Taliban-ruled country in ‘darkest hour of need,’ U.N. says

 

  

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Live Afghanistan updates: Taliban-ruled country in ‘darkest hour of need,’ U.N. says

Rachel Pannett  4 hrs ago

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The top United Nations official has warned that Afghanistan is facing an impending “humanitarian catastrophe” following the departure of U.S. forces, as the organization pressed its new Taliban rulers to ensure the advances women made over the past two decades aren’t reversed in a return to the its severe interpretation of Islamic law.

© B.K.Bangash/Associated Press Afghan girls wait for their turn to receive soup, in this 2001 photo taken at a refugee camp near the Afghanistan-Iran border. The United Nations warned on Tuesday that many Afghan children under 5 are at risk of acute malnourishment.

U.N. Secretary General António Guterres on Tuesday urged countries to help the people of Afghanistan facing “their darkest hour of need,” noting that almost half of the population — 18 million people — need humanitarian assistance to survive, amid a severe drought and with a potentially harsh winter looming. Basic services might collapse completely, with the $1.3 billion U.N. humanitarian appeal only 39 percent funded, the global body said.

Meanwhile, the acting head of the U.N. women’s agency has called the “inclusion of women in the governance architecture … the litmus test for the new political leadership,” as she urged the Taliban to ensure women can continue to play an active role in society and that girls keep the right to attend school. The Taliban has said that its new government will be more moderate than a previous iteration that ruled brutally from 1996 to 2001; the claim has been met with widespread skepticism.

Here’s what to know

• President Biden on Tuesday defended the U.S. departure, saying in a White House address: “It was time to end this war.” Biden also praised the efforts to get more than 120,000 Americans and allies evacuated to safety.
• The State Department is scrambling to stand up a remote diplomatic mission in Qatar to coordinate with the Taliban and help those stranded under the Islamist group’s rule.
• An eerie quiet settled over Kabul Tuesday following the complete withdrawal of U.S. forces. The Taliban has yet to make any formal commitments or release details about what kind of government it wants to form.

4:47 AM: U.S. reportedly to allow some aid into Afghanistan despite sanctions

© Akhter Gulfam/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock Afghan children leave school after a class in Afghanistan on Aug. 23, 2021.

The U.S. Treasury has issued a license to ease the flow of humanitarian aid into Afghanistan, Reuters reported, after the Taliban solidified its control of a country that depends heavily on foreign cash.

The authorization, issued last week, allows Washington and its contractors to help aid get into Afghanistan despite U.S. sanctions against the Islamist militants which are on the designated terror list. This would facilitate deliveries of food, medicine and other supplies to the country, where the United Nations estimates almost half the population — 18 million people — need it to survive.

The global body warned on Tuesday of a looming “humanitarian catastrophe” in Afghanistan which faces a severe drought and a wave of internal displacement. A million children are at risk of malnutrition, UNICEF says.

A day after the U.S. evacuation mission out of Kabul airport ended, and the last American troops left, U.N. chief António Guterres urged countries not to forget the people of Afghanistan in “their darkest hour of need.”

Afghanistan was already one of the world’s poorest countries. While Washington spent billions in aid during its two decades of war, the military budget dwarfed spending on reconstruction, and critics say much of the money went to state corruption in Afghanistan.

Last year, foreign aid made up an estimated 43 percent of an economy battered by conflict. Much of that aid is now frozen with Western governments wary of the Taliban whose last term in power was marked by its harsh rule.

In the wake of the Taliban advance, the World Bank suspended funding this month that represents up to 30 percent of Afghanistan’s civilian budget.

The Biden administration has choked off another source of national income for the militants: billions of dollars of Afghan central bank reserves held in U.S. bank accounts. The IMF also blocked access to the country’s $460 million in emergency reserves.

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid urged world powers on Tuesday to keep investing in Afghanistan and said the militants wanted good relations with all countries.

By: Ellen Francis

4:15 AM: U.N. chiefs sound alarm on looming ‘humanitarian catastrophe,’ reversal of women’s rights in Afghanistan

© EMMANUEL DUNAND/AFP/Getty Images Afghan women, shown in this 1996 photo taken in Kabul, wearing burqas that the Taliban made mandatory.

The top United Nations official has warned that Afghanistan is facing an impending “humanitarian catastrophe” following the departure of U.S. forces, as the organization pressed its new Taliban rulers to ensure the advances women made over the past two decades aren’t reversed in a return to the its severe interpretation of Islamic law.

U.N. Secretary General António Guterres on Tuesday urged countries to help the people of Afghanistan facing “their darkest hour of need,” noting that almost half of the population — 18 million people — needs humanitarian assistance to survive, amid a severe drought and with a potentially harsh winter looming.

Basic services might collapse completely, with the $1.3 billion U.N. humanitarian appeal only 39 percent funded, the global body said. More than half of Afghan children under the age of five will be “acutely malnourished” in the coming year, Guterres said.

The combined effects of drought and the coronavirus pandemic, on top of years of conflict, are taking a heavy toll. In the last two weeks, U.N. agencies delivered food to 80,000 people and relief packages to thousands of displaced families.

Meanwhile, the acting head of the U.N. women’s agency, Pramila Patten, has called the “inclusion of women in the governance architecture … the litmus test for the new political leadership,” as she urged the Taliban to ensure women can continue to play an active role in society and that girls keep the right to attend school.

The Taliban has said that its new government will be more moderate than a previous iteration that ruled brutally from 1996 to 2001 — a claim that has been met with widespread skepticism. Several prominent Afghan women lawmakers and activists, including the minister for women, fled Afghanistan in the final days of the U.S. evacuation effort, saying they felt unsafe remaining in the country under the Islamist militants.

Though women continued to face discrimination and violence in the war-torn country, freedoms multiplied after 2001. By 2020, about a quarter of Afghan members of parliament were women. Roughly 40 percent of students in Afghanistan were women in 2020, according to USAID figures.

By: Rachel Pannett

3:45 AM: Britain in talks with Taliban to bring stranded citizens, Afghans to U.K.

© Jonathan Brady/AFP/Getty Images Members of the British armed forces' 16 Air Assault Brigade walk to the air terminal after disembarking a Royal Air Force Voyager at RAF Brize Norton, west of London on Aug. 29, 2021. (Photo by Jonathan Brady / POOL / AFP) (Photo by JONATHAN BRADY/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

British officials are in talks with the Taliban about bringing home scores of additional United Kingdom citizens and locals still inside Afghanistan, after the U.S.-led efforts to airlift people out of the country ended earlier this week.

London’s defense secretary, Ben Wallace, told lawmakers that there are 150 to 250 people eligible for relocation in Afghanistan, plus their families, the BBC reported. Simon Gass, the prime minister’s special representative for Afghan transition, is meeting with senior Taliban officials in Qatar to secure their passage, the report said.

Speaking on local radio on Tuesday, Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said he doesn’t have an exact figure on how many Britons remain in Afghanistan, though he said they could number in the “low hundreds.”

London is also seeking to offer permanent residency to Afghans who worked for the U.K. The number of Afghans who are eligible to be flown to the U.K. but stuck inside Afghanistan could be 1,100, according to the Associated Press.

Britain’s Home Office is initially aiming to provide routes to 5,000 Afghans to set up home in Britain permanently. The long-term goal will be to expand that figure to 20,000. Officials will give priority to women, children, and minorities exposed to the most risk from the Taliban. The program will be modeled on a similar plan that resettled 20,000 from Syria from 2014 to 2021, the Home Office said.

Officials are also seeking to provide funds for housing, vaccine shots, and English-language education.

The U.K. has evacuated about 15,000 people since mid-August, when the Taliban took Kabul. British forces withdrew a few days ahead of American troops who stayed until Monday.

By: Andrew Jeong

2:59 AM: Taliban faces unwelcome consequences of dramatic success

In an address to the nation Tuesday, President Biden appeared to confront domestic critics of his decision to carry out the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan. He defended his administration’s commitment to end the “forever war,” commended the work of American troops and diplomats in evacuating more than 120,000 people from Kabul after it fell to the Taliban, and pointed a finger at his predecessors in the Trump administration for establishing the conditions that accelerated the collapse of the Afghan government.

“I was not going to extend this forever war, and I was not extending a forever exit,” Biden said, likely reacting to the uproar in Washington over the havoc of the withdrawal. But beyond paying lip service to extending U.S. humanitarian aid to the country, Biden said far less about the plight of the millions of Afghans now living under de facto Taliban rule. And that plight is getting all the more dire.

Read the full story

By: Ishaan Tharoor

2:00 AM: U.S. military leaders urge troops who served in Afghanistan to ‘hold your head high’

© Olivier Douliery/AFP/Getty Images Gen. Mark A. Milley at a Pentagon news conference on Aug. 18.

U.S. military leaders urged service members who fought in Afghanistan to hold their heads high in a letter dated Tuesday, a day after the United States pulled out its last troops from the country.

The message from Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Ramón Colón-López, the most senior enlisted member, comes as American veterans of the war question whether their sacrifices — and those made by friends killed in Afghanistan — had made any meaningful difference now that the Taliban regime that the United States helped depose in 2001 has reclaimed power.

The two men wrote that U.S. forces had prevented another terrorist attack in the United States on the scale of the events of Sept. 11, 2001, echoing remarks Milley made at a news conference Aug. 18.

What we lost in Afghanistan: Readers share their sacrifices from 20 years of war

American troops had also helped evacuate 124,000 people from Afghanistan since mid-August, Milley and Colón-Lopez wrote, giving them “an opportunity to live in freedom.”

“To every member of our Joint Force who fought in Afghanistan, you can hold your head high,” they said. “To each of you, your service mattered.”

More than 2,300 American troops have been killed in Afghanistan, with more than 20,000 service members wounded since the United States helped the Afghan Northern Alliance topple the Taliban nearly 20 years ago. War operations in the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater have cost the United States at least $2.3 trillion, according to an estimate by the Watson Institute at Brown University.

By: Andrew Jeong

1:15 AM: Analysis: Seeking an orderly end to chaos

© Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post President Biden speaks to the public about the end of the war in Afghanistan.

The country needed President Biden to speak even though there wasn’t much that he could say. The chaos as American troops withdrew from Afghanistan was vivid and indelible. The fear was writ large on the faces of civilians trying to evacuate — so was the anger and sorrow. There were new deaths to mourn and countless futures now imperiled. And Americans at home were appalled as they saw what their government had wrought, how nation-building had devolved, how a 20-year war — even the ending of it — was so infuriatingly, heartbreakingly messy.

All Biden could do with his Tuesday afternoon speech from the White House was craft a few minutes of order and eloquence at the tail end of profound havoc.

Read the full story

By: Robin Givhan

12:26 AM: Afghan interpreter who helped rescue Biden in 2008 reportedly begs President to save him

© Stefani Reynolds/Pool/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock U.S. forces helped rescue Sen. Joe Biden from an Afghan valley in 2008 after his helicopter made an emergency landing.

An Afghan interpreter who helped rescue Sen. Joe Biden from a remote valley in Afghanistan in 2008 has pleaded with the president to save him and his family, the Wall Street Journal reported.

“Hello Mr. President: Save me and my family,” Mohammed told the Journal in an article. “Don’t forget me here.” (The newspaper did not publish his last name at his request due to security concerns.)

In 2008, two Army Black Hawk helicopters carrying three U.S. senators: Biden, John F. Kerry and Chuck Hagel, were forced to make an emergency landing due to a heavy snowstorm. Mohammed joined a rescue mission with the Arizona National Guard and the 82nd Airborne Division. They drove hours to rescue the politicians, according to Brian Genthe, who at the time was a staff sergeant in the National Guard.

The valley where the U.S. officials landed was not in Taliban territory, but the 82nd Airborne had engaged the Taliban in a recent major fight nearby, the Journal reported.

Mohammed, his wife and four children are among the scores of local allies who were left behind after the United States withdrew from Afghanistan on Monday. Many are desperate to flee the Taliban-ruled country.

Mohammed said he is hiding from the Taliban after years of attempting to get out of the war-torn nation. His efforts to escape have been thwarted by bureaucracy: Mohammed had applied for a Special Immigrant visa but his application was held up after the defense contractor he worked for lost the required documents, Genthe said.

On Tuesday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki thanked Mohammed for his service and vowed that Washington would continue to get Afghan allies out of the country.

“We will get you out,” Psaki said after a Journal reporter read Mohammed’s message to the president. “We will honor your service.”

When the Taliban took over the capital, Mohammed attempted to reach enter Kabul airport. U.S. troops refused to let his wife or their children in, he said.

“I can’t leave my house,” he told the newspaper Tuesday. “I’m very scared.”

By: Paulina Villegas

12:26 AM: Analysis: Biden tries to make Americans feel the costs of a war that few of them were paying

© Stefani Reynolds/Pool/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock President Biden delivers remarks on the end of the war in Afghanistan at the White House on Aug. 31.

President Biden on Tuesday got to give the speech that each of his three immediate predecessors had hoped they could: the one bookending the culmination of the war in Afghanistan. But it was not the speech that any of them would have liked to have given, centered in part on the fact that the two-decade-long mission had failed to create a stable, democratic nation.

Most immediately, Biden’s intent in giving the speech was to reframe an understanding of the U.S. exit that has been centered on the specifics of the withdrawal. The president had repeatedly insisted that Americans who wanted to leave Afghanistan would be able to do so; that some number (pegged in the “low hundreds” by one official on Monday) could not is an obvious failure.

But since announcing his plan to remove U.S. forces in April, Biden has often found himself pushing back not against support for the war but indifference toward it. Americans didn’t really support the war, but it continued for two decades in part because it also wasn’t at the forefront of their minds. In other words, Biden wanted not only to defend how the war ended but to increase the salience for Americans of why he thought it should.

Read the full story

By: Philip Bump