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پی پی پی افغانستان میں ایک کثیرالجہتی، مساوی حقوق اور جمہوری حکومت کی حمایت کرے گی، چیئرمین پاکستان پیپلز پارٹی بلاول بھٹو زرداری

پاکستان پیپلز پارٹی کے چیئرمین بلاول بھٹو زرداری نے افغانستان میں موجودہ صورتحال کی پیشِ نظر وہاں کے عام شہریوں کو درپیش مسائل پر اپنی جماعت کی جانب سے تشویش کا اظہار کرتے ہوئے تمام اسٹیک ہولڈرز پر زور دیا ہے کہ وہ امن کی جانب بڑھیں۔ پی پی پی افغانستان میں ایک کثیرالجہتی، مساوی حقوق اور جمہوری حکومت کی حمایت کرے گی، جو کئی دہائیوں سے جنگ سے متاثر ملک میں تمام عوام کے لیئے امن، تحفظ، زندگی اور آزادی کے ساتھ ساتھ ان کی املاک کی حفاظت کو بھی یقینی بنائے۔ افغانستان کے موجودہ حالات اور پاکستان کی سیاسی صورتحال پر پاکستان پیپلز پارٹی کی سینٹرل ایگزیکیوٹیو کمیٹی کے اجلاس کے بعد وزیراعلیٰ ہاوَس میں پریس کانفرنس سے خطاب کرتے ہوئے پی پی پی چیئرمین نے کہا کہ انہیں اپنے افغان بھائیوں اور بہنوں کے لیئے تشویش ہے، جو کئی دہائیوں سے بڑی جرئت اور حوصلے کے ساتھ مشکل حالات کا مقابلہ کر رہے ہیں۔

 انہوں نے کہا کہ انہیں افغانستان کے تمام شہریوں ، خصوصاً خواتین، نوجوانوں اور تمام اقلیتوں، کے لیئے تشویش ہے۔ انہوں نے مزید کہا کہ یہ محرم کا مہینہ ہے، اور افغانستان کے شہریوں کو محرم کا مہینہ بلا روک ٹوک منانے کی اجازت دی جائے۔ بلاول بھٹو زرداری نے کہا کہ وہ پاکستان میں امن و امان کے معاملے پر تشویش کا اظہار کرتے رہے ہیں۔ اب حکومتِ پاکستان ملک دہشتگردی کے معاملے پر کسی مصلحت کا شکار نہ ہو، بلکہ نیشنل ایکشن پلان پر من و عن عمل کیا جائے۔ یہاں مختلف دہشتگرد گروپس ہیں، جنہوں نے ہمارے شہریوں اور سکیورٹی فورسز کو نشانہ بنایا ہے، انہیں یہ واضح پیغام جانا 

چاہیئے کہ ہم یہاں ان کی اس طرح کی سرگرمیاں برداشت نہیں کریں گے۔

 ‘داسو، کوئٹہ اور کراچی میں دہشت گردی کے واقعات ہوئے ہیں، حکومت نیشنل ایکشن پلان پر عمل درآمد جاری نہیں رکھے گی تو خطرہ ہے کہ واقعات میں اضافہ ہوگا’۔ پی پی پی چیئرمین نے کہا کہ امید اچھی رکھنی چاہیے مگر ہمیں ہر طرح کی صورتحال کے لیے تیار ہونا چاہیے۔ اس کے علاوہ پاکستان میں سی پیک کے منصوبوں کے سیکیورٹی پر نظر ثانی کی جانی چاہیے اور ان پر کام کرنے والوں کو پوری سیکیورٹی دی جانی چاہیے۔ چیئرمین بلاول بھٹو زرداری نے کہا کہ پاکستان کی حکومت کے لیے بہت ضروری ہے کہ قوم پرست ذہنیت کے لوگوں کو مشغول کرنا چاہیے اور پر امن حل نکالنا چاہیے۔ ملک بھر کے قوم پرست نوجوانوں سے مل کر پرامن حل نکالنا چاہیے۔ ہم سمجھتے ہیں حکومت کو اپنے وعدے پورے کرنے ہوں گے۔ انہوں نے کہا کہ موجودہ صورتحال پر پاکستان پیپلز پارٹی کا یہ فوری اور ابتدائی رد عمل ہے اور وقت کے ساتھ ساتھ ہماری پالیسیز بھی بنیں گے۔ پی پی پی چیئرمین نے حکومت سے مطالبہ کیا کہ افغان صورتحال پر پارلیمان کو اعتماد میں لیا جائے اور پاکستانی کی پالیسی کے بننے کے طریقہ کار میں سینیٹ کی قرار داد کےطریقہ کار پر عمل کیا جائے تاکہ بہتر پالیسی بن سکے۔ سب افغانستان کی صورتحال کو غور سے دیکھ رہے ہیں اور اس کی حوصلہ افزائی کر رہے ہیں کہ افغانستان میں ایسا نظام آئے جس میں تمام برادریوں کی نمائندگی شامل ہو۔ 

انہوں نے کہا کہ پاکستان میں سرحد پر باڑ لگانے کے عمل پر ہم انحصار کر سکتے ہیں، اگر افغانستان میں امن و عامہ کی صوررتحال بہتر ہوجاتی ہے تو ہم پناہ گزینوں کی آمد نہ دیکھیں تاہم اگر ایسا نہ ہوا تو ہمیں ان چیزوں کا خطرہ ہے۔ بلاول بھٹو کا کہنا تھا کہ اس بات میں کوئی شک نہیں کہ پاکستان کی پالیسی واضح ہونی چاہیے کہ پاکستان کی عوام دہشت گردی کو کسی صورت برداشت نہیں کریں گے۔ انہوں نے کہا کہ وزیر اعظم نے ہر معاملے پر ایک موقف اپنایا ہے اور پھر یوٹرن لیتے رہے ہیں جس سے الجھن پیدا ہوتی ہے اور ہم اس وقت ایسی چیزیں برداشت نہیں کرسکتے۔ اس وقت ہمیں ایک واضح پالیسی، سیاسی حمایت اور اتفاق چاہیے، اگر حکومت میں وضاحت نہیں ہوگی تو الجھن کا ریاست پر اثرات مرتب ہوں گے۔ ایک سوال کے جواب میں بلاول بھٹو زرداری نے کہا کہ دہشتگردوں کے معاملے پر ایک سیکنڈ کے لیئے بھی کنفیوژ نہیں ہونا چاہیئے، پاکستان کی عوام نے ہمیشہ دہشتگردوں کو مسترد کیا ہے۔ ایک اور سوال کے جواب میں انہوں نے کہا کہ وزیراعظم عمران خان بار بار یوٹرن لیتے رہے ہیں، لیکن موجودہ صورتحال میں ملک کسی کنفیوژن کا متحمل نہیں ہوسکتا۔ مسلم لیگ (ن) سے روابط کے متعلق سوال کے جواب میں بلاول بھٹو زرداری نے کہا کہ پی پی پی کے سب کے لیئے دروازے کھلے ہیں۔ وزیراعلیٰ سندھ کے متعلق سوال کے جواب میں انہوں نے کہا کہ وزیراعلیٰ سندھ کے عہدے کے لیئے ان کے تین نام ہیں، اور وہ ہیں “مراد علی شاہ، مراد علی شاہ، اور مراد علہ شاہ”۔

https://www.ppp.org.pk/pr/25355/

Afghanistan's winners: Qatar, Russia, China, Pakistan, Turkey, Iran

By SETH J. FRANTZMAN

Most of these countries have hosted the Taliban or tacitly backed them. The victors in Kabul will be those who benefit from the Taliban taking power. They will also be those who benefit or cheer as the US appears humiliated.

Among those “winners” are Qatar, Russia, China, Pakistan, Turkey and Iran. This can be seen in various ways. Most of these countries hosted the Taliban or tacitly backed them. Others, such as Turkey, have sought to have a role in post-American Afghanistan. Iran’s media is full of stories arguing that the Taliban won’t export extremism or threaten anyone and that Iran has always helped the Afghan people. Iranian official Ali Shamkhani, for instance, has put out positive statements about Iran’s role in Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, Qatar’s Al Jazeera was on hand to showcase the Taliban taking the presidential palace in Kabul. It appears Qatar had advance knowledge of the Taliban’s plans because Doha has been hosting the Taliban for years. Qatar has a large US military base but has always backed religious extremists, including Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, and has given red-carpet treatment to the Taliban. This is a big win for Qatar, and it will use it for leverage across the Middle East. While Qatar and Turkey benefit because of their links to Islamist groups and general backing for far-right Islamic movements, Iran benefits from seeing the US leave its doorstep. Iran also wants the US out of Iraq and will use the Afghan chaos to push it to leave Iraq as well. Turkey will be working with Russia and Iran in Syria to try to get the US to leave. All these countries agree that they want America gone from the region.

Russia and China have both hosted Taliban delegations in recent years and months. They want to have open channels to the Taliban and consider recognizing them as the new government. This is important at the United Nations Security Council. With backing from Russia and China, the Taliban can get the international clout they need and eventually obtain wider recognition. The meetings between Taliban officials and Russian envoys this week, which have been reported, are important. “Russian Ambassador to Afghanistan Dmitry Zhirnov will meet on Tuesday with the coordinator of the leadership of the Taliban movement [outlawed in Russia] to discuss ensuring the security of the Russian Embassy, Russian Presidential envoy to Afghanistan Zamir Kabulov said in an interview,” Russia’s TASS news agency reported. “Our ambassador is in contact with representatives of the Taliban leadership,” he said. “Tomorrow, as he told me just 10 minutes ago, he will meet with the coordinator from the Taliban leadership for ensuring security, including our embassy.” The Russian ambassador will discuss with the Taliban representative the details of the external protection of the diplomatic mission of the Russian Federation, Kabulov said.

This means that Russia may consider recognizing the Taliban at a future date. Russia could help put the wind in the sails of the Taliban. But Russia has its own background in Afghanistan. It has noted that the US-backed Afghan government has fallen quickly. Russia wants to secure Central Asia as well, including its southern flank.That means the chaos of Afghanistan must not spread. It will want to work with China, Pakistan, Turkey and Iran to make sure that the Taliban are contained and come to power in a stable way.

All these countries have common interests. They want the US gone from the region. They want America humiliated. They also want to share energy and mineral resources that may flow through Afghanistan. This is their invitation to help make the decline of the US and the West more rapid.These countries have different ideological agendas. Turkey, Pakistan and Qatar have a far-right Islamic worldview of the world. They have wanted to work with Malaysia and even Iran on new concepts regarding an Islamic system of trade or television programs to confront “Islamophobia.”Turkey and Qatar form an axis that backs the Muslim Brotherhood, and as such, there has been cheering in Syria and the Gaza Strip regarding the Taliban takeover. China and Russia have other ideas about how this may benefit them on the world stage.

For now, the Afghanistan debacle is a major setback for the US globally in terms of image and the perception that US-backed systems tend to be as weak and temporary as the grass that greens with the spring and withers in the fall.

https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/afghanistans-winners-qatar-russia-china-pakistan-turkey-iran-676844

For America, and Afghanistan, the Post-9/11 Era Ends Painfully

 By Roger Cohen

The desperate scenes at the Kabul airport will now give Afghanistan a place in America’s national memory as another failed attempt to reshape a far-off land.

An era that began two decades ago with the shock of hijacked planes flying into American skyscrapers drew to a close this week with desperate Afghans clinging to American planes as they tried to escape the chaos of Kabul. Some fell; one was found dead in the landing gear.

A colossal bipartisan investment of American force, treasure and diplomacy to defeat a hostile ideology bent on the creation of an Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan has failed. Over four presidencies, two Republican and two Democratic, more than 2,400 Americans gave their lives, and more than $1 trillion dollars was spent, for shifting Afghan goals, many of which proved unattainable.

The curtain came down on the post-9/11 era, with the Taliban retaking control of the country that served as the base for the attack on America, a full-circle debacle for the United States that will engrave Afghanistan painfully in the national memory.

Mistakes and illusions and a particular American naïveté, or hubris, about remaking the world in its image led to the swift Taliban takeover almost two decades after its defeat, but a more fundamental factor also played a part. With China flexing its muscles, the nation’s priorities shifted. The relative power of the United States is not what it was 20 years ago.

The country’s capacity and inclination to commit resources to faraway struggles ebbed. Absent the Cold War, Americans have little appetite for the kind of open-ended military commitment that cemented democracies in Germany, Japan, South Korea and elsewhere.

“As president, I’m adamant we focus on the threats we face today, in 2021, not yesterday’s threats,” President Biden said Monday, defending his decision to proceed with a rapid military withdrawal.

“American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves,” Mr. Biden said.

Yet if there has been a single thrust to Mr. Biden’s presidency, it has been the defense of democracies at an “inflection point” with repressive forms of governance spreading, and the reassertion of American values.“America is back,” has been the refrain. But the question will now be raised: To do what? A planned summit in December conceived to reinforce democracies looks far less credible now that Afghan schools may be closed to girls again and Afghans who believed in freedom are desperate to flee.“For decades Afghanistan has been the victim of people who wanted to do it good,” said Lakhdar Brahimi, an Algerian diplomat who served as United Nations Special Representative for Afghanistan and Iraq. “At this point there was no good time to leave, so this was as good — or as bad — as any,” he added.

The chaos in Kabul as the United States and its allies scrambled to evacuate their nationals, and the Afghans who had helped them, has inevitably been compared to the desperate scenes in Saigon in April 1975 as North Vietnamese troops took the city. Then, as now, a homegrown guerrilla insurgency undid a superpower’s designs.

The analogy should not be overdrawn, however. The United States was bitterly divided over the Vietnam War. Today most Americans want out of Afghanistan. Their priorities are domestic.

As Mr. Biden said, an overriding American objective was achieved: Islamist terrorism, in the form of Al Qaeda, was largely defeated over the past two decades. But the political Islam embraced by the Taliban has retained its magnetism as an alternative to secular Western models of governance.

It remains to be seen whether a newly savvy Taliban, honed by diplomatic experience that may have cooled something of the zealous ardor of the seminary, will honor promises to prevent Afghanistan becoming a terrorist haven again.Debate will long rage over whether the United States should have maintained a modest military presence sufficient to keep the Taliban from power and preserve the hopes of the women and emergent middle class of Afghanistan who now feel betrayed.

There was little reason to think that what could not be achieved in 20 years might be one day. On the other hand, as Saad Mohseni, an Afghan entrepreneur whose MOBY group runs radio and TV networks in Afghanistan, argued, “Afghans have been pushed under the bus in the most unfair and irresponsible way.”

What seems beyond debate, for now, is the disaster the precipitous American withdrawal has provoked. Just days ago, President Ashraf Ghani, who has now fled, thought he still had two weeks to negotiate an organized transition, according to a person who spoke to him then. In fact, without the United States, his was a house of cards.Long skeptical of the purpose of the longest American war, President Biden acted in the conviction that it was “highly unlikely” that the Taliban would be “overrunning everything and owning the whole country,” as he put it last month.Those words seem certain to haunt the Biden presidency, even if there is blame enough to be shared by both parties. So, too, will images from Kabul of the shuttered American Embassy, and of gun-toting Taliban forces taking over the government buildings that were supposed to enshrine an American-built democracy.

“I have no doubt this will be a huge liability for Biden, even if Trump boxed him in,” said Cameron Munter, a former United States ambassador to Pakistan, referring to the agreement the Trump administration signed with the Taliban in 2020 that stipulated the American withdrawal this year.

That was the difficult legacy bequeathed to Mr. Biden. Still, his administration had options short of its accelerated withdrawal.

“The thing that is appalling is that the administration had no plan,” said Stephen Heintz, the head of a foundation that has been working on Afghanistan since 2011. “There was scarcely any consultation with NATO and little with the Afghan government. It’s a failure of intelligence, of planning, of logistics, and in the end a political failure, because whatever it is, it’s Biden’s.”

Others were more supportive of the president. “Twenty years was a long time to give Afghan leaders to plant the seed of civil society, and instead they planted only the seeds of corruption and incompetence,” Representative Jake Auchincloss, Democrat of Massachusetts and a former Marine who served in Afghanistan, told The New York Times.

Both Mr. Biden and his predecessor were responding, in different ways, to an inward-looking American mood. Policing the world is expensive, often thankless work, and domestic problems abound. The military withdrawal from Afghanistan accurately reflected a shift of priorities, including toward the sharpening great power rivalry with China.

But America-in-Afghanistan amounts to a chronicle of errors and misjudgments that pose fundamental questions for U.S. policymakers.

From the moment the United States decided to go to war in Iraq in 2003 on the basis of flawed intelligence — opening a second front and diverting attention and resources from Afghanistan — a sense that the Afghan conflict was a directionless secondary undertaking grew. Defeating terrorism morphed perilously into nation building. But democracy was a far-fetched objective in a country that had never had a census, and where tribal loyalties were powerful. It was always unlikely that massive electoral fraud could be averted, or that millions of dollars in aid would ever reach its intended target.

The attempt to build a credible Afghan army turned into a fiasco with an $83-billion-dollar tab.

“We tried to build an Afghan military in the image of the Pentagon that actually cannot operate without us,” said Vali R. Nasr, a senior adviser on Afghan policy between 2009 and 2011. “It should not have depended on our air support or an ability the Afghans don’t have to service helicopters.”

The reckoning on this American failure seems certain to be painful. The inclination to build in the American image — rather than adapt to simpler, less ambitions Afghan needs and capacities — seems to carry a wider lesson for the United States in the world in the 21st century.

Mr. Munter, the former ambassador to Pakistan, led the first Provincial Reconstruction Team in Mosul, Iraq, in 2006. He recalled arriving there and finding “there was no plan whatsoever.”

Officials distributing aid seemed more concerned with how quickly they could do it, rather than where it went, “so that they could convince the people on the Hill that we were spending the money allocated to us,” Mr. Munter said.

The Mosul experience, he added, “seemed like a miniature version of what happened on a much grander scale in Afghanistan.” The element that so often seemed missing in American policy, both in Iraq and Afghanistan, was an ability to pose a fundamental question: What is it we know about where we are going?

“Americans have been very reluctant to acknowledge that they don’t know a whole lot about what was happening on the ground, may not know what they don’t know, and have made mistakes because they did not know enough,” Mr. Brahimi said.

American naïveté, if it was that, did however bring many benefits. Mr. Mohseni compared the last 20 years to a “golden age” that ushered Afghanistan from the 12th to the 21st century. Women could be educated again. A digitally connected middle class emerged. Infrastructure and technology linked people to the world.

“Afghans have changed forever,” he said. “For us, the stalemate was sweet.”

The question now is how much of all that the Taliban, themselves changed by the internet on which they depend, will attempt to reverse.

The most immediate threat they pose is certainly to Afghans, and particularly Afghan women, rather than to the United States. Anything seems possible, including violent reprisals and a massive refugee exodus.

“This is a devastating blow to American credibility that calls into question how sincere we are when we say we believe in human rights and women,” Mr. Heintz said.

When Richard C. Holbrooke was the special representative for Afghanistan from 2009 until his death in 2010, he insisted that all his team read Graham Greene’s “The Quiet American.”In the novel, a well-intentioned and idealistic American intelligence officer, Alden Pyle, confronts the bitter realities of the French colonial war in Vietnam as he tries to bring social and political change to a complex society.

Greene, through his cynical journalist narrator, writes: “I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/17/world/asia/afghanistan-united-states.html