Pakistan's government. Pakistan does not allow Indian transport vehicles to use its land route to Afghanistan because of tense relations with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government.

In an indication of the complex positioning on Afghanistan by various players in the region and the international community, sharp differences emerged during discussions on several drafts of the resolution with India, a non-permanent member of the Council, and France, one of the Permanent 5, on the same side and China and Russia on the other.

According to the MacArthur Foundation-supported Security Council Report, which provides analyses of happenings at the horseshoe table, Resolution 2615, proposed by the US on December 3, was hard fought over three weeks.

India and France, with a couple of other non-permanent members advised caution, while China and Russia pushed for, and succeeded in getting a more open-ended arrangement, which was also backed by several non-permanent members.

India, Estonia, France, and the United Kingdom, which is also a P-5 country, suggested a six-month period for the exemption and a review at the end of it. China and Russia wanted no time limit, making the case that such a restriction would hamper aid operations. The final resolution places no time limit on the exemption, saying only that it will be reviewed after 12 months, and includes no provisions for the consequences of misuse or misappropriation of the funds.

Dilbu wrote:Iran says won't officially recognise Taliban after Tehran talks

KABUL: The Taliban’s prime minister called Wednesday on Muslim nations to be the first to officially recognise their government, as aid-dependent Afghanistan faces economic collapse. "I call on Muslim countries to take the lead and recognise us officially. Then I hope we will be able to develop quickly," Mohammad Hassan Akhund told a conference in Kabul called to address the country´s massive economic woes.

“We don’t want it for the officials. We want it for our public,” he said, adding that the Taliban had fulfilled all necessary conditions by restoring peace and security.

The Taliban promised to bring peace, but fear reigns above all in the eastern city of Jalalabad, hit by Islamic State group attacks and reprisals, and with corpses appearing mysteriously in rivers.

In the evening, the inhabitants of the trade hub in Afghanistan's Nangarhar province hurry home before night falls and the shooting starts, fearing both IS and the indiscriminate retaliation of the Taliban.

Once a fringe force in Afghanistan, analysts say the local chapter of IS has been increasingly active since the United States agreed to a deal in 2020 with the Taliban to withdraw foreign troops from the country.

The fundamentalist fighters, who are opposed to any compromise with the West, are believed to have about 2,000 to 4,000 fighters in Afghanistan, against 80,000 Taliban.

The biggest ideological difference between the two Islamist groups is that the Taliban sought only an Afghanistan free of foreign forces, whereas IS wants an Islamic caliphate stretching from Turkey to Pakistan and beyond.

At his headquarters guarded by dozens of heavily armed Taliban, the much-feared head of the Nangarhar intelligence services dismisses the threat.

Islamic State "no longer exists" in the city or rest of the province, says the official, who goes by the name "Dr. Bashir".

But in the streets of Jalalabad, his fighters paint a different picture.

"These days, there is at least one attack a week," said Sajjad, a Taliban unit leader, adding his men are on high alert "at all times".

The attackers, he told AFP, "come in twos or threes... in a [motorised] rickshaw... and shoot at us with Kalashnikovs or pistols".

According to Abdul Sayed, an academic specialising in jihadist networks, the group is responsible for nearly 100 attacks since mid-September -- some 85 per cent aimed at the Taliban -- and Jalalabad is the front line.

The Taliban are accused of clandestinely eliminating their enemies, and the United Nations attributes at least 72 murders to them, including 50 suspected IS members in Nangarhar.

Macabre discoveries feed the suspicion -- such as the bodies found last month along a canal in the suburbs of Jalalabad.

A little way from the village of Bakhtan, a rickshaw washer told AFP he had seen "four or five" corpses recovered. A local entrepreneur says three were found. Several sources across the province say up to 150 bodies have been found in rivers and streams.

Nangarhar has a strong Salafist bent -- an austere branch of Sunni Islam introduced to the area by Saudi jihadists such as Osama bin Laden during the war against the Soviet Union.

While Salafist elders do not deny the community has been a source of recruits for IS, they say they are now being collectively punished.

ambar ji: what do the bunnies have other than chinese made AKs ?

Ambar wrote:A Taliban delegation has been invited by European powers next week to meet with EU diplomats, human rights activists and civil right representatives ! The Taliban delegation may also travel to the US to negotiate the release of 19 billion dollars stuck in the banks because of sanctions and allow Taliban to formally open its consulates and embassies abroad . Well, there you have it, the west once again making bed with barbarians, atleast the gulf shiekhdoms had oil, what do the bunnies have other than chinese made AKs ?

Proud of Norwegian gov inviting Taliban-gov, civil society & key countries 2 Oslo. And pleased - as an elder - to meet Acting For Min Muttaqi. To me, freedom of expression & education for all are priority challenges. But US must release frozen funds to avoid causing disaster!

Joe Biden on Sunday called for the release of Mark Frerichs, a US Navy veteran taken hostage in Afghanistan nearly two years ago.

Frerichs, a civil engineer and contractor from Lombard, Illinois, was kidnapped in January 2020 in the Afghan capital, Kabul. He is believed to be held by the Taliban-linked Haqqani network.

“Threatening the safety of Americans or any innocent civilians is always unacceptable, and hostage-taking is an act of particular cruelty and cowardice,” Biden said in a statement to mark the second anniversary of the kidnapping on Monday.

srikandan wrote:https://twitter.com/kai_eide/status/1486106007201886211

Proud of Norwegian gov inviting Taliban-gov, civil society & key countries 2 Oslo. And pleased - as an elder - to meet Acting For Min Muttaqi. To me, freedom of expression & education for all are priority challenges. But US must release frozen funds to avoid causing disaster!

As expected, Norwegians at the head of the line to fund the taliban to keep the region in a boil, because all of the 19B$ will be spent towards FoE and education in Afghanisthan. Like Norway/EU kept funding and arming the LTTE in Sri Lanka until the very end of the conflict.

[Following the Abbey Gate bombing that killed 13 US servicemen and 170 Afghans at Kabul airport]

“Know this,” Biden said after the bombing. “We will not forgive. We will not forget. We will hunt you down and make you pay.” This turned out to be face-saving political theater. Three days later, an air strike killed ten Afghans, seven of them children. Not one of the dead, as far as we know, was an “ISIS facilitator,” as the administration had alleged.

In fact, the Pentagon now says that the bombing was the work of a lone terrorist rather than a “complex” network, as the Biden administration had initially maintained. At the time, General Mark Milley not only referred to the strike as “valid” and “righteous” — let’s concede for a moment that he was basing this on the best available information — but went further to describe a “secondary explosion” and a supposed plethora of evidence justifying the bombing. None of that, it seems, was true. It seems increasingly likely that Biden was going to blow someone up to project his toughness.

The more we learn about the administration’s Afghanistan withdrawal, the more it becomes clear that its decisions were driven by political considerations and panic. Here, for example, is a snippet from ProPublica’s recent investigation into the Kabul suicide bombing:

[ Must-read link https://www.propublica.org/article/suic ... ptkF8h6MTi ]

Days before the final withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, thousands of desperate Americans and Afghan allies seeking to flee the country were using unguarded routes across open fields and through narrow alleys to reach one of the few gates providing access to the Kabul airfield.

Despite intelligence warning of terrorist attacks, U.S. military commanders encouraged use of the routes. Some U.S. officials even provided maps to evacuees trying to bypass Taliban fighters stationed at a checkpoint outside the airport.

The fact that the murderer of 13 Americans “likely” gained access to troops via a path that U.S. officials were encouraging people to use seems quite noteworthy. As does the fact that we were helping evacuees circumvent the Taliban even as the Biden administration was assuring the public that the Islamic militants were facilitating the extraction of Americans.

These are the same Taliban with whom the Biden administration had reportedly shared a list of “American citizens, green card holders and Afghan allies.” When defending his reliance on the militants, the president claimed that, “to the best of our knowledge, the Taliban checkpoints — they are letting through people showing American passports.” In September, the administration declared that the Taliban had “shown flexibility” and were comporting themselves in a “businesslike and professional” manner.
...

Secretary of State Antony Blinken would later say that there were “under 200” Americans remaining in Afghanistan who “want to leave.” A new Senate Foreign Relations Committee report from ranking member Jim Risch (R., Idaho), contends that State Department officials estimated that on August 17 there were 10,000–15,000 Americans trapped in Afghanistan. Over the subsequent two weeks, as the Afghan forces the United States had trained and funded for 20 years disintegrated, 6,000 Americans were able to escape. I’m not a math whiz, but that leaves a lot more than zero, or even 200, stranded.
...

The Pentagon investigation into the bombing — relying on hundreds of witness interviews, drone footage, and reports by medical examiners — also concluded that the suicide bombing at Abbey Gate was “not preventable,” words that recurred in headlines atop reports by the Associated Press and other outlets.

In truth, the attack became unpreventable only after the Biden administration evacuated secure positions without having extracted those who wanted to leave. When George Stephanopoulos asked Biden whether he was warned that adhering to the Taliban’s timeline would put lives in danger, Biden answered: “No. No one said that to me that I can recall.”

This was surely a lie. As the New York Times reported, American intelligence had warned Biden that Afghan security forces would not resist the Taliban for long, and that the American-allied government would not hold Kabul

... Neither Secretary Lloyd Austin nor General Milley had much confidence in “over-the-horizon” counterterror strategy and that both had warned Biden to keep 2,500 troops to cover the withdrawal.

...

A recently declassified report by the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, which was submitted to the Department of Defense in January 2021, also warned the administration that the Afghan air force would quickly collapse. Yet, when asked in July 2021 if a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan was inevitable, the president scoffed at the notion, arguing that “Afghan troops have 300,000 well-equipped — as well-equipped as any army in the world — and an air force against something like 75,000 Taliban.” What with the U.S. military equipment now in the Taliban’s possession, I guess that makes the Taliban as well-equipped as any army in the world.

A yet fuller picture emerges from another Army investigation, released to the Washington Post this week through a Freedom of Information Act:

Military personnel would have been “much better prepared to conduct a more orderly” evacuation, Navy Rear Adm. Peter Vasely, the top U.S. commander on the ground during the operation, told Army investigators, “if policymakers had paid attention to the indicators of what was happening on the ground.” He did not identify any administration officials by name, but said inattention to the Taliban’s determination to complete a swift and total military takeover undermined commanders’ ability to ready their forces.

So, apparently, the only branch of the armed services that didn’t warn the administration was the Coast Guard. Yet none of this advice stopped the president from abandoning the Bagram air base. Nor did it prompt him to set up military safe zones to retrieve stranded Americans or Afghan allies before retreating. His failure to do so caused a bottleneck at the Kabul airport that put troops and civilians in needless danger. Biden maintained that chaos was inevitable even as he promised a “safe and orderly” withdrawal when making his announcement.

...

chetak wrote:norwegian delegations abused and shouted at members of an Indian parliamentary delegation

Neilz wrote:

chetak wrote:norwegian delegations abused and shouted at members of an Indian parliamentary delegation

Chetak, Could you please provide details of this exchange, or any link to read on / video. I am very curious to know.

Rudradev wrote:The Afghanistan Debacle Looks Worse and Worse
By DAVID HARSANYI
February 8, 2022 2:45 PM

A truly damning indictment of Biden's Afghanistan debacle, based on new information from recently declassified reports.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/02/ ... e/#slide-1

[Following the Abbey Gate bombing that killed 13 US servicemen and 170 Afghans at Kabul airport]

“Know this,” Biden said after the bombing. “We will not forgive. We will not forget. We will hunt you down and make you pay.” This turned out to be face-saving political theater. Three days later, an air strike killed ten Afghans, seven of them children. Not one of the dead, as far as we know, was an “ISIS facilitator,” as the administration had alleged.
[/b]

...

srikandan wrote:https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/11/us/p ... funds.html

So 3.5B$ being given to the Taliban regime so they can bring more human rights to the Afghani wimmens and childrens.

ritesh wrote:

srikandan wrote:https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/11/us/p ... funds.html

So 3.5B$ being given to the Taliban regime so they can bring more human rights to the Afghani wimmens and childrens.

The US in particular and western foolishness never ceases to amaze with reference to their dealing with porkis and izlamists.

Indian Muslim girls struggle for Hijab shows that Hijab is not an Arab, Iranian, Egyptian or Pakistani culture, but an Islamic value for which Muslim girls around the world, especially in the secular world, sacrifice with different types and defend their religious value.#Muskan pic.twitter.com/VfkNR2qCmb

— Inamullah Samangani (@HabibiSamangani) February 9, 2022

India-Afghan relations post Taliban

The name of the new unit has also sparked social media interest.

A Twitter user by the name Islam Paal, who identifies as a “proud” citizen under the Taliban regime, said the new Panipat military unit by saying it is a “clear sign” to Hindus.

“Hindus should take this as a clear sign. We haven’t forgotten our ancestors. Muskan sister, we hear your cries (sic),” he said.

Muskan Khan, a 19-year-old student from Karnataka’s Mandya Pre-University (PU), has become one of the major faces of the ongoing hijab row, after a video of her standing up to alleged hecklers in saffron shawls went viral.

Ever since the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan last August, New Delhi and Kabul have shared ups and downs in relations.

In October last year, Taliban leader Anas Haqqani visited the tomb of Turkish ruler Mahmud Ghaznavi in Afghanistan and referred to him as a “Muslim warrior” who “smashed the idol of Somnath”.

Today, we visited the shrine of Sultan Mahmud Ghaznavi, a renowned Muslim warrior & Mujahid of the 10th century. Ghaznavi (May the mercy of Allah be upon him) established a strong Muslim rule in the region from Ghazni & smashed the idol of Somnath. pic.twitter.com/Ja92gYjX5j

— Anas Haqqani(انس حقاني) (@AnasHaqqani313) October 5, 2021

“When we are asking the whole world to help the Afghan people, how can we stop India from doing so?”

Information Minister Fawad Chaudhry also said that pukestan had initially blocked transportation of Indian wheat because it carried some disease and had asked New Delhi for its certification.

chetak wrote:

“When we are asking the whole world to help the Afghan people, how can we stop India from doing so?”. Information Minister Fawad Chaudhry also said that pukestan had initially blocked transportation of Indian wheat because it carried some disease and had asked New Delhi for its certification.

Cyrano wrote: I'm aghast the wheat is not being sent in sealed containers but in open trucks where it can get damaged from rain/frost and of course easily pilfered on the way.
Am I really blessed with divya drishti to see this clearly when all our IAS babus and ministers can't ?