This thread is among the most satisfying Twitter exchanges I have had since I started my account. In the midst of reporting developments of Hurricane Ida approaching New Orleans she took time during a break to reply to my twitter inquiry.
Just caught the end of that interview w the Afghanistan expert discussing AID and yrs of development. Impressive guy, white beard, spoke of 32 radio stations, currency & much more. You called him Andrew. What is his whole name & bio?
20 years of US presence permanently changed Afghanistan.
One sign: the smart phones thousands are using to communicate with the world or coordinate their escapes. In 2001 there were no cell phones, just a few sat phones carried by journos, spies or soldiers. I saw one landline. In Nov. 2001 I crossed the Amy Darya river on a ferry that made me think of the River Styx. My sat phone relied on a fragile cable. I had an extra; but I believe another journo swiped it. When my last cable broke, the nearest replacement was likely in Moscow. Somehow I fixed it.
The one landline I saw was in an official's office in Sheberghan. I watched a man dial a number on it. The number had three digits. That's how few phones were on that particular phone exchange. The man dialed several times. Nobody answered.
In recent days we've heard voices from different parts of Afghanistan. A network of veterans in the US helps Afghan comrades get out, making calls or sending documents from thousands of miles away. Soldiers at Kabul airport call refugees and guide them in through the streets.
If the Taliban consolidate power, they may well restrain or censor the network, as their neighbors China and Iran have done. But unless they literally blow up the cell towers, as they once blew up ancient statues, they won't fully reproduce Afghanistan's old isolation.
Some Afghans have blue eyes. I've heard people speculate that they may be descendants of the army of Alexander the Great, which crossed the the Amu Darya 2,400 years ago. Improbable though that old tale may be, it suggests how long Alexander's army has persisted in memory there.
In the same way it seems likely that the American presence in Afghanistan will persist long after the last US troops leave. The Taliban inherit a different country than the one they lost in 2001. They may well try to smash that legacy. But it will be not be easy to erase.
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| Tom Watson tweet. |
The Taliban took control over Afghanistan on August 15 — two decades after the extremists were driven out of power by American-led military action. The Taliban had risen to power in 1994.
As the Taliban secured city after city, women activists, politicians and educators spoke to international media about their fears of reprisal. Fears grounded in historical precedent. In a U.S. State Department report from 2001, the Taliban decreed women had to wear coverings from head to toe, were not allowed to work, and were barred from attending schools. Women’s healthcare was restricted. Women were not allowed to leave their homes unless they were accompanied by male relatives. The windows of houses had to be painted over to stop outsiders from seeing women in their homes.
On August 17 there were credible sources, including statements by witnesses and victims, of Taliban sending girls back from school and women from their work. In an interview with @BBCYaldaHakim, a Taliban commander said girls cannot have education and endorsed stoning and amputation as reprisals.
As the horrific scenes of total chaos at the airports and along the streets have played out on CNN, criticism of the Biden administration’s decision to withdraw the last of the U.S.’s troops from Afghanistan has come from all quarters, right and left.
In an astonishing lack of self-awareness, George W. Bush has opined about his concerns for the women of Afghanistan. Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) also lambasted President Biden.
Yet it was Bush who led the U.S. into Afghanistan with the orchestration of Vice President Dick Cheney, Liz Cheney’s father.
History exists for a reason, and revisionist historical takes are not the same as actual history. The people who know this best are the historically marginalized and vulnerable: women and LGBTQ people — the very people most at risk now in an Afghanistan under extremist Taliban control.
History says the Bushes and Cheneys should be reserving their critiques for themselves.
When I was reporting from London in the late 1980s, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush and Margaret Thatcher were working in concert to create the entity we now call the Taliban. They were to be the antidote to the Soviets in Afghanistan. But then they became their own threat — and to more than just dissidents, women and LGBTQ people.
I wrote about the Taliban blowing up the giant Buddhas of the Bamiyan Valley in Afghanistan in early 2001. But by that time women had already been ushered back into their homes, girls taken out of schools, gays and lesbians made invisible.
The Taliban decreed in 1996 that women and girls be barred from education, work and travel without a male chaperone. The punishments for violations were severe and could even be death by stoning, as depicted in the 2008 film The Stoning of Soraya M., although that film takes place in Iran.
Punishments for LGBT+ Afghans were also severe. Mere existence was illegal. Death was, as it is for women who disobey Sharia law, the ultimate penalty.
When the U.S. looks to lay blame for who caused the current crisis, the answer is — uncomfortably — the U.S. The U.S., over decades, wreaked a level of havoc that perhaps couldn’t have been anticipated. Yet until Biden, some could argue, no attempt was made to fix it.
Donald Trump made things worse, of course. Trump negotiated the release from prison of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar in 2018. In 2020, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, about whom I reported in PGN repeatedly throughout 2019 and 2020, negotiated a deal with the Mullah — not with the legitimate government of Afghanistan.
That deal released 5,000 Taliban men from prison. Men who had terrorized women, girls, LGBT+, dissidents. Now the Mullah is the head of the new Taliban-led government, and Biden is beholden to that Trump/Pompeo treaty.
Yet on August 17, Trump claimed what is happening in Afghanistan is the greatest humiliation for the U.S. Many would argue that was January 6, when there was an attempted coup at the Capitol, fomented by Trump and led by his followers.
The perils in Afghanistan are very real, regardless of which side of the aisle is speaking its own ideologically perceived truth. And the Biden administration, while perhaps correct to withdraw the last of America’s stabilizing presence in Afghanistan, has been stunningly tone deaf in how it has addressed the crisis, as well as in their descriptions of the Afghan people.
Those who concern me most, as a journalist who reported on the last takeover by the Taliban, are the women, girls and LGBT+ people of Afghanistan. It would be impossible to overstate the terrors they each face, now, simply by the mere fact of their existence in a male-dominated, cis-het society in which they have no real place and in which they are at best second-class citizens with no autonomy.
Reporters in Afghanistan are already detailing the threat. And if they weren’t, the Taliban leadership has itself been succinct: Sharia law — Islamic law, religious law — will define everything in Afghanistan going forward. Within that construct there is no room for female, queer or trans autonomy.
Imposition of the death penalty for homosexuality has been classified as judicial murder of gay and lesbian people; a form of genocide. Yet it is, according to Afghans and human rights advocates, imminent.
On August 16, Nemat Sadat, the first gay Afghan to come out publicly, tweeted: “It’s not hyperbole to say that the Taliban will do what Nazis did to homosexuals: weed them out and exterminate them from Afghan society. Please help.”
Last month, Gul Rahim, a Taliban judge, told the German newspaper Bild that, “There are only two penalties for gays: either stoning or they have to stand behind a wall that falls on them. The wall must be 2.5 to 3 meters [about 10 feet] high.”
I have reported on “corrective rape” and honor killings of lesbians for various publications. I reported on lesbian asylum seekers fleeing Sharia law to the U.K. and stringent new asylum laws here in the U.S.
NGOs have reported for years that gay men and lesbians have been raped as punishment–which the U.S. government knows. “[Gays and lesbians] continued to face arrest by security forces and discrimination, assault, and rape,” said the U.S. State Department’s country report on Afghanistan in 2020.
Nemat Sadat pleaded, “Please help.”
The question now, with more than enough blame to go around, is where will that help — for women, girls, and LGBT+ people — come from? Or will it come at all?
Victoria A. Brownworth is a Pulitzer Prize-nominated award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Baltimore Sun, DAME, The Advocate, Bay Area Reporter and Curve among other publications. She was among the OUT 100 and is the author and editor of more than 20 books.
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Ok, since no one seems to know any of the history of Afghanistan before this week, a refresher:
• 2/29/20: There are 13,000 US troops there. Trump reaches deal with Taliban. Agrees Afghanistan Gov, which is not part of deal, will release 5,000 Taliban fighters. Requires Taliban to take action against al Qaeda, not to attack US troops or coalition forces, or launch high-profile attacks.
• 3/1/20: Afghan president freaks out, says US has no authority to commit to release prisoners held by Afghanistan. (Trump Admin forces it to happen anyway.) Despite there agreement not to attack any provincial capitals, Taliban unilaterally attacks Afghan forces in Helmand province.
• 3/19/2020: DOD IG says U.S. cut troop levels by more than 4,000, even though “Taliban escalated violence further after signing the agreement".
• 8/18/2020: DOD IG releases report saying Taliban didnt distance itself from terrorist organizations in Afghanistan. UN and U.S. "Taliban continued to support al-Qaeda, and conducted joint attacks with al-Qaeda members against Afghan National Defense and Security Forces.” In other words *every element of the agreement - dont attack, renounce terrorists, don't work with terrorists - had been violated.
• 9/3/2020: Afghanistan, pressured by Trump, has been releasing the 5,000 Taliban in jail. Last 400 released this day. They return to fighting.
• 9/16/2020: In continued violation of the Trump agreement, Taliban - reportedly working with al Qaeda - attacks 3 provinces in Northern Afghanistan. Immediately after election, Trump Admin leaks they're going to do a massive, rapid withdrawal of US troops before inauguration. Distressed by reports, Rubio warns of “a Saigon-type of situation." McConnell says "would hurt our allies & delight the people who wish us harm".
• 11/17/2020: Without consulting with incoming administration, which is still being blocked from security briefings, Trump Admin announces rapid withdrawal of troops down to 2,500 by 5 days before inauguration. That's down from 13,000 the year before. This was playing with people's lives. This was incompetence writ large. But here is where Biden screws up - by not more fully reversing the nonsense Trump had done.
• 2/3/2021: Afghan Study Group, created by Congress, urges Biden to abandon the Trump timetable, and set withdrawal on all sides - both Afghan government and Taliban - meeting all commitments under a peace framework that had been reached. So, it would be based on status, not date.
• 3/25: Gen Richard Clarke of Central Op Command says Taliban has not met its obligations under treaties & frameworks.
• 4/14: Biden sets a deadline of 9/11 for getting out of Afghanistan, ignoring recommendation of the working group. This is the big mistake.
• 4/18: Trump rants and raves, saying Biden should start pulling everyone out beginning in about 2 weeks, so yes, Biden made a mistake. But we are dealing with a situation where the former president pulled down troop levels to a ridiculous level just five days before inauguration, ignored attacks and violations of a treaty he hit, and pretended he had succeeded. He gave them 5,000 fighters.
I mean, look at this: The Taliban was violating *every term* of the treaty, and Trump pulled out 1000s of troops. Other than setting ourselves up for a firefight with the Taliban, the only options seemed to be bringing people back in, changing the timeline or this. I don't know. Its a cluster.
I'm not even sure I can call what Biden did a mistake. Did they have intel that the Taliban, which had been moving forward since Trump struck his stupid deal, was planning to attack our troops? Who were way outmanned? I don't know.
But this idea that this had some other easy solution or if - instead, as Rubio & McConnell said in December - the rapid drawdown of troops by Trump set up a disaster, a Saigon-type situation that was handed off to Biden, I don't know.
But this is what you get when you allow violations of treaties, petulant troop withdrawals, and media who seems to have no memory, and a political party hopeful that no one will remember.
I am not excusing Biden. I just want experts to say, given the actual situation he was handed, how it should have been done.
Kurt Alexander Eichenwald is an American journalist and a New York Times bestselling author of five books, one of which, The Informant (2000), was made into a motion picture in 2009. Formerly he was a senior writer and investigative reporter with The New York Times, Condé Nast's business magazine, Portfolio, and later was a contributing editor with Vanity Fair and a senior writer with Newsweek.
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Several days after taking control of Afghanistan, the Taliban has begun searching for journalists and activists, using house-to-house searches or intimidation tactics to target people they see as a threat. According to our Observers, house-to-house searches have been held in at least four provincial cities as the Taliban solidifies its hold on the country. (The FRANCE 24 Observers team has chosen not to publish the names of any locations in this article, for security reasons.)
The Islamist group went house-to-house on Wednesday to find a Deutsche Welle journalist – who they didn’t know had moved to Germany. When they were unable to find the journalist, they shot dead one of his relatives and seriously injured another. The Taliban have raided the homes of at least three DW journalists, the German broadcaster reported.
The Taliban is also conducting “targeted door-to-door visits” and screening people at checkpoints to find people who worked with US and NATO forces, according to an intelligence report prepared for the UN and released Friday. The report says the Taliban is "intensifying the hunt-down of all individuals and collaborators with the former regime".
The searches come amid the Taliban's sophisticated PR campaign with the group claiming to protect women's rights within the limits of Islam and to forgive all those who worked with US forces. At the group’s first press conference on August 17, Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid said, “Let me remind you that we forgive everyone, because it is in the interest of peace and stability in Afghanistan. All the groups that were confronting us are all forgiven.”
As evacuations out of Afghanistan remain difficult, foreign auxiliaries, journalists and activists who are stuck in the country are now living in fear that the Taliban will knock on their doors.
‘Taliban fighters are going to the neighbourhood mosque and asking people if they are aware of activists’
Zarghuna (not her real name) is a human rights activist who has gone into hiding since the Taliban entered her city in western Afghanistan.
I’m well-known in my city for my work as a human rights activist. Everyone knows me in my neighbourhood and on my street. When the Taliban entered our city, I hid out in a friend’s house because I knew they’d come for us sooner or later. A day or two after I moved, some of my neighbours whom I kept contact with told me Taliban fighters were going to the neighbourhood mosque and asking people if they are aware of activists, journalists or anyone else that has worked with foreigners – either in NGOs or with foreign security forces. Apparently, the Taliban told them that it’s their Islamic duty to share this information with them.
Going to mosques to find information makes sense for them, because they think that people in mosques are their fans and supporters. They think they will cooperate with them. I don’t know if they’ve been able to find my previous address yet. They were apparently able to find one of my colleague’s addresses this way, through supporters in the mosque. On August 18, the Taliban raided my colleague’s house, but luckily my colleague and my colleague’s family had already moved like me and the house was empty.
The Taliban has started their house-to-house searches to look for activists. They haven’t announced it officially and they don’t do it openly, they just try to find the targets they are looking for and hunt them “surgically” to avoid a buzz.
Mosques have been an important tool for the Taliban’s roundups. Rashid (not his real name), a human rights activist in northeastern Afghanistan, told us that a Taliban member has used a local mosque to announce their intentions to hunt down people.
Today [August 20, 2021] in the Friday prayers, a Taliban imam in our city openly said: “We have lists of people who were collaborating with foreigners. They are corrupt.” They invited the people praying to cooperate with the Taliban to find journalists and activists. There is no more future in Afghanistan for me, I have to get out of here.
‘Some corrupt police officers in our city are employed by the Taliban’
Reza (not his real name) is a human rights activist in northern Afghanistan.
Friends have told us that some corrupt police officers in our city are employed by the Taliban. The Taliban have made a task force with these officers. They are using the Afghan police’s resources and records to get details about activists and journalists – where they live, where they used to work and who they worked with. The Taliban are even getting information about activists from police officers, such as their ethnicity, religion or affiliation with political parties.
With the lists they have created with the help of the police officers, they have started to go house to house and search in our city. We can’t see any other option but to find a way to leave the country. If I stay, I’ll risk not only my life but the safety of my family.
The Taliban has targeted several Afghan journalists in recent weeks, including Nematullah Hemat of the private television station Ghargasht TV, who is believed to have been kidnapped from southern Helmand province, and Toofan Omar, the head of the private radio station Paktia Ghag Radio, who was shot and killed in Kabul.
‘A few days ago, the Taliban local commander summoned all the journalists and activists in our region to a meeting’
However, some witnesses have reported that the Taliban is still attempting to maintain a conciliatory image and liaise with activists and journalists. One journalist, Ahmad (not his real name), said Taliban officials in his town summoned journalists to a meeting to reassure them, but they were not convinced.
In the days after the Taliban captured our city, people didn’t dare to leave their homes, but now they are less afraid to go out. So far in our region, I haven’t heard of any persecution, or attempts to arrest journalists or activists yet. On the surface, there’s nothing to fear. But in reality, it’s very frightening. A few days ago, the Taliban local commander summoned all the journalists and activists in our region to a meeting with him.
We went there and, at first, everything seemed nice and friendly. He told us that we could continue working, as long as we do it within the limits of Islamic Sharia law and Taliban surveillance. But in the middle of our meeting, some armed men came into the room and showed us their weapons. The message was received: you can do whatever you want to do, but you should not mess with the Taliban. Now I’m more afraid than ever before.
‘They are repeating exactly what they did in our region in 1996’
Mustafa (not his real name), a journalist in eastern Afghanistan, says that the Taliban’s methods are nothing new.
Maybe some other journalists or activists are too young to remember, but in the 1990s, the Taliban did exactly the same thing. At first, they behaved: they were nice with people, including journalists and activists. Then, when they felt safe in their position, they showed their true colours, and everyone knows what they did back then. The Taliban have not changed. We don’t have a “moderate Taliban". They are repeating exactly what they did in our region in 1996.
The UN refugee agency UNHCR has said there is “no clear way out” for the Afghans who are living in danger of the Taliban. As of August 20, 2021, evacuation flights out of Kabul are still ongoing, but access to the airport and finding a flight remain huge challenges for many people.
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The quick collapse of the Afghan National Army stunned many, including the Pentagon's top military officer, General Mark Milley. He told reporters this week that the U.S. intelligence community estimated that if the U.S. forces withdrew, it would be weeks, months, even years before the Afghan military fell to the Taliban.Devastating report via NPR
This prescient memo was written December, 2016 by a woman by the name of Sharon Furiosa. (If you copy and paste, please be sure to give her credit.)This is not specifically related to events now unfolding in Afghanistan, but the insights are important to grasping the convoluted political and PR wrinkles of the tale.
Gary is a Christian peacemaker whose writing I've read as a result of my connections to Every Church a Peace Church (www.ecapc.org). It's a timely history lesson.
Nagasaki is famous in the history of Japanese Christianity. Not only was it the site of the largest Christian church in the Orient, St. Mary’s Cathedral, but it also had the largest concentration of baptized Christians in all of Japan.
It was the city where the legendary Jesuit missionary, Francis Xavier, established a mission church in 1549, a Christian community which survived and prospered for several generations. However, soon after Xavier’s planting of Christianity in Japan, Portuguese and Spanish commercial interests began to be accurately perceived by the Japanese rulers as exploitive, and therefore the religion of the Europeans (Christianity) and their new Japanese converts became the target of brutal persecutions.
Within 60 years of the start of Xavier’s mission church, it was a capital crime to be a Christian. The Japanese Christians who refused to recant of their beliefs suffered ostracism, torture and even crucifixions similar to the Roman persecutions in the first three centuries of Christianity. After the reign of terror was over, it appeared to all observers that Japanese Christianity had been stamped out.
However, 250 years later, in the 1850s, after the coercive gunboat diplomacy of Commodore Perry forced open an offshore island for American trade purposes, it was discovered that there were thousands of baptized Christians in Nagasaki, living their faith in a catacomb existence, completely unknown to the government - which immediately started another purge. But because of international pressure, the persecutions were soon stopped, and Nagasaki Christianity came up from the underground.
And by 1917, with no help from the government, the Japanese Christian community built the massive St. Mary’s Cathedral, in the Urakami River district of Nagasaki. Now it turned out, in the mystery of good and evil, that St. Mary’s Cathedral was one of the landmarks that the Bock’s Car bombardier had been briefed on, and looking through his bomb site over Nagasaki that day, he identified the cathedral and ordered the drop.
At 11:02 am, Nagasaki Christianity was boiled, evaporated and carbonized in a scorching, radioactive fireball. The persecuted, vibrant, faithful, surviving center of Japanese Christianity had become ground zero.
And what the Japanese Imperial government could not do in over 200 years of persecution, American Christians did in 9 seconds. The entire worshipping community of Nagasaki was wiped out.
Ariana Delawari
To the younger Afghans who follow me. What you see now or little to no coverage of afghans rising up against the Taliban and Afghan requests from the international world, this was even worse in the 80s and 90s.
When Afghanistan won the Cold War and then was left completely destitute with no assistance, no retrieval of weapons given, completely broken nation. THIS is why a civil war broke out. This is why tribal leaders started in fighting. Western media + western govts largely to blame.
Just taking this moment to point it out next time you get angry at any certain tribe. It’s largely the biproduct of this silence. Afghans are who Afghans have been waiting for. We show up, we are strong, we don’t back down. Now it’s time we show up for each other and get heard 🇦🇫
And to clarify we see how the rest of the muslim world is silent. Because Afghan needs don’t fit into their agendas. That’s sad and needs to change. Youth across the region should join forces and dismantle all funding and sanctuary of terrorists. Taliban etc. Find a way 🤲🏽
The earth is like a body. Every single thing is connected as part of a single body. If any of us ignore what is happening in other nations, to groups of people, to the wildlife, to the trees and oceans, we will eventually feel it and regret it. The pandemic should have taught us.
Josh Shahryar
Can confirm. In the 90s, it was IMPOSSIBLE to get anyone to care about Afghanistan. I lived in Peshawar. It was the unofficial capital of Taliban in Pakistan. The rest of the world only cared after 9/11. That, too, so Dick Cheney could invade Iraq
sHaH @TheProducteer
Back then we had the Lion of Panjshir Ahmad Shah Massoud trying what he could to control the chaos. Later also against the Taliban. The world ignored it until 911
And it’s encouraging to see how this time across all ethnic groups there is resistance against the Taliban and their insane distortion of Islam. And we have social media so the Afghans have a voice themselves now. And support of many people around the world which experienced AFG.
Ariana Delawari
Yes ! Incredible. Very very positive [Raising hands emoji]
